Lessons I learned from failing to write a book
Why I don’t talk about musicians and scientists as much anymore
I used to hype up “scientists who make music” a lot more than I do now. What happened? I learned about publishing, storytelling and audiences and I stopped caring so much about academia. Here’s the whole long tale about what happened, and for subscribers there’s another big chunk about what I’ve shifted towards and some advice on what makes for an interesting story.
One of the reasons this newsletter is called Mixture is because it combines several older blogs and newsletters that used to exist separately, including the Musicians & Scientists Quarterly newsletter. That newsletter featured news about (and music from) people involved in both music and science, and it’s why you still occasionally get these features in Mixture as well. But there’s a more complicated story about why I started that newsletter in the first place. I actually wanted to write a book on the topic, and have gradually changed my mind about that over the years. I never really talked about why, so I thought I’d take a bonus Mixture post to explain how I changed my way of thinking about musicians and scientists.
The first half of this (the main explanation) is public, but I’ve put the rest under the subscribers paywall.
About fifteen years ago I first started toying with the idea that I wanted to highlight the many scientists who also did music. I initially explored whether I could tell this story as a documentary (probably boosted by my tiny Lab Waste film making it to the Imagine Science Film Festival in 2009) but soon realised the incredible cost and complexity of that. Plus, I moved from Toronto to Cambridge UK in 2010 and once I was no longer in a film industry town I simply stopped thinking about that medium.
Instead, I spent the next few years exploring if it was possible to write a book about scientists and musicians. I learned how the book publishing process works, I took courses on how to write a proposal, I did years of freelance writing, I published content online to associate myself with the topic (that’s where the original newsletter comes in), I interviewed many scientists and musicians about their interests (including several of the subscribers to this newsletter) and I spoke to agents and book editors about the idea.
What made me change course
From all that work and all those interviews and conversations I gradually learned a few very important things:
Only a niche group of people would be interested in reading an entire book about musicians and scientists. It’s feedback from several agents and editors, and I know they’re right. If it was a general interest topic, I would have found it easier to grow an audience around the topic, but none of my online content about musicians and scientists ever broke through beyond my usual audience. (Unlike some other types of content - more about that under the paywall below).
It became less relevant to me. When I first became interested in the topic of musicians and scientists, I was a Biochemistry PhD student who felt trapped in academia. I went to orchestra rehearsals and attended music festivals to take my mind off science, and realised that the way that I coped was by having this balance in my life. In the interviews I did with other scientists and musicians this story of balance kept coming back. But while scientists love hearing how others manage to find balance, for many people outside of research this stronghold of academia is not as relatable. And the further I moved from research, the less relevant it became to me.
There was no narrative arc. As I learned more about writing and storytelling, I quickly understood that “scientists and musicians” is not a story. The exciting part of the narrative to me was always something like “it takes all sorts of people to do science” or “everyone is creative at heart”. But that’s only interesting if you want to encourage creative people to consider science careers and not a particularly thrilling narrative arc on its own. A story needs some kind of conflict or twist and this story had neither. The only tiny struggle most musical scientists ever encountered was when they had to persuade their family or professors that their music career wasn’t a waste. And the only “surprising twist” I could find in this story was one that shouldn’t be a surprise at all – that humans are interested in multiple things.
A lot of research into the topic was overly highbrow and annoyingly pretentious. To resolve the lack of narrative structure, I thought that I should delve into *why* people still consider music and science to be these different worlds when they’re obviously not. Now we’re into the territory of C.P. Snow’s famous lecture about The Two Cultures, and of Robert Root-Bernstein’s study of Nobel Laureate hobbies. It’s academics talking about other academics, and that wasn’t at all what I was after. I wanted to showcase a joyful and colourful community that brought science into the performing arts, or that combined their passions. I didn’t want to forcefully fit it all back into academic discourse.
It was a story about privilege. This isn’t really separate to the above four points, but a summary of all of them: Anyone who is able to fit both science and music practice into their life is somehow privileged. Not even necessarily in terms of money, but privileged because they were introduced to those paths and encouraged to explore them. That can take many forms. Some people might come from artist families that let kids do whatever they want, while others were brought up by strict parents who pushed their children to academic and musical achievements. Either way, they had access to the ivory towers of academia and the arts. But many people have neither. In fact, one of the most salient stories I came across in my research on musicians and scientists was the narrative of people using music to make science more accessible. (More on this under the fold because it ties into “what’s next”) Overall, the story of musical scientists is a story of privilege. It’s why the audience is overly narrow, why I lost interest once I moved further from that audience, why there is no conflict in the narrative and why everything became so boringly academic once I scratched under the surface.
Overall, the story of musical scientists is a story of privilege. It’s why the audience is overly narrow, why I lost interest once I moved further from that audience, why there is no conflict in the narrative and why everything became so boringly academic once I scratched under the surface.
That doesn’t mean I’ve thrown away years of work. Obviously the topic lives on here in Mixture, where I still share links and music from musical scientists or scientific musicians. The work I put in also taught me about the process of non-fiction book proposals, but I’m pretty sure that the next proposal I send out will be on a different topic. From other work and through freelance writing I now have a better idea of what makes for interesting stories, and I also have a few other projects on the go at the moment.
The second half of this post goes into some of these ideas, and explains the professional side of writing a bit more.