The Writing Life: Patterns in the Splatter by Lisa Ahn

Once upon a long-ago, I hurled high school algebra against the wall. It’s the only time I’ve ever thrown a book. I was looking for the splatter, the ruination of mathematics. All those y‘s and x’s? They belonged anchored hard in sentences, not traveling at indeterminate speeds out of Chicago, passing other locomotives with the hijacked ghosts of a and b.

Oh, I hated math.

My hatred blossomed from a warped assumption: a person could be good at the humanities or good at math-and-science. Definitely not both. Knowledge was a path that forked in two, an either/or contraption. I filled my schedule up with AP English, French, and history. I wrote myself into a corner, neatly labeled, boxed.

This is not a good choice for a writer, a fabulist who must gather goods from all directions. I cannot afford to carve knowledge down by halves and quarters. Stories never thrive in boxes.

People don’t do well in boxes either. After college, I earned a Ph.D in English, and then, in classic karmic fashion, I gave birth to a math savant. All at once, the stakes shot higher.

My nine year old wakes up spouting word problems. She find patterns everywhere, understands Fibonacci at a glance. She invents algorithms in the same way I coin stories. Square roots, prime numbers and geometric tessellations deliver her to joy.

But here’s the rub. My daughter also loves to write. She has a notebook full of poems, a novel half-way done. She delights in rhymes and word play. She reads several books a week. She is equally at home if “x” is “9” or the final sound in “fox.”

What’s more, her younger sister is following right along, eyes and ears cast wide. As their mother, I am always learning. This is basic parenting; children stretch our boundaries. As a writer, the same formula applies: learn, grow, don’t set artificial limits. Be open to revision.

Back in high school, physics gave me hives. I marveled at the light-stroked waves in ripple tanks, but I never fathomed all their laws and angles, their parabolic barriers and perpendicular(ish) refractions. I memorized the formulas and spit them out on tests.

Now, life offers up a second chance. As a homeschool mom, a writer, I listen to Stuff to Blow Your Mind and How Stuff Works for all the dirt on garbage-powered cars and fracking, parasites and germs, mapping, creativity, and the metric system. I watch Vi Hart doodle mathematical spirals and Neil deGrasse Tyson describe a death by black hole. I subscribe to Brain Pickings for Anne Patchett and Neil Gaiman — and for the CERN science videos. I immerse myself in literary fiction, but I also soak up essays on neural networks , cognitive quirks, and the birth of stars.

I learn, decades out of high school, that the scientific method is a crucial state of mind. The writer Kevin Kelly argues that, “We can learn nearly as much from an experiment that doesn’t work as from one that does. Failure is not something to be avoided but something to be cultivated.”[i] This idea is not intuitive for me. As a writer, I cringe from failure and rejection. I want my first drafts to come out singing. I dislike the messiness of early pages, all their guts laid out, their incompletions and diversions, awkwardness emblazoned like a high-school dance. Sure, Hemingway famously pronounced, “The first draft of anything is shit” — but can’t I be the one exception?

Probability would say no. Math, again.

It turns out that experimentation, pushing limits and “cultivating failure,” is the only path toward better writing. Those sentences that make me cringe are the curving route toward story. If I lay nothing down, then I’ve only emptiness before me. For scientists and writers, progress means “falling forward.” There isn’t any way to skip those clumsy, awkward steps. I have to take the chance, make the leap. Otherwise, I’m standing still.

This far into life, I am tired of sitting paralyzed at my desk, staring at the blinking cursor, afraid to make a start. Fear held me back in high school math and science — the fear of taking risks, of getting it all wrong. Fear restricts me as a writer too, the shackle of a blank page hanging on my wrists.

No longer. Today, I have two bright girls who love language, math and science. They knock down my artificial walls, my binary diversions.

Today, I will throw words down on the page, string them towards a sentence, clumsy. I will move it, bend it, break it. It may or may not sing, but at least I’ll have a start. I will encourage splatter — for its patterns, its unexpected art. I will work on “falling forward.”

As parents, writers, human beings, we rarely hit the jackpot on a first run. Much of life is repetition. I ride the merry-go-round a thousand spins for a chance at that brassy ring. Spin on, then. I’ll follow in the footsteps of my kids, traipsing through knowledge like a playground. Even in my younger days, I loved the incandescent flow of ripple tanks, but now I dive them deeper, and I discover something more than fear, more than inhibition. I unearth poetry in the smallest things, the strangest places. In physics. In failure.

Even, yes, in algebra.

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