Goodreads asked Douglas J. Emlen:

How do you get inspired to write?

Douglas J. Emlen I've always loved writing, and it's a big part of my job as a scientist and professor. But I discovered that writing for general audiences is a very different skill - I actually had to "unlearn" most of what I thought I knew about writing. The conventions that make an effective research paper in a technical journal, or the tricks that make a grant proposal especially compelling, are NOT helpful when it comes to writing about these topics for a non-academic reader.

Learning to write in this new (for me) style was frustrating and slow, and required patience on the part of my editors. They kept bouncing chapters back to me. "Do it again. You sound like a professor." At one point I even called my editor and explained "but I AM a professor!" She finally convinced me that I was going to have to lose all of that, and start fresh with a new voice. I had to learn to tell a narrative, to find clever ways to pull readers into the biology, and to make the animals vivid and real. I also had to find ways to pull readers into the rain forests, and into the mindset of scientists in the field, to bring the process of science to life in an exciting and memorable way.

None of this is ever part of technical papers or grant proposals!! But I fell in love with this style of writing. Once I began to find my voice, so to speak, the stories just gushed - I'd had years of crazy adventures stashed away in the recesses of my mind, detailed in letters I'd scribbled to my girlfriend (now wife) when I'd been living and working in the jungle all those years ago, and now I had a chance to tell these stories, weaving them in and around the biology of crazy animals with extraordinary weapons.

I now look at writing in an utterly different way, and I appreciate nuances in the writings of other authors that I'd never noticed before.

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