The
desire to write grows with writing.
—
Desiderius Erasmus
There was a
time in my life, a long time ago when I was in grammar school, when the mere
mention of writing an essay for a class exam would strike terror in my mind and
heart. The teacher would hand out those little blank blue essay books, reserved
for the privilege of exam time when we would have to write out the longer
answers to exam questions, or write the dreaded essay. All I remember is that
my brain went blank; I froze and could not for the life of me come up with one essay
idea to write about that I thought was even remotely creative. I could not
write on cue, with someone standing over me or in front of the room, telling me
‘time’s up’ after one hour. Even the memory of it today makes me flinch. I
remember struggling to find an idea, any idea, and wasting precious time trying
to find the perfect idea. By the time I came up with an idea worthy (in my
mind) of writing about, I had to rush through to get it finished on time. I am
surprised that I ever did as well as I did; looking back, I’m guessing that my
teachers knew that I tried hard, and that since I was good in all my other
subjects, they cut me some slack.
I was no
good then (or now) at performing on cue, in the same way that I am no good at
coming up with snappy retorts or good arguments on cue, unless I know the
person I am bantering back and forth with/discussing with and unless we have a
certain level of understanding with each other. It wasn’t until I started high
school that I got interested in writing for the fun of it, and that started in
an English class taught by an excellent teacher, who remains a friend to this
day. He loved literature and books, and it shone through. He loved teaching and
he loved to tell us about what he read, or he read it to us—poetry, snippets of
a short story, a newspaper article. It didn’t matter. If he was jazzed about
something, he shared it with us. That’s a good teacher. He encouraged us to
write, and it didn’t matter what we wrote—poetry, prose, essays, plays—all of
it mattered to him. Because if we wrote, he was happy. When I re-read most of
my early poetry, I cringe. But some of those early poems were good. That taught
me an important lesson—the 99:1 lesson. For every 100 things you attempt
creatively, 99 will not pass muster and 1 will be good to excellent. So I am
happy if one of 100 poems I’ve written is good. But that shouldn’t discourage
us, because that’s how the creative life is. Heck, that’s how life is in
general. It’s the same way in research science, perhaps even more so. You can
perform many experiments to test out many ideas, but perhaps only one or two
will be worth following up and writing about. Science, like writing, requires
patience and perseverance. It’s not about quitting at the first sign of
trouble. It’s about not getting bowled over by the endless rejections. It’s about
having a good cry when your work gets rejected or your experiments fail for the
umpteenth time and then getting back up on the horse. Lately, the scientific
horse has less appeal to me than the creative writing horse. But that’s just
where I am these days, and it will have to do.
The early
lessons in grammar and high school shaped me. I persevered in my overall
studies, and ended up in science. But I continued to write, all the way through
college and graduate school, my first job (that had a lot of dead time in the
lab; I wrote poems on scraps of paper), all the way up to the present time. I
wrote poetry—tons of it. I wrote short stories. I started several novels. I
tried to publish a book of my poetry; it was rejected by a major publishing
house in New York, but they actually did read the poems and picked out the ones
they liked and told me why. That helped me. I didn’t get back a crass review
like we risk and often get each time we send a research article to a scientific
journal for review by our ‘peers’. It’s hard to hear for the umpteenth time
that ‘your article is unfortunately too descriptive and would have been better
if you had done the same experiments in five additional cell lines’. Your heart
sinks when you read these words, because just doing the experiments you did in
two or three cell lines might have taken two years. So how many years can you
spend on one piece of work, making it better, making it perfect? When there is
no such thing as perfection, when we know that we cannot achieve perfection on
this earth? We have to draw a line somewhere, have to know where to stop. As one
teacher said to me very early on ‘better is the enemy of good’. What we do can
always be better. A better perspective may appear years on down the road. But
we can’t go back and change what we did even when we know that the new
perspective might be more correct, more fitting, or more relevant. Done is
done, published is published.
The desire
to write does grow with writing. It
also grows with feedback. Every time someone comments on something I
write—whether or not they agree with what I wrote—if they tell me it was
well-written, I want to continue writing. The feeling of having touched people,
having reached them, having stimulated new thoughts or feelings—that is a large
part of what makes me want to continue writing. But mostly, the desire to write
is innate—it’s always been there and always will be there. It just had to be
set free, and it took one excellent teacher to do that for me. I can read a
book or a magazine or watch a movie now, and ideas flood my brain. I start
thinking—I can write about this or that. I just need to remember the idea. That
is a fear—not remembering the idea or ideas, not remembering a scenario or a
formulation. You need to strike while the iron is hot. Ideas fade from memory.
It pays to write them down somewhere; so that your memory gets jogged the next
time you read what you wrote. But just like we will never write the perfect
novel or essay, we will never have a perfect thought or a perfect retrieval
system for thoughts. That is another lesson about being human—we must take
advantage of the opportunities that present themselves, in the moment that they present themselves. If there truly is a
collective unconscious and I believe there is, the pool of wisdom, mythology,
thoughts and ideas that abide there will perhaps make the rounds another time
and filter into our brains again. But that could take years, if it happens at
all. In the meantime, it’s best to jot ideas down, and then to get started writing
about them. It leads to somewhere good.
