Today is Day 4 of my November Writing Challenge, and I struggled to sit down and type out something, anything. To be honest, I figured I’d struggle most within this first week, since I’ve always heard that building daily habits is the toughest on day 3 of starting out – well, here we are, technically Day 4 but that first day was really just an introduction. That was the whole point, though. By writing every day, even if just a little, it would help build up a habit of writing, something that professionally I need to do more of but these casual (creative?) writing exercises would serve to build the habit.
I have such massive respect for people who have creative talent. I mean that pretty broadly, not specifically writing or art or music, just the act of “creating” something from nothing. The “talent” half of that doesn’t necessarily mean innate, inborn talent, and from what the artists in my life tell me, almost all creative talent is built from lots and lots of practice rather than being naturally gifted. The rest of us don’t see much of the practice pieces, only the “masterpieces”, I’m told. Still, I have a lot of respect for creative talent and especially artistry that is broadly appreciable. There’s an argument that even science experiments are creative, but even the most elegantly designed experiments are hard to appreciate unless you’re already deep in the niche of that field. Prepping a “perfect” experiment, with <20% coefficient of variation and p-values < 0.05, just doesn’t hold the same kind of broad appreciation as cooking an amazing meal or painting a beautiful landscape. It’s all creative talent (in the sense of creating something from nothing) and requires mastery in their own respects. But the former can’t really be as broadly appreciated as the latter.
The rate and visibility of “failure” in science is probably similar to creative arts. Hardly anybody speaks about their failed experiments; there’s a survival bias of only the experiments that worked since those are the ones being published and presented. Sometimes the failures aren’t even because the science was bad, it might just be bad luck, or that there weren’t enough resources, or the idea was otherwise ahead of its time. But the failed experiments are also “practice” for a scientist, I guess, so it doesn’t matter so much whether every experiment works or not, it still can count for practice.
Not all experiments are tangible, which makes it harder to feel like “practice”. For some reason, doing something creative feels more real to me when it’s making something tangible, rather than the sometimes esoteric nature of science experiments. (Most of my science is mixing clear colorless liquids, so it’s “creating” something in the literal sense, but there’s not cool color changes or gently smoking beakers or glowing slime like some media portrays.) In the last year of my PhD, I got the wild hair to teach myself how to make macarons (NOT MACAROONS) in part because the Great British Bake Off insisted it required a lot of practice. I made a batch almost every week for nearly a year, and I finally got a recipe down good enough to serve an assortment of macarons at my thesis defense party.
That kind of practice made progress feel more concrete and measurable. I had a clear product to compare, week after week. I even stored some “representative” macarons in the freezer to lay them out the next week and see where they improved or where they got worse. Each iteration was clearly comparable to the last. It’s similarly easy when I “practice” running (more like jogging, to be honest), since I can see my speed or time change week over week and gauge if I’m improving.
Seeing how “practice” helps (or doesn’t help) in my science profession is a bit harder than macarons or running. But maybe that’s why writing felt like a good thing to practice – I can measure my progress by word counts. Whether any of the words are worth reading is a different metric.
Lindsay K. Pino 