\nMy first<\/a> Futures<\/em> 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<\/em> were the oppressors? The rather obvious political comment was an afterthought.<\/p>\n \nThe story that I sent Henry for Mallorn<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n \nOnce 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<\/em> have a notebook full of ideas, but no published novels. Yet).<\/p>\n \nBut what about science<\/em>?<\/p>\n \nMuch 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<\/a> that resulted in finding this run of binding motifs this morning come from inspiration, or sheer cold, Vulcan logic?<\/p>\n \n \nThere 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<\/em>“–but I can’t remember it, nor why I thought it in the first place.<\/p>\n \nThere must<\/em> a kind of scientific inspiration similar to that experienced by creative types. But if so, how do we tap into it, encourage it?<\/p>\n \nWhat do you do for inspiration in the lab?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019s first immortal” … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.usyd.edu.au\/labrats\/nature\/motif-thumb.png\")
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