Do you know how modern physicists analyze Leonardo da Vinci has made optical mistakes in "The Savior"? Do you know that the Nobel Prize winner who founded modern neuroscience, Ramon Cahar, was also a painter who loves graffiti? Do you know how migraine feels schematically drawn by a nineteenth-century doctor Hubert Airy? Do you know that literary master Nabokov published an amazing foresight of the migration and evolution of butterflies in the 1940s? These wonderful mixed stories have all written into a book by Xiaozhuang, co-founder of Guokr.
htmlOn September 17, Xiaozhuang, a master's degree in polymer chemistry and physics, member of the Chinese Science Popularization Writers Association and co-founder of Guokr, came to the event site of the Beijing Book Market Langyuan Station with his new book "Zoom in - the intersection of science, art and culture". This event is co-organized by the Beijing News Book Review Weekly and China National Geographic ·Book, and sponsored by China's first craft beer culture brand "Craft Youth+". At the event, Xiaozhuang shared what are the techniques and methods of producing content in the intersection of science, art and culture in actual operations; how can producers find their audience?As the founder of "Guoke Reading", one of the most influential science popularization publishing brands in the new era, Xiaozhuang resolutely left the Internet and publishing industry more than four years ago and became a freelancer, focusing on scientific writing and translation. She firmly believed that although relatively unpopular and niche, writing in science, art, and culture has their own reasons and spaces in the entire "big entertainment" ecology:
"I tried many things when I was young, and I also had various loves, music, literature, art, etc., but what brought me the greatest peace and happiness is science. It is the way I get along with this world: delve into the origin of things and ask all kinds of why. I know that I am and I are by my side. Some friends who are doing popular science are insisting on writing, and some of them are still on the front line of scientific research. Good works that can be accumulated must have profound and unique insights into a certain field and discipline, and their influence can reach many other fields and bring unexpected inspiration. "
"Zoom in - the intersection of reality of science, art and culture", written by Xiaozhuang, China National Geography·Books | Hunan Science and Technology Press July 2022.
Xiaozhuang, a master of polymer chemistry and physics, a member of the China Association of Popular Science Writers, and co-founder of Guokr. He has served as the editor-in-chief of the "Science and Art Research Center". He has written popular science works such as "Amplification - the Intersection of Reality of Science, Art and Culture", "Experimental Report on Love and Sex". He has long written scientific and cultural columns for Caixin Weekly and the City Pictorial, and has translated nearly ten works such as "The Inflamed Brain", "A Guide to the Sea of Air", and "The Side of the Sea".
How to produce excellent popular science works?
I am actually more resistant to making a so-called guide, or something to guide others, because I don’t really believe that doing so can really play a role and allow the audience to quickly improve their creative level. What I can provide is my own mental journey or personal experience, which is difficult to directly apply to other people's practice. But today I will appear here to share this because I sometimes listen to discussions from my colleagues. Its significance is that if you have such a (writing) dream, you need to know what others are doing and know that there are people who are walking this path together, common beliefs are more important.
If you want to enter the career we are going to discuss today, that is, to produce science, culture and art content, you first need to find a direction you are good at, that is, the first question, whether to write or talk. You need to know whether you are good at writing or telling. The two are actually different. I used to be an editor. The most troublesome thing in my editorial career is meeting a kind of person - he talks very well and thinks he knows a lot, but once he asks him to write down these things in words, he will find that it is completely wrong and he is simply unaware of what he says. I used to modify such manuscripts, which was so painful.In my time when I was working on magazines (a dozen years ago), meeting such people was a problem for editors. But the situation is different now. The important way to carry content at the moment is podcast and videos, which requires many people with strong oral expression skills. These authors who I thought were having trouble before had a place to work in this era. However, it should be noted that even if you are just a person who focuses on telling, basic writing skills are still needed. This writing skills are mainly reflected in whether you can make a clear outline and organize a certain degree of organization. You may not be able to write very gorgeous long articles, but oral narrative also depends on the basic structure.
The second question is, whether it is long or short. We will see that some influential big Vs are particularly good at writing short articles of "tofu blocks" and "Weibo style". It seems to be just a few lines, but it is actually not easy. It requires considerable skill to write such articles well. Not only should you include as much information as possible in a very short space and express your core point of view, but you should also have a certain amount of incitement. This is the most difficult. In terms of ability, some people can write long and some people can write short. These two are not contradictory, and some people can take into account both. But I think I am not good at writing short articles, and I am always worried that I can't express my meaning thoroughly, so I am more accustomed to adding and displaying more relevant information I know. There is another problem with
, the style selection. When we first started writing articles in the early days, we always had objects to imitate, so the choice of style depends more on the choice of objects to imitate. First of all, you must recognize the tone of your language and what style of text you can control, and then choose an imitation object that matches your style. You can't just try to imitate the words of a certain author just because you envy him. For example, if you don’t have many humorous cells but are particularly fond of jokes, then it is very painful to study hard from them, and such imitation is not necessary. I have some friends who can laugh at the audience by just shaking their jokes. Although I like them, I know I can't be like them, so I silently appreciate them and still write solid and affectionate words. You like the style you can achieve, and you don't have to force it to be consistent with the style you like.
Although there are many forms of content production now, the clearest and firmest thing I had before production was that no matter what form it was expressed, the kernel is the most important thing. Let me define here first. The content of art and culture discussed today is also art and culture under the category of "big science". That is to say, the intersection of science and art, science and culture is different from celebrity gossip, literary expression or fiction. To enter these content areas, I think judgment, intake and expression are very important.
event site.
judgment. The content about science must come from more recognized facts. The evidence we use to support must not be heard from. We must trace and confirm whether it is a reliable source of information before writing an article. This will also reflect the issue of taste. For example, if a person who writes popular science articles talks to me about his zodiac signs, I will look at him with skepticism. In the end, it is the difference between thinking styles. The expressions under the category of "big science" are to a certain extent based on conjectures, a proof process, and finally a phased conclusion is obtained. They are not imagined out of thin air or cannot be falsified.
Intake power, I have devoted a lot of my energy to writing books in recent years and have a very personal experience. Intake power really determines efficiency and the final result. Where to find the required literature, what tools and keyword searches are used, and how many databases are available, these will have a decisive impact, and the way to get them must be a long-term process. There are many websites that I watch regularly in my browser collection folder. Basically, every day I check if there is any new and fun content. After getting clues about the nature of news reports, I started to search for relevant papers, which required some online journal libraries, some required historical documents, and so I needed some libraries.When I search for information, I feel a sense of happiness, just like a person who particularly likes jewelry. Suddenly, I walked into a jewelry store displaying a wide variety of jewellery stores, hoping to fill all the packages on my body. Of course, I will also overload it in this process. I have collected too much information and couldn't finish it. I believe many people have also experienced this pain.
After all the questions and preparations are solved, all we need to do is turn them into content for reading. At this time, the ability to control language and characters is very important - it is expression. Expression is a very wonderful thing, it is not something that so-called professional studies can give us. Here is an interesting story. I worked in a magazine in the early days. The editor-in-chief at that time was Yan Feng teacher in the Chinese Department of Fudan University. He was a teacher I admired very much, knowledgeable and knowledgeable. Because I have both majors in college and graduate school, I am a veritable science student, so I always feel that I have something missing when I work in magazines, which requires writing skills. So I asked Teacher Yan if I can study for your doctoral student. If I want to study for a PhD in Fudan Chinese Department, then I can be a writer. He looked at me very despisedly and said, if you still want to write something, you must not read and write a graduate student. It is unlikely that a truly excellent writer can be cultivated in that way.
When I think back now, I feel that this sentence is really enlightening. In fact, if you want to become a good writer, you must understand and read all kinds of things by constantly reading, reading, outside your focus, in areas you cannot imagine, and slowly, you will be integrated with all the words you have seen and produce a unique you. Teacher Yan’s own reading is particularly interesting. He will read online articles that I think are a waste of life, but his point is that when reading, don’t set too many restrictions on yourself, thinking that “what should be read by people like me” is unsatisfactory. He told me that you should know the good and the bad, that is, you should not only know what good is, but also what evil is. This sentence also touched me a lot. I think, to expand it, I can write various topics with ease today, whether it is scientific, artistic or cultural, it may be inseparable from the local literature I read when I was a child.
Of course, just reading a lot is impossible for you to come with a pen. In addition to reading, writing training is also required. Many of my friends have read a lot of books, and I think they are capable of writing, but they always say that when they finish what they have at hand, when I make enough money, and when I can rest assured, I will start to write. Well...If it's always tomorrow, then I don't know which day it will be. Don’t treat what you need to start immediately as something you can do in the future. Things you can do in the future are basically things that are impossible to do.
How to find your own audience?
After you really start producing content, no matter you are a self-media producer or an author of a larger platform, you will inevitably face the problem of "who do you write for to show what you write". Many people who start writing popular science will have this confusion. Science, art, and cultural content must be very niche. It is impossible to be read by so many people like writing celebrity gossip, eating, drinking and having fun. You must be lonely. But you have to remember that since everyone has the opportunity to become a five-minute celebrity, every niche content has such an opportunity, and you don’t know when the opportunity will appear. Maybe the things you produce are completely ignored at the beginning, but once they fit into certain hot spots and opportunities, they will be hit on the headlines and hot searches, forming viral transmission.
I have always felt that producing scientific and cultural content is like building a library. Things should be placed there and taken out when needed. I have participated in the early content construction of Guokr. One of Guokr’s ideas is to treat any news as technological news. As long as there are hot topics, we will dig out the technological components from it and interpret it in the form of technology.The premise for doing this with confidence is that the original precipitation has accumulated there, and when the hot spots come, you can naturally use the existing reserves to tie them to it.
I would like to give a few examples. Several years ago, I wrote an article titled "New Impressionism: Scientific Experimental Painting", which mainly introduces the dot-study method of George Seurat . His works are drawn with dots, which you can understand as a bit like a computer screen, using pixels to form images and using various colors to match them bit by bit. This is a very hard-working way of painting. Many scientific researchers pay attention to his paintings because they embody many optical and visual theories. That article is just one of our daily posts, and after two days of sinking, no one will read it. However, what I didn't expect was that something happened after a while. A child posted some comics he drew on Weibo (it should have been posted by his parents). Many netizens praised him for his excellent paintings and his drawings were good. Suddenly a cartoonist jumped out and issued a statement saying that the child was plagiarizing his work. Just the second day of the incident, the article I originally wrote suddenly became popular, and even I couldn't react to what was going on. In fact, in my article, I listed some current art works that are also imitating George Seula's composition, including the cartoonist's paintings. Those who stood up to their children happened to see this and pointed out that you are also copying George Seurat, so they turned the article into a hot topic. This tells me that you will never know one day the article you write will suddenly become a five-minute headline. All you can do is prepare more.
George Seula "Sunday afternoon on the Big Bowl Island" (1886), now in the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, USA.
In addition, human nature is the same. If we want the content produced to be accepted by others, we should think more about how to impress others, how to touch people's own preferences, and empathize with . It is a particularly good direction to arouse some resonance among readers, and it is also worth doing, especially in technology content. Many people have a hard and cold impression of scientific content, but science itself is not that cold. Any scientific topic must be related to people. Even if we are talking about the far-reaching universe, it is related to your origin and our destination, so we need to find such a point.
Let me talk about my experience. I have written an article called "Have you seen the color of death? 》, which introduces Luke Jeram, who made glass sculptures, whose subject is viruses. Viruses are very small, and light will penetrate directly from it, and there will be no color, so the viruses we take under a microscope are all colorless. If you see colorful viruses in pictures or photos, it is because the scientific painting methods in the past were used to coloring them. But the sculptor thought of using glass to make some viruses to express their colorless nature. This is also related to the artist himself, because Luke Jeram is , the color he sees is much paler than that of ordinary people. His works include HIV virus , cold virus and smallpox bacteria, etc.
Among them, the glass sculpture of HIV virus caused a sensation after it was posted online because a HIV patient wrote a letter to the artist saying that the sculpture had him look at something inside his body for the first time that might bring him death. He found that it was such a beautiful form, which gave him a different understanding of his disease. Although the letter is short, it attracted a lot of attention and also allowed the sculptor's works to be spread more. I translated the letter in the article and described the matter. At that time, the number of followers I was working on was very small, but the number of readings in this article was much higher than that of other articles, and I received a lot of reposts. When we do this content, we need to find something that makes people empathetic.
In addition to being warm, people also need to seek fun. Gossip is also a good auxiliary material, but I think low-level and interesting gossip is not advisable. We can discover more advanced gossip and tell it.Are you familiar with the picture below? Have you seen it in many world classics I read when I was a child? Once, the imported versions of "Red and Black", "Fat Ball" and "Two Cities" used this picture as the cover, which was really funny.
Portraits of Lavoisier couples commonly found in world classics and textbooks.
This is a portrait of Lavoisier and his wife, a famous chemist in France in the 18th century and a very tragic figure because she was finally pushed to the guillotine. There was once a hot post on the Internet discussing these covers, and netizens posted a lot of them. But what we thought of was to take this opportunity to push Mrs. Lavoisier. She herself is very smart and capable. At that time, she followed Lavoisier to do science and completed a lot of work, but due to the limitations of that era, no one talked about her. So the author of Guoke wrote an article to introduce her contribution to science, which was very popular all of a sudden. In fact, many women in history have contributed to the progress of technology at various stages, but have not been named. Now people are re-examining these histories, re-telling the stories of women in the history of science, and bringing them to everyone little by little. Gossip mining like this is very meaningful.
How to keep your works creative?
When creating content, regardless of form or subject matter, you must finally make it stand out as many audiences as possible. Creativity is very important. This is like when we write a paper, we need to compare and check pounds, we need to know what others have done and what others have not thought of. When we write articles or produce content, we also need to have such a string in our minds. Don’t talk about what others have already said. Even when choosing the same topic, we must find points that others have not thought of, or tell it in a more interesting and unique way.
How to keep your works creative? How to make yourself a creative person? I only provide some more theoretical views here, but it may be something that can be used in practice. First of all, creativity does not require overly structured knowledge. This is actually divided into several levels. For example, when I write the history of science and culture, I must do a systematic collection. My folder will sort out the articles written by various disciplines and authors at different times in different categories. This is a structural thing that arises in the learning stage. But the point is that when you really start content production, you need to break your existing structure, because if you write this way, it is textbook or programmatic, which is very boring. If you really want to write interesting articles, you need unexpected points. Every time I write an article, it is not a problem to use any materials to write. How to enter is the most tormenting thing. At the beginning, I will think about it for a long time. This is not something structural knowledge can give me, but requires a wild and divergent thinking. It may be something I ate this afternoon or someone I met accidentally. Regarding this view, I provide evidence that a paper published in 2017 by Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes pointed out that the information we usually contact has two information structures: layered and plane. The hierarchical information structure is more three-dimensional and is applied in the learning process. The planar information structure is flatter. The paper concluded that in terms of information processing methods, the use of multiple plane information structures is more conducive to cultivating creativity.
I once published a book called "Cold Romance", which is the result of the game. At that time, there were a group of authors on the science blog we were doing. In order to urge them to update, I assigned a task to throw out a word every once in a while, and asked the participating authors to write an article under the word. Each of us comes from a different discipline and needs to be analyzed from a professional perspective. We have selected eight keywords one after another, including love, beauty, art, etc. Before writing an article, these authors will discuss with me, from which angle she/he is going to talk about it.This fun-oriented activity lasted for more than a year until one day we discovered that these contents could be turned into a book, so we came up with the book "Cold Romance". This book is a typical bestseller among original popular science books, and at that time it was rare to sell more than it was. What I was very proud of was that I kept doing the loss of money until one day I suddenly realized that I could make some money.
"Cold Romance", New Star Publishing House July 2015.
For creativity, storytelling is particularly important. An article in March this year introduced that the team that researches creativity found that the most effective way to cultivate creativity is to let people in training tell stories, such as asking them to describe a thing, imagine various possibilities in a broad range, and complete the inspiration and activation of creativity in narrative. For writing, this points grasp the essence. Really good articles and good books must be able to tell stories.
I will talk about "Does God Roll Dice?" Open the first page of this book and you will understand that the author wants to tell you about these physicists' gossip, and the feeling of a storyteller is revealed. There is also the "Legend of the Heart" written by my former Guoke Reading Team. Recently, it has released a collector's version, telling the history of the progress of external surgery. The author himself is a cardiac surgeon. When he was studying in Korea a few years ago, he went to the library every day and found many interesting stories about seniors in the field. So he wrote them one by one in the form of a blog post. When he wrote five or six articles, we persuaded him, otherwise he would write it into a book. In this way, these stories formed this book.
Whether you are posting public accounts or writing books, you have to think about how to tell the story movingly. The paper I mentioned earlier also said that creativity is not about achieving a goal or result, it is actually not important. The creative process itself can trigger countless possibilities, which is important. Among the countless possibilities, a phased optimal solution will definitely be produced, which is the so-called inspiration.
written in a good work, you must first learn to imitate
The following is the recommended reading time. If you are interested in non-fiction writing in science and technology, culture and art, I highly recommend reading John McAfee, an old wizard in this field. His "Writing Crafts-Princeton University Writing Class", "Control Nature", and "Walking with the Wilderness" all have Chinese versions, and we can regard them as good examples of textbooks. The author of "Looking for the Road" He Wei is an outstanding student of McAfee. McAfee also has a disciple named Richard Preston. His famous work is "Blood Epidemic" about Ebola virus . HBO made six mini-series based on this book. This book is very lens-like, and it appears very well at every point in time, a bit like the American drama "Twenty-Four Hours", but it actually appeared before this American drama. Preston wrote the whole book with lens method, and he is my mind's writing role model. Another of his book "Blood Sorrow" tells a more recent Ebola epidemic. He interviewed the survivors in the hospital of the outbreak center and recorded their lives and deaths. Those stories made me cry, especially the story of the dead director was so touching. This author is inspiring to me. I think the best way to learn him is to translate him, so I finally snatched a book from my friend that has not been translated into Chinese. It is about smallpox virus. Combined with the recent monkeypox crisis, it can be said that it is worth reading. I have submitted the draft at the beginning of this year.
"Blood Epidemic", written by Richard Preston, Shanghai Translation Press Publishing House March 2016.
Good writing must first imitate and learn. I translate about two English books every year, mainly popular science, and sometimes literary ones. The important reason why I translate these books is that they are of great value for learning. For example, the "Wandering Guide to the Sea of Air" published in 2020 talks about climate and weather phenomena.Everyone hears about climate change every day now, but what exactly happened to the earth, how do we trace changes from history, and what do these current states mean? Few people really understand these issues, and I have only a little understanding of them, so I learned the truth by translating a book, and I have benefited a lot because it is also very good in writing. The author himself is a Canadian poet. Another book "Inflamed Brain" published earlier this year, I would recommend it to friends around me who have depression . This book believes that the mainstream view of using serotonin deficiency to explain depression is problematic. This is just a result, not a reason. The author is the director of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge and has experience in cooperating with pharmaceutical manufacturers. His tendency to explain that those depressed brains are in an inflammatory state, and subsequent drug development must examine this.
"Compassion: The Story of Us and Animals", written by Aisha Akhta, translated by Xiaozhuang, Shanghai Translation Press, October 2022.
"Company: Our Story with Animals" will be published recently, and it tells the relationship between people and pets. The author of the book is a neurologist. She was sexually assaulted when she was a child and was a minority girl. She has a great psychological disorder. Keeping a pet is very important to her treatment. She also interviewed many people from this perspective, and even went to prison to interview serial killers (because serial killers showed signs of animal abuse in their early childhood). This is a very solid and thought-provoking book. I am also very honored to be the translator of the "Translation Documentary" series because of translating it.
Shared Guest/Xiaozhuang
Organized/Li Yongbo
Proofreading/Wang Xin.
