Exercise #16: The Scientific Method as Story Shape
Ted Chiang, Jonathan Lethem, Jennny Odell, Luis Alberto Urrea, Kristopher Jansma, Italo Calvino
Hi friends,
Hello again! I hope this finds you and yours healthy and safe as we transition from spring into summer. Here in the Sonoran Desert, temperatures have started to climb as we head into the hottest part of the year, which means I’ve been getting up earlier and earlier, preemptively moving my morning and other exercise into the only hours where it’ll be cool at all come July and August. Summer is undoubtedly the hardest time of year to live in Phoenix, but I do love the early mornings it forces on me: I’m at my best as a writer if I get to it early, and so my summer schedule tends to make me feel like I’m doing my best, regardless of how the pages actually turn out.
Hopefully there’s a good summer ahead for you too, wherever you are, and that your community is opening up safely and smoothly, where possible. In the past month, I made my first in-person trip to a bookstore since last March, and I found I’d missed browsing even more than I’d realized. I also saw so many new novels and story collections on the shelves that had come out during the pandemic, many of which I owned but had never seen in their “natural” habitat of the bookstore. Another reminder of what a hard year it’s been for anyone releasing a new book, and a good reason to pick up a few more new releases.
Good luck with this month’s exercise! As always, if you write something you like, feel free to tell me so. You’re also welcome to pass this prompt on to others, if you’d like, either by forwarding the email or sharing the link on social media. If you do, know that I appreciate it.
Be safe this month, be kind to each other, and have fun writing!
Happy writing,
Matt
www.mattbell.com
What I’m Reading:
The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem. I’ve always been a huge fan of Jonathan Lethem’s novels, and The Arrest was a good reminder why: it’s inventive and strange, full of great characters and some of my favorite dialogue in anything I’ve read recently. Its protagonist, Journeyman, is also an all too relatable writer-type, the kind I might occasionally see in the mirror: “Journeyman found that if he sank enough hours into a given piece, it gained a certain life. His fatal weakness, perhaps: he liked what he wrote.”
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. Every few months, it seems, I need another book encouraging/reminding me to be willing to go slower, to pay closer attention to the world around me, to focus on my time and place to resist the algorithm-driven flattening of contemporary life. Odell’s book is one of the best recent books in this loose genre, and one I know I’ll return to again in the future. A favorite bit:
To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is that you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world, but the channels through which you encounter it day-to-day. It also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one. Unlike the libertarian blank slate that appeals to outer space, or even the communes that sought to break with historical time, this ‘other world’ is not a rejection of the one we live in. Rather, it is a perfect image of this world when justice has been realized with and for everyone and everything that is already here. To stand apart is to look at the world (now) from the point of view of the world as it could be (the future), with all of the hope and sorrowful contemplation that this entails.
The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea. Not a new book, obviously, and one that hardly needs my recommendation, but still: a great book, one I’d meaning to read for a long time and wish I’d read earlier. In addition to the urgent story it tells about the crisis at the border, it has some of the best landscape writing I’ve seen about the Sonoran Desert, including this unforgettable passage about the extreme quiet you sometimes experience when alone in the wilderness here:
In immense stillness, vast as the horizon, yet somehow flat, echoless, leaning against the ear like a deafness. It was not as if the sounds of the world had been swallowed by the desert—it was if the sounds of the world had somehow failed to end the land.
Exercise #16: The Scientific Method as Story Shape
This past week, I had the pleasure of giving a keynote speech for a graduate student symposium at SUNY-New Paltz, where I was asked by Kristopher Jansma to speak on “Fiction for the New Millennium,” in a riff on Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Millennium. In one part of my talk, I proposed a number of models for writing stories suited to the complexities and crises of our time, including several kinds of problem-solving fiction. One of those models came primarily from the short stories of Ted Chiang, especially his stories which depict the scientific method at work, allowing readers the experience of seeing characters approach a complex problem through a series of concrete actions and specific questions, gathering evidence, drawing conclusions, and implementing or at least imagining solutions. This mode of storytelling works so well off Chiang that I’ve been thinking a lot about how he does it, and wondering more writers don’t do the same.
Let’s give a try, shall we?
In an interview at Locus, Chiang said that “Exhalation,” the title story of his recent collection, is about conceptual breakthrough:
a way of describing scientific discovery and the experience of gaining a greater understanding of the universe. Recapturing the experience of conceptual breakthrough, dramatizing that, is one of the things science fiction is good at. You can just as easily do that in a completely made-up universe with a totally different set of physical laws. The underlying process is the same, and I still think of it as scientific investigation.
If (according to Wikipedia) the five basic steps of the scientific method are Formulation of a Question, Hypothesis, Prediction, Experiment, and Analysis, how might these be used to structure a story? What kinds of stories might such a structure produce?
Science fiction, according to Chiang, even if it doesn’t immediately appear as such: “I consider most of my work science fiction, even the stories that look like fantasy. To me, what makes a story science fiction is not whether the universe has the same laws as our universe or not, but whether it is a universe in which the scientific method works.”
Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” is one such story, narrated by a robotic scientist (a self-described “student of anatomy”) living in a world where people live in a world bounded by a “solid chromium wall that extends from the ground up into the infinite sky,” and where they breath argon instead of oxygen, with the argon contained in exchangeable tanks installed in their chests. Early in the story, the narrator describes an unsolved scientific problem among their people, offering the first two parts of the scientific method in short order, the Formulation of a Question and then two competing hypotheses:
Despite these advances, the field of anatomy still had a great unsolved mystery at its core: the question of memory. While we knew a little about the structure of the brain, its physiology is notoriously hard to study because of the brain’s extreme delicacy. It is typically the case in fatal accidents that, when the skull is breached, the brain erupts in a cloud of gold, leaving little besides shredded filament and leaf from which nothing useful can be discerned. For decades the prevailing theory of memory was that all of a person’s experiences were engraved on sheets of gold foil; it was these sheets, torn apart by the force of the blast, that were the source of the tiny flakes found after accidents.
This, the scientist says, is the “inscription hypothesis,” which they discount by offering an alternative: “I was a proponent of the competing school of thought, which held that our memories were stored in some medium in which the process of erasure was no more difficult than recording: perhaps in the rotation of gears, or the positions of a series of switches.”
The scientist goes on to explain how they’ve already prepared to address the memory question in both Prediction and Experiment, hesitating only because their experiment is dangerous: “I had envisioned an experiment which might allow me to determine the truth conclusively, but it was a risky one, and deserved careful consideration before it was undertaken.”
What finally prompts the scientist to make their attempt is what becomes known as the “clock anomaly,” an odd anecdote the scientist first hears of at one of the filling stations where their people swap empty argon containers for full ones:
At noon of the first day of every year, it is traditional for the [district’s public] crier to recite a passage of verse, an ode composed long ago for this annual celebration, which takes exactly one hour to deliver. The crier mentioned that on his most recent performance, the turret clock struck the hour before he had finished, something that had never happened before.
Soon other reports of similar discrepancies come from nearby districts, all of whom report a mismatch between the hour-long verse and the hour marked by the local clocks. Inspections of the mechanical clocks provides no clear answer, the scientist reports, and “most people suspected fraud, a practical joke perpetrated by mischief makers.” (Hypothesis again!) The scientist begs to differ, saying, “I had a different suspicion, a darker one that I dared not voice, but it decided my course of action; I would proceed with my experiment.”
At this stage in the story, there are two questions formulated: “What is the nature of memory?” in these beings; and “What is the cause of the clock anomaly?” For both questions, there are competing hypotheses; for each, the scientist narrator has also made a prediction—in the case of the clock anomaly, their “different suspicion,” not yet voiced—which they will test via the dangerous experiment they had not previously been brave enough to attempt.
The bulk of the in-scene action in “Exhalation” is given to the depiction of this experiment, which begins with the construction of several devices needed to carry it out. At last, the scientist is ready:
Assembling all of this equipment took months, but I could not afford to be anything less than meticulous. Once the preparations were complete, I was able to place each of my hands on a nest of knobs and levers and control a pair of manipulators situated behind my head, and use the periscope to see what they worked on. I would then be able to dissect my own brain.
As the scientist proceeds step by step through the intriguing dismantling of their metallic, constructed skull and what lies inside it, they encounter areas of their physiology only hypothesized about, never before seen in a living member of their species. Peeling back layer after layer, the scientist approaches the center of their own brain, “the cognition engine,” “a microcosm of auric machinery, a landscape of tiny spinning rotors and miniature reciprocating cylinders,” made of leaves of gold flake, the same flakes that had given rise to the inscription hypothesis of memory and its opposite, that memory was encoded in the position of gears and switches.
Even with their brain still exposed, the scientist begins to analyze the results of their experiment:
My consciousness could be said to be encoded in the position of these tiny leaves, but it would be more accurate to say that it was encoded in the ever-shifting pattern of air driving these leaves. Watching the oscillations of these flakes of gold, I saw that air does not, as we had always assumed, simply provide power to the engine that realizes our thoughts. Air is in fact the very medium of our thoughts. All that we are is a pattern of air flow. My memories were inscribed, not as grooves on foil or even the position of switches, but as persistent currents of argon.
In the moments after I grasped the nature of this lattice mechanism, a cascade of insights penetrated my consciousness in rapid succession.
What follows is the moment of conceptual breakthrough Chiang mentions writing toward in the Locus interview: a series of new understandings of this species’ brains, of the clock anomaly, and, eventually, the nature of their world and the future of their species. Inside the world of the story, the conceptual breakthroughs discovered through this one character’s application of the scientific method are as world-changing as the discovery of DNA, or the nature of the atom, or the fact that the Earth rotates around the sun and not the other way around. This is a short story whose plot reorders its characters’ universe by nothing more dramatic than following a line of thought and inquiry step by step to its conclusion.
It is, to me, an absolutely thrilling way to build a story.
Your exercise this month is to write your own story that contains all five of the phases of the scientific method: Formulation of a Question, Hypothesis, Prediction, Experiment, and Analysis. Many writers began a story with a “What if?” kind of wonder: “What if the world was like X?” or “If X happened, what next?” For this exercise, go past this scenario-generating question into a query that could be answered by the scientific method, which means a question that can have an answer and can be tested.
Your story can be set in our world or in an alternative one, as long as it has discernible rules that allow for the scientific method to be followed, as in “Exhalation” (or another of my favorite Chiang stories, “Tower of Babylon”). Your character doesn’t have to be a scientist, but will probably need to be someone capable of thinking like one.
For the purpose of a first draft, I might suggest trying to divide your story into equal lengths for each part of the scientific method, as a generative constraint and so you can keep track of the steps: 500 words for each of the five stages would result in a 2,500-word story. I wouldn’t follow this constraint past its usefulness, though: my guess is that a more satisfying breakdown might give Experiment the most room on the page, as its likely to be the most physically active part of the story.
This exercise is a de facto chance to practice writing a story driven almost entirely by a character’s thought process, which might come in handy in other scenarios: it can be hard to write stories about a character’s thinking about something that are as compelling as stories about ones about characters acting, but Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” and his use of conceptual breakthrough as a story’s climax seems like one good model for doing so.
It’s also, hopefully, one model for how we might write fiction about the many problems we find in the world around us, scientific and otherwise. Stories depicting the step-by-step process of solving difficult problems might make it easier for us to imagine doing the same, and I think that’s something we’re going to want help doing, in times to come.
Good luck! See you next month!
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Matt Bell’s next novel, Appleseed, is forthcoming from Custom House in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, will follow in early 2022 from Soho Press. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
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