Souben ar Pouloudenn

Writing and reading, this is what academic life is so much about. For the writing part, I have a favorite guide, not exactly the one commonly recommended by the research institutions: “On Writing, a memoir of the craft” by Stephen King.

This book is actually not really about how to write, it is about the writing experience, about crafting. Most of the book about science writing are giving their lots of “do and don’t”, tips to get the manuscript published, how to structure an introduction and so on. This book by Stephen King is about his experience, about living the writing process. He does not explain “how to”, he shows and tells about his writing.

I can see many common points between writing novels and writing science. The grant writer I am can only identify to the writer receiving multiple rejections for the first manuscript he submitted. Stephen King nailed to the wall all the rejection letters he received. By the age of 14, the nail could not support anymore the weight of the letters. Sounds familiar? One of my first review paper got back from 4 or 5 journals, they all liked it, but not enough to take it. It’s still not published to date… Neither is King’s first story, “happy stamps”.

I guess the adrenaline shot is comparable when the work get finally accepted, particularly when it is the first ones. “The future lies ahead” wrote the editor Bill Thomson to King when he book “Carrie” got accepted for publication.

From this book, I take four pieces of advice. First, a writer needs to invest in a toolbox. It consists of grammar, vocabulary and all sorts of habits that turns nebulous thoughts into digestible text. Dropping adverbs and passive verbs is part of it. “The soils have been sampled using a shovel” or “we sampled the soil with a shovel”? This toolbox can be small (maybe a limited but specific vocabulary) or huge, but it should be adapted to your need.

Second, King expresses very well the link between creative process and writing. In this book, Stephen King is not explaining you the psychological triggers leading to a great idea, then turned into text, he is writing it. For example, he writes how the idea of his bestseller “Carrie” came to him. He associated together a memory of a summer job afternoon working as a janitor in a college, and an article about telekinetic phenomena read in a magazine some years before. “Pow! Two unrelated ideas, adolescence cruelty and telekinesis, came together, and I have an idea”. It sounds to me very close this idea of incubation I developed in this other blog.

Third, the reading is a part of the writing. “If you want to be writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot”. Reading is not only about collecting knowledge, it is also about experiencing what is good and what is mediocre. It gives a measure of the distance you are from the best writers of our field. “Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life”.

Fourth, writing is a question of discipline and regularity. King writes 2000 words (about 10 pages) per day, everyday. Without exception. He goes on writing until he reaches this limit, would it take him 3 or 8 hours. This discipline and regularity lead to a complete immersion into the piece of text and set it as the priority of the day. Except in rare occasion, like the start of a PhD thesis, I think that every scientist has always something to write. From my side I try to have the discipline to write at least 500 words per working days. I hope I will succeed to keep up with this rhythm sooner or later…

Summer is coming and you may be searching for a book to take with you on holidays. From King, I would recommend you some novels, like “11/22/63” or “Finders Keepers”, but if you plan to use this time to work on your skills, take with you “On writing – A memoir of the Craft”, I bet you will learn something useful.

Science is not a linear process. Some ideas may need quite a long time to mature and transform to a concept, an experiment and finally to a publication. I often incubate ideas, to be used at a later stage. This post is about one idea that took more than 5 years to materialise.

Global predicted PyC stocks as t ha−1 for the first 2 m soil depth.

I have a box I call “incubator” where I drop ideas worth to remember. Most of the time, it stays there long enough and I give up on it. Sometimes, it actually turns out to be a good idea. Recently we published a paper coming from this box:

Reisser, M., Purves, R. S., Schmidt, M. W. I., and Abiven, S. (2016). Pyrogenic Carbon in Soils: A Literature-Based Inventory and a Global Estimation of Its Content in Soil Organic Carbon and Stocks. Frontiers in Earth Science 4, 1–14. doi:10.3389/feart.2016.00080.

Full text here

In brief, this paper is an analysis of the literature about the quantities of fire-derived organic matter in soil. It consists in a collection of data extracted from the literature. We first compared these stocks to other types of organic matter, and then we analysed the drivers that couple explain these stock distribution geographically.

I found traces of the initial idea back in 2010-2011. I guess I was searching for references for the first papers we published in the topic of fire-derived organic matter (charcoal-like material) in the soil. I was searching for an idea of how much of this material was in the soil and I was surprised to find very few references, most of them pointing to a article giving a large range, actually based on 2-3 values. I had a rapid look and built up a database of 10 values or so, showing already quite a discrepancy with the referred ones.

I am fortunate enough to teach to very capable students at master level, and I often use this opportunity to test ideas as mini-projects postgraduate. In fall 2012, two Msc students selected the following topic: “how much fire derived organic matter do we find in soils?”. They found about 50-60 values, came up with several questions and issues and wrote an excellent paper. Then the idea wen dormante for a year or two.

The first reason for this pause was the “lack of time” for such topic. By lack of time I do not really mean I was so busy that I could not go further, but rather that I felt this idea needed my full attention for a couple of weeks, so that I can turn it into a meaningful piece of information. The second reason came from the students work: the issues they raised were serious: how to compare data measured with different methods, considered as not comparable ; how to deal with very geographically heterogenous origins of data, to cite a few. Also, I considered the database was too small at that time. So the idea and the students paper went back to the incubator.

It came out again a few times, for example I tried to give the data extraction task to several student helpers. It failed consistently, mainly because the students did not manage to select the proper information to be extracted from the published literature. To be more accurate, I did not manage to explain them what I wanted, for the good reason that I did not know myself, the concept explaining the stock formation was still missing.

The next decisive step took place end of 2015, at the beginning of a new PhD project. While preparing the project together with the PhD candidate, we realised that this literature analysis was still missing and was more and more needed, particularly because we wanted to compare ecosystems around the globe, so this geographical aspect matters more than ever. In parallel, we were developing some new hypothesis about soil organic matter stock formation in the frame of another research project, and we realised these hypothesis based on ecosystem properties were fitting perfectly to selected the drivers explaining the data we wanted to collect.

So the PhD candidate did the work. He collected 560 values out of about 60 publications and was able to find most of the informations we need to describe the drivers we wanted to highlight. He collected the database in a couple of weeks, we then wrote the paper in a month or so, with the help of colleagues from the department.

From an outsider perspectives, it may have looked like a extremely fast process: the data collection took place from February to March 2016, the data analysis and the manuscript writing until May. The manuscript was submitted end of May and was very well received by the reviewers. We have a couple of revisions to do and the paper was accepted early August. So 7 months for a literature/review paper. Actually, rather 5+ years…

Again from the outsider perspectives, it may have looked as all the pieces came together logically and smoothly. It was indeed not the case, it took ages to make sense out of it, mainly because most of the concepts developed over time and constructed this logical path. During this incubation time, since 2011, about 25% of the publications used in the database were published, representing something like 35% of the data.

I think this is a useful paper, giving a very new perspective to my research field. For example, it tells that there is roughly the same quantity of carbon buried as charcoal-like organic matter in the soil than in all the plants of the world. It was worth waiting for it incubation.