Scientific Storytelling

It's like a memoir, not fiction

I was tootling around my office this past spring when I got a surprise phone call from a friend. T. is both a scientist and a writer. I love reading her lyrical meditations on the mysteries of nature, the power of coincidence, and the importance of human connection. A seasoned academic with many scientific publications under her belt, she was struggling to write her current scientific manuscript.

T. asked if I had any advice on how to get out of this slump. After casting about for a bit, I suggested that she pull all the figure legend titles (which we agreed should state the result shown in the figure, not just describe the approach or technique), put them in an ordered list, and try to make a story out of them. To my delight, T. was energized by the suggestion, saying it sparked her imagination and gave her a new entry into the task at hand.

A scientific paper tells a story

While T. was particularly suited to lean into a narrative approach to scientific writing, most of us have heard similar advice. And I think it’s true—the best scientific papers tell some kind of story. They create a coherent narrative out of a tangle of results, experiments, ideas, hypotheses, previous results, and historical assumptions. They have a beginning, a middle and an end. They have a theme. Those that are the most fun to read also have narrative tension, or a conflict and a resolution of that conflict.

As Stephen B. Heard says in this excellent post from his blog Scientist Sees Squirrel (quoting from his own book, The Scientist’s Guide to Writing):

What does it mean for your paper to tell a story?  Successful fiction…sets up and then resolves some interesting question in a reader’s mind, by exposing compelling characters to a well-defined plot.  A scientific paper does the same.  It has characters: the rocks, chemicals, equations, or other entities that you studied.  It has plot: the methods you applied to your characters and the results you obtained from them.  Most importantly, it raises and answers an interesting question. —S. B. Heard in The Scientist’s Guide to Writing.

Scientific writing as memoir rather than fiction

I don’t love the fiction angle, for obvious reasons. While biologists may love dreaming about what might be going on with our molecules or genes or organisms or ecosystems, in the end we are limited to those plot points that are supported by our data. Maybe it’s more like the experience of those authors who say they create characters and then they take on a life of their own, moving the plot to places the author never foresaw.

But I think that the most interesting metaphor here is non-fiction—writing where you are limited to the truth. Scientific papers aren’t like a travel journal, where you write down every detail in chronological order—that’s a lab notebook. Even an autobiography isn’t quite right, as it typically means the entire history of a person’s life.

Instead, scientific papers are a lot like memoirs. A memoir is a constrained selection of memories or personal history that come together to generate a meaningful insight or understanding about the human condition. In writing a memoir, you have to choose which events in your life are related to the point you want to make—then make artful decisions about the order in which to present them and the strength with which each event plays in the overall conclusion you want readers to draw. Similar to the process of writing a scientific manuscript, you sort through memory for relevant events, see what themes emerge, how you think one thing leads to another.

The limitations of selecting memories or experiments to include

Of course, this approach of sifting through memories has to be approached with caution. In a fantastic memoir-writing class I’m taking this month, the instructor cautioned us not to ignore stories or events that we feel resistance around—these are likely to be meaningful and compelling. If you skip over the events that make you look bad or that you have strong feelings about, you may be missing a chance for deeper insight.

In writing a manuscript, things are even more clear cut—a scientist absolutely may NOT choose to ignore the results of an experiment that doesn’t support their main hypothesis. I was lucky to have mentors who were unequivocal about this point during my training, because it can be tempting to ignore a result—or just not do the experiment because you are afraid the results will challenge a pet theory.

The stories that don’t get told

The tagline of The Taproot, a podcast that Ivan Baxter and I co-created and co-host, is “digging beneath the surface to tell the story behind the science”. Mixed metaphors and too many prepositions—perhaps. But what we talk about in the podcast isn’t the science—not really. We try to get to the stories that lead up to the creation of new knowledge: how the funding was obtained, how the personnel were hired or recruited, how the techniques or tools were developed; how hypotheses changed as data came in, how the people involved in the work informed and influenced outcomes. These stories are there, they just don’t get told (except maybe by PIs at the bar at a scientific conference).

How do we tell these other stories? As I’ve shared over the past few pieces, I didn’t come up in the system knowing much about the mechanics of scientific publishing, and I have the sense that the same is true for young people today. So much of the system is opaque and never really brought into the open. I think it’s worth asking ourselves if the current system of sharing our work is the right one. Maybe it is. But maybe there are ways to publish a wider range of formats, from poems to multi-generational sagas.

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Discussion Section

• Do you have experience with selecting moments to write into a memoir or experiments to report in a scientific paper? What are your thoughts about the conflict between telling a coherent story and telling the truth?