How To Write into What You Don't Yet Know

Richard Panek on starting from scratch

“You start with the desire to write about a subject, then you discover, ‘Oh this is what I am doing,’ and start to see the connections.” —Richard Panek, author of Pillars of Creation: How the James Webb Space Telescope Unlocked the Secrets of the Cosmos

Preview: Emerging Form Episode 124 with Richard Panek

Early in his writing career, Richard Panek learned how to turn ignorance on a subject into a benefit for his books. “It allows me to be a surrogate for the reader,” he says, helping the reader learn alongside him so that difficult subjects become more understandable. He brings this approach to his newest book Pillars of Creation: How the James Webb Space Telescope Unlocked the Secrets of the Cosmos. In this episode, we talk with him about how he researches and organizes, plus how punctuation can help writing be more conversational, how to write personably without using the first person pronoun, and trying creative things you haven’t tried before.

Richard Panek is the author of numerous books including The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, which won the American Institute of Physics communication award and was longlisted for the Royal Society Prize for Science Books. The recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts as well as an Antarctic Artists and Writers grant from the National Science Foundation, he is also the co-author with Temple Grandin of The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, a New York Times bestseller. His own books have been translated into sixteen languages, and his writing about science and culture has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Scientific American, Discover, Smithsonian, Natural History, Esquire, and Outside. He lives in New York City.

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What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

• I have long been a fan of Maria Popova’s blog The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) and every year she sends out a list of things she’s gleaned in the past year—one life learning for each year of her anniversary. This year’s 18 life learnings opened me in all the best ways … especially her focus on forgiveness, unselving, resisting cynicism, and questioning your models of the universe.

• In times of trauma, challenge and cruelty, it’s hard to know what to do, how to respond. How to bring balm, build bridges, offer love. This is the spirit in which the Out of the Depths anthology was created by Elizabeth Topper. It’s available free, online, in English and Hebrew—poems from all around the world that speak to Grief and Mourning, Love and Yearning, Kindness and Compassion and Hope and Faith.

• I didn’t know how much I needed to hear Saved by a Poem as an audiobook. For over 15 years, I’ve treasured my much-dog-eared paperback copy, but like a poem, this was a book that desperately wanted to be spoken, to be heard, to be brought into the body with music and cadence. The generosity, passion and honest joy in Kim Rosen’s voice (she was our guest in Episode 71 on letting go of identity as a maker) makes the words bloom in me, and I discover again, as if for the first time, how powerfully, how generously language can open us, can bring us into communion with the other beings in this world and with the world itself. Listening to this book, I feel transformed, galvanized, alive with possibility and hope for humanity. It’s a love song of a book spoken by one of the greatest readers of poetry of our time.

Christie:

• We don’t usually talk politics here at Emerging Form, but we are standing at a precipice. The United States is about to either elect the first woman president or elect a tyrant who has promised to end democracy and obliterate our political norms. Please vote for candidates who will uphold the Constitution, adhere to the rule of law and commit to the peaceful transfer of power. The stakes couldn’t be higher. To quote a recent editorial:

  “Trump says he will deploy the American military against U.S. citizens. Believe him. Trump says he will use the Justice Department to punish people he doesn’t like. Believe him. Trump says he will round up and deport millions of immigrants. Believe him. Trump says he will allow vigilante violence to end crime. Believe him. Trump says he will order the military to strike foreign civilian targets if the United States is attacked. Believe him. Trump says he will punish blue states by withholding disaster relief. Believe him. Trump says he will use ideological tests to decide which public schools get federal money. Believe him. Trump says he will abandon U.S. allies. Believe him.”

• On a lighter note, I love Laura Helmuth’s Scientific American story about the science behind how apples have become so delicious. “The world of commercial apples has two phases: before Honeycrisp and after Honeycrisp,” says apple research David Bedford.

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Getting Out

Sometimes there is inside me
a space so great
my body takes itself outside—
as if the house is too restricting,
as if this inner space
must be met by something vast as field,
boundless as sky, immeasurable as interstellar space.
If it is storming, so much the better.
If rain races down the face
and saturates the clothes, this is right.
If wind rips at my hair
or snow stings my cheeks
or lightning makes my hairs stand on end,
it only serves the aliveness.
If it is warm and still,
the inner space expands
into the warm and still.
There are feelings too immense for four walls,
too intense to be trapped in the skin,
sensations that rhyme with the cosmos,
moments when we start to grasp
what we are made of—
more energy than matter,
more nothing than something,
more everything than we ever dreamed.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
 

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A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

First, we want to thank ALL our subscribers! We are so grateful you join us in this conversation about what it is to engage with yourself, the world and others in a creative way. And a BIG thank you to our paid subscribers. You make this podcast possible. Starting this month, only our paid subscribers will receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support.

This week, we talk with Richard about what it’s like to win a Guggenheim, the ups and downs of relationships with other creatives—”floating in creativity,” and the glorious feeling of looking at your creative project and thinking “everything is right where it needs to be.” If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can go now to our website, EmergingForm.substack.com, or by clicking the button below. Thank you!

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Two Questions:

(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)

1. If you could research and write a book about any subject you currently know very little about, what would it be?

2. What is your favorite punctuation mark and why?

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