Physics and drama

On Good Friday, I joined a group of about 10 other physics students for lunch with Robert Benjamin. Robert is a physicist by training, who after 30 years at Los Alamos decided to retire in order to pursue play-writing full-time.

We had an interesting conversation, flowing over areas of interest to theatrically-minded MIT students. I'll recount a few things that struck me.

He asked whether people felt that the creativity required in science is similar to that required in creating writing. I believe it is not, but others disagreed with me. I feel that there is a tremendous difference between discovery and invention, and science is about the former, creative writing, the latter. If I am doing science and things are going well, the path ahead seems obvious and my vision of it clear. On the other hand, when at my most creative in writing an operetta libretto (it's been a while since I wrote any other fiction), possibilities are flying all around my brain, and I have to pull the right ones together and lay them out - as if I am constructing the path rather than simply walking along it.

He mentioned that writing plays can be like solving a harmonic oscillator. The subject of that reference (though not necessarily its relevance) will be immediately obvious to a physicist, but for the benefit of others, I might suggest that the harmonic oscillator problem is physics' answer to the major triad in music, the Our Father in christian prayer or the drive in batting (cricket). It's the standard tool of choice, to be applied, perhaps with variations to many situations.

His point was that characters are likely to interact in similar ways even in different contexts, and by understanding how this interaction works, an author can easily construct interactions that might appear very different to someone who hasn't seen their construction from the inside.

One particular similarity I notice between scientific and creative writing is the need to try to look at things from the audience's perspective. When writing scientific papers, it's easy to fall into the trap of acting as if the audience knows everything the author does, which is obviously false. A scientific article should tell a story just as much as a fictional work should, and in both fields it is useful to try to put oneself in the reader's shoes, and understand how he comes to learn what is being conveyed.

I plan to write more about my writing process soon, but at the moment preparation for The Yeomen of the Guard is occupying a large fraction of my leisure time.