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Microcosm carl zimmer page count1/20/2024 ![]() ![]() Or collapse.Īnd so, while I personally feel very lucky to have ended up making a living as a science writer, I am very cautious in recommending it to others as a line of work. Depending on who you talk to, a better word might be metamorphosis. I also didn’t realize that traditional science journalism-and journalism in general-was undergoing a drastic change. Along with everyone else, I had no idea that it would end up at the heart of science journalism. In 2004, when I began blogging, many professional journalists looked at it as an odd distraction from real work. When they stopped running essays, I decided to set up a blog where I didn’t have to pitch ideas to anyone beside myself. At the time, I had been writing essays for Natural History. In the early 2000s I began enjoying the handful of blogs about science. ![]() Just as I had stumbled into science writing, I stumbled into its online world. It took a very long time for many in the science writing world to realize that change was coming, and many tried to ignore it once it had arrived. The only alternatives were crudely printed zines, which attracted only a tiny fraction of the circulation of large magazines and none of their big-ticket advertisers.Īll of that has changed, of course. This was an age when magazines and newspapers held a near-monopolistic control over science writing. At the time, magazine publishers did not see the point of rigging their computers to telephone wires. Another reason is the fact that for the first five years of my career, I did not have access to the Internet. That’s one reason to take my advice with a grain of salt. I can only take credit for being able to recognize when I fell into a deeply satisfying kind of work. I didn’t prepare for the career by taking a lot of science classes or going to graduate school for science journalism. In other words, I did not know in college that I wanted to be a science writer. Then I headed out on my own, to write books, features, and other pieces. I stayed at Discover for ten years, the last four of which I served as a senior editor. And scientists were willing to help me understand their discoveries, in long conversations over the phone or visits to their labs and field sites. In nature, I was discovering strangeness beyond my own imagining. I then got a chance to write short pieces.Īt some point, I realized this was an experience unlike any previous writing I had done. Fortunately, by then my editors had let me start to fact-check stories, which is arguably the best way to learn how to write about science. ![]() I got the job but turned out to be a less-than-perfect copy editor, which means that I was a terrible copy editor. I got a response from Discover, saying they needed an assistant copy editor. In 1989 I wrote to some magazines to see if they had any openings for entry-level jobs. After college, I spent a couple years at various jobs while writing short stories on my own, but I gradually realized I didn’t have enough in my brain yet to put on the page. By college, I was working on both fiction and nonfiction, majoring in English to learn from great writers while trying to avoid getting sucked into the self-annihilating maze of literary theory. I was the sort of kid who wrote stories, cartoons, and failed imitations of Watership Down. While I didn’t know I wanted to write about science, I have written for as long as I can remember. The question “How do I become a science writer?” is not equivalent to “How did you become a science writer?” I stumbled into this line of work without any proper planning in the early 1990s, when journalism was a very different industry. I may be the wrong person to ask for this advice. I first wrote this essay back in 2013, and I’ve updated it a little from time to time.īut first a caveat. But then I thought it would be better for everyone - the people contacting me and myself - to sit down and write out a thorough response. At first I responded to these requests with hasty emails, so that I could get back to figuring out for myself how to be a science writer. Some have no idea how to start some have started but want to know how to get better. (For some of my writing guidelines, see here.)įrom time to time, I get letters from people thinking seriously about becoming science writers. ![]()
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