Why I'm Starting the Absolute Zero Collective

Last week I announced that applications are open for my new year-long writing development programme, Absolute Zero. I’m calling for writers of all styles and genres who want to experiment with writing about STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) in their work, and I thought I’d tell you a little bit more about why. 

My inspiration for the collective came from Steve Cross’ performance development programme, Talent Factory. I was lucky enough to be part of its first year in 2016-17, when I was able to cut my teeth on the comedy stage, and when I first discovered storytelling as a science communication tool. But more than that, in Talent Factory I found a community of like-minded friends that was absent - shockingly - from the basement physics laboratory in which I did my PhD. Now in its fifth iteration, Talent Factory is a proven model whereby community and friendship engenders creativity and innovation. Having had my career shaped by such a group, I thought it was about time to pay it forward. 

I have always loved writing. I can remember spending weekends and school holidays typing out stories on my Dad’s Windows 98 computer, making every sentence a different colour until my eyes bled in HTML. Years later, I loved storifying my PhD thesis and I’ve never been happier than when I was writing the first draft of Handmade in the lido cafe. But as a reader of science, I’m often left unsatisfied. ‘Popular science’ as a genre still attracts the usual suspects of authors and audience, and I often find it patronising, dry, and devoid of relatable characters and reasons for us to care. Whilst I attempted to break this mould with my autobiographical narrative nonfiction odyssey Handmade, it still sits on the popular science shelf, and failed to reach the audience that I’d hoped for. 

So, my hope for Absolute Zero is that we’ll break this mould together, through poetry, fiction, comics, plays and more… I want us to create work where people come for the story and stay for the science. I want us to make something new. 

I must confess that my reasons for starting the group are not entirely altruistic. As a materials scientist and storyteller, I have no well-worn career path to follow. Instead, it’s more like swimming the open ocean with the constant threat of drowning, tides and the occasional jellyfish sting. So, I recently asked myself; ‘what does France look like?’ Okay, end of metaphor. I recently asked myself; ‘what does the dream look like?’

And to me, the dream looks like one day having my own publishing house that supports writers from all backgrounds to produce truly innovative science writing. I’ve recently coached and mentored several science writers at various stages of their publishing journey, and I love playing the role of ally antagonist, helping them tell the best stories possible. 

I see the Absolute Zero Collective as the first step on that journey. It’s a group where we’ll commit to our individual writing practice, have weekly ‘writing group’ style meet-ups to share and feed-back, and we’ll all contribute to our collective output. The group will decide what form that will take, but I’m envisaging podcasts, videos, zines and/or live performance nights to reach audiences as yet untapped. 

Who knows where it will lead? But that’s the scientific method for you. Hypothesis: change is possible. Results? Watch this space. 

An Adventure Begins

Next week I’m going to be embarking on a year-long project with StoryArcs and the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) examining and critiquing the narratives told in UK research today.

I’ve worked in academic research and public engagement for a decade, using storytelling techniques to engage both public and academic audiences with my work through writing, presenting and broadcasting. For the last two years, I have been running a business teaching storytelling to researchers to help them do the same. 

My experience has shown me that storytelling can be an incredibly powerful toolbox for researchers to use to disseminate their work to each other and the public. But the way that researchers are framing their stories may not be serving researchers, research, or the wider academic community well.

This is because researchers must adopt multiple roles when they communicate their research; the author, the narrator and the protagonist. In my view, playing all these parts simultaneously makes researchers inherently unreliable narrators. The UKRN’s concern is that the ‘publish or perish’ pressures on researchers to pump out high quality and high quantity outputs means that their narratives serve to persuade, rather than inform. Researchers as authors write to persuade the gatekeepers; editors, peer reviewers, PhD examiners, conference audiences, grant panels etc. - that they are worthy of their place in the ivory tower. 

Such persuasive storytelling encourages the narrator to spin positive stories, and the author must retrospectively weave a narrative in which they, the protagonist, arise the hero. To write such clean narratives obfuscates precious data points about failures, blind alleys and messiness in the research. In the best case scenario, this results in shorter, simpler, more impressive publications. But in the worst case scenario, we lose important information about the researcher’s thought process, biases, expectations and flaws that may be crucial for us, the audience, to critically assess the conclusions that they came to. 

To address this problem, my aim over the next year is to explore whether and how research reporting needs to shift its emphasis from persuading to informing, in order for research to become more authentic, honest and transparent. Guided by an advisory panel of experts from across research, journals and the media, I intend to interrogate current research reporting, assess the strengths and flaws of its narratives, and use creative methods to test alternative approaches towards achieving this goal. 

The Importance of Tension

John Yorke’s Into the Woods is one of the classic modern storytelling theory books. In it, Yorke defines story as:

‘…the dramatisation of the process of knowledge assimilation.’

This, to me, sums up why science is so well-suited to being communicated in story. Because science is, by definition, the process of knowledge assimilation. By doing experiments or building computer models or reading the literature of scientists past, we assimilate knowledge about how the universe works. 

So, when we tell stories about science, all we’re doing is dramatising that process; dramatising the process that science already just is. 

When I say dramatising, I don’t mean inserting the Eastenders drum riff at the end of every presentation. The skill of a storyteller is to understand in what order to give the information to their audience so as to continually manipulate dramatic tension.

Our audience need dramatic tension to care, and that dramatic tension must constantly change for them to keep caring. If you’ve ever read a Dan Brown novel, you’ll have experienced whiplash from that rollercoaster of dramatic tension with every page-length chapter. 

Increases in dramatic tension are caused by increasing uncertainty. What’s going to happen next? How will they escape? Will she notice the monster hiding under the bed? Etc.  

In other words, we raise dramatic tension by raising questions. 

And what goes up must come down. Dramatic tension is released when we answer those questions. That feels good for our audience. They get a dopamine kick when tension is resolved. Which sets them off craving that feeling again…

So what does this mean for telling scientific stories?

Well, scientific research is done by asking a series of questions. Well, the most important question you ask if your overarching research question, or hypothesis. A simple scientific story would set up the context, ask that question and then answer it.

But along the way you encounter all manner of smaller questions;

• What equipment should I use?

• Which parameters should I test first?

• Why is the data not showing me what I expected?

• Should I just give up and join the circus?

• What if this outlier actually means something though?

• Can I repeat it?

• Has anyone else found this?

If you want to communicate your research as a gripping story, start by listing the small questions that contributed to your findings, then take your audience on the rollercoaster of tension with you.

Falling

The first law of thermodynamics states that energy is neither created or destroyed, merely converted from one form into another. 

The apple presumably started that day like any other. The dawn light refracting over the garden wall to be both absorbed and reflected by its skin, that latter portion rendering whichever lucky observer saw it to smile upon its redness. Later, perhaps some bobbing on a branch. Maybe a perching place for a small songbird. You know, apple stuff. 

Given what else we know of that apple’s day, we can hypothesise of the apple that its volume was large, its density ripe and the forces resultant from those two properties that were acting through the small umbilical of wood that connected the apple to the branch were reaching some critical point. 

The first law of thermodynamics states that energy is neither created or destroyed, merely converted from one form into another.

Potential energy. A coiled spring. A glass on the edge of a table next to a cat. A ripe apple being blown by a pleasant summer breeze directly above the balding scalp of a man named Isaac. 

Kinetic energy. Motion. Falling. 

Sound energy. Thunk.

Heat energy that instantaneously dissipates into the air as the impact is absorbed by both the man’s skull and the body of the apple itself, the percussive shockwaves later ripening into bruises on both parties. 

A lightbulb moment.

Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation states that every particle attracts every other particle in the universe with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses, and inversely proportional to the square root of the distance between their centres. 

In other words, the closer things are together, the stronger the attractive force between them. 

Do you think that explains what happened to us?