Introduction:

You pick up your pen and poise it over a blank page.

“I’ve got this,” you say. You have been writing novels your whole life. A ten-page paper about your research on DNA supercoiling should be easy.

But the pen stays poised, unmoving, as no words come to mind.

This isn’t storytelling. The tone is different. The content is different. The audience is different. Writing about your science feels like a new and unfamiliar beast, requiring a completely different set of skills from what you know.

Therefore, you conclude, your heart falling, you need to learn a completely new set of skills for the dry, academic style of scientific writing.

Of course, if that were true, you wouldn’t be reading this article. In this article, I am sharing how you can take one of the most important lessons from creative writing – stories have conflict – and apply it to scientific writing.

Storytellers are masters at crafting compelling conflicts, and these conflicts are key to driving a successful story forward. Lord Voldemort is trying to come back to full power; the Empire is building a Death Star and Katniss needs to survive a death game. Each of these conflicts creates a driving force in the story, giving it direction and keeping it interesting.

Science writing should have conflict as well. In a research paper or grant application, this is your research question, the central problem you have been trying to solve. In communication with the general public, it might be some misinformation or stereotype you want to mitigate. It might be an anecdotal conflict, such as the time your microscope stopped working right before a big deadline. It might be barriers you have faced during your career as a scientist.

Throughout this article, I will provide tips that I’ve learned through creative writing that you can apply to science writing to make your problem and overall science writing more compelling for the audience. I will also build upon both a creative writing example and a scientific example to illustrate how these tips can help turn them into compelling stories.

Tangible Tips:

These tips will walk you through how to create an impactful conflict. The first tip outlines how to frame the conflict within your writing and implement writing structures that support it. The second tip goes into more detail about the importance of conflict and how you can make sure you have presented one, with a focus on the ‘And, But, Therefore’ storytelling structure. The last two tips are two strategies creative writers use to make readers invested in their conflicts: raise the stakes and make the conflict relatable.

• Framing the conflict. When you read or write lots of stories, you soon notice that they tend to follow common structures. These structures can be as simple as a three-act structure (beginning, middle and end), or far more complicated, such as the Hero’s Journey. For an example, let’s make up a simple story about getting a peanut butter and jam sandwich.

It's the middle of the night and you are hungry. (Beginning)

You make a peanut butter and jam sandwich. (Middle)

You eat it and go back to bed. (End)

This is a very simple example that presents a conflict (you are hungry), a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s also not super exciting, but we will improve it with the following tips.

The same structure can be applied to science writing.

Supercoiling DNA can change its structure, and this can impact gene regulation. (Introduction/Beginning)

Whether supercoiled DNA is heated or cooled before it’s brought to an experimental temperature changes the speed of these structures changing. (Results/Middle)

Cells might be able to use this as a form of memory. (Conclusion/End).

Structure is important because it creates a sense that the piece of writing is going somewhere and creates forward momentum for the reader. It also helps writers, because following a structure keeps your writing focused on the message you want to get across. [4] is an excellent summary of different types of story structures with clear examples for each. [5] contains an interesting discussion about plot, plot structures, and how a plot is a promise to the reader that a skilled writer will fulfill throughout their piece.

• Why the conflict is important. You may have noticed that the above examples aren’t particularly interesting. This is because they lack a clear and interesting conflict. One simple story structure that is useful for developing a conflict is the ABT. Here, you start with an and statement to set the status quo, followed by a but statement to introduce a conflict, and end with a therefore statement to provide a resolution. This is very similar to the three-act structure used above, but puts more emphasis on structuring conflict and resolution. Applying this to our examples, we get:

It's the middle of the night and you are hungry. You decide to make a peanut butter and jam sandwich.

But your father is asleep in the room next to the kitchen.

Therefore, you must tiptoe to the fridge as quietly as possible.

And

Supercoiling DNA can change its structure, and this can impact gene regulation.

But DNA is complicated, making these structural transitions hard to predict. For example, the speed of transition can depend on whether DNA was heated or cooled before a measurement is even started.

Therefore, cells might be using these complicated transitions as some form of memory.

Just the addition of that ‘but’ makes the examples so much more compelling to read, because now we are introducing conflict. This structure makes a promise to the reader: here is a problem that we will solve if you stick with me until the end. More information about ABTs can be found in [1], [2] and [3].

Now that you have a conflict, how can you make your readers care about your conflict? Below are two ways to do this: raising the stakes and making the story/characters relatable.

• Raise the stakes. This is a common piece of advice for fiction writing. When you are writing a story, you want to make sure that the stakes are high, that the protagonist has a lot to gain or a lot to lose. This will get your reader invested in the story because now you’ve built suspense. In fiction writing, this can involve making success more important, failure more detrimental, or just increasing the difficulty of achieving success at all. For our peanut butter sandwich example, here are some ways to raise the stakes: you haven’t eaten at all today and you’re starting to feel faint from hunger; your father has an important interview in the morning and needs to rest in order to do well. Waking him up can ruin his interview; and the kitchen floorboards are very creaky.

In scientific writing, we are less trying to build suspense and more trying to illustrate why our problem is important to study and why our results are important to share. We can ask ourselves the same questions we ask with fiction writing: why is success important, why is failure bad, and why is success difficult? Communicating these effectively will make the reader care about the problems you are trying to solve. Returning to our previous example, understanding the role of DNA structure in gene regulation can help us answer fundamental questions about cell differentiation; not understanding how it works can lead to missing its role in diseases such as cancer; success is difficult because DNA is so small that we cannot directly observe these structures without immobilizing the DNA in some way.

More information about raising the stakes can be found in [6].

• Make your conflict relatable. This is a staple piece of writing advice for fiction writers. Make the characters relatable so the reader becomes emotionally engaged. Using our peanut butter sandwich example, our protagonist didn’t eat all day because they spent the whole day working on a big presentation and were so stressed that they forgot to eat. Since many people have a fear of public speaking, and many people have experienced trying to meet a tight deadline, they can connect with our protagonist on an emotional level and will better understand their desperation to make that peanut butter sandwich.

A similar rule stands for scientific writing. When you are developing your scientific story, you want to make the problems you present relatable. You can do this through tying them into common diseases, well-known problems, day to day life, or common observations your audience would be familiar with. For example, DNA structure plays a key role in gene regulation that we don’t fully understand. Gene regulation is important in every aspect of life. It’s what makes sure your eyeball makes eye cells while your elbow makes skin cells. And when gene expression goes wrong, all sorts of diseases arise, the most notable of which being cancer.

Useful resources:

Science writing resources:

[1] This video goes more in depth about the And, But, Therefore template, where it came from, why it works, and why it’s useful to apply it to science communication:

TEDMED, Randy Olson Great Challenges Day at TEDMED 2013. Youtube, 2013. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERB7ITvabA4

[2] This book provides more information about the importance of scientific storytelling, and introduced the And, But, Therefore structure.

R. Olsen, Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story. United Kingdom: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

[3] This video is part of a series of workshops about telling your science as a story, science communication and scientific podcasting. This particular video goes in depth about crafting an outline for your story following the And, But, Therefore template. It also gives some good examples of how to apply this template to scientific writing.

The (Un)Scientific Method, Workshop series: Telling your science as a story (Day 2/2). Youtube, 2022. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkXmQy8znG4

Novel writing resources:

[4] This book has beginner friendly breakdowns of different plot structures, with examples, and an in-depth explanation of various methods of using conflict to drive a story forward. Specifically, it builds on the three-act structure to make it more conflict driven, and discusses how to use internal and external conflict to flesh out characters.

R. Ingermanson, Writing Fiction for Dummies. Wiley Publishing Inc, 2010.

[5] This video is part of an undergraduate lecture on writing science fiction and fantasy. This video particularly focuses on plot, and discusses how written works make a promise to the readers, and your job as a writer is to make good on that promise.

B. Sanderson, Lecture #2: Plot Part 1 — Brandon Sanderson on Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Youtube. 2020.

6] This article discusses raising the stakes of your conflict in greater detail, and provides tips on how to raise the stakes in fiction writing.

C. Bradshaw, 5 Surefire Ways to Raise the Stakes of Your Story. Writer’s Edit. Available: https://writersedit.com/fiction-writing/5-surefire-ways-raise-stakes-story/

Acknowledgments:

Thanks to The (Un)Scientific Method podcast and SciCATS for hosting this workshop series, with funding from NSERC Science Communications Skills Grant.