Paraphrasing Reality: The epistemology of narrative technique in science and other writing
Here's a session David Quammen and I are proposing at ScienceOnline 2014. For me, anyway, it's one expression of my conviction that we need to remake the conventional science narrative.
Paraphrasing reality: Epistemology & technique in narrative
alt title for the -ology-averse: Paraphrasing reality: Vividness versus verity in science and other narrative writing
suggested by David Dobbs and David Quammen, who would like to moderate
We like to tell ourselves we're relaying reality. But we're not. We are always paraphrasing reality. How do we write in a way that's realistic while acknowledging that?
Popular narrative stories about science typically have two goals: to make a story vivid, and to make it accurate. To do this we often rely on certain conventions of reporting, scene-setting, dialogue, and description common to most narrative nonfiction. We also rely on some narrative conventions peculiar to science writing — ways of describing studies or study results, for instance, or the status of debate-v-consensus within a discipline.
These conventions shape narrative elements ranging from descriptions of simple actions ("She asked him to roll up his sleeve, swabbed his arm, and drew blood.") to the use of quotes ("She said, "You have wonderful veins.'") to the results of lab tests ("The gene-expression results that came back made one thing clear: Adrian's time in Iraq had left its mark deep in the machinery of his cells.")
Those three sentences are typical of the sort found in many scientific narratives. But how true are they to what really happened? How well do they balance vividness and verity? How does the real trustworthiness of these sentences — and whatever larger conclusions they lead to — vary depending on whether the writer a) directly witnessed the scene or b) constructed it from after-the-fact reporting? Can we ever truly trust three sentences like this? Should we really quote her directly if we weren't there, for instance? Should we clean up her quote if, as is often the case, she stumbled, rewound and fast-forwarded, or changed her sentence halfway through? Might it be better — if arguably less vivid — to simply say, "She told him he had nice veins."
How, in short, can one most honestly write a scene like this and still make it vivid? How do we tell or signal to a reader what we've witnessed directly, what we've compressed, what we've reconstructed, and what point of theory is firmly settled and what still in play? What conventions do we need to challenge, revise, toss out, or amend?
This session proposes to examine such questions, brainstorming them by presenting some short passages from science narratives and pressing them with these questions. We'll focus particularly, at least at first, on conventions surrounding quotations and dialogue. This will be a heavily collaborative session — a focused but hiveminded exploration, which we (David Quammen and David Dobbs) propose to moderate.
