This will be my 25th contribution to this newsletter. It has been fun to create each piece but every one has taken time and effort. Even when I was quite familiar with the subject, there were always things I did not know or understand initially. Hence, every article has required more reading and thinking to complete.
Here, I will deviate from this pattern, with a subject that requires no research: the story of how I came to undertake this newsletter. That connects, of course, to the longer tale of how I got into science writing in the first place.
This topic may well be of lesser interest to my readers than my biological subjects but the question of how someone becomes a writer is not boring. My impression is that most non-fiction writers do not talk much about how they write or their motivation. One tends to be protective of the process, private about one’s feelings and, often, modest about one’s achievement. I think that this is particularly true of science writers, most of whom, I suspect, regard their craft as unglamourous, perhaps even a tad boring, unlike their subject matter itself. Nor does the process itself look exciting: if one were to spy on a writer at their work, would it be more exciting than watching paint dry? Perhaps slightly. One can have all those feelings while quite enjoying the work of being a science writer and believing that it has value.
Perhaps modesty about such writing stems in part from the fact that must of us who do it fell into it, after starting along some other path. I think few children have science writing as an ambition. Kids may dream about becoming pop stars or actors or astronauts or scientists or doctors but, only rarely, writers. Some children of best-selling novelists may see it as glamorous or a field of competition with their successful parent (one thinks of Martin and Kingsley Amis) but the children of science writers? I think not many.
In my case, my childhood passionate interest was certainly not in writing but in the world of Nature and, in particular, that of animals, whether alive (my cats and dogs, the animals of the African savannahs) or dead (dinosaurs!). I cannot remember giving any thought to being a writer in my childhood or early teen years.
Yet, I had the idea of “literature”, and I was quite positive about it. My mother was a literary person. She loved the world of books and stories, was always reading, and talked frequently about writers she knew or admired. (In later decades, she would achieve success and a degree of fame as a translator and editor.) My father, a doctor, also loved literature and stories, and would read to my brother and me before bedtime. In particular, I remember him reading The Odyssey to us and I was absolutely enthralled by the story. (I was 6 or 7 at the time.)
Thus, from childhood I had respect for writers and their work. Yet, from 12 or so onwards, I was focussed on becoming a biologist of some kind and gave no thought to writing. My first real brush, as a teenager, with writing was the weekly essay I had to do in first year in college (Reed College, Portland, OR), in Humanities 101. These were serious efforts, often 10 to 12 type-written pages, and had a strict deadline (12 noon Saturday!), with failure to meet it earning the penalty of a much reduced mark or even failure in the course. I remember this writing as a chore, not fun, though I must have been getting some value from it.
I did become a biologist as per my goal, a research scientist, getting a Ph.D. in the field of genetics and doing research on various subjects as a young researcher. This work was first on bacteria, then on a bacterial virus, and then on a species of a primitive kind of complex organism, a “slime mould”. If one is a young research scientist, of course, you have to do some writing, in the form of research articles, reporting on and discussing one’s findings. (Grant-writing, a great burden, comes later.) Writing was considered something anyone could do and when I was a young scientist, there was no instruction in how to write, let alone guidance on how to do it well. This is still true today in most university science departments and research institutes. Accordingly, most of the scientific “literature” so produced is either mediocre or poor as writing. It is hardly literature in my parents’ sense.
Nevertheless, I think I must have picked up something about writing in producing these articles. In particular, I learned to keep sentences fairly simple, avoiding unnecessary words (verbiage), and keeping the “flow” of the thoughts good, to produce a clear account. At some unconscious level, I understood that if a research article was to have interest for the reader, it would have to be a narrative, a “story” in some sense though, of course, faithful to the reality of one’s work. To be effective, it had to be interesting, and the best way to ensure that was to make it the writing as clear as one could.
Yet, in my mid-30s, writing became more important to me than simply as an instrument to convey my research. In retrospect, I can see that there were three changes in my life, over several decades, that drew me progressively into writing as something worthwhile in itself.
The first was my decision to write a book in a field of genetics that lacked a current one. The situation that led to my decision was the realisation that I was probably falling out of the career of “research scientist”. My work had been good and my scientific mentors, who were excellent scientists, had thought well of my abilities. Yet, in my thirties, I had not published enough papers. In the vigorously competitive world of scientific research, that spells professional death. I was not entirely sad about this. While I loved biology, I had been pulling away from the world of laboratory research for several reasons, in particular its cut-throat competition and the ceaseless chasing after research funds that this life requires.
If you fall out of research, what do you do next? Perhaps I would end up teaching high school biology. This was perhaps not exciting but acceptable; I could imagine it. At least, however, I felt that I could leave a good book behind me as my (small) legacy to biology. Thus, at age 35, in 1980, I started writing a book, an advanced text in the field of developmental genetics, the part of genetics that explores how biological development takes place. In 1980, the last good book in this subject, by a distinguished Swiss scientist, had been published twenty years previously but the field had grown and deepened a lot since then.
I had no book-writing experience, but, hey, how hard could writing a book be? After all, I had written some good research papers and had grown up around adults who had thought about, discussed, really lived, books all the time. I felt I knew the world of books well. Surely, writing one would just be an extended version of writing a paper. Wrong! A book is an entirely different kind of animal from a research paper, as I soon discovered. Every morning, I would sit down at my desk at 8am and start to write, allocating three hours for the morning session. And, for three or more months, the result was the same: I would look at my newly typed pages and realise that they were no good. As in the old movie depictions of frustrated writers, I would literally tear up the pages and vow to try again the next morning.
It was deeply frustrating and discouraging. Writing a book was clearly different from doing a research paper. What kept me going during this period, I really do not know – pride, stubbornness, masochism? Whatever it was, I persevered. And then sometime in month four (as I remember it, maybe it was sooner or a little later), something clicked. There was the feeling, looking at some newly produced text, “Hey, this is not too bad. The writing is better.” I then kept on going, without the frustration and continued to be pleased. I had somehow tapped into a writing style that worked, that is one suitable for this kind of book.
Nor was this simply self-delusion: when the book came out, it garnered excellent reviews and was a success. I had to pinch myself. Was this really happening? Yes, it was. As a result of the book’s success, I did not fall into high school teaching but became the deputy editor of a newly launched review journal, BioEssays, in Cambridge, England. It was going to be a general review journal, essentially covering all of biology. This was wonderful! I already knew that I loved reading and thinking about aspects of biology. Now, I would be paid while doing so.
This new job then led to the second element in my becoming a writer. I had an excellent working relationship with the Editor, a fine man named Bill Whelan, and Bill was quite happy to let me oversee many of the articles that were submitted to us. This involved not just getting referees’ reports (two to three for each paper) but giving suggestions to the authors on the writing. That meant that I had to be pretty confident that I was giving good advice. At the beginning, I must have been bluffing about this a bit. After awhile, however, my confidence was genuine. I could see what the authors needed to do to improve their articles in terms of clarity and interest. Since the feedback from them on my advice was quite positive, that strengthened my confidence that I knew what I was doing in the writing-advice business. And, of course, thinking about what others should do, or avoid, was helpful for my own writing.
Indeed, I discovered that Bill was quite happy to have me write opinion pieces for BioEssays, including editorials. More writing experience! In the course of this, I discovered that I could write for other scientific journals as well. Since I was no longer a research scientist, I could not do research articles but nothing was stopping me from writing hypothesis articles, review articles, book reviews. This freedom was wonderful. I also wrote a further two books during my time at BioEssays, and they were also well received critically, hence the first book success had not just been a fluke.
After five years, Bill went on to a new project and I became the Editor of BioEssays. Now I was fully in charge and knowing that was delightful.
This work for BioEssays then led on to the third element in my formation as a writer: teaching scientific writing to honours undergraduates, and then graduate students. In a sense, this was a continuation of giving advice to my authors but in a classroom setting and orally, not in writing. I loved it. I enjoy being around young people because they see things through fresh eyes. As an older person, one hopes to help younger people from your accumulated experience, even perhaps with a degree of “wisdom”, but younger people can help older people see things anew. I believe that my writing workshops were two-way learning exercises in this way.
Teaching writing forced me to take my essentially intuitive approach to writing into a set of ideas and guidelines on how to write well. I could tell from the students’ responses that they felt this was helpful and it was useful to me to codify my largely unformulated understanding of what works, or doesn’t, in writing.
There is one piece of advice I gave my students that I will mention here: always keep your readers in mind, trying to see what they need explained and finding the most straightforward words to get those ideas across. Years ago, I asked a friend of mine, who is brilliant at learning new languages (including Danish and Hungarian!) how he did it. He thought about it and produced one word: “empathy”. If you are trying to speak a new language, you have to put yourself in the shoes of a speaker of that language. I think that is absolutely true and it pertains equally to non-fiction writing: you have to develop a sense of what the other person needs in order to explain something to them. And with enough experience in writing, you can find the right words to do so faster and with fewer false starts.
We are now coming to the point of my becoming a Substack writer.
I retired from the BioEssays editorship in 2008 but continued writing: more articles, one big new book (plus recently another), and various articles. Early in “retirement”, I also had two fellowships at two excellent institutes (one in Berlin, Germany, the other near Capetown, SA). More freedom to write about interesting things! And, after those, I continued my teaching, both of writing and of “good scientific practice”.
However, the Covid-19 pandemic put a halt to my teaching and then to its demise. The institutes I had worked for shifted over to teaching by Zoom, which is both easier and cheaper for them. For me, however, Zoom teaching is a lot less fun, hence after 20 years I gave up teaching. (If there is an opportunity to resume, with “in person” teaching, as it is now called, I would be glad to.)
And, then, earlier this year, I started talking with an old friend of mine, Steve, a friend from my college days, about possibilities to supplement my income, which at present consists of my pension funds (hence, fairly tight constraints). Steve knew that I enjoyed writing and had done a lot and he suggested that I consider writing a Substack newsletter, inviting paid subscriptions.
We kicked the idea around and I realised that this had a lot of appeal for me. I am always reading and thinking about biology. Why not share some of these thoughts with others? Why not write for, primarily, a general audience but also biologists, if they were interested? The goal would be to show how biology helps illuminate so much in human life. Just as editing BioEssays had forced me to greatly expand my knowledge and understanding of biology, to help my authors write good pieces, writing a Substack newsletter could be a similar broadening experience. It would be a license to write about a huge range of things, since biology comes into, in one way or another, practically everything.
Indeed, in my explorations of the Substack universe, I came across just that thought. One of these newsletters was by a psychologist named Frederick Prete, and it had a wonderful title, “Everything is biology!” Rats! (An old American expression indicating frustration.) That phrase summed up my view and would have been a wonderful title but, clearly, it had already been taken. Hence, after consulting with the two friends who are helping me on the technical side of this effort, Steve and David (who does the pictorial work for this column), we decided on the title, “BioBuzz”.
I am enjoying the experience fully. Nor is there any danger that I will run out of topics. I have many ideas for follow-up articles on subjects I have already covered and in my daily reading, I always come across new topics that could be the focus of new pieces. Building a subscribership is proving slow and it is not clear whether this effort will create a real second stream of income for me. However, I shall continue, writing one article per week, and we will see. I am learning a lot in the process and I hope that my readers feel that way too. I am always glad to receive comments and suggestions from readers and will reply.
Of course, everyone’s story is different and every writer who has ever lived became one in their own way. No one’s life or career can ever be a model for anyone else’s. Yet, each life story has some illustrative value and therefore some potential worth for other people. In that respect, I hope that this account of my becoming a writer has been of interest.
Next week, however, we return to biology.
Supplementary Reading
There are many books and articles on how to write about scientific subjects but I am going to recommend two books on writing well that are more general. They are quite different in style but complementary and both are very enjoyable. The first is On Writing Well: The classic guide to writing non-fiction (2006) by William Zinsser (Harper Collins: New York). The second is The Sense of Style: The thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st century (2014) by Steven Pinker (Penguin Books: London).