Writing can be taken up at any point. But you need to remember that the arts are fundamentally unfair. Hard work and diligence won't necessarily take you all the way. Talent, nepotism, influence, and pure luck play a huge part.
There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Scientific training can enhance writing skills, but creativity is crucial regardless of one's academic background.
David Brin's quote reflects on the relationship between scientific knowledge and writing, particularly in the genre of science fiction. He suggests that while a background in science may improve an author's ability to craft believable narratives, a strong literary foundation and creativity are equally important for producing exceptional work. This highlights the value of diverse skills and perspectives in the creative process.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a writing workshop, an instructor might use this quote to explain the importance of both science and creativity in writing.
More from David Brin
All quotes →Competition, by itself, always leads to cheating by the powerful, who try to establish pyramids of power, like feudalism. Yet, competition is the great creative force! So how do we save it from its own contradictions? By cooperation! By cooperating with each other, via politics, to make rules and prevent cheating, so that competition can thrive!
Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.
It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.
When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.
Human beings are inherently misled into subjective fantasies, but there's a saving grace. We all have different delusions. Other people don't necessarily share yours, and hence they will help you penetrate yours through the miracle of criticism!
Similar quotes
Whether you can go back in time is held in the grip of the law of quantum gravity.
History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
No matter how counter-intuitive it may seem, basic research has proven over and over to be the lifeline of practical advances in medicine.
All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent loosening of the rules for normal research. .. Or finally, the case that will most concern us here, a crisis may end with the emergence of a new candidate for paradigm and with the ensuing battle over its acceptance.
Science has always been my preoccupation and when you think a breakthrough is possible, it is terribly exciting.
Psychology, as the behaviorist views it, is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science which needs introspection as little as do the sciences of chemistry and physics.... The position is taken here that the behavior of man and the behavior of animals must be considered in the same plane.