Science Writing Meta: The Stories Behind My Stories (2)

Part Two – The leap from non-paid to paid science writing via opinion pieces.

Most advice I’ve seen for aspiring/newbie science writers recommends they start pitching short “front of book” news stories. The kind of work where editors require a quick turnaround and the articles are straightforward to pull together. Writers therefore don’t need an extensive portfolio of paid work, just samples that show they’re familiar with the genre.

I stumbled through another entry point: the Op-Ed.

The Source.

Okay, another useful bit of freelance science writing career advice I have: Twitter should be your weapon of choice. Plenty of online media have Pitch/Submission Guidelines on their main website (once you’ve scrolled to the bottom), but Twitter is where a lot of editors call for pitches. Heck, you can even find the names, email addresses and remits of editors, if they aren’t listed elsewhere.

Anyway, in August 2017 I saw Nessa (@SuperScienceGrl) – a fellow #ChemTwitter citizen, at the time fresh out of grad school and starting her industrial chemist career – write an op-ed/humour column for Chemistry World magazine [1]. After reading her column I was slightly jealous: deservedly so, because it was a great read. This piece marked an directional shift in ChemWorld’s ‘Last Retort’ column: its editor Kit Chapman[2] was steering the column away from “interesting historical tales” to “fun everyman slices from scientist life”.

I saw Kit’s call for pitches (see above) right after Nessa’s article was published. Since hers was the first column under the new direction I had the advantage of being able to pitch almost anything knowing it hadn’t already been taken…but with little guidance from previous columns about what was acceptable/expected.

The Pitch

It didn’t take too long to come up with an idea (lack of raw ideas is rarely a problem for me, but I need to get better at refining & targeting them to the right publications). I was aiming for a universal experience that every chemist – be they a research professor, industrial scientist or student – could relate to. But it also had to be something humorous that no one had written much about before. I went with thesis acknowledgements.[3]

I’ll talk in my next blog post about what you shouldn’t do when writing opinion, but this ~700 word piece was easy to fill out and didn’t require straining to meet the word count.

Perspectives and opinion pieces are a good entry into science writing. They’re less competitive/elusive than full-length features, and background expertise with the subject matter is often an acceptable substitute for paid writing clips. From what I’ve seen, pay for an opinion piece is on par with pay for a similar-sized news story. Editorial oversight and journalistic rigour vary between outlets, but some publications (e.g. Undark) put their opinion pieces through the same fact-checking wringer as their Features and News. All you need is an opinion and evidence to back it up. The Open Notebook has a guide to writing opinion you may wish to consult.

Anyway, the Last Retort column was where I landed my first paid writing assignment. Now I could angle towards writing features…

 

Footnotes

[1] Nessa is still going strong at the science writing and is now a Chemistry World featured columnist. I’m not the only one who used this route!

[2] Kit Chapman has since moved on from Chemistry World. Check out his debut book ‘Superheavy: Making and Breaking the Periodic Table‘ – it’s an excellent vehicle for his writing and wit.

[3] This was an idea I had to sit down and think about (“Hey, why don’t I write…”), then I needed to think some more about what I’d include and its structure. In contrast, I wrote a particularly sassy entry in my private diary about an eventful group dinner at a chemistry conference – several months later I converted that diary entry into a Last Retort column with minimal adjustments.

 

 

Science Writing Meta: The Stories Behind My Stories (1)

I remember the mix of confusion, panic and pride I felt when an aspiring science writer first approached me for advice. My postdoc was in a tailspin, and “failure” was the only adjective I could slap on it. Yet here was someone (who knew nothing about my research sphere failure) who’d identified me as being a couple of confident steps down their desired career path, wanting to emulate me. The moral of this story? Your perceived failures can be interpreted by others as success.

Perhaps I can help. Here is the background on a few of my freelance science writing pieces, charting how I went from a portfolio of zero to my first paid feature. Hope it’s useful!

 

Story 1. Feature Article (Unpaid): Rutgers Daily Targum. 

Scenes from Rutgers | Piscataway NJ

To get paid science writing opportunities, you usually have to start with the unpaid kind. My advice: linger at this stage as briefly as possible. Aspiring science writers are often nervous about submitting those first big pitches (100% valid!) so may continue with unpaid writing until they feel more confident.

Yet from what I’ve seen, editors only need 3 clips to support a pitch from a new/unfamiliar writer. You may want a few extra clips you so can mix and match with your pitches, but once you have a portfolio of 3-5 unpaid articles, I think you’re ready to go chase money.

If you have the revelation that you want to pursue science writing while at university (undergrad-PhD-postdoc), then get involved with your student newspaper or a student science magazine. I was a PhD student in my final semester when I volunteered at my primarily-undergrad student paper (Rutgers Daily Targum). For more backstory, check out my WordPlay blog posts (one, two, three).

I wrote 3 feature article that last semester. Two of them came from school press releases the Science Editor spotted; out of the pool of writers I volunteered first. Essentially those features were fleshed-out versions of the press releases, though I spun my own interpretations in there too. I had to interview at least 3 scientists involved with the work, most of whom were used to speaking with student journalists.

The third was an idea I pitched to the Editor. The 2017 Nobel Prizes had just been announced, with the Chemistry Prize awarded to the developers of cryo-electron microscopy. I knew that Rutgers already performed a lot of research with cryo-EM, so my pitch was simply to highlight our research and interview the scientists who did it.

Which brings me to my second main piece of advice: pitch early, pitch often. In the world of freelance science writing the onus is usually on writers to approach editors with ideas.  I also realised that these ideas don’t have to be earth-shatteringly novel: you can pitch an interesting idea to a magazine that hasn’t covered the topic before. At the “news” end of science writing it’s more about being the first to pitch a cool discovery, with insider/expert info helping you spot what is “cool”.

Pitching in a low stakes situation (e.g. sending your idea about a local piece of news to your friendly editor at the unpaid student newspaper) helps get get you ready to pitch for higher stakes (e.g. cold-pitching to an editor you’ve never met before who works for a popular national website).

Last thing to note. Editors at paying science magazines don’t (in my experience) denigrate student newspaper clips. Why would they? Many editors got their first clips the same way. Many of the journalistic rules implemented by student publications mirror those in science magazines.

 

If you want more info on pitching and breaking in to science writing, I’d recommend reading The Open Notebook’s ‘Getting Started in Science Journalism.’ I’ll talk more about that site in a later piece, but check it out in the meantime.