Art and Science: Something Powerful in Common

April 15th, 2009

I’ve been thinking about how hard it is to sell stories, to make a living as an artist, and how there are parallels with how hard it is to publish papers and to secure grants in science.   There are some key differences, of course, but there’s something powerful in common, too.

As an artist, a writer, and a scientist, I believe I have some insight.

There’s a certain level of craft involved in all of these activities.   It’s the mechanical things.   An artist can draw what they see with some level of skill, make a pleasing composition.   A fiction writer can arrange description, dialogue, and characterization into a plot that moves.   A scientist can conduct an experiment, estimate the uncertainties, and draw conclusions and write them up so everyone understands what they did.

Those are essential tools for success, but they are not sufficient.   Far from it.

Imagine a painter rendering banal picnic photographs with great skill.   Imagine a writer giving a terrific description of brushing teeth.   Imagine an astronomer dutifully measuring the light curve of a known variable star with greater precision than ever done before, and adding a few decimal points to it’s period.

Who cares?

I don’t.

And no one else is likely to either.

I remember one art teacher in high school going on about how subject didn’t matter.   A great artist could take any subject and make it compelling.   That’s bullshit.   Great artists find compelling things, often in things everyone else overlooks, and shows us what makes them compelling to them.

We’ve all seen great writers, artists, and scientists do mediocre work from time to time.   I have seen myself do it, too, and can tell when I’m doing it and when I’m doing something really good.

It’s excitement.

You can tell when you’ve got an exciting idea, something compelling, and it’s just a matter of showing everyone else what has gotten you excited.   If you’ve got the craft, you can do it.

Almost everything I’ve had great success with in art and science has been flagged by this excitement.   I’ve tried to train myself to recognize it and follow it.   Simultaneously, I’ve tried to resist working on things just for the sake of working.   Probably has hurt me from time to time, being “blocked,” but I don’t usually work fast enough for it to be a problem.

It helps a lot to go through workshops and to sit on review panels.   It’s a little hard to learn to consistently recognize the excitement in your own ideas, and how they play to a broader audience.   Workshops/reviewing helps train you with positive feedback.   It starts becoming obvious that when someone captures something novel and exciting, and expresses it well, that everyone gets infected.

When writing proposals or begining writing projects now, I have a simple test.   Am I excited to do this?   If the answer isn’t a sure “yes,” I don’t do it.   I look for other ideas.   The best way to have good ideas is to have a lot of ideas, and to train yourself to recognize which ones are the best, and not to work on the boring ones.

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