Where do you get your inspiration?
For me, the most difficult thing about writing is getting that initial germ of an idea. My Futures piece this week came about after the phrase “The suicide note of the world’s first immortal” came into my mind one sunny afternoon. Why? No idea. But from that initial kernel I thought about how someone might become immortal, within the realms of science and technology rather than magic and fantasy, and why they might be driven to such a state of despair.
My first Futures piece came to me one night as I walked home in the dark last autumn, looking up at the stars. Could I write a story, I thought to myself, about alien invaders and only at the end make it clear that we were the oppressors? The rather obvious political comment was an afterthought.
The story that I sent Henry for Mallorn (that he described as ‘C.S. Lewis on acid’) resulted from my fevered brain interpreting ‘The Importance of Being Ernest’ as something quite different; and wondering what would happen to a necromancer who didn’t know the difference between ‘adjure’ and ‘abjure’. Similarly, the poems I’ve written generally spring from a single observation, or sometimes just the sound of words that like each other.
Once I have that inspiration I can work up a story or a poem into something halfway decent. That’s just a bit of hard work, a sprinkling of natural gifting and a lot of time (the latter is why I still have a notebook full of ideas, but no published novels. Yet).
But what about science?
Much of science comes out of what has gone before; incremental steps, small improvements or tweaks, logical progressions. But what about those truly inspired leaps of imagination? The things that can get you out of an experimental rut, or win a Nobel prize? Did the idea to write the code that resulted in finding this run of binding motifs this morning come from inspiration, or sheer cold, Vulcan logic?
There must have been a seminal moment when I thought “Ah! Why don’t I search my transcript sequences for the motif and plot the hits against the exon structure“–but I can’t remember it, nor why I thought it in the first place.
There must a kind of scientific inspiration similar to that experienced by creative types. But if so, how do we tap into it, encourage it?
What do you do for inspiration in the lab?
I read blogs! Science inspiration for me comes from looking at many different things, many different journals, talking to many different people then perhaps a couple of connections are made between ideas, and a new idea results. Writing inspiration, well, I’ve lost that at the moment. All gone, don’t know where, so I’m sulking.
To me, both types of inspiration (science and ‘creative’) always felt the same.
Katherine: same here. As much input from as many different areas and people as possible!! The wider you cast your net, the more chances you’ll see the patterns.
My best moments of inspiration have come from listening to talks at meetings. Unfortunately not all of these moments get translated into action. Especially when one is
too old and dodderysnowed under with other administartive/teaching duties to have the time to actually do the experiment and so must generate a grant/studentship to follow it through.A couple of years ago I was at an MRS meeting in San Francisco and I wandered into a session on nanomechanics between talks in the session I was involved with. I heard a very interesting talk on the deformation of nanowires which include the statement that “we could not make specimens smaller than 200 nm”. But in my group we were routinely making 30 nm nanowires for another (non-mechanical) project and thus we moved into mechanics. However it took over 2 years to do this because we had to get another student trained to do the work.
The wider you cast your net, the more chances you’ll see the patterns
so you reckon it’s just pattern recognition?
Pattern recognition, correlation, making connections…but all at the risk of overwhelming the senses.
I get my best ideas while dozing, something about being semiconscious and just letting ideas float around my head helps me see connections that weren’t obvious. I’m sure blogging was one such idea.
Hmm, I guess that’s starting to go full circle. Where does the spark come from that takes you a step further, after you’ve recognized the pattern? Dozing sounds good… letting your imagination run wild…
..now, if I only had some inspiration, I could finish that thought.
Did you really send me an article for Mallorn? You should probably send it again as
the dog has eaten itit’s disappeared down the cracks of doomI’ve lost it.Inspiration happens all the time. Sometimes fuelled by caffeine – like those dreams you have just before you wake up, and you get caught up in a fevered frenzy that it would make the world’s best novel, but then you start to write and cold reality sets in.
I’d say about once a month I get caught up in things like that. My major tool – PubMed. Keyword searches are second nature to me, and I love moving from one to the next. I generate crazy hypotheses that most of the time I can’t investigate, and I am regularly accused of “dispersal”.
But if/when one of those ideas pay off, it’s all worth it.
However, I might be inspired like that, but it’s never a very ambitious inspiration. Candidate genes for diseases, but the concept is not original at all. Like the form of a novel is not usually that original.
(I’m still on a high from this morning until we finally throw out that hypothesis. But hypotheses come fairly cheap around here. That’s the fun part.)
Things just come to me at random, no matter what I am doing. I have learned that the most important thing to do when the muse strikes is to scribble it down. Otherwise it is lost forever. Oh, and of course, you do have to remember to look at your scribbles on occasion.
I’ve written about this subject before.
I have a feeling that it’s impossible to pin down the source of inspiration, or even work out a strategy to encourage it – it just hits you, and that’s that.
my writing usually comes to me when I have a nice evening with friends or blogs or tv shows and then some free time so my mind can wonder. Need to write it down, scribble scribble, and then let it sit for a while….
my science inspiration. Oh gee, if I could give talks and go to talks all the time… that is what gives me inspiration. To get questions and ask questions, the discussions. Not nessiscary scientists but in the “talk” thoughts get free kind of.
Did I mention that I need to discuss with other people to get really interested? (I think some of it has to do with the one time when I had an idea out of the blue that I didn’t check with anyone and then after writing it up and thinking more about it someone saw it and crushed my thing within two seconds. That’s when I realised that there are too many things I don’t know in the world so I need to talk to others 😉
I have learned that the most important thing to do when the muse strikes is to scribble it down.
Absolutely. I even have a notebook by the bed for such occasions—although trying to figure out in daylight what
rabbit deformed oxytocin sloop meant to me at 2 in the morning is a different matter.
Sleep apnea (my bread and butter disease of interest) is characterised by it’s failure during Inspiration.
So I’m doomed…
I am a believer of the read, read, read, talk, talk, talk… and then relax school of inspiration, at least as far a science goes. I find it helps to stand up and use a large white-board sometimes. But I also agree whole-heartedly with Brian’s point about the need to wander outside your immediate comfort zone from time to time.
As for writing, nay blogging, these just seem to need to percolate. I usually get struck by something that happens, let it stew for a while and see if it boils down to anything edible. Doesn’t always…
… but with blogging, we get your indigestion…
Yes, I’m afraid you have to suffer for my art…
A problem shared is a pain in the arse, that sort of thing?
As I tried to explain last week, blogging is sometime a pain from the arse…
But there is a serious point here… somewhere. Too tired to think what it is though. Oh yes – the percolation. On occasion, something so striking crops up that it immediately stimulates a post – usually a brief one. I don’t have Henry’s easy facility with words. Otherwise I have to mull it over for a while, to see what rises to the surface and test whether the elements hang together. Once that’s brewed for a while (couple of days?), it doesn’t take long to pull together. Jenny’s early (and sound) advice was not to spend too long writing posts. That said, I’m hoping to be able to speed up!
I like to speculate (since I know nothing about neuroscience, psychology etc) that inspiration comes from the subconscious processing of concepts that you understand well. For example, your coding idea could not have come about if you didn’t already have these concepts in your head: (1) (perl) programming, (2) gene structure – transcripts, exons, introns, (3) gene mapping tools – alignments, motif finders and so on.
So those “eureka” moments occur when connections are made between “things that you know”. The mystery is how your subconscious does the work and then delivers it to your conscious as a packaged idea. One of those traits that confers some selective advantage to us humans, I guess.
I tend to agree with you, Neil—it’s not pattern recognition as such, in fact it’s nothing like pattern recognition—it’s somehow seeing connections where there isn’t a pattern.
Do you think it works better when you’re drunk/tired? Perhaps we could do an experiment laughs
Henry, that post was before my time.
I’ll dig up the story and resend it, you useless Cromerian.
Perhaps we could do an experiment laughs
I’m permanently knackered just now, so “tired” should be easy enough 🙂
As for the second variable, guess we have about 3 months to have that beer. By the way, looks like I’ll be moving back to Sydney about the same time you leave.
Yeah, I figured that. I’m planning on working here until end Feb, which gives me a week to sort my life out before the lease on the house is up.
@Stephen
It’s an interesting observation on weblog entries (he says, “pointedly”:http://network.nature.com/people/scurry/blog/2008/09/09/i-hate-blogs-bloggers-and-blogging). I find that my ‘best’ ones (subjective, I know) are the ones I can bang out almost on the spur of the moment. That’s not to say I don’t spend a while writing them and (*gasp*) fact-checking, but the ones that I’ve thought about for a long time beforehand seldom see the light of day. I have a couple that I’ve been wanting to write since about October, but they just ain’t happening.
I have a couple that I’ve been wanting to write since about October, but they just ain’t happening.
Sorry to hear about the constipation… Perhaps in that case is means that the idea really isn’t germinating and it’s time to move on. Is there a kind of sub-conscious filter at work?
yeeerrrs… it’s stopping me being very rude about certain people
(no one here, don’t worry).
Nice piece in Futures rpg. Wistful.
Thanks Stephen. That was the hook on which I hung this post—believe it or not!