Carl Zimmer’s advice for aspiring science writers It’s a daunting time to be a professional science writer. They are published under Creative Commons Licence (CC BY-NC-ND) Sometimes you build up to a climax, and then jump forward a few years to a brief scene that acts as a powerful postscript. And scientists were willing to help me understand their discoveries, in long conversations over the phone or visits to their labs and field sites. New York: Dutton, (forthcoming) 3/9/2021. Nick talks to science writer and NYT columnist Carl Zimmer about his new book, "Life's Edge: The Search For What It Means To Be Alive." But if you are shifting from one aspect of a person’s life to another, you can’t rely on time. (Thanks to guests who have visited my class over the years and helped shape my thoughts on these matters, including Joshua Foer, Maryn McKenna, Annie Murphy Paul, Michael Specter, Florence Williams, and Ed Yong. In 1989 I wrote to some magazines to see if they had any openings for entry-level jobs. A poorly developed scene will read like a procession of faceless ghosts drifting through a phantom world. In my experience, recording apps on phones are unreliable, but there may be something out there that works well. If you find yourself struggling to come up with a nut graf, that may tell you something important. Scientists are not robots chunking out new bits of knowledge. Scientists invent words, which they use to talk to each other efficiently. If not, the writer becomes an awkward guest. There are exceptions, of course — business analysis stories, for example, or short crime reports. In other words, I did not know in college that I wanted to be a science writer. I still find science writing wonderful after three decades, but the industry is full of upheaval and uncertainty. In this episode of Science et al., Daniel speaks with Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer) about the intersection of science writing and communications, a subject that continues to be of local, national, and global importance. Here are a few places to continue reading and learning: The Craft of Science Writing & The Open Notebook And that requires a few things. To keep students focused on the importance of transitions, I don’t allow section breaks in class assignments. They are published under Creative Commons Licence (CC BY-NC-ND). Carl Zimmer . You have to entice editors to get them to give you an assignment. His latest book is "She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity" (May 2018, Dutton). All that being said, some venues for science writing are thriving. (I keep a running list of words I’ve encountered in assignments that are examples of unacceptable jargon. They have to rely for the most part on what you put on the page. I got the job but turned out to be a less-than-perfect copy editor, which means that I was a terrible copy editor. Kristen Delevich, one of the students who took my workshop at Yale, distilled some of my remarks about the craft of science writing (such as choosing your words carefully and building paragraphs like cathedral arches) in this blog post. He's the author of many acclaimed books, including Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, and now he’s taken on an experiment: Publishing his next book, … In 2004, he started a blog called "The Loom", in which he wrote about topics related to his books, but later expanded it into what he terms "a place where I could write about things I might not be turning into an article for a magazine, but … Location: Carl Zimmer is the author of thirteen books about science. For the most part, though, “I” am best left out of stories, even if that means making the extra effort to write around oneself. — If a quote sounds like drab exposition, just use your own words to move that part of the narrative forward. Take full advantage of their power. It is confusing to read a paragraph in which a quote is wedged in the middle of exposition. 2010 Feb 11;463(7282):737. doi: 10.1038/463737a. They are not as reliable as digital recorders. A lot of journalism has behind it a moral mission. These old and new outlets will probably never support the same number of science writers there were the 1980s. Scientists, for example, will sometimes say that a drug works “in mouse.” In is a familiar word. His latest book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, will be published in May 2018. Zimmer is a frequent guest on Radiolab and has written hundreds of articles for magazines such as National Geographic, The Atlantic, and Wired. His next book is Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive. Novels, short stories, and plays are all organized around scenes — focused moments in which people do and say things that advance the overall narrative. Why does one sentence follow another? Carl Zimmer’s Index of Banned Words. If you’re Joan Didion, definitely. Even the most gorgeous piece of prose can be ruined by careless handling. In the first sentence, we should understand why it flows from the last sentence of the previous paragraph, and each subsequent sentence should also flow logically from the previous one. I generally discourage this. American newspapers enjoyed a great boom after the end of World War II, but that boom crested around 1990, and newspapers now employ fewer people than they did in 1950. Pay can be lean, even at high-profile publications. Host: Erika Edwards. As you write the rest of your story, make sure that it really lives up to the nut graf. Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive, Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins, Reading and Negotiating a Freelance Contract.