Science blogging: The essential guide - Christie Wilcox, Bethany Brookshire, Jason G. Goldman 2016
Science and the art of personal storytelling
Ben Lillie
Some of the best scientific stories are personal, using an author’s experiences both to provide context for the scientific content and to create a relationship with the reader. Ben Lillie, co-founder of The Story Collider, will describe how personal experience can help to inform the content of a blog, and how putting more of yourself into your writing can bring out the best in the story and the science.
“Is there room for storytelling or personal experience in talking about science?” That’s a question I hear a lot, and I find it deeply confusing. On the one hand, I get it: shaping science into a compelling story can distort the truth and, if it’s done without care, distort it badly. But on the other hand, storytelling is the oldest art form; it’s a way that people have been communicating and bonding with each other for millennia. The biggest cultural force in America—Hollywood—is obsessed with story and narrative. We grow up hearing stories and relating to them. When you sit down with your friends in the pub, you usually start by saying, “So, I was sitting on the bus when . . .” And you do that because that’s how we relate. Yes, it takes care to do it right, but if you have something to say, why wouldn’t you use story?
I’ve been obsessed with story for a very long time. From an early fascination with mythology to my career plan to be a playwright, it’s been a constant part of my life, interrupted only briefly while I got a Ph.D. and did a postdoc in theoretical high-energy physics. Most recently I co-founded and continue to run The Story Collider, where we have people tell true, personal stories about science in their lives. The storytellers are people with science backgrounds and people without. The stories are all about their experiences, not about explaining the science. It’s a fantastic way to show a side of science that rarely gets talked about. But the principles of narrative are far more generally applicable, and so are important for many kinds of science writing.
Straight “explainers,” like this chapter, can be great, and are often the best choice for getting a point across, but I do think narratives and personal experience are vastly underused. That’s understandable. Particularly if you’re a scientist who blogs, it’s easiest to default to a writing style you know, and science papers are (for very good reasons) written in the third person, without a heroic narrative arc. But stories can engage, they can pull people into a subject, they can be the thread that keeps them reading through the whole piece. The strongest stories can forge an emotional bond that helps people connect to information—and each other—in ways that straight facts usually don’t.
Now, narrative theory is a huge field. Even the simplest question, “What is a story?,” turns out not to have any sort of simple answer. Without going too far down the rabbit hole, I’ll say that there are a lot of definitions, none of which are great but some of which are very useful. For this chapter, I’ll focus on two: one where the science is the main focus, and the personal experience is used as an aid, and the other where the personal story is the main point.
Science first
Steven Jay Gould had a trick, a very good trick, that he used all the time. He’d introduce an essay with a little personal anecdote, describing himself, say, walking on the beach looking for snails or watching a baseball game. He would then relate that narrative to a bit of science he wanted to discuss, for instance, ecological diversity within species or statistical analysis. But crucially, the anecdote often wasn’t directly about the science he was discussing. He might use an example of learning baseball statistics to help illustrate how to interpret statistics of dinosaur fossils near the Cretaceous extinction. Or famously, he opened his book Full House with his own cancer diagnosis as a way into the arcana of statistical analysis. It wasn’t necessarily “I was in the lab and we discovered this, let me tell you about it,” but rather, “Here’s a thing, it’s kind of like this other thing.”
More generally, using personal anecdotes can help our understanding of a possibly unrelated bit of science. This is the first sense of story, which is a tale of a thing that happened. (Did I tell you about the time I smashed my face in trying to skateboard? Oh, man.) This is the kind of story you tell a bunch of friends at the bar. It could be a funny thing to break up a long bit of explanation, a bit of connective tissue between one idea and the next. Or, as in Gould’s case, it could be a useful metaphor. In any of those cases, it’s incredibly useful for grounding the science, which can seem quite arcane compared to daily experience.
The other day I was trying to explain to a friend what it looks like inside a proton. The inside of a proton can be hard to visualize if you aren’t used to it, to say the least. So I told him about the time I put a bunch of food coloring in a pot of boiling water, how the colors bubbled and popped and then mixed into a brown goop. That’s sort of what happens to the quarks and gluons inside a proton. Now, that’s not at all what it looks like inside a proton (it doesn’t look like anything), but it’s a good place to start building a metaphor. Putting it in the first person grounds it in the real world. Putting food coloring in a pot is kind of weird in itself, but saying that I did it for kicks helps people believe in it as a thing, and relate a little bit. (Who hasn’t done a weird experiment in the kitchen?)
The challenge here is to make sure that the bits of story are serving the science that you want to discuss. If the story is for a metaphor, is that metaphor clear? If it’s a funny moment to break up some explanation, is it actually funny? The key to making sure bits serve their purpose, generally, is to keep them short and leave out any details you don’t need.
Story first
The other way to use your personal experience, and the one I’m much more familiar with, is to make the story the whole point of the piece. This is the kind of story that takes your readers on a journey with you, and brings them to the end having seen you change. This is a story in the sense that it’s used in Hollywood, or in novels, or in the kind of live storytelling that The Story Collider is a part of. In its simplest formulation this kind of story is something with a beginning, middle, and end. In between, someone changes. That is, there’s a plot and an “arc”—something about a character is different than it was when the story started. Maybe a relationship changed, or maybe the change is in how one sees the world, or oneself. The plot is what keeps readers going—they want to know what happens next—whereas the arc is why it’s satisfying at the end.
These pieces accomplish a very different goal. Rather than teaching a lot of science, they help forge an emotional connection. It’s not about getting readers to learn something, but about showing them why they might care. If all goes well, readers identify with the protagonist and care about the things the protagonist cares about. If you are the protagonist in a story about trying and failing to get data about the distribution of dark matter in the universe, and you tell the story well, in the end we’ll care about the distribution of dark matter. We might not understand about the distribution of dark matter, at least not at any level of detail, but for this sort of story that isn’t the point. Ideally once people care, they’ll go looking for more information. Keeping that distinction in mind is essential, because of the next point: for this strategy to succeed you need to do the exact opposite of what I described for the previous technique—that is, the science bits have to be kept to an absolute minimum, and everything that survives has to be in the service of the story.
That can be really hard to do, and often will mean being okay with your audience not fully understanding something. I call this the Dilithium Crystal Principle. It’s okay to have something in your story that isn’t explained, as long as it’s clear that it’s important. In Star Trek, the characters need dilithium crystals to make the ship go. Why? How? No clue. But it’s often an important plot point, and that’s okay. They need to align the crystals, often as a matter of extreme urgency, and if they stopped to explain why, we’d lose the momentum of the episode.
One of my favorite examples of this is Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, which is quite possibly the finest piece of science writing ever produced. A couple of the characters study chaos theory and thermodynamics. And while the audience won’t learn anything beyond “disorder increases” and “it’s impossible to predict some things,” those themes infuse the play so thoroughly it’s impossible to come away without a changed appreciation of both.
So with all that in mind, here are some additional suggestions that we often give out to writers who are hoping to improve their storytelling.
Begin in the middle. Start with action. That doesn’t necessarily mean a fistfight, but start at an important moment. Let’s say you’re telling a story about getting a wrong result and what it took to fix the problem. (A good sort of story!) Start with the wrong discovery. “I’m sitting in my lab, and I see the crystals come together, and I yell, ’Rachel, we found it!’” That’s much stronger than “We were trying to figure out what to study, and figured crystal structure might be interesting, so we set up an experiment.” All of that is implied in the fact that you’re looking at crystals in a lab, and if there are bits you need to expand on (why did you think it might be interesting?) you can fill them in later. The important thing is to get the narrative momentum going from the very first sentence.
End at the end. If you have ever been at a live storytelling event you will see a remarkable thing: storytellers continuing on after the end of their story in order explain what it means. But whenever this happens, you will also see the audience become bored: they will start shifting in their seats, whispering to each other, or getting up to use the restroom. If you’re pulling the audience along with a plot, once it’s over, they’re done. If you really want to explain what everything means (and most of the time, honestly, don’t), then find a way to do it before you resolve the action.
Don’t give away the end. Or any information really. There’s a tendency to want to let readers know where the story is going, particularly if you want to be sure not to upset them. “Don’t worry, we made it, but . . .” Don’t do that. This is part of what will make the audience want to stick around. They’ll want to know the answer to the key question: what happens next?
Set things up ahead of time. The flip side of not giving away too much is that if there’s information that’s essential to a plot point, set it up ahead of time. Let’s say you’re working with acetone, and you accidentally hold a match over it and it explodes because it’s flammable. Tell us that it’s flammable long before then, so we know what’s happening the instant the match hits the liquid.
Know what the narrative arc is. You might not say it outright in the story, but know what changed from the beginning to the end about your character. Maybe you realized your dad is actually a smart person, or that your teacher really did care about you, or that you weren’t alone in the universe. If you know what that arc is, it’ll help you figure out what to include and what to leave out.
Make sure we know how you’re feeling. One of the easiest ways to go wrong with writing about science is to forget that a lot of your audience doesn’t find it exciting to watch hexagonal crystals form. So tell them. That might mean explaining the science, but you can also do it by simply telling us that you find them incredibly exciting. Early in the story set up that you love looking for hexagons, then when we get to them in the story (“Wow! I nearly jumped out of my seat—there they were, perfect hexagons!”), we’ll trust you. Technical bits are exciting as long as you show the emotion.
Remember that storytelling is the kind of field you can spend your life learning about, with many layers. Every one of these “rules” can be broken, if you know what you’re doing. If you want to read more about creating narratives, I’d recommend books on screenwriting. Film is a place where people obsess about how to make good stories. Many people like Story, by Robert McKee. Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat is shorter and more direct. There are also the classic fiction-writing books The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker, and On Writing by Stephen King. For live storytelling there isn’t really a good book, although Margot Leitman has one coming out soon, and William Demastes’s Spalding Gray’s America has a lot of good advice, although it’s mainly a biography of Gray. For the style where the story is anecdotes, most of Steven Jay Gould’s work, particularly the mid to later essay collections, provides great examples (http://www.stephenjaygould.org). I’d also recommend anything by Lewis Thomas or Loren Eiseley, as well as Janna Levin’s How the Universe Got Its Spots.
As to the opening question of whether one should use narrative, particularly personal stories, in writing about science, I can offer this: narrative is incredibly difficult to get right, and fraught with dangers of oversimplification. But it’s also how we, as human beings, relate best to each other. It’s how we bond with our friends and family and, when everything goes completely right, our enemies. Saying “You know, this happened to me” is the act of creating an anecdote and, as we all know, does not convey data. It’s also the most powerful tool for communication in existence, driving all the profits of Hollywood and all the literature from centuries and millennia past that we remember today. Science writers ignore it at the risk of never being heard.
Ben Lillie is the founder and director of The Story Collider, where people tell stories about their personal experiences with science. He is also a Moth StorySLAM champion and a former writer for TED.com.
Ben is based in New York City. Find him at his Tumblr, http://tumblr.benlillie.com, or follow him on Twitter, @benlillie.