Tag: writer’s block

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The Light Bulb Moments

This is what science is made of: Long stretches of I-have-no-clue-what-this-means, but as you go along with it, you might find a light bulb or two (or more like, a couple burning candles)*.

Sometimes, you will go through literature and concepts which make no sense to you. You will go over them again and again without absorbing anything (like when you have to go over a sentence twice just to confirm that it is (indeed) written in English). Did you perhaps miss a lecture in your classes? Missed a lesson life might have been trying to teach you at some point in the past? Or are you just missing the point here? Were you just not made for this? Did that escalate really quickly**?.

You will feel hopeless and a failure and start debating every life decision you have made leading you to this particular research article. But, in time, you will find this is not entirely true. You will realize (at some point) that all that reading and going through concepts, again and again, was actually going through to your brain in some way. And that you are definitely not as dumb as you had started to think you were (not too many self-esteem points, though – you are still capable of dumbness, just not as much as you had begun to believe).

Somewhere along, you see that it has started to make some sense. That definitely this line that you are reading right now, this would have been complete nonsense a couple journal articles ago.

It doesn’t happen all of a sudden, not (at all) like someone has switched on a light bulb. But the vision slowly clears and you can see a little more. It’s like each new paper you go through, you start to understand everything just a bit better than before (in some kind of a cumulative effect). 

That all that wandering wasn’t getting you lost. That there’s still hope for you (probably).

 

*This definition may differ from scientist to scientist.

**The answer is yes.

 

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Blocked

I find writer’s block to be quite a fascinating thing.

It’s really a great reason for an author to be not-writing (read reason as excuse). And the best part is, it is considered a valid one, too. It’s the exact reason I am not writing a blog post every day.

In fact, it’d be pretty great to come up with terminologies for every kind of block that a PhD student might face. Like the “lab-experiment-block” or the “reader’s-block”. Or just plain old “work-block” that could fill in every time we don’t feel like working.

However, I do think even the far-better-evolved excuse of writer’s block would stop working so well for me once I start writing my PhD thesis (like everything else in science that doesn’t work).

Anyway, the other day, I was listening to this podcast “No Such Thing (As Writer’s Block)“. It tells, among other things, the routine of Isaac Asimov, the big sci-fi writer. He got up early morning, sat down and wrote… whether or not he felt like it. Every day.

Writing daily is a little daunting. I have given it a try in the recent past, and well, you can write daily if you want to, but you surely wouldn’t be producing your best work every day. Some days, yes, but not every day. However, statistically speaking, if you write something daily, then you increase your chances of producing something worthy at least some of the days.

Just as doing science daily is a little daunting, and somewhat demotivating if you are not seeing immediate results at least some of the times. But every experiment that you run, adds up, whether it was a failure or moderately successful. The more you put in, the better chances you have of seeing patterns.

Although you can sometimes get lost in “the cloud”, as this professor notes in this rather interesting TED Talk (that you might want to listen to if you are in science, or a problem solver in general).