In a short article posted early in June last year (2016) I was, yet again, musing on the topic of ‘scientists as real-life people’. The post was catalysed by my discovery, in a book on words which have no clear-cut equivalent in English, of a Japanese word which encapsulates the act of gazing into space without thinking about anything in particular. The post was titled Boketto. As an experiment, for my own benefit more than anyone else’s, I appended to the core reflection a short story I had written as a piece of ‘homework’ for the creative writing group I was a member of. However, I later got cold feet and deleted it. This may have been premature. Having now written several short stories for one writing group or another (and even a competition-winning shape/concrete poem, see here) I have spotted a distinct theme which prompts me to reconsider. I have no desire at present to move my blog away from its core raison d’être – namely to offer posts on being a scientist and on public engagement – but it is evident to me that even my creative writing exercises derive their essence from my life as a scientist. The fact that they are all informed by my experiences as a scientist and an academic ought not to be a surprise of course, given that all authors – even the very amateur ones like me – write out of themselves in some way.
What I intent to do, therefore, is to post a handful of them and allow those interested in reading them to do so and to come to their own verdict. They are all reasonably short, varying from about 1200 to 2000 words, and have had the significant benefit of constructive criticism from fellow amateurs more talented than me; one of the stories even made it to the final ten in a local competition and is due to appear in a small anthology. In this introductory post I will try to draw out some of the more direct links with the events, themes, places or follies of my career. It might also be of interest to fellow creative writers out there if I try to give you a ‘feel’ for the background to each of the exercises: what were the tasks set by our group leaders that gave rise to the stories you read. I have posted them separately, in the order in which they were written, and have included links to each of the stories below; in that way this post will act as a contents page as well as an introduction. I hope you will explore, and perhaps even enjoy, one or more of my stories – but I must of necessity leave that with you.
1) The Baptism of Jon arose from an exercise which began with the following tasks: pick a character’s name and give this person a tattoo, choose a second character who will either help or hinder the first; there must be a setback, but then a resolution. (Those of you who write will recognise this as a variant of the classic story arc.) There’s no immediate link with the physical sciences but, almost unconsciously at first, I ended up setting the story in a conference room. I’ve been sitting in such rooms, off and on, for four decades …
2) Triple Scoop takes us back to the early 1980s when I was making repeated extended trips to a national laboratory in the USA. I included something of this period of my career in an earlier post (here). The dramatic event at the centre of the story actually happened, and my homage to American ice cream parlours of the time definitely comes from the heart, but the characters are made up: some autobiographical traits and many others borrowed from a mishmash of acquaintances and observation.
3) Carriage C was originally drafted at the rate of ~500 words per installment through a five-session creative writing course with the local University of the Third Age, U3A, but then re-edited to iron out the consequential disjointedness and weakened overall direction. The initial exercise called for a description of a place/space in the absence of people – I wrote it on the train from London to Sheffield, where I was participating in the centenary meeting of the UK’s Society of Glass technology (see here, second half, for my reflections on the conference). Thus, I owe the entire trajectory of the story to this conference journey. Moreover, one of the fellow scientists travelling with me provided the initial constructive feedback.
4) The choice of title for the next story, New Blood, reminds me, although only in hindsight, of the government scheme to help address the age profile of UK universities in the mid-1980s. It was on the strength of this injection of funds that I was able to begin my three-decade academic career. This was a challenging exercise, heavily constrained by the requirement to use the first sentence (in italics) as the opening lines for the story. However, the vision of a group of people jointly writing a ‘make-or-break’ document came directly from experience. Almost all my published scientific output – follow the link at the bottom of the right hand column to 'orcid' for more details – has been collaborative by choice; most of this was managed using fax machines and later via the internet, but not all. There was one truly major item deemed to be so important that we shut ourselves in a room and worked on it in precisely the manner depicted in this story. With genuine affection I wrote about this team of people here.
5) Mr and Mrs Micawber arose from another challenging exercise, in this case to write a short story inspired by an image our creative writing group’s leader had provided. I have included in the post the image allocated to me, together with a crude diagram I thought might prove useful. Apart from a nod towards a pair of characters in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, the setting of the story is heavily inspired by lectures I used to deliver to new physics students during the latter, more confident and relaxed, phase of my academic career. In order to engage those students who lacked confidence in the ‘strange’ learning environment they found themselves in I would show clips from movies as the starting point for science-focused discussion or problem-solving. I made passing reference to this approach in an earlier post, here. An oft-used clip was that of the approach and docking sequence at the rotating space station depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: a space odyssey’ – a film my daughter once described as “three hours in which nothing happens”, but which to my mind has remained one of the classics of the genre. Thus, Emma and Wilkins Micawber, live on an analogous station sited at the first Earth-Moon Lagrange point ...
I sincerely hope and trust that I will continue to be able to write short fictional stories in the stimulating company of diverse, but universally creative, fellow writers. I do so for my own pleasure, but it will be interesting to see how my life as a scientist continues to inform and populate even these ostensibly ‘non-scientific’ creative writing exercises.
P.s. since posting this, and the five short stories that went with it, I'm glad to say that I've continued to write even fiction as through the lens of my lifelong love of science. My tally of shape/concrete poems has now reached two with a poem titled Cusp, after the mathematical term and which proudly displays the word 'singularity' right at its centre (the first poem, Harmonics, is mentioned here). There is added to this my first free-form poem, which was inspired by what I stumbled across during a mid-experiment walk out of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory a couple of decades ago. There's a new short story as well, set in the park below Glasgow University within site of the statue of physical scientist Lord Kelvin.
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