Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

Advice for science writers, from science writers

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Ed Yong, an incisive and prolific science blogger-writer-communications officer, opened up his blog to the science-writing community earlier today, with this invitation:

Every now and then, I get an email from someone who’s keen to get into science writing and wants to know how I started. Whenever I reply, and I always try to, I’m always left with the nagging feeling that my experience is but one of a multitude of routes that people have taken. Science writing (whether you want to call it journalism, blogging, communication and so on) is a diverse field, as are the people working in it. It would be far more illuminating for a newbie to see a variety of stories rather than just one.
…I will be asking science writers around the world to do what they do best – tell a story – about the thing they know best – themselves. This will be a perpetual thread that I hope will act as a lasting resource for the writers of tomorrow to take inspiration from.

That was about 18 hours ago. So far there are 59 comment/stories posted, from some of the brightest and sharpest writers working today, with more to come tomorrow, I am sure. (Also, umm, me. I didn’t get in til #51, because I was trying to catch a plane.) Collectively, the comment string is both a peek behind the curtain of how science writers and authors work and think — and think about their work — as well as a trove of advice for anyone else who wants to try this odd and taxing profession.

A selection:

Mark Henderson (#2), science editor of the Times of London: “If you can’t find great stories from everything that’s pouring out of the world’s laboratories, you’re not much of a journalist.”

Jonah Lehrer (#4), author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist: “Writing is a craft. There are no born writers. One has to practice and practice and practice.”

Maggie Koerth-Baker (#5), BoingBoing.com: “Think of yourself as a business, ask to be paid what you’re worth and stick to your guns, always turn things in on time, learn that editing is not your enemy, and work really, really hard at writing nuanced, factual stories that are still fun to read. Luck helps those who help themselves.”

Raima Larter (#16), writer and former chemistry professor: ” I don’t think you can go wrong when you make your choices based on what most excites you. Passion can go a long way in carrying you forward in any career.”

John Pavlus (#21), writer/filmmaker: “BE curious and ACT curious. Everything else will work itself out from there.”

TR Gregory (#29), an evolutionary biologist who has started a companion thread on his own blog: ” There is a lot of frustration among scientists and educators with the way new studies are portrayed in the media, but when someone is recognized as an honest and skilled communicator, he or she will be among the ones that scientists hope will discuss their research.”

Brendan Maher (#34), features editor, Nature: “Humility and self-assured enthusiasm can coexist.”

Eric Michael Johnson (#41), blogger at The Primate Diaries: ” Take risks. Make mistakes. Fall flat on your face. The difference between wanting to be a writer and actually being one is in how often you pick yourself back up.”

(Stripped of the biographical material, here’s my contribution: “Work nights and weekends. Seek mentors. Stay alert to serendipity. When someone wants to tell you a story, listen. Develop expertise. Distrust everyone’s motives, including your own. Always ask another question. Talk to people face to face. Rejoice in complexity, in systems and in persons, and accept that it takes its time revealing its intricacies. Try to tell the truth.”)

Past time to pay attention to polio

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In the winter of 1999, I stood in an outpatient clinic in a pediatric hospital in New Delhi and listened to a father sobbing over the paralysis of his only son. He was a farmer and lived in Uttar Pradesh; counting walks, minibuses and trains, it had taken him 24 hours to get to the hospital. He had carried the toddler the entire way.

His son had gotten the drops, he insisted: Every time the teams came to his neighborhood — which they did three, four times each year — he or his wife had lined up all their children, the boy and his older sisters. His son had had 11, 12 doses, the man said. How could he have gotten polio? And it was polio, the doctor treating him confirmed, not one of the transient febrile paralyses that exist alongside the disease and make detection and diagnosis so complex in resource-poor settings. She saw this all the time, she confided. The massive polio-eradication campaigns that continually blanketed India had trouble reaching some resistant populations, and those children contracted polio because they were not vaccinated — but children whose parents were compliant, who believed in the drops and made sure their children received them, became paralyzed as well.

I was in India that winter because the long-hoped-for goal of the worldwide eradication of polio was supposed to be achieved the following year, in 2000. The global eradication initiative — led by the WHO, the CDC and a massive volunteer effort by Rotary International — didn’t make that goal that year. Or in 2002, or in 2005. For a variety of reasons, from the biology of the disease in the tropics to political manipulation in service of unrelated ends, several countries have remained stubborn hot spots. And as long as the disease persists within their borders, it can leak outside them and become re-established in any area where vaccination has slowed down because the goal of stopping local transmission appears to have been achieved.

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A great blog leaves the 'sphere

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Constant readers: Well, the bug finally got me, or one of its close cousins did. I’ve been on the road almost nonstop, and after a book event at University of Wisconsin last week, was felled by a violent bout of foodborne illness that was almost certainly staph — not MRSA, but the related strain of staph that causes very rapid food poisoning. (And, umm, thorough. Ick.) So I’ve been out of commission both physically and mentally. And on a plane again tonight. Back soon in both ways, promise.

But there’s important sad news today that I want you all to know about. Revere, the peerless author of the marvelous public health blog Effect Measure, is bowing out of the blogosphere. For more than 5 years now, Revere (a collective voice of an unknown number of public health experts —for simplicity, let’s say “he”) has been a reliable, thoughtful, expert, humorous and deeply knowledgeable guide to the intricacies of public health and public health politics. He has taken a particular interest in the possibility of pandemic flu and has been the unofficial leader of the loosely knit but fiercely loyal group of bloggers and crowdsourcers who call themselves Flublogia. And though few would admit it, Revere’s posts have been consistent agenda-setters in newsrooms all across the planet; insiders knew that, if Revere said something, it would start showing up in newspapers and on wires about 12 hours later.

If you are a Revere reader and missed this news, get over there and leave a note in the quickly lengthening comment string. If you never made the blog’s acquaintance, now would not be too soon.

Special bonus for disease-detection wonks

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Constant readers: Some of you know that my first book, published five years ago, was a narrative and history of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, the young, committed corps of MDs and PhDs who give up two years of their lives to serve on front-line outbreak SWAT teams.

The EIS are very important right now, because there are almost 100 CDC people in the field, in Mexico and in US cities and other countries where H1N1 swine flu is emerging.

My next book — the one for which this blog is the whiteboard — is being published by the same imprint, Free Press, part of Simon & Schuster. So because the EIS is so crucial to the outbreak investigation, FP has relaxed their rights and very graciously allowed me to fling up some parts of Beating Back the Devil on the web, for free, to my regular readers.

My web skills are not magnificent, and my site has outgrown the program I used to build it. However: If you go to this page, you’ll see a section that announces Excerpts! And in it you’ll find a prologue and two chapters in various formats. (We did this fast; it is messy. Sorry.)

I particularly recommend Chapter 13 [pdf], which is a narrative of the SARS outbreak in Asia, starting with an EIS officer named Dr. Joel Montgomery staring down a tray of blood samples in a laboratory in Vietnam. (I wrote about the importance of serology — blood-analysis — surveys to swine flu at CIDRAP tonight.) The description of that outbreak response should give you a good flavor of what the CDC investigators are doing and thinking about now. And, bonus, it talks about some little-known cases of avian flu H5N1; we did not know at the time how important those cases would turn out to be.

If you have time, there are also links to sections that FP has posted on their own site: Chapter 1, which will tell you who the EIS are and why the corps exists (Korean War veterans will know already); and the book’s Prologue, which takes you inside the first bioterror-response training that EIS members ever endured.

I hope you enjoy.