Be Still and Receive

“Great ideas fly through the universe all the time. Stand still long enough and one of them will hit you.”

That was Isaac Asimov’s answer to the question of where he got his fantastic story ideas. At least that is what fellow science fiction writer Ben Bova said of Asimov, scientist and famed author of nearly 500 books, many in the genre of science fiction.

Of course, the universe is rife with great ideas! But to catch a great idea, Asimov said, a person must be still.

My dad and Asimov

When I was a kid, Asimov’s novels lay around our house. My father would settle in his black Naugahyde chair, a lamp shining over his shoulder, and plunge into a paperback with Asimov’s name on the cover. I never asked Dad what he liked about those stories, but perhaps he felt a kinship with Asimov’s imagination. Contemporaries—Asimov lived 1920-1992 and my father, 1912-1997—both were scientists. My father was Chief Scientist at our county’s Public Health Department. As a microbiologist, he peered through microscopes day after day. He spent hours being still.

Sometimes, when I visited my father at his laboratory, he’d let me peer through high-powered lenses to witness the movement of otherwise invisible purple-stained amoebas, green squiggles, and yellow bits of life moving on their own. These life forms, which science made possible for me to see, feel part of the whole idea that to “be still long enough” allows an idea to hit you—perhaps even a children’s story about a lavender amoeba?

Stillness required

To see microscopic life, stillness is required. Isn’t stillness also essential for writing? Those after-school be-still lessons in the laboratory are likely swirling around in the background of my writing life today. And I remember another set of lenses Dad acquainted me with: our large telescope. If a solar or lunar eclipse was coming, or just for the fun of it, Dad would set the telescope on the front lawn, and we’d be transported to another place. He showed me how to adjust those cumbersome lenses and focus on what he described as Orion or the Big and Little Dippers, or Venus, Saturn, or Mars. For those hours, we time-traveled across eons of time and space to the twinkling lights in the black distance, trying to imagine what was out there.

Catching ideas

Flash forward to 1995 when I heard Ben Bova pass along Asimov’s advice. Bova spoke at a Space Coast Writers Conference in Cocoa Beach where I sat enraptured by his talk of spinning stories around scientific facts, other worlds, stars, planets, and moons. I recalled my father’s love of science, his reading Asimov’s books, and introducing me to tiny amoebas and mysterious planets. He showed me that to capture riches of science, I had to settle down. Bova’s second-hand encouragement from Asimov—be still to receive ideas flying through the universe—now may be third-hand advice, but remains first class wisdom.