Science Writing Meta: The Story Behind My Stories (4)

In late 2018 I got my first feature assignment. I felt suitably pleased with myself.

Most editors aren’t hostile to receiving feature pitches from less-experienced writers. Nor have I encountered any editorial policy of refusing to accept pitches from writers with < x years experience.

It’s a hard sell, though. Feature articles come with a higher rate of pay…so from the viewpoint of an editor they’re more expensive, thus fewer opportunities are available. They take time to research and write, and it certainly takes an editor more time to comb through 3,000 words and provide comprehensive feedback. An editor doesn’t want to assign a story to a new writer, wait 1 month for them to deliver the piece (during which time they may have to decline or delay other pitches) only to wade through 5 pages of text and realise there’s serious problems.

Having those 3-5 clips is not just about establishing your experience; from the perspective of the editor it’s risk mitigation. You (the writer) are arguing that you can deliver what you are promising.

For this reason, my advice when pitching your first feature: be unimaginative and disingenuous.

You may be someone like me who is crackling with ideas of varying quality but excessive variety. Or you’re desperate to break out of your boring wheelhouse. However, your first feature pitch should be on a topic well within your expertise. Either it’s on the same topic as something you’ve already written about as a short news article or opinion piece; or it’s a solid part of your education background (“I have a PhD in this/I did research on this”). I don’t mean that the idea should be unimaginative and disingenuous, only that your argument to the editor about why you should write it must be. Once you succeed at the first assignment you can pitch more imaginatively, because now it’s clear you can write features.

Which brings me to my “safe topic.” I’d started my science writing career at a student newspaper, and I knew I wasn’t the only one. While a postdoc I became Editor of the university’s Postdoc Science Writers Magazine. I was 100% qualified to write about student newspapers. The Open Notebook explicitly asked for pitches about breaking in to science writing (so I knew I was pitching an article that fit the venue).

My pitch to the editorial team. 

The pitch (above) was accepted. With hindsight and a bit more experience, it would have been better if I included the names of people I planned to interview as sources. Source-chasing is the hardest part of the article development process. People are flaky. Experts in the field have crammed schedules, weeks of international travel and 30 minutes availability for a phone call at what turns out to be 2.30am on a Monday morning in your time zone (Australians are great…just don’t make me interview them). Many publications want a minimum number of sources per feature, so your great article idea will fail/be delayed if you can’t get enough people to talk to you. Having a list of source email addresses ready to copy and paste into messages the instant your pitch is accepted will make the deadline so much easier to meet.

That’s a digression. My feature article got through development, editing, fact-checking and copyediting. It may not be a viral sensation or accumulate heavy website traffic, but for a small audience it hopefully will prove to be useful.

Science Writing Meta: The Story Behind My Stories (3)

Third instalment. And this is about a piece of science writing that’ll never see the light of day: an editor killed it. This shouldn’t be taken as a knock against the publication or the editor (if you can deduce their identity), since it was a vital learning opportunity for me.

The idea for this story came out of an interview I conducted with a physicist for a different story. They made an offhand remark that intrigued me. Science journalists are encouraged to ask their sources “what’s new/cool/exciting in your field?” as a way to find story ideas. That’s worked for me several times.

So, I’d come across an idea. I found an online science magazine whose remit easily tied in to the theme of my piece. The editor was amenable, approved of my plan & source list, and asked if I could write them an opinion piece.

I mentioned in my last article that opinion pieces are a good starting point for new writers. I was hoping for a feature, but figured it would work out the same. I started lining up sources to interview. As soon as I got my first draft in the problems started.

I’d been trying to write a feature. You know the kind of great stories that are expansive, reflective and nuanced? Doesn’t work when your editor is expecting an opinion piece.

Opinion pieces have two things: an Outrage(TM) and a hot-take solution.  The writer has to be Outraged(TM) at something/someone, and that emotion fuels their story. It doesn’t have to be wild raging at an injustice, it can in fact be a mild displeasure. And you have to propose a solution. I call it a hot-take because it doesn’t need to be brilliant, popular or even correct. Your goal with the Op-Ed is to provoke discussion in other people, not necessarily showcase your own cleverness.

I was able to reflect upon this after the fact. I went through several rounds of edits and rewrites. My original idea may have worked as a feature, or maybe it was too broad to ever succeed. It involved interviewing scientists in 4 or 5 countries; I was making both data-driven and “human interest” arguments. It was the first time I’d worked with the editor, so I didn’t pick up on the warnings they were about to kill my piece.

Got the verdict while I was at a large conference, so I moped when I should have been at my professional A-game. A killed article is going to sting, even when they pay you some of the agreed-upon fee.

***

But here’s my main bit of advice: I continued pitching to that magazine and editor. Despite the hurt to my pride. Not all my future pitches were successful, but I was able to adjust my pitches based on the article that failed. Tighter scope. Built-in Outrage(TM). Throw in some hot-takes. Later I got a popular, well-edited article published with them.

When you’re starting out as a science writer, a lot of your pitches will be ignored or rejected. That doesn’t mean you’re forbidden from pitching to that editor again…as long as you learn from your mistakes and incorporate feedback the editor gives into your next attempt.

Stay tuned for the fourth instalment: my first feature article.

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.

The Bio-Hustle

It’s been a while. Not that I’ve had nothing I wished to say – it’s that I haven’t found the framing, motif or theme to pack the words into. It’ll come.

In the meantime, here are some snapshots of what I’ve been up to in the last 12 months. Uniting theme? Hustle.

(Northeastern) Big City Nights

I don’t need much of an excuse to visit DC. In November 2018 the American Medical Writers Association hosted their annual conference there. I’d yet to visit the National Museum of African American History & Culture, and I had a couple of hundred dollars in my bank account. How many more signs did I need?

DC. Washington DC.

I like the grand expanse of the US Capital. It’s a bitch to walk round on a sunny day – sunlight beamed back off marble – but there’s space to pause and enjoy the surroundings, which you can’t do in NYC. Every time I visit I’ll peek into the Library of Congress, I love it as a monument to intellectual power.

This time around I lucked out and found a pretentious coffeeshop near my hostel. They served me a double espresso in a volcano-shaped mug, on a slate tile. Although not pictured above, there were extensive quantities of cacti. The espresso was perfect.

This could be the section of my post where I brag about the AMWA conference: how insightful it was, how many late night revelries I crammed in, the glamour of big meetings in endless hotels. Instead I departed DC with the realisation I wasn’t quite a medical writer. I was hitting ~50% success rate interacting with people at the conference: half the people I had decent chats with and enjoyed their company, the rest I had kinda stilted exchanges with and felt I wasn’t connecting. The workshops and talks were all useful, but there were 3 blocks of attendees (writing academic papers, regulatory writing and continuing medical education) and by then I was self-identifying as ‘healthcare marketing’.

The AMWA Southeast chapter.

A disappointing conference isn’t the worst thing life can hit me with. It helped me refine my professional identity: I’m not a medical writer, I’m a healthcare copywriter (that’s totally a thing). There were plenty of good experiences on the trip: I was able to walk into the NMAAHC without a minute of queuing, I spent time with my local AMWA chapter (“local” in this case encompassing Atlanta, Knoxville and chunks of Florida).

 

ChemBros

People don’t come to Atlanta for chemistry. I was surprised to learn that my adoptive city specialises in global health. Atlanta hasn’t been branded with the same strength Boston has as a biotech hub, for example. Global health equates to public health, medicine, epidemiology and the likes…but not chemistry.

So you can imagine my delight when two chemists did visit for the weekend.

Fernando and Peter – selfie afficiandos.

The Future Leaders in Chemistry program sustained me throughout my PhD. It was only two weeks during the summer between my 1st and 2nd year, but when I hit the mid- and late-stage troughs of grad school I remembered that someone had accepted me onto this prestigious program (and no one had questioned my inclusion once I was there). It’s been 5 years now, and I’m not sure I’ve become a ‘Leader in Chemistry.’ But maybe that doesn’t matter.

Anyway, my two FLIC buddies had lunch at Ponce City Market. It’s one of those hipster utopias: ‘industrial’ interiors, expensive shops and artisanal food. I paid $8 for a sandwich smaller than my fist…but was one of the best things I’ve ever put in my mouth, albeit for all of 5 seconds.

 

While you were partying, I studied THE STICK

 …Well, you probably weren’t partying first thing on a Saturday morning. Nobody does that. As a time for karate & jiu-jitsu classes goes however, it’s pretty effective: with evening classes you have a whole day to accumulate excuses and flakiness. First thing in the morning you’re always fresh. There have been a few occasions when I woke up to the 6.30am alarm I’d earnestly set for myself Friday night…rolled over and went back to sleep. I’m human. Still, I’m more likely to be in attendance than not. It’s an intermediate-plus class, so we go through tricky things like weapons.

With martial arts, it often feels like moving up the ranks just means opening extra avenues of critique. You don’t stop doing technique wrong, instead you access more sophisticated layers of wrongness. It can be frustrating, especially when it seems you’ll never get it right.

However, jiu-jitsu shows proof of my progression. When I first hit blue belt I was thwarted by hip throws. These are (basically) when an opponent’s behind you, and you bump them up and over your back.  Despite drinking many protein shakes, I don’t have the upper body strength to brute-force the throw, I have to apply good technique. And I since I’m a tall woman my practice partners are either women roughly my weight but shorter (which makes body alignment hard because I’ve got to crouch down), or men who are taller than me…but 100 lbs heavier. You can’t hide bad technique: you’ll either do the hip throw or fail. My tolerance for practising the throw was limited – I’d get too frustrated after a series of misses to continue.

Then one class…I performed the throw. THWACK! went my partner. And I realised I was hitting correct the technique more often than I was missing. I still mess up my hip throws, and I’ve now graduated on to its more finicky variants, but it’s proof that eventually things click. There aren’t any showy flashes of insight here, just getting things right. It’s not that I enjoy failing, but I can tolerate it. And to improve at martial arts (and life, I guess) you need to tolerate exposure to your failures.

Party in the dojo – Saturday 9am | Photo courtesy of The Martial Arts Center Atlanta

Lastly, here’s a picture of me and a lizard.

I realise this photograph raises more questions than it answers. But as we say in Okinawan Shuri-Ryu: ‘Karate is my secret.‘

I bless the rains down in Atlanta

Don’t bother with waterproofs in Georgia. Get caught in a summer thunderstorm and you’re getting soaked. Waterproofs just leave you at the uncomfortable ‘partially-damp & itchy’ level of wetness. Let the rain soak you instead: it’s less like being under a warm shower; more like floating in a warm bath. I’ve been caught in those thunderstorms when I was out walking. The sidewalks turned to rivers – I splashed along up to my ankles in lukewarm water. Atlanta drivers – oblivious at the best of times – sent plumes of water breaking over me as they passed. By the time I got home to towel down the rain had stopped, the sun was pounding down, and half the deluge had already evaporated.

Southern thunderstorms are quite something. I love them.

***

I’m dealing with a professional upheaval right now. I’m not in a place where I can talk about it (yet) because (i) I don’t want to jinx the good stuff (ii) hindsight makes it easier to write an intelligible account that people would actually want to read.

Anyway. Here’s a bullet point summary of the things I’m balancing that I can talk about:

• Communication & Marketing for Women in Bio-ATL. They’re a professional organisation bringing together all “bio” and “bio-related” folk for networking/professional development. I’m creating event flyers & email promo.
•  Emory Postdoc Science Writers Fall 2018 magazine. I’m reprising my role as Editor for a “microbiome”-themed issue. It’s great to see the postdoc team grow in confidence with their science writing: tackling unfamiliar topics, longer article forms, letting their personalities come through (we’re often taught to repress personality in our academic writing).
• Wikipedia Fellows Women in Science cohort. There are several programs trying to boost the representation of female scientists on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia Fellows program is being rolled out by WikiEdu, targeting scientists who belong to professional organisations (e.g. the American Chemical Society). So I’ve been part of a summer program learning how to edit Wikipedia – something I’ve never thought much about, but is easier than I imagined. I’ve expanded several “stub” articles, and created a brand new Wikipedia entry for a scientist in my field whose omission from the platform was suitably glaring.
• Freelance science writing. I had an article idea I felt inspired to pitch to an online science magazine. Much to my surprise I received a reply several days later encouraging me to submit the full thing. It’s a beast: I’m chasing down scientists in 4 countries for interviews, and collecting lots of crunchy numbers to back up the point(s) I’m trying to make (not all of the information is displayed to the public). This kind of science writing exercise gives me a massive kick – it’s stressful, but it activates so many regions of my brain at once. I can only hope the article inside my head eventually matches what I commit to writing.

***

It’s a busy time. Evidently I like being busy. You’d hope I would.

Beneath the bubble and frenzy is an undercurrent of fear and anxiety. I’m trying to reposition myself into a new professional lane, aware that I don’t have the luxury of unlimited funds or time. I’ve also got plenty of handicaps that make getting what I want harder than it would be for others. The stakes are higher in some of the projects than others. If my freelance article gets accepted it’ll make it easier for me to successfully pitch future stories (editors always look for previous published work).  If the article is killed it brings me back to where I was before, with an additional dent in my self-confidence. It’ll also decelerate my income flow, which is I need to keep a tight watch over.

I know the point I lose confidence and momentum is when I’ll fall. So I’m pushing forward and filling up my Moleskine planner with reminders, deadlines & To Do lists. It’s been several years since I wanted to fight for a city with the ferocity I’m fighting for Atlanta. That alone tells me I should fight harder.

Word Play. Part 2

He is the man I met 5 years ago! Does he recognise me?!

That’s a dumbass question for me to ask. Of all the (valid) things you can say about my appearance, “quickly forgettable” isn’t one.

It’s August 2017 and I’m at the ACS National Meeting in DC. The stress-fog of my PhD has risen – it’s only been a couple of weeks since my lab & PI moved to a new university, leaving me behind to write up my thesis. It now feels like the end of the grad school line, and I need to strategise my next steps.

I had time to kill, so went to book a drop-in resume review at the Career Fair. By chance there was an ACS Career Counsellor waiting around when I signed in. When I saw his badge I recognised M from a workshop I’d attended at the ACS Meeting in Philadelphia –  Fall 2012. Before I’d been admitted into any PhD programs. We’d chatted about PhDs and career options, then exchanged some emails afterwards.

Given M’s reticence as we sat down, I figured he was probably trapped in the same etiquette twilight zone as me (“I recognise her! Does she recognise me?!”), so I spoke up.

“…I, um, think we met at an ACS meeting a few years ago…”

“So we did, Claire.”

If you remember the career advice someone gave you 5 years ago, it’s worth asking them for more.

At the ACS Meeting in DC, giving out advice in my role as a SciFinder Future Leader | Credit Linda Wang/C&EN

I started to talk about the intersection of writing and science as the place where I thought I wanted to be. M remembered I told him the same thing 5 years ago. I know people whose “dream career” changes every month. My plans shifted in focus, the details jigged around…but the central notion remained consistent: I wanted to write.

The drop-in resume review didn’t cost anything, but M then asked the question that would have made our chat worth the money: “Well, have you talked to any science writers at the conference yet? There are plenty of them around.”

The question provoked mild outrage, put me on the defensive, and was answered with a lame excuse. I didn’t feel READY for that kind of commitment. ‘PhD Student’ was my comforting umbrella label. It was broad and amorphous. It wasn’t a label that pigeonholed or restricted. If I was going to walk around introducing myself as an “aspiring writer” then that’s what I BECAME. I lost the freedom of future career ambiguity. I couldn’t roll back self-identification mid-way through meeting someone important.

And yet by the end of the conference I’d cornered and pounced on a science writer. I knew M was right. Even if I was making a career mistake, I could never become a professional writer if I refused to identify as one when it mattered. The science writer advised me to get some articles published as a base to chase higher-profile opportunities. Student newspaper science stories counted, they told me. As you can see in my “portfolio” blog tab, I took their advice. It worked.

Shot from the 2012 ACS National Meeting in Philadelphia. Proving I’m good at attracting the chemistry paparazzi… | Credit Linda Wang/C&EN

It will be a while before I can tell you if I chose the wrong label…but that’s not really the point. I’m grateful to M for challenging me – I needed the shove. If you don’t commit to a career track you’re never going to move far along it.