In defense of words

I notice a lot of enthusiasm in replacing traditional modes of communication with new ones, especially with images, videos, and interactive websites. I agree — a lot can be done with images and videos, slides and photos, to tell stories in depth. But, this post is a defense of words — just words — for telling stories.

One of the traditional views about telling fiction stories through words only goes like this: When the storyteller leaves a lot to the reader’s imagination, the exact contours of the story are borne in the reader’s mind. So, a reader is (almost) an equal participant in the story, which feels like a dialogue or a conversation between the writer and the reader. In writing something that is later read, the writer has created many individual dialogues with many individual readers. Thus, the reader is not just a passive consumer but one of the many people with whom the writer shares a common bond. The story is the medium. The result feels like magic.

I will, however, put out a different perspective today. It may have been written about — I don’t know — but I felt like I just had to document my thoughts on what pure text does: to non-fiction storytelling.

I have been writing non-fiction science stories for a while, either with a promotional/communication intent or with a journalistic approach. My experience has evolved, and I have become more comfortable writing about topics I didn’t know much about earlier.

While developing stories from scratch, I read, ask questions, gather my understanding, and do my best to tell a comprehensive story. The process involves a cognitive function: understanding, second-hand, what specific researchers are saying, and explaining it with nuance — what that means and why the reader should care. (ChatGPT and other AI tools claim to be doing this, but creating research “summaries,” however reliable, is hardly the point of science communication or journalism.)

These days, I have been writing a non-fiction book. And this exercise is really making my grey cells work hard, probably making them use muscles I haven’t used before. For I am not only writing in first-person — something I have actively avoided and still avoid for all my science communication and journalism work — but I am also actively pondering on how to think about something I have thought about mathematically: without using any maths! So, in writing English words instead of equations, and forcing myself to think less in terms of equations and more in terms of narrative, I am creating a narrative that doesn’t exist. I am fleshing out thoughts that have not been thought before, even by me.

When I wrote the chapter outlines for the book earlier this year, I described how the thoughts would evolve. Now, I find that the thoughts don’t actually evolve the way I thought they would, so I have to think new thoughts and create new ways of thinking. In some sense, I am creating new knowledge about something for which a wealth of knowledge already exists.

There lies the power of words. They are the only medium that lets one translate new thoughts fresh onto the table. All other modes of communication are derivative of these thoughts or summaries of a bunch of them, neatly summarizing paragraphs. But the fresh thoughts are conveyed via words. So, they are a raw reflection of the mind’s output on pages.

(Of course, you could say AI can generate new thoughts or even think, but I leave the technicalities of why this is untrue, and why all generative AI output is derivative — to your thoughts.)

In March 2024, I struggled with science writer Anil Ananthaswamy and 9 colleagues to write science stories in a classroom setting. We struggled to write words — each our own — which told unique stories about the research we were covering. This struggle was essentially about thinking through incidents, findings, arguments, and processes coherently. Together, they told a story. But what is that story? We were all grappling with figuring it out, while sticking to our likes and dislikes of storytelling in the first place.

For me, the book-writing process is similarly challenging. I have a bunch of ideas in my head — fresh, new, novel. There lies the challenge. To give these ideas shape, I need to write, not draw. They go in circles, but I need to provide them with a straight line to walk on. They should run, but not too much. They should rest, but not for long. Most importantly, they should take me from one thought to another, with many in between. And these thoughts, together, should tell a story that a reader should connect to.

In non-fiction, especially in science non-fiction, the element of wild imagination is taken away. The text has to be factually accurate, so all imagination must be real. But here too, in imagining along with me, the reader will think these thoughts for the first time, and in unison, we will appreciate why this way of thinking tells us so much about the universe we live in (or so is the hope).

Even in my book, I am using images and graphics, of course, because they help me strengthen my argument, and, when the readers use them as additional references to my text, they help drive the point home. So, they are an essential addition to my arguments. But the arguments are made through text, just like how I argued here with words only.

You and I, dear reader, just had a conversation, no matter when you are reading it. If this argument were an image, a video, a series of images, or an interactive website, we would still exchange information, but could we converse without really talking?

Words are magic for a reason, and that reason is fundamental to being human.