Finding the Glow Within: What Biology and Fiction Writing Have In Common

Biology is the study of life—of finding unusual beauty in the ordinary. So, too, is writing. Why do we find glowing lights pretty? From natural occurrences like fireflies and bioluminescent ocean waves, to manmade ones like holiday lights and sprawling evening cityscapes, there is an allure in all the sparkle, glitter, glow. The pull is a gentle one, more of a suggestion than a tug. In nature, glowing lights are a matter of survival: for fireflies, light attracts mates; for some jellyfish, the lightshows within their tissue-paper membranes shoo off predators; for certain marine bacteria, making light is the ticket to a cozy home within squids and fish, which use that gifted glow to nullify their moonlit shadows or as a means to catch prey. We humans are intrinsically drawn to such luminescence because similarly bright and sparkly things signal a source of water, and the sight still tickles awake some primitive, survivalist corner of ourselves—or so one theory goes. (A hard-wired oooh shiny.) Such biological sorts of glow are part of my day-to-day, as a PhD student studying bioluminescent bacteria. In both science and in writing, there is no such thing as useless knowledge. But life-sustaining glow also takes forms beyond the biological, and when I sit down to write stories, it is these variations on the theme that I am most interested in. I am talking about the glow in certain moments and memories, which evoke the same cocoonlike feeling as the light of campfires and of candles crowned in flickering flame. That glow within your chest when you, a reader, sink into a book that hits all the right notes. Or the glow when you, a nostalgic, leaf through old photos, touching your thumb to each bygone era that the passage of years has rendered rosy. Or when you, a sibling, notice your brother humming along to a song as he looks out the passenger seat window, his chin idly cupped in heel of hand, the humming simply a reflex of happiness within this most mundane of moments with you. I am talking about this kind […]

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