Biology is the study of life, of finding unusual beauty in the ordinary. So is writing.
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Why do we find bright lights so pretty? Whether natural phenomena like fireflies and bioluminescent ocean waves, or man-made ones like Christmas lights and sprawling evening cityscapes, all that twinkle, shimmer, and glow is uniquely alluring. The attraction is gentle, more of a suggestion than a tug.
In nature, bright lights are a matter of survival: For fireflies, light attracts mates; for some jellyfish, the play of light inside their tissue-paper membranes drives away predators; for some marine bacteria, producing light is the ticket to a cozy home among squid and fish, which use the gifted glow to cancel out their shadows in the moonlight or as a way to catch prey. We humans are inherently drawn to such luminescence because similarly bright and shimmering objects signal a source of water, and the sight still tickles some primitive, survivalist corner of ourselves—or so one theory goes. oooh brilliant.) These types of biological glows are part of my daily life, as a doctoral student studying bioluminescent bacteria.
In science, as in writing, there is no such thing as useless knowledge.
But the glow that fuels life also takes forms beyond the biological, and when I sit down to write stories, it is these variations on this theme that interest me most. I am talking about the glow of certain moments and memories, which evoke the same cocooning sensation as the light of campfires and flickering candles. That glow in your chest when you, the reader, immerse yourself in a book that hits all the right notes. Or the glow when you, nostalgically, leaf through old photographs, your thumb brushing over each bygone era that the passage of time has made rosy.
Or when you, a sibling, notice your brother humming a song while looking out the passenger window, his chin resting on the heel of his hand, the humming just a reflection of happiness in this most mundane of moments with you. I’m talking about that undeniable kind of thing. shine, this bioluminescence of the emotional variety, a nebulous thing not quite precisely captured in an English word, existing perhaps on a plane intersecting or tangential to Danish Hygge, or in Korean All right (atmosphere).
A mixture of safety and wonder, warmth and sudden weightlessness, a sense that it is all fleeting as if it were a brief happiness but somehow also more lasting as if it were a true contentment, plus a certain amnesia to top it all off, because in this sheltered amnion of shine, We forget for a moment that there is something beyond that. When we talk about the American quest for happiness, isn’t that the kind of glow we’re really looking for? That little miraculous pulse of warmth somewhere in the chest, in a cavity that’s not strictly biological, not exactly physical, but can still feel like it’s bursting at the seams?
bioluminescence noun the emission of light by living organisms.
I’m looking for this emission of light when I write stories, like many writers. How do you create bioluminescence in writing?
One possible answer to this elusive question comes from the biology lab. When it comes to cellular mysteries, sometimes the best way to find an answer to a question is to ask alternative questions that probe from oblique angles, then look for indirect readings of the original phenomenon. To find brilliance in writing, I ask these kinds of parallel questions, too. How do we face the unknown? What is identity, when all our identities are in perpetual flux? And when these incorporeal multitudes that define us are shattered, by the nature of existence in an irrational world, how are they reconstituted? Where can we find this mysterious glue, even in the most unexpected places?
The percolation of such questions during my final year of undergrad, the first year of the pandemic, coalesced into We carry the sea in our hands. I’ve found that when I ask these kinds of questions repeatedly, looking around, sometimes I get lucky and notice a parallax, a glow. Sometimes it just takes a particular angle to see it. A play of light, like most blues in nature. Aren’t we all chasing will-o’-the-wisps, anyway?
Perhaps this is why, in science as in writing, there is no such thing as useless knowledge. Knowledge acquired through mere curiosity seems to have a strange perspective. Scientists-in-training are often encouraged to attend seminars in other departments, because perhaps a molecular biologist at a mechanical engineering conference will find a strange piece of information or a way of thinking that will spark a new idea. Fiction writers, too, cannot predict when learning a very specific and random fact might prove useful in a story: the oily flammability of birch bark, the difference between the contact calls and alarm calls of songbirds, the behavior of tin buttons in cold weather, the vagaries of utility.
Read a lot and read often: A phrase heard so often by scientists and novice writers that they share the same tickling reflex in their heads when they hear it—of both agreement and annoyance. Stick your nose into other genres, we are told. Dive into something new, leave all your presuppositions behind, and simply observe how things are done, we are told. And in doing so, we may stumble upon a new angle from which to approach our work, to look for a glimmer of light in some unexpected corner. I think this is what Abraham Flexner was talking about in his essay “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge.”
The process of writing a story and that of scientific research are not so different. People find fragments of themselves in stories, both in reading them and in writing them, and can move these images around, like an abacus, to try to make sense of things that have happened, are happening, or will happen. I wonder if this is also what biology is? To me, it feels like an echo, moving questions and data points around to find an abstraction of truth.
For me, the best way to find the glimmer of hope when I write is to go to the lab. Or rather, to think about biological phenomena, which the lab is conducive to. There is so much to admire in a single cell, the vast knowns and the vast unknowns of something so small, so delicately complex yet surprisingly robust, such elegant and autonomous works of art. They are landscapes of tiny subtleties that float and spin and dance, carried by molecular ferries and electronic shuttles, all timed and positioned just after millennia in the dollhouse of evolution.
How brief each movement can be, and yet how impactful it is in a rippling sea of movements! How precisely complex a cell is, how easily it arouses wanderlust and vertigo – so much so that one wonders how anyone could probe and delve into its choreographies with any sensitivity, as one tries to cut slices of a cake with one’s bare fingers.
Questions without clear answers or conclusions are both the nature and the purpose of it all.
Thinking of biology as the wonder that it is (or reminding myself of it when the realities of routine lab work blur this beautiful view) creates an approximation of shine For me, if I want to write, it’s often just a matter of transferring that nascent light into the written word. (A bit like how FRET works, for scientists.)
Scientific research and fiction writing are perhaps the two fields that most complement each other in their appreciation of uncertainty. Nothing is a fact; it is natural to return to questions. Like ocean waves, echoing up and down the shore, each sandprint is like the one before it, but not quite the same. This is partly why scientists and writers are blessed or cursed—you take your pick—by the endless stream of questions: “What am I doing?” “Am I doing anything right?” “Do I know anything? And if so, how do I know it?”
Whether I choose to reassure myself by viewing this as evidence of scientific rigor, as the appropriate level of doubt and questioning with which I should approach my science, or whether I choose to call it a small crisis of rigor to be worked out with a philosopher or a therapist—or whether I choose, as is often the easiest, to simply slap the imposter syndrome label on it like one of those “Hi, my name is” stickers on a child’s birthday—what seems true is that questions without clear answers or endpoints are both the nature and the purpose of it all. To borrow a phrase one of my thesis advisors likes to say, “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” It seems to be the cartilaginous material that stretches between science and writing, making them two organ systems within the same body. In my life, writing and biology are necessarily symbiotic.
Four years ago, I wrote in my PhD applications about how my childhood hobby of writing turned into an interest in science. All I wrote then about this new inverse relationship, about how science in turn gave life to my writing, was that “biological research seeks to understand what makes life move, and creative writing seeks to understand why it makes sense for people and society.” Microscope and macroscope, I think. This essay is my addendum—but I wonder how all this might change in the years to come, this polaroid of opinions and awkwardness? We become the stories we tell ourselves.
In recent months, I’ve felt myself drifting between two worlds, unable to say “I’m a writer” or “I’m a scientist” without feeling like I’m wearing ill-fitting clothes. But I recognize that living unmoored between questioned identities that keep shifting like refracted light—“a writer?” “a science enthusiast?”—has its own value, if you look at it from a particular angle. To settle into this interstitial space is to ask a lot of questions and enjoy the privilege of not knowing many of the answers yet (which I think is this: it’s easier to learn something amazing and fascinating when you simply have so much to learn in the first place). It’s also a state in which I’m learning to find brilliance.
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We carry the sea in our hands by Janie Kim is available from Alcove Press, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.