Ask the Author: Douglas J. Emlen
Answered Questions (4)
Douglas J. Emlen
I wish I had a better answer here.....writer's block drives me crazy! As a full-time scientist/professor, my biggest problem writing is finding free blocks of time. Preparing and giving lectures, meeting with students, reviewing manuscripts and grant proposals, writing technical papers, faculty meetings, committees, grading term papers and exams....my days (and often evenings and weekends) are packed. So when I manage to clear a few quiet hours for writing, it is absolutely sacred. And nothing is more frustrating than squandering hours of this "sacred" time beating your head against the wall stuck, with no words gushing forth. The worst are the days where I not only fail to write new material, but in the process I manage to convince myself that sections I've already written are terrible -- these days I actually LOSE ground!
Yet writer's block happens all the time. For me I change locations. I have searched for places where, for some bizarre reason, the writing works (at least more often than not). Too quiet and I get distracted and restless -- so the stacks of the University library don't work. Too accessible, and I get interrupted all the time - so my office is out, as is my home when my family is around. Some background noise helps. Like a hum of white sound it lets me tune out my surroundings and immerse myself in the material.
I finally found a part of the student center at my university that works well, with students bustling past but not looking for me, so it becomes a background blur. And a coffee shop with hard stone floors that echo with just about the right amount of background hum. They also have fantastic coffee and a really friendly staff. So, for me, the secret is finding the perfect place, and this works most of the time. But when I hit the wall I have to get up and move, and try someplace else.
Yet writer's block happens all the time. For me I change locations. I have searched for places where, for some bizarre reason, the writing works (at least more often than not). Too quiet and I get distracted and restless -- so the stacks of the University library don't work. Too accessible, and I get interrupted all the time - so my office is out, as is my home when my family is around. Some background noise helps. Like a hum of white sound it lets me tune out my surroundings and immerse myself in the material.
I finally found a part of the student center at my university that works well, with students bustling past but not looking for me, so it becomes a background blur. And a coffee shop with hard stone floors that echo with just about the right amount of background hum. They also have fantastic coffee and a really friendly staff. So, for me, the secret is finding the perfect place, and this works most of the time. But when I hit the wall I have to get up and move, and try someplace else.
Douglas J. Emlen
I am now beginning to write a children’s chapter book (aimed at 8 – 10 year olds) about my adventures in the rainforest studying beetles. It will be a companion of sorts to Animal Weapons, but will focus on solving the mystery of why only some species have horns.
Douglas J. Emlen
I've always loved writing, and it's a big part of my job as a scientist and professor. But I discovered that writing for general audiences is a very different skill - I actually had to "unlearn" most of what I thought I knew about writing. The conventions that make an effective research paper in a technical journal, or the tricks that make a grant proposal especially compelling, are NOT helpful when it comes to writing about these topics for a non-academic reader.
Learning to write in this new (for me) style was frustrating and slow, and required patience on the part of my editors. They kept bouncing chapters back to me. "Do it again. You sound like a professor." At one point I even called my editor and explained "but I AM a professor!" She finally convinced me that I was going to have to lose all of that, and start fresh with a new voice. I had to learn to tell a narrative, to find clever ways to pull readers into the biology, and to make the animals vivid and real. I also had to find ways to pull readers into the rain forests, and into the mindset of scientists in the field, to bring the process of science to life in an exciting and memorable way.
None of this is ever part of technical papers or grant proposals!! But I fell in love with this style of writing. Once I began to find my voice, so to speak, the stories just gushed - I'd had years of crazy adventures stashed away in the recesses of my mind, detailed in letters I'd scribbled to my girlfriend (now wife) when I'd been living and working in the jungle all those years ago, and now I had a chance to tell these stories, weaving them in and around the biology of crazy animals with extraordinary weapons.
I now look at writing in an utterly different way, and I appreciate nuances in the writings of other authors that I'd never noticed before.
Learning to write in this new (for me) style was frustrating and slow, and required patience on the part of my editors. They kept bouncing chapters back to me. "Do it again. You sound like a professor." At one point I even called my editor and explained "but I AM a professor!" She finally convinced me that I was going to have to lose all of that, and start fresh with a new voice. I had to learn to tell a narrative, to find clever ways to pull readers into the biology, and to make the animals vivid and real. I also had to find ways to pull readers into the rain forests, and into the mindset of scientists in the field, to bring the process of science to life in an exciting and memorable way.
None of this is ever part of technical papers or grant proposals!! But I fell in love with this style of writing. Once I began to find my voice, so to speak, the stories just gushed - I'd had years of crazy adventures stashed away in the recesses of my mind, detailed in letters I'd scribbled to my girlfriend (now wife) when I'd been living and working in the jungle all those years ago, and now I had a chance to tell these stories, weaving them in and around the biology of crazy animals with extraordinary weapons.
I now look at writing in an utterly different way, and I appreciate nuances in the writings of other authors that I'd never noticed before.
Douglas J. Emlen
I’ve been interested in animals with extreme shapes for as long as I can recall…. and by the time I got to graduate school I’d zeroed in on insects (they were the “uncharted frontier” of the animal world, with so many species unstudied and so much still to learn; they also had an abundance of species with absurd morphologies). From there it was an easy jump to beetles — they’re so cool — and they have ridiculous horns. I’ve been studying beetle horns ever since (twenty five years!)
The book arose as a side project, initially. After two decades studying beetle horns — the function of beetle horns, the sneaky alternative tactics employed by tiny males without horns, the hormonal and developmental genetic mechanisms regulating expression of beetle horns, the phylogenetic relationships among species with beetle horns, well, you get the idea — after years working on one type of animal weapon, I had a chance to step back, and look at all the other crazy weapons that were out there. I knew there were lots, and that there were loads of papers on these other species, but given the crazy pace of academic life I’d never had the time to really read that literature the way that I should have. SO I started pouring through the literature. As part of this I ended up writing an academic review (an article on animal weapons in Annual Review of Ecology, Systematics, and Evolution), but the editor kept making me trim, trim, trim, and all the fun natural history got cut from the final paper. So I decided to write a book spinning the stories together of all these wonderful species with their ridiculous armaments.
But then something really magic happened. As I worked through all my copious notes, with notecards and scribbles and sketches spread all over every table and surface, I began to realize that all of these different stories were really just one story. It didn’t matter if I was talking about a mastodon with 15-foot tusks or a moose fly with 1/2 inch antlers — the essential biology of these extreme weapons was always the same. This meant I had to completely re-organize the book, and the order in which I organized and presented the material; but it also meant I now had something much more important to say — ideas that were likely to be groundbreaking for biologists too, not just interesting natural history for a non-academic audience. These new ideas were exciting and, I felt, likely to shake up my field.
Then the plot thickened. My editors kept asking me to look into human weapons too. We all know that our weapons can get sucked into arms races, so just how similar are these processes? At first I resisted, but then I started digging. And digging, and digging — the deeper I dug the more astonished I became. The story really IS the same, and it applies to our weapons too. I was nervous at first, about talking about military arms races, given my background as a biologist rather than a historian, but I stumbled on work by a true card-carrying (if there is such a thing) military historian (Robert O’Connell), and in his books (Of Arms and Men, in particular), he’d come to almost exactly the same conclusions that I had!! So I, a biologist, was talking about the essential features of animal arms races, dipping into history where and when it felt appropriate, and he was a military historian talking about manufactured weapons and arms races, dipping into biology. We’d converged on much the same lessons. I was blown away (fortunately, he turned out to be super kind and helpful, and he read through my entire manuscript and helped “fact check” a lot of my military history). So now I am much more confident that these parallels are real, and important.
So my book started out as a book on animal weapons, with a chapter or two tacked on at the end comparing human weapons. But my editors wanted a lot more, so it then became a book with animal chapters, and boxes inserted into each chapter with the human parallels; But they wanted more still, so, in the end, it became a book that flowed back and forth between these realms and covers them fairly equally.
Bottom line: it all started with me taking the time to step back and think outside of my box, digging into the literature on lots of diverse weapons that are not beetle horns. But the project pulled me in and became rather all-consuming, and the book evolved a ton as it came together.
The book arose as a side project, initially. After two decades studying beetle horns — the function of beetle horns, the sneaky alternative tactics employed by tiny males without horns, the hormonal and developmental genetic mechanisms regulating expression of beetle horns, the phylogenetic relationships among species with beetle horns, well, you get the idea — after years working on one type of animal weapon, I had a chance to step back, and look at all the other crazy weapons that were out there. I knew there were lots, and that there were loads of papers on these other species, but given the crazy pace of academic life I’d never had the time to really read that literature the way that I should have. SO I started pouring through the literature. As part of this I ended up writing an academic review (an article on animal weapons in Annual Review of Ecology, Systematics, and Evolution), but the editor kept making me trim, trim, trim, and all the fun natural history got cut from the final paper. So I decided to write a book spinning the stories together of all these wonderful species with their ridiculous armaments.
But then something really magic happened. As I worked through all my copious notes, with notecards and scribbles and sketches spread all over every table and surface, I began to realize that all of these different stories were really just one story. It didn’t matter if I was talking about a mastodon with 15-foot tusks or a moose fly with 1/2 inch antlers — the essential biology of these extreme weapons was always the same. This meant I had to completely re-organize the book, and the order in which I organized and presented the material; but it also meant I now had something much more important to say — ideas that were likely to be groundbreaking for biologists too, not just interesting natural history for a non-academic audience. These new ideas were exciting and, I felt, likely to shake up my field.
Then the plot thickened. My editors kept asking me to look into human weapons too. We all know that our weapons can get sucked into arms races, so just how similar are these processes? At first I resisted, but then I started digging. And digging, and digging — the deeper I dug the more astonished I became. The story really IS the same, and it applies to our weapons too. I was nervous at first, about talking about military arms races, given my background as a biologist rather than a historian, but I stumbled on work by a true card-carrying (if there is such a thing) military historian (Robert O’Connell), and in his books (Of Arms and Men, in particular), he’d come to almost exactly the same conclusions that I had!! So I, a biologist, was talking about the essential features of animal arms races, dipping into history where and when it felt appropriate, and he was a military historian talking about manufactured weapons and arms races, dipping into biology. We’d converged on much the same lessons. I was blown away (fortunately, he turned out to be super kind and helpful, and he read through my entire manuscript and helped “fact check” a lot of my military history). So now I am much more confident that these parallels are real, and important.
So my book started out as a book on animal weapons, with a chapter or two tacked on at the end comparing human weapons. But my editors wanted a lot more, so it then became a book with animal chapters, and boxes inserted into each chapter with the human parallels; But they wanted more still, so, in the end, it became a book that flowed back and forth between these realms and covers them fairly equally.
Bottom line: it all started with me taking the time to step back and think outside of my box, digging into the literature on lots of diverse weapons that are not beetle horns. But the project pulled me in and became rather all-consuming, and the book evolved a ton as it came together.
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