Bolts of Inspiration
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
A small aside in "Such Stuff as Dreams" made me think of one little thing that always annoys me in spec fic. It's when an author wants their protagonist to make some important scientific discovery, but they don't really understand how discovery works.
You might think this is a sci-fi problem, but I often see it even more blatantly in fantasy about pre-modern societies. In sci-fi the science is often a bit silly (and a bit of silliness can be on-brand and forgivable!) But there's at least an intuitive understanding in sci-fi that doing science involves having a laboratory and trying some experiments or something, and that there needs to be some build-up and explanation, because it's something that we in the modern real world won't understand until the characters do.
Fantasy is the genre that often really gets this wrong, because there'll be a character in a pre-modern society who discovers something that is commonplace to our modern selves, and it will just come to them fully formed out of nowhere. They'll wake up one day and go, ooh, what if we put a bunch of symbols together and each one made a different sound and that way we can spell words out and communicate with each other even when we're not physically together, this is a great idea that I just had this morning, let's call it WRITING. Or they'll be like ooh, I was just casually looking at the stars and I had this idea, what if the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around? I can't believe nobody's thought of this before, it seems so obvious to me. Then all the other characters will either adore them for their genius or persecute them for their heretical ideas, depending on what kind of story it is. In extreme cases, the protagonist will have several such ideas over the course of the story, all out of nowhere and conceptually unconnected to each other.
The way we teach children about science is partly to blame. In the West we are in love with the narrative of a single moment of inspiration coming out of nowhere to a single misunderstood genius. We tell students about the moment when an apple hit Isaac Newton on the head and he realized there was gravity; we don't tell them very much about what his process was like before and after that.
We're so in love with this trope of the misunderstood genius with a single idea that we insert it into stories where it doesn't belong. We sanitize the story of Christopher Colombus, for example - an awful person even by the standards of his time - by teaching children that he believed the world was round when no one else did, and that he set out to sea to bravely prove his theory correct. In reality, it had been common knowledge that the world was round since the time of ancient Greece. The controversy in Columbus's time was more to do with exactly how big the earth was. He would have perished in the ocean trying to get to India, having drastically underestimated the distances involved, if there hadn't conveniently been another continent in the way.
In reality, Isaac Newton did have a moment where he watched an apple fall and it made an impression on him; but at that point he was already an avid student of physics who was thinking seriously about the physical forces of the universe. The fact that objects fall to the ground - or orbit each other in space - had already been studied by earlier scientists like Galileo. Newton's big contribution was an equation to describe exactly how objects are graviationally attracted to each other and exactly how this attraction varies with distance. This equation was hugely important, but it took many more years after the apple moment before Newton had articulated it fully - and the scientific community was so well-prepared for such a theory, by that time, that other scientists had come close to articulating the same thing.
"Such Stuff as Dreams" uses the example of Darwin's theory of evolution, one of the biggest and most influential breakthroughs in any science ever. The idea of evolution by natural selection is commonplace to most of us now; there are creationists in some communities who reject it, but they still have a pretty good idea what it is. With an idea that feels commonplace like this, it's easy to imagine it as one thing, one single insight. But Darwin articulated this idea in several stages, each developed over years of study - both direct study of the natural world, in his years of travels, and also the kind of study that comes from carefully reading other scientists’ published work and thinking about its implications. Each stage was, in itself, a smaller breakthrough relevant to the controversies at the time. These led up, in stages, to the big idea of natural selection - which, in turn, led to more ideas, developed both by Darwin and by others, each of which required further time and thought and study.
It's not that big flashes of inspiration don't happen. They do - sometimes very dramatically, like Friedrich Kekulé's vision of the structure of benzene. It's just that these visions don't happen in a vacuum. They are one aspect of a lengthy process that also involves a great deal of study and work. Work occurs before the insight, in order to gain the expert knowledge that the insight is built on. And work occurs after the insight, to refine it and test it and work out its implications. Moreover, this process is iterative - not one massive bolt out of the blue that explains everything, but a thicket of many smaller insights that each lead to and depend on other insights (and which sometimes turn out to be a dead end).
I've been talking about scientific inspiration, but artistic inspiration works this way, too. A beginner artist doesn't sit bold upright at four in the morning one day and say "I know what I'll do - I'll paint the Mona Lisa!" Flashes of inspiration do happen - sometimes hardly at all; sometimes so many that we don't know what to do with them; sometimes so threadbare that we can't figure out how to get from "concept that briefly seemed cool" to any actual fleshed-out work. These inspirations are part of a much longer, larger process in which we learn, work, try things, fail a lot, and scaffold new insights on the bones of older ones. They almost always take place within a community, where we learn from and are influenced by other artists and we influenced them in turn. An artist who does something very original and visionary - like, say, Picasso inventing Cubism - has done so through this same process: slowly learning, working, developing, using those learned skills to work with the inspirations that arrive, and happening to eventually develop in a direction that differs interestingly from those that came before.