Let natural selection sharpen your writing

Physicists like to think. Ask interesting questions. Resolve or pose mysteries. But, like all scientists, they must interact with others, as each individual takes inspiration from prior works to create new ideas that in turn inspire others. Such interactions require communicating with researchers across the globe, which entails something many physicists dread: writing.

This necessity is often seen as unfortunate. Writing “is like some vile, incurable disease: There are bad days, and there are worse days,” wrote essayist Jim Holt in The New York Times. The task sounds simple: Have something to say and say it clearly. In practice, it is a lot harder. Another maxim, often attributed to Ernest Hemingway, reframes the problem of writing: “There is only one way to write well, and that is to first write badly, and then to fix it.” Appreciating this perspective is perhaps the most important key to becoming a successful writer.

For the past 15 years, a colleague, Justin Mullins, and I have been running scientific writing workshops for Ph.D. students and postdocs. We’ve learned that many students value good communication and want to improve, but see writing as a chaotic, mysterious, and slightly terrifying process. We teach them that they’re right: Writing is messy and difficult. And accepting the inherent messiness is the first step to writing well. Writing is part of the process of thinking: By putting partly formed ideas on the page, you discover what is valuable and what is wrong, incomplete, or imprecise.

As in most of life, you learn by trying something you don’t quite understand — and making mistakes along the way. The first draft is like a painter’s first sketch in pencil: uncertain, haphazard, and full of lines that will later be rubbed out.

One lesson, then, is never to be discouraged by your first terrible draft. Novelist Pamela Druckerman put this well in a graduation speech. “To be successful,” she said, “you will need to learn to tolerate the gap.” After writing a first draft, she explained, the gap you need to tolerate is the yawning cavern that separates “the glorious image you had in your head, of what you intended to create… and the sad thing you just made.”

Many great works started as bad first drafts. The real secret of writing is that good writing emerges from relentless self-editing. It emerges through iterations as, draft by draft, ideas get sharpened, details filled in, and repetitions removed. A writer creates a good text much as a blacksmith fashions an elegant sword: first with crude hammering and grinding and only later through tempering, quenching, sharpening, and careful adornment.

A second lesson is to trust that things will improve — often more dramatically than you expect — because you have a powerful ally in the self-editing process. Editing is an engine of evolutionary discovery. Evolution is a natural process that possesses no intelligence, yet it routinely lands on exquisite solutions to extremely hard problems. It works through natural selection: an iterative process that, at each stage, selects and preserves elements that work well and discards those that do not, while introducing some new structures through mutations or recombination. Over the past 30 years, research has demonstrated that algorithms that mimic the process of evolutionary selection have an extraordinary ability to find good solutions for complex design problems, from aircraft engineering to drug discovery. What is writing if not a complex design process?

To keep this evolutionary engine running, one must also manage the delicate psychology of the human mind. For example, you may need to accept, as I have, that your brain does not produce good material on demand. Much of the process consists in sitting, trying, waiting, and producing nothing at all — or writing something only to delete it. That’s normal. To cope with that reality, I need to change rooms frequently. I write outside, if possible. When I am really stuck, I open an email and send ideas to myself — because composing an email feels less formal and oppressive than opening a Word document. The moment I do that, my brain says, “Now you are doing something serious,” and I seize up.

A student once told us of a famous writer who takes several showers a day, because he has learned that his best thoughts always arrive under a cascade of warm water. Why not? Putting the text down and forgetting it for a time is crucial, because your mind falls into ruts. You need time and distance to see it freshly again. Above all, avoid guilt, which kills creativity. Writer Raymond Chandler had three writing rules: He had to sit at his desk for two hours a day; he did not have to write anything, which is to say, he didn’t permit himself guilt; and during those two hours, he did not allow himself to do anything else. He found, and I agree, that the brain, if not allowed to wander off, will eventually produce something useful — if only to escape boredom.

In our writing seminars, we try to convince students that, if they trust the process, they do not need to be naturally gifted at writing or exceptionally intelligent or creative to produce strong essays, research papers, and more. What they do need is the determination to keep working until everything becomes clear. It may be useful to drive this evolution by focusing on one aspect at a time: crafting effective sentences (for example, by favoring active over passive ones), building paragraphs with clear structure and purpose, and so on.

Mullins and I often share the same reaction when we look back at articles or books we wrote years ago: “I do not understand how I wrote that — it is smarter than I am.” How can that be? The answer is that a finished piece of writing is the fruit of a long process of cumulative improvement through revision. Promising but flawed ideas that emerge midway are never shown to the reader until they’ve been completed or replaced by better ones. At other times, a poor idea introduced in an early draft eventually ends up “colliding” with another idea in a later draft and, through a kind of constructive accident, becomes something genuinely insightful. Such outcomes are often not the results of a deliberate, conscious effort by the writer, but emerge from the natural sorting mechanism of the evolutionary editing process.

So, if you find yourself staring at a “sad” first draft — as I frequently do — remember that you are looking not at a failure of talent but at a zeroth-order approximation. It is meant to be ugly; don’t be alarmed. Trust the evolutionary engine of editing and keep selecting for clarity and meaning. In time, the process will take over, and you’ll find yourself having written something smarter than you thought you were.

This article was reprinted from Physics Magazine, an APS publication.