Thread by @SiriCarpenter

The best part of science writing is the writing. The worst part of science writing is the writing. If you’ve ever felt this way (and yes, yes you have), here are some of the tricks I’ve found helpful for dealing with anxiety about writing. A thread. (1)

So, you’ve gathered a lot of incredible material in your interviews (those juicy quotes!) and research (those startling findings!). You’ve got everything you need to get started, but … now it’s staring back at you in raw form, waiting for you to shape it into brilliance. (2)

How do you decide what makes it into your story, and what doesn’t? Which quotes do you use? What IS your story about, anyway? How in the world will you craft a clever lede? (3)

As a beginning journalist, I made the same mistakes most new writers do: Transcribe entire interviews, pull out all the good quotes, and try to build stories around them. It took a long time to figure out this was a lot of wasted effort and didn’t yield the best stories. (4)

Learning how to move from pile-of-notes to having-a-draft is a process — it was for me, and it will be for you. Here are some strategies that eventually helped me. (5)

When I was just about done reporting, I’d go through all my notes and highlight things that seemed particularly important — key facts, good quotes, juicy anecdotes. The idea was just to refamiliarize me with what I’d gathered. Then, I'd do one of two things. (6)

THING 1: Setting my notes aside, I'd jot an email (which I may or may not send) to my editor, describing oh-so-informally what I’d learned through my reporting. This was a way to help me distill the main ideas without feeling like I was ~WRITING~. (7)

“Hey so-and-so, just thought I’d share what I’m finding out about this story. So, the key idea seems to be that X, and this is interesting because it basically means Y. Isn’t that weird?!? Oh, and then here's this other thing …” (8)

This email was just one long, casual, badly written paragraph full of ideas that I barfed up in whatever order they entered my brain. No artful lede, no nut graf, no direct quotes. There might be typos, clichés, passive sentences galore. All fine. (9)

Once I was done with this oh-so-breezy email, I’d paste it into a document, then break it into paragraphs and start to edit it, filling in details and quotes where they supported the main points, correcting things that I got wrong when I was jotting from memory, etc. (10)

OR, THING 2: After reviewing my notes, I’d build an outline, starting with a single bullet point — one sentence that captured the main point of the story. Then, I’d create additional bullet points in incomplete sentences (this is crucial) that related back to the main point. (11)

Why not full sentences? Or quotes? This is not the place to worry about aesthetics. I’d just keep adding more bullet points, rearranging as I went so ideas were in a logical order. (12)

Only then could I add quotes, but ONLY if they added something to support the main point. Important: Don’t let your sources’ quotes hijack your story. YOU are the author. Write your own ideas, based on your reporting, and let the quotes support that. (13)

Then, I’d go back through and turn each partial sentence into complete, grammatical sentences. They didn’t have to be beautiful. They just had to start with a capital letter and end with a period. (14)

I’d create a new document, paste the big outline into it, and take out all the bullet points and paragraph breaks. Then, I’d break it up into paragraphs, edit sentences, find places where I needed transitions. It’s like making a list that you edit. (15)

By the end, I would have a story, written by ME, filled with all the important and interesting things I’d uncovered, supported by the quotes I’d gleaned from all my sources. (16)

Some things to remember:
*First drafts won't be good. Get your ideas down, out of your head, onto the screen. You can edit later.
*Don’t perfect each sentence as you progress. You will need to cut some. If you love them too much, you will have a hard time letting go. (17)

Also
*You should not allow your source quotes to drive your story. It’s very easy to be seduced by quotes. Synthesize. The quotes support your writing but do not define your writing. (18)

It’s only in the cold light of day, when you’re looking at your story from the perspective of “what will serve the main point of this story?” that you’re able to resist the temptation to include those quotes at all. (19)

And that's all I have to say about that. (20/end)