Member Spotlight: Robert B Lull

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? Writers have long pointed to text as the medium that best engages the imagination, and that still holds true. Whether it’s imagining entire worlds while engrossed in a science fiction novel, or simply picturing oneself in a beautiful place explored in a travelogue, the written word activates brain networks that, for all their merits, visual media simply do not. That capacity is what stirs me as a writer, because my primary goal is to spur curiosity, and this imaginative medium is best suited to that purpose.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? I have what sometimes might be considered an advantage in that my job as a professor entails many different duties and attending to those is usually sufficient to cure writer’s block by the time I return to a manuscript. That being said, the downside is that uninterrupted time is at a premium, and that’s just as valuable to my writing process.

What is your favorite time to write? This is a strange answer in that my favorite time to write is probably morning once the caffeine starts kicking in, yet my most productive time is later in the afternoon from 2-7.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? I’m not that successful putting it into practice, but Strunk and White’s classic always lingers in my head: “Omit needless words.” Otherwise, as a sports fan, I found this advice from Will Harrison’s “My Unlikely Writing Teacher: Pedro Martinez” especially helpful. Harrison compares writing to the pitching approach of a baseball maestro: “It’s all about pitch sequencing, about sentence variation. You have to move the reader through the paragraph. Fastball, curveball, changeup. Normal sentence, long sentence, short sentence. Straight declarative sentence, periodic sentence, sentence fragment. Keep them on their toes, keep throwing the ball past them. I’m always thinking about the role that rhythm and movement play in my own prose and in the prose of my favorite writers; I love the way that language can leap from my mind and then to my fingers, much like a curveball arcing out of the hand of an All-Star pitcher. I studied Martinez, first as a baseball player and then, eventually, as an artist — I close-read him as you would a Modernist author. I came to learn that he is an excellent writing instructor, as wild as that sounds. His signature games are a master class in how to shift registers, how to strategize, how to create forms and patterns and leitmotifs. From Martinez, you can learn how to perform on the page.”

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? The ability to immerse ourselves in the entirety of an author’s process developing a book, and, from the other side of the coin, my own capacity to share that process with audiences. With events, podcasts, short-form video, and myriad other ways to engage with writers beyond the immediate text, we live in a golden age for understanding what motivates writers and the “inside baseball” of how projects develop.

Robert B. Lull’s Our Natural Lab: Remarkable Stories of Science from America’s National Parks is out now with Oxford University Press.