Scientists and science communicators looking to better engage the public with their work can learn a lot from creative writing. In this “toolkit” series, I take lessons from poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction and apply them to the science communication context in order to show how science communicators can leverage the lessons of creative writing to build empathy, emotion and gravity into their work. In this first post, I will explore the image.
Well-crafted images are central to good poetry and prose. In the context of creative writing, an image is simply a description meant to engage the reader by putting a specific picture in their head. Effective creative writers can use images to great effect, especially when they make a poem or story memorable. Take, for instance, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” by Edgar Allen Poe, a story so stuck in the American psyche that it has become a staple in high school English classes all over the country. Why is this story about murder, guilt and madness so pervasive? One answer is that central, eponymous metaphor—the victim’s heart beating beneath the floorboards betraying the antagonist’s crime. This is such a delicious headworm of an image because it is so surprising.
We live, for better and for worse, in an era of “old language.” Where an idiom like “bite the bullet” may have once been a captivating turn of phrase, inspiring people to actively imagine snapping a bullet out of the air with their teeth alone (the hutzpah!) today the phrase hardly inspires anything. This is the circle of life for an image. As it becomes more commonplace, it loses its ability to be evocative. To inspire readers to actually pause and reflect on a bit of writing, when a language’s most obvious metaphors have become hackneyed and trite, a writer has to constantly supply fresh ways of imagining something. Poe understood this better than most.
If Poe’s murdered character woke up and started screaming, and that inspired the murderer’s remorse, the story would not be nearly so powerful. It is the fact that the heart alone woke up, and the obvious absurdity that the murderer can hear such a prairie-quiet sound, that is so compelling. You might forget what actually happened in “The Tell-Tale Heart” after high school. But you’ll never forget that eerie heart thumping away in the floorboards.
So what can science communicators learn from a master like Poe about the image? For one, avoid the sappily sentimental. Too often, science communicators reach for the simplest description, the one that comes from a cursory evaluation of a phenomenon, or worse something handed down from a long line of unimaginative writers. A drop of coral snake venom can kill five adult humans, sure. I’ve been reading that a drop of this or that poison can kill varying numbers of people and elephants ever since I picked up my first “Zoobooks.” When you read an image like that, does your brain light up with a picture? Probably not.
What if you read: “The coral snake is colored like a candy cane. But locked up inside that sugar-fun coat is the death of an entire family, with just a single prick.” Can you see the family? Can you see the end of the candy cane you sucked to a dangerous point? If you’ve never thought about a snake as a candy cane, your brain now has something new to hold onto. That novelty inherently makes an image like that effective at triggering a reader’s brain to picture something new and exciting, without doing any work.
Images are a tremendously powerful tool for anyone looking to better communicate about science. If you want to practice being a better image-maker in your own work, consider looking to creative writers for inspiration. For diction, I would specifically recommend reading image-heavy poets like Ron Rash, Elizabeth Bishop and US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (especially her collection Life on Mars, my goodness). While reading these poets, focus closely on what pictures populate your mind as you scan each line. What imaginative constructions lead you to imagine what you do? How does the image billow out as successive images rise and fall in your head? By focusing your attention on the craft of creative writing, you can learn how to incorporate the imaginative craft into your own work.