Months ago, I became connected with a senior journalist and editor who gave me the opportunity to pitch story ideas related to vaccines for COVID-19, write the ones she found most interesting and timely, and if one or both of them turned out good enough to use in their special issue on vaccines, they’d use it and pay me for it.
Off I went. I pitched five ideas. Two stuck.
Then the hard part began. I researched the topics and reached out to professors for interviews. I interviewed professors. After the first two, I learned to research the professors more than the topic. After the third interview, I learned to research the topic more than the professors, because 90 minutes is an overwhelming amount of content for the next phase. There is no right way. It’s iterative.
After the interviews, the actual hard part began, deciding what to use. To decide what to use, you need to know what you have. This means hours of transcribing, relistening, fixing the transcription for accuracy. This part could be farmed out for a fee. But the brain must reengage with the content to make those decisions, so there’s no escape from relistening and rereading for meaning, taking brain-cleaning breaks in moments of overload, then revisiting and mining for nuggets.
Have you ever written a term paper in college, headed down the road on one thesis, then realized that your sources showed you a different theme and you had got to change it all around?
Have you ever started down a project with one hypothesis, found that your data answered a different question, and then had to change your narrative? Was it painful because it wasn’t what you said you would do in your grant proposal or thesis proposal or last week’s proposal for the current week?
It’s like that. See what you have. Accept that it’s different from what you thought. Detach from the hours you’ve poured in on one road, research again, reframe the narrative, and rebuild. This can mean that even after that 90-minute interview, you’ve got to reach back to the source to refine those insights for the new story.
After writing and submitting Story One, the hard part began. Feedback.
“It’s all over the place.” So what’s a better order? “There are gaping holes.”
She was right, and it’s OK that it wasn’t so clear to me before I submitted it, and which, of infinity unanswered questions, are most important to readers?
Getting it in the right order – news is organized in an inverted pyramid. Put the most crucial information first, write a ~ 30-word lead, then least important information at the bottom. But what is most important to me, and what is most important to you?
Like a senior citizen taking driver’s education, training out old habits hurts.
Thankfully, some scientists made their own comparative version in their scientific article about writing for lay audiences. Like a senior citizen who recently graduated driver’s ed teaching driver’s ed to a senior citizen. Thank you.
At some point, I took my printed article and turned it into Legos. I color coded each sentence according to those categories on the inverted pyramid, pulled them apart, put them in the Lego bucket overnight (tripping hazard if littered on the floor overnight), then rebuilt in the morning. After doing this, it started to look more newsy. At least more like the stories already on their website.
Then the hard part began. Style.
I looked at those stories as a model and tried to mimic their formats. Some expertly crafted stories were heavy on quotes, with the writer fading into the background to let the voices of the sources shine. I tried to do that. But the voices of my sources didn’t exactly come together in such a smooth story, and for one story, I had a lot of material from one interview and very little material from others. I don’t have enough, I thought.
But no one asked me to mimic someone else’s style. They recruited me to write science stories for a reason.
I wrote Story Two loaded with insights from published writings including one line summaries from scientific papers, quotations from policy papers, and a recorded interview.
“This is an interesting piece and I will certainly use it,” came the feedback. Hurrah!
After two short rounds of edits, the hard part began. Just kidding.
Story Two and Story One played my strengths differently. Revisiting Story One was hard because it was a harder topic for me, and I’m deeply grateful to the editor’s specific feedback about the work itself that pushed me to make it into what was finally published.