This post is a bit of a mental download of all the thoughts swirling in my head after attending one of the sessions moderated by Ed Yong (of Not Exactly Rocket Science fame), and Maggie Koerth-Baker (editor at BoingBoing.net) where they extrapolated on the conundrum of providing context in science stories. The session was prompted by the concern that science news and science journalism often lack enough context so that readers can make adequate sense of complicated findings, such as Arsenic Life, or chronic issues that frequently have new developments which must be continually covered, such as climate change, or cancer research.

This is a fair concern when you’re contemplating how to best communicate news from a field that is often riddled with complexity and context.

First, the panelists asked audience members if they knew of any technological fixes for providing more context. Some people mentioned slideshows as complimentary to main stories, providing links to FAQs, or providing sidebars (as in, the old-school sidebars where pertinent information is extracted to a box next to the main story). Linking out to sources that provide a deeper explanation of a key concept, mechanism, process, or history was also mentioned; though some folks expressed concern about losing readers if they directed them away from their own news site or blog.

While I acknowledge the role technological fixes like slideshows can provide to add more context to a story (or more links to places with more information), I think this question sidestepped the elephant in the room, which is that sophisticated and skilled writing can incorporate needed context. In other words, from my perspective this is an issue that falls out more on the side of writing craft and reporting.

Writing craft points to consider

Using a strong story arc — with a beginning, middle and end — is one way to weave both background and broader context into a piece. Using characters and making a true narrative of the story arc is another. Or, if you’re not using narrative, it could be as simple as organizing the flow of information so that it either circles back in time to recap relevant information, or makes connections to how the new science findings or event relate to public policy or society at large. Yes, sometimes having a graphic timeline to supplement a story is a better visual explainer than incorporating a series of dates and events. But, if told well, the writing can usually stand alone to both explain news and provide the necessary context to help a reader understand the importance of a new finding, or its relevance to existing research, or how it fits within our existing societal fabric.

That’s not to say that this is always how it’s done in practice, for a variety of reasons. One obvious pitfall here is that putting effort into creating a story arc, or a narrative with actual characters, takes time. Sometimes, it takes copious amounts of time. That’s not something a prolific blogger, or writer for a daily publication, usually has.

Another pitfall is that adding context typically adds details which in turn add length. The more context, the more length. While bloggers and online writers have endless space and need not worry about word counts or column inches (only the patience of their readers), people who write for print publications do have space constraints. This is how sidebars developed: it was easier for the editor to excise the contextual paragraphs and make a box of copy separate from the main article, versus fighting the word count in the limited existing space.

And this issue of more detail equals more length brings up another point: isn’t it the writers job to weed out the extraneous details so that a reader gets a clear picture of what’s going on? As a general rule of thumb, if I have details in a story that aren’t helping to set a scene or move the narrative along, they must come out. (One of my favorite “lessons learned” from writing my recent book is that of “phones that ring for no reason.” In trying to faithfully record all that happened in a scene I witnessed, I wrote that someone’s phone rang and she fished it out of her pocket. This was singled out by a reviewer as an example of extraneous detail, because the woman’s role in the scene was unimportant, and the fact her phone rang had no bearing on the point of the scene. In re-writing, I not only removed the phone ringing but wiped her out of the scene entirely. Why? She served no function to the story line.)

So something writers must ask themselves is at what point does trying to add context bleed into no longer having a tight story and simply throwing too much information at a reader, so much so that they can no longer differentiate the hierarchy of important facts and details? I’ll never forget when a journalism professor who was frustrated with the lengthy, detail-ladden stories I kept turning in, finally burst out: “DeLene, you have to understand that you’re not writing for stupid people, you’re writing for people who are in a hurry!” By “stupid people,” he wasn’t being condescending… he meant that it wasn’t necessary for me to spell out everything for everyone and to provide all sorts of background about each story topic. What was important was to get to the main point so that someone reading my story over breakfast, or on a morning commute, could pull the gist of it away rather quickly. Writers and scientists may make the mistake of thinking that all readers read as intentionally as they do. But the truth is that not all readers read all that intentionally. There are a lot of skimmers and speed readers out there too. Keeping the target audience in mind is important both for the writer, and for critical readers assessing whether a story hit the mark or not. Maybe a science story appearing in USA Today has enough context for the readership of that paper, but one might expect that if that same story topic appeared in Scientific American or Miller-McCune then it would be written much differently.

But what is context anyways?

One thing that I noticed in this session was that no one defined what they meant by the word “context.” As a word, it seems simple enough. It doesn’t seem like a word that should easily confuse. But some people who commented appeared to be referring to background, and some appeared to be referring to the broader concept of context.

I’d argue that background and context are two different but closely related things. In fact, background could be classified as a subcategory of context. I see background as a component of context, but I think that context is broader than background alone.

What does providing background really mean, in a writing/journalism/science communication sense? How does it differ from providing context? I can’t offer an authoritative statement, but I’d argue that usually providing background consists of summarizing or presenting the series of circumstances or events that lead up to the main thing, event, or phenomenon being written about. This may mean writing about a series of publications, findings, or experiments that came out prior to the main one being written about. In the session, Ed stated that this is often missing in many stories about new cancer research findings: they fail to mention the previous studies that pounded a well-worn research path and may have even inspired the current work. Or, providing background may mean providing information about historical research or findings (I’m referring to a longer time frame here, research from 50 to 100 years prior). Or, it may require a discussion of the historical age in which something was first investigated and why; as well all know, the social mores and values of a time period can greatly influence the perspective through which research findings are viewed — think: evolution, or stem cell research. Or, communicating background may also mean showing a reader the development or progression of ideas generated over time to explain an observed phenomenon.

So then how does providing context differ, in a writing/journalism/science communication sense? Again, I’d be a fraud if I claimed this was an authoritative definition, but I can tell you what I think it means. You could say it’s about the word choices a topic or message is embedded within and that help to communicate its meaning. You could also say that context conveys the circumstances or setting in which a phenomenon or event occurs, or how it’s related to other phenomenon or events. This may mean connecting findings from a recent study to potential public policy decisions and outcomes. For example, connecting climate change studies to regulating carbon dioxide. Or connecting earthquakes along an Ohio fault to nearby fracking activities. Or it may mean making connections between research fields that aren’t traditionally linked (or have not historically been strongly linked). For example, when researchers first began studying the effects of gray wolf reintroduction upon the Yellowstone ecosystem, it linked predator behavior (the wolves and their predatory behavior vis-a-vis their prey) with botany and how the prey’s avoidance behavior allowed aspens and willows to grow where it had not for years. In this scenario, to fully communicate the new research of trophic cascades, writers and scientists had to provide some historical background about the absence and reintroduction of wolves to an ecosystem, as well as explain how this phenomenon affected other organisms — both plant and animal — and how these effects rippled through the ecosystem. To fully understand trophic cascades, the context of how an ecosystem functioned in a “before” and an “after” sense must be well communicated.

I’m all for writers trying to integrate more context in their science stories, but I’m also all for writers using literary tools to make their work interesting and engaging. To move their words beyond the realm of churnalism and into a space that evokes a bit more reflection and contemplation. And I guess I’m arguing for media critics to consider that there should be a balance. Obviously, if you’re reading the news briefs in a paper, there is a lot less room for words in each brief than if you were reading a feature story. So it doesn’t hurt for readers to consider the format of whatever they’re reading if they’re thinking critically about whether it provided enough context or not. (I’m not saying nothing is wrong with science journalism as it stands, I’m just arguing we should recognize that not all formats can accommodate deep context.) And maybe scientists longing for more context in the popular press need to recognize there may be times when trying to cram too much context into a story will simply clog the flow and make it less interesting for a general reader to read. If a reader truly wants to find out more and dig deeper on a topic, my bet is that they will.

Zeghie Peninsula Ethiopia. (Photo courtesy of David M. Jarze,n, PhD)

Simply put, 2011 was not the easiest year for me, personally or professionally, for many reasons I won’t go into here. So it gave me a boost to learn in mid-December that one of my blog posts from 2011 was chosen for inclusion in the anthology known as Open Lab. I’ve had two posts accepted to Open Lab before (2009, 2010), but this year felt different because the anthology was picked up by Scientific American and will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Previously, it was self-published on Lulu.com by its creator, Bora Zivkovic, and whoever Bora chose to be that year’s editor.

You can see a list of the 50 posts and one poem that were chosen out of the 720 entries at Jennifer Ouellete’s blog, Cocktail Party Physics. Jennifer was the gracious cat herder editor this year. The new title of the anthology is: The Best of Science Writing Online 2012. Normally this would be called OpenLab 2011, but with the new publisher and different editorial and publishing process the anthology will skip a year and come out late in 2012. As more than one person has noted, however, this doesn’t mean the chosen posts are THE best online science writing—that would be an impossibility to judge and curate—they are simply some of the best from the posts that were submitted. (To give credit where it’s due, that sentiment was first expressed by Ed Yong.) This brings up the obvious point: if you want your work to be considered for judging, you have to submit to OpenLab.

My single complaint about the transition to Scientific American from independent publishing is that SciAm inserted an indemnity clause into the publishing agreements they require the bloggers to sign in order to license reprinting of their work. What this means is that should anyone anywhere decide to sue over something that is published in the anthology, SciAm and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux are as resilient as greased teflon to the suit, which will smack the blogger instead. This made me pretty darn angry. Especially in light of the fact that the bloggers get zero payment for the use of their work (just the illustrious glory and bragging rights of being published with a byline, and a free copy of the book.) I asked the editor to inquire if they’d budge on the indemnity clause, but they would not. This is unfair. Basically, the publisher gets all the toys to play with, but if anyone gets hurt the liability rests solely with the indie blogger. Really?  A more reasonable approach to the liability question would be for SciAm to offer slightly different language next year. Instead of insisting that the bloggers indemnify the publisher, they ought to have language that says that the publisher and blogger will share in responsibility for any reasonable claim made against the work. It’s ridiculous to force the entirety of the liability upon the blogger, who likely carries no liability insurance to protect against such suits. The idea that anyone anywhere could sue over my piece and I alone would be responsible for my legal defense and costs makes me nauseaous. It should have the same effect on all the other contributors too. Nevertheless, I held my nose and signed the agreement. (I figured my post was innocuous enough that no one would sue over it.) Which is exactly what the publishers were counting upon everyone doing.

Now that I’ve aired my complaint, let’s move on.

My chosen post, Saving Ethiopia’s Church Forests, was first published on the guest blog at PLoS. It covers a unique and happy accident of conservation in Ethiopia where Orthodox Christian churches percieve it as their religious duty to preserve existing forests surrounding their churches. In a land where deforestation is ripe, the church forests represent some of the last biodiversity gems. The article discusses their spiritual motivations for conserving the forests (which are thought of as metaphorical gardens of Eden), as well as the physical demands people of the churches make upon the forests—such as gathering firewood and using them as toilets.

The first paragraph of my original post drew a comparison between fundamentalist Christian attitudes toward nature in the States versus Christians in Ethiopia. While I had conceived of this comparison in the historical sense, I failed to qualify this idea in the lede. The result? The post recieved the stink eye (and bucketfuls of negative comments) from many Christians who took offense to my use of the word “fundamentalist,” and what they saw as my failure to acknowledge that green movements are penetrating some modern Christian faiths, especially those of with Evangelical leanings. While I concede the second point, and have ammended the lede for the anthology, I still retained the use of “fundamentalist” in the anthology. Why? Because I had failed to clearly communicate in my original post that I was drawing an analogy between historical Christian attitudes and Ethiopian Orthodox attitudes toward nature. Some people wrote to me, including an editor of a prominent Christian magazine, pointing out that I ought to have used the word “Evangelical” because “fundamentalist” is perceived by many Christians as pejorative. (In the comments, some people even assumed that I hated religion and insisted that I’d made the slight on purpose, an accusation that pains me.) Let me be clear that it was never my intention to insult Christians with this post, even though many followers took it this way. (On the flip side, if I took offense to every post that intentionally insulted people who value the environment—often unfairly framed as extremists with labels such as greenies, eco-crazies, eco-terrorists, tree-huggers, nature-wingnuts, and animal-worshippers—I’d never get off the internet.) I’m now well aware that many today prefer “Evangelical” to “fundamentalist,” but the problem is that I was not referencing today’s Evangelicals, I was referencing several hundred years of Christian faith traditions which interpreted literally the Bible passages of God granting man dominion over the earth and its beasts. The word fundamentalist is widely used to refer to those faiths that adhere to strict interpretations of their spiritual teachings. It is in this vein, and in an historical context, that I used the word. I hope this clears up some of the controversy and ill feelings by some people of faith toward my original post. The online comments turned into such a bash fest I decided it was not worth it to try and explain my thoughts there. Feathers were ruffled, teeth were gnashing, and it was obvious not much would settle them at the time.

Congrats to everyone else who will be published, and I can’t wait to see the finished product. Maybe as the Open Lab/The Best of Science Writing Online series gains traction and visibility, it will raise the bar for online science writers. Perhaps many of us will strive to improve our craft as the competition steepens for getting published in the series. Wouldn’t that be neat? Better writing and improved communication will benefit everyone, and it would make a richer and more engaging product in the end!

Like the young red wolf pup shown here, I had a lot to learn. (Photo courtesy of the Red Wolf Recovery Program, FWS. Here, Ryan Nordsven takes a blood sample from a red wolf pup, a routine procedure to test for genetic purity.)

As promised in my last post, I’ve pulled together some of the “lessons” I learned about the process of writing a non-fiction book while writing my first one, The Secret World of Red Wolves: A true story of North America’s other wolf. The process of writing a book is surely as different for every writer as the fingerprints inscribed on our digits. What follows below is a list of things I learned along the way, over the two year process it took to bring my project from an idea to a finished manuscript. (The focus of this post is on the actual writing, structure, and organization issues I encountered—not how to write or sell a book proposal.) I don’t expect that what I’ve shared here will make sense to everyone, but if you’re a writer who is struggling to tackle a big project then perhaps some granule of this discussion will help you to tackle your own project in a new, productive way.

Approaching the writing: Knowing enough to know where and how to start

I planned for my book to be somehwere around 87,000 words (it topped out at 95,000), but before embarking on this project I’d never written anything longer than 4,000 words. Which might explain why I started out with lots of questions about how to organize and approach a writing project more than twenty-one times larger than anything I’d ever done. Seeking guidance, I asked two non-fiction authors I know (who had published multiple books each) how they had managed to break down the massive amount of work involved in writing multiple chapters. They are both journalists, and each told me that they simply treated each chapter like an in-depth article, and then stitched all the “articles” together. That sounded like a manageable way to tame what seemed like an unruly mess of ideas in my head, so that’s how I tried to conceive of my chapters. I stared at my draft table of contents and thought, This will be easy! I’ll just write seven or eight “articles” about these ideas. 

After bungling around for a few months and feeling stuck each time I tried to write the first “article,” I realized that their method didn’t work for me. I couldn’t conceive of the chapters as isolated articles linked by the theme of the book. I could only see the continuity between the chapters I’d outlined, although I couldn’t yet clearly envision the narrative path I wanted a reader to take through the story. I knew I wanted to plant seeds in the first chapter that would be cultivated and tended to in later chapters, but this was hard to do in the sense of writing an article. I realized with a sinking feeling that in biting off writing the first chapter, I first had to have a much firmer understanding of the whole book — the whole story — before I could understand where it began.

What followed was three or four months of intensive research and interviewing, more notes than I knew how to handle, a mind jammed full of red wolf facts, and a dozen or more stacks of research papers and documents carefully grouped by topic on my desk. I felt adrift and anchorless in those months. I often awoke at 3 a.m. with a hard, cold fear in my belly from knowing that after four months of “working on the book” I still had yet to finish a single chapter. Failure seemed imminent. I felt small and unproductive, but feeling small also drove me to batten down the hatches, focus and work hard. I assuaged the fear by diving further in to the research. Having recently completed my master’s thesis only the year before, the process of researching was familiar and comforting, so I swaddled myself in it.

But there was also something else driving me during those research days, I just didn’t recognize the impulse yet: I wanted to know every detail of the topic so I could know what to include, and what to leave out. I wanted to know what had already been reported upon in the popular press, what was under-reported upon, and how that differed from what was recorded in the scientific literature. Before I knew it, in “researching the first chapter” I was actually pulling research for the middle and end of the book. It seemed like I was working beyond the scope of the task at hand. Frankly, I was working blindly. But I kept following this wild impulse that I felt sure was going to bring me somewhere productive.

And it did. It worked better than I could have foreseen. You see, I’d made the mistake of trying to begin writing before I actually knew the path and scope of the story I wanted to tell. Let me correct that: I thought I knew the path and scope… but when I had initially tried to write that first chapter, everything I thought I knew vaporized. So after four months of blindly following my research impulse, when I at last sat down to attempt to write chapter one again, I had a much better idea formed in my mind for what the shape and depth of the book would be. I knew the contours and the boundaries of the story I wanted to tell. I could see the path I wanted to carve for readers. And I could finally see its beginning.

Two months later, I finally finished chapter one. Except it actually turned into both chapter one and chapter two… and chapter three. I’d gotten so deep into the research, and so deep into understanding the path I wanted to take, that I hadn’t yet thought clearly about the scale of the ideas within the story I wanted to tell. Or the structure of how to tell them. Or how to break that structure into chunks, and keep each chapter trimmed to one specific idea or theme along the path of the overall story arc.

Crafting the right voice, and writing for my audience

At the same time that I was struggling with where to start writing, I was also struggling with how to write for who I wanted to read the book. Parts of the red wolf’s story get very complex very fast, so complex that many writers simply abandon addressing certain aspects of its history and our scientific understanding of this animal. I knew I wanted to cover these aspects, but I also wanted to write the book for a very general audience — one with a predisposition for natural history, nature, and wildlife science, but perhaps they’d not pursued a master’s or a PhD in these subjects. On the one hand, I didn’t want to scare off more general readers because the writing was too complex. On the other hand, I had to cover the results of some genetics and morphometrics research in an evolutionary context. I wanted anyone from a high schooler to a senior citizen to pick the book up and be able to comprehend it without being driven to a dictionary or a genetics textbook. In short, I didn’t want to take a certain level of learning for granted in the audience I thought the book would appeal to.

I decided perhaps the best way to deal with what I perceived as getting the audience invested in the story was to let them learn with me in the first few chapters. Despite having researched the heck out of the subject, I present my own character as somewhat naive in the beginning. I wanted to be the vehicle through which the reader gained both the interest and the confidence to learn more about red wolves. Using this approach, I built the complexity slowly throughout the text. More learned readers may find it to be a slow start, but in writing for what I percieved as a very broad audience, I figured I’d have to ask for forgiveness from both sides of the spectrum. Similarly, readers less familiar with genetics and taxonomic studies may find the middle chapters on competing theories of red wolf origins too taxing. But I hope this approach engages a wider set of nature and wildlife lovers than a strict sciencey approach that assumed a certain level of learning would have.

The golden key was decoding the structure

For me, the golden key to this whole endeavor was re-jiggering the structure. I knew the focus of the story I wanted to tell, and I eventually found its boundaries. But in the beginning, what I struggled with endlessly when trying to start writing chapter one, was the structure of the whole book. I’d originally proposed writing the book in a strict chronology of three Parts: Past, Present, Future. This meant I would loosely go from the red wolf’s evolutionary origins to its decline upon European contact, to its demise in the East, to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s efforts to define the animal taxonomically and captive breed it, to reintroduction and modern management.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the treatment I envisioned for the modern management was the most interesting aspect of the book. I planned to shadow red wolf biologists in the field over the course of a full year in order to show readers what a seasonal cycle of management looks like, and field work inevitably produces engaging scenes. Shoving this to near the end just wouldn’t do. Likewise, placing the discussion of evolutionary origins at the beginning meant I was asking a general reader to dive into the most complex, most sciencey part of the whole book straight out of the starting blocks. That too simply wouldn’t do.

Then one day I realized it was completely within my power to pull the chronology apart and tell the story in whatever order I wanted. And what I wanted was to start in the present, then dive into the past, and then circle back to the future at the end. Once I re-jiggered the table of contents into three parts of Present, Past, Future everything else snapped into place. I could put the exciting field biology scenes up front, the complex taxonomy and origin story in the middle, and thought-provoking discussions of how climate change will effect the red wolf’s future could be delivered at the book’s end. With the structure decoded, I sat down and wrote chapter one. Which, as I already told you, really became chapters one through three.

Splitting chapters was organic, and essential

Sometimes a chapter I’d conceived of in the draft table of contents grew arms and legs of its own and walked into other parts of the book. Or it grew too large and seemed out of place. I originally wanted to keep the chapters all the same approximate length. But I soon realized that I couldn’t dictate their final form based upon a desired symmetry of pages. Rather, I had to let them each grow into their own and take whatever form they needed. Still, I drew the line at around 35 pages because I figured that beyond that would simply test a reader’s patience. We all know we do this when reading a book. You hit a certain page number and think, “Sheesh, am I ever going to get to the end of this chapter?” A friend recently hit page the sixty-fifth page of a chapter and placed the book back on the shelf in frustration. I didn’t want that to happen to mine. I figured if I couldn’t complete my thought within 35 or so pages, then I needed to take another look at the original thought the chapter was supposed to address, and break it up into separate thoughts—just like a writer must break up run-on sentences into shorter, complete ones.

In Part One, I had conceived of a single chapter that would address the modern management of red wolves. Oh, how naive! One chapter is laughable! After visiting the field team twice, I realized that the best way to cover their work was to break it up into seasons. At first, I still thought I could do this in one long chapter; I’d just break it up into sections. But after following the biologists around for four days during their spring field season when they find all the wild dens and take blood samples from all the wild pups, and then trying to write a mere quarter of a chapter about this work, I realized what a joke of an endeavor it was. My “quarter of a chapter” was a full chapter. The same thing happened when I returned for their fall trapping season, when they target animals whose radio collars are failing, to replace the batteries (among other things). The organic nature of the field research and writing showed me that, clearly, each season needed its own chapter.

Of course, stubborn as I am, I’d written three of these chapters as a single chapter before I finally split them up and wrote the the fourth chapter separately. For the umpteenth time, I renumbered the table of contents… the four chapters I’d envisioned for Part One, which includes more than just the seasonal field work, had multiplied like Star Trek tribbles into seven.

Riding the writing rhythm equalled unparalleled productivity

Once I finished Part One, I was actually half-way done with the book’s first draft in terms of the word count, but a third of the way through it according to the major divisions of the content. Somewhere around chapter four I developed a rhythm to the writing and the work. I’d already compiled 80 percent of the research I needed for the whole book, thanks to my anchorless and rudderless attempt at starting chapter one with no clue what I was doing. And I’d developed a system of indexing my research notes so that I could quickly and easily find what I needed according to whichever chapter I was working on. But hitting a stride with the writing style–and sticking to a schedule—made it all gel.

I struggled with the writing style at first because this was my first book, and let’s just say that writing a newspaper story for the Observer, or a wildlife story for a magazine, takes a very different flavor. Especially when it comes to dialogue and quotes. When writing about the field work I observed, I attempted to make certain scenes have a cinematic quality. I wanted readers to feel like they were there with me and the biologists when we found a wolf injured in a trap in the woods, or when we found a pile of puppies in a den after searching for it in bramble and briers for three days straight. This meant learning to craft dialogue.

When writing in a newsy style, all you need to do is set up a quote with context and then slide it in. But with dialogue, it’s completely different. Some of the dialogue simply consists of me asking questions of the biologists in the field (which I did to let readers learn along with me, I didn’t want my role in the book to be that of an encyclopedic narrator that knows everything), but my favorite parts capture vital scenes that show how the biologists manage the wolves on a daily basis and how they make decisions amongst themselves. In addition to playing with the dialogue, I also played with sentence length and learned to drop interesting little hooks and complications throughout each chapter to keep the reader reading.

I learned that once I was in this rhythm, it was best to just hang on and ride it. I set hours on my daily calendar when I planned to write (usually about six hours per day, with two hours of research, reading, note curation, or editing), and I stuck to them. If I was uninspired to write in the mornings, I’d read what I’d crafted the day before and then pick up wherever I’d left off. This also helped me with revising, as I often began my writing hours by revising the previous day’s work. This helped me stay grounded in the style and rhythm I’d developed. I also found it helpful to break the chapters up into component sections which I kept numbered. If you’ve ever read David Quammen, he often publishes his work this way. While I had no intention of keeping the numbers delineating sections in the final text, I wrote this way so as to outline visually for myself where the contours of major sections lay within each chapter. This meant I had to pay attention to making clean transitions between the sections, but it often was not a problem.

Keeping scale in mind was important to the overall cohesiveness

It’s easy to get lost in the details and lose sight of the overall arc of the story. Many times in my early attempts to write the first few chapters, I ended up wandering off the narrative path and found myself somewhere outside the boundaries I’d envisioned for the story. Or arriving to parts too early that I’d thought would come later. But once I figured out the structure, and after I had all the chapters of Part One completed, I began to re-read, revise, and edit the Part iteratively, working and re-working it like a baker kneading dough.

This constant contact with the material kept me grounded in the story at different scales. What I mean is, in reviewing one third of the book (Part One) so intensely before moving on to Part Two, I was able to keep the intimate details of that Part in my mind before moving forward. I feel this did two things: it helped me to stay firmly on the narrative path I’d envisioned for the whole story, and it helped me to know in detail each section of that path. That might sound silly in that you may suppose every writer knows every part of a book they’ve written. But it’s a lot easier than you might think to write something in chapter two and then completely forget about it by chapter ten. At least, that’s how my mind works. So this process of reviewing major Parts of the book iteratively before moving on to the next section allowed me to work and think at different scales in the story: at the sentence and paragraph level while editing a specific chapter, and at the chapter level while reviewing an entire Part for cohesiveness, all while keeping in context where that Part fit in the overall structure and narrative path. This became especially important when I switched from using the present tense in Part One, to the past tense in Part Two, and then back to the present and even the future tense in Part Three.

(Oh, and those seven or eight articles I started out trying to write? They morphed into fifteen chapters. It helps to be flexible…)

Parting thoughts

If you’re a writer who has developed your own methods for undertaking a book or large writing project, I’d love to hear about your own “lessons learned” in the comments.

Captive male red wolf at Sandy Ridge facility, near Columbia, North Carolina. (Photo courtesy of Ryan Nordsven, red wolf biologist with USFWS)

It’s been exactly six months since I posted on Wild Muse. What have I been up to since then? I finished my first non-fiction book! (No, really! It’s done!) It’s tentatively titled The Secret World of Red Wolves: A True Story of North America’s Other Wolf. Writing this book is a singular accomplishment in my life. If you’ve read this blog, you’re probably familiar with the book’s topic. But if you’re not familiar, then here’s a quick recap: it’s a story of the red wolf, Canis rufus, which is a predator that used to live throughout the central and southeastern United States. It’s a contested species, and its taxonomy has been elusive. Some people don’t believe it’s a wolf at all. Others believe it opens a window to a lineage of wolves that evolved solely in North America. If you’re opening another browser tab to look it up on Wikipedia, take the entry with a grain of salt, it needs improvement and the sections on its taxonomy and origins appear to be largely authored by the camp of people who disbelieve the animal is a distinct entity, without much coverage of opposing views. In the book, I cover the full spectrum of these views, in the context of how our understanding of these animals has changed as science uncovers new clues to their past origins.

Oddly, a modern detailed treatment of the red wolf’s whole story has not been told all in one place before for a general audience. The idea for this book came to me after I moved to North Carolina in late 2008. The Old North State is home to the only wild population of red wolves in the world. They have been reintroduced to the eastern part of the state, in a coastal area known locally as the Albemarle peninsula. When I moved, I knew from my previous research on Mexican gray wolves that a red wolf program was underway in North Carolina, but that was about the extent of my knowledge. In my literature review of Mexican wolves, I’d also bumped up against several papers on red wolves for which I read the abstracts but didn’t have time to read more. I filed them away for investigation at a later time, but they left me with the lingering impression that there was something controversial about the red wolf’s origins and our current understanding of its genetics.

When I finally had some free time, I searched for an in-depth non-academic book to learn about red wolves, but I was surprised I could not find a current one. The most recent one for general audiences is actually a section of a book from 1993— and believe me, a lot has transpired since then. Other recent books were written for children, or were fairly superficial and did not address any of the evolutionary origin or genetic debates that I knew had cropped up about red wolves since the mid-1990s. Writings that addessed the red wolf’s genetics and taxonomy were relegated to academic chapters within other works, and scientific papers. Without truly understanding what I was getting myself into, I began to form the idea that perhaps I should write a current book about red wolves. Afterall, I love learning about predator ecology and conservation. What could go wrong? (Well, for one thing, I didn’t know how to write a book!)

After a few months of research, I wrote a book proposal and sent it to a few university presses. The University of North Carolina Press accepted it in November of 2009. After two months of joyously proclaiming to my friends and family that I had a signed book contract!, it hit me like a freight train that, Oh crap. Now I have to write a whole fricking book. My joyous proclamations suddenly seemed premature… I wanted to hide in my room and weep because I had no idea how to actually go about writing a whole book. With embarassment, I came to understand that I should have saved my theatrics for when I could tell them that I’d written a book. In hindsight, that seems oh-so-much-more mature and responsible.

After floundering about mentally and otherwise for the next four months, trying to get started actually writing the book, things finally picked up traction by the following April. My delays were not a case of writer’s block. Rather, the project I had undertaken was so massive I simply had no clue where to begin. Strike that, I thought I knew where to begin — at chapter one — but each attempt to write it ended with me miserably banging my head against the kitchen counter (which served as my office desk until fall of 2010 when I was finally able to afford a proper desk).

It took many months of effort, eight trips to the coastal reintroduction site, one trip to Albuquerque, one trip to Virginia, one trip to Washington state, being lost in my own mental wilderness, and writing, revising, editing, writing, revising, editing, but I finally finished the entire manuscript in November of 2011. (And in between 2009 and the book’s end, I planned my wedding, got into a horrific car accident, moved to a new city, and married my best friend. Which I mention to show that a writer must keep writing even when Life keeps happening around her, no matter how much she wants to crawl into a hermetically-sealed room, slam the door, and cut herself off from the world indefinitely.)

The book I’ve just completed spans the red wolf’s entire history, as best as we can piece it together from fossil fragments, DNA analyses, field observations, and historical writings. I also heavily emphasized the red wolf’s modern management and future conservation challenges. This was my favorite part, because I shadowed the red wolf field biologists over time from August of 2009 to January of 2011. The time I spent shadowing the red wolf biologists was the most exciting and engaging part of my research, and I wanted the readers to share in the first-hand encounters I experienced with actual wild red wolves.

I hold a great amount of respect for the biologists I worked with, and especially for Ryan Nordsven, the biologist I ended up shadowing the most frequently. One of the newest members of the red wolf field team, Ryan has already put in around seven years of field work on the reintroduction project. He proved to be an empathetic and accessible character and heartily agreed to me using his personna to tell the story of how the Service manages red wolves. The result turned out better than I could have ever hoped for. The other red wolf biologists share decades of experience; Chris Lucash, Mike Morse, Art Beyer and Ford Maunet have 26, 24, 22 and 14 years (respectively) of experience reintroducing red wolves. The current program coordinator studied the red wolf for his PhD in Zoology. Collectively, the whole red wolf recovery team has more than 100 years of combined experience in reintroducing red wolves. Not all endanagered species programs are so lucky as to have such a stable staff with such a deep institutional memory; particularly when the species at hand is a controversial large predator.

It’s my hope that readers of this book will feel transported to the red wolf recovery area where they’ll learn how difficult and rewarding it is to restore a species that once numbered as few as fourteen animals. I strove to portray the landscape, the ecology, the red wolves, the biologists, and the local people as accurately as possible. It’s a landscape that is accessible to many—it’s a bear, deer and waterfowl hunters paradise, not to mention a joy to kayak or canoe through—but the secret world of the red wolves within it is only visited by a lucky few. The nugget of this book is that it unlocks this elusive world for all readers who wish to enter. The book is aimed at very general audiences with a predisposition for reading about nature, wildlife and science; but it’s written in a way that makes it accessible to all.

In the beginning, I researched and wrote it while juggling other freelance work, an experience akin to schizophrenia. Switching mental gears between the gargantuan-to-do-list of researching and interviewing needed for the book, and shorter-term projects was, at the very least, distracting. At worst, I found it counter-productive. (I know other writers handle this sort of duality with ease, but it was a nightmare for me.) Around March of this year, I decided to put the freelance aside for a few months and make a dedicated push to finish the book. Luckily, my husband was on board with the decision. It worked. Having a dedicated stretch of time to do nothing but focus on the book let me burrow my head deep into the project and keep it there. It helped to sustain the rhythm of the writing and it helped my mind to dwell uninterrupted in the fertile stew of all the materials I’d  collected.

The week before Thanksgiving, the day I’d been working toward finally arrived: the manuscript traveled down the Old Fort hill outside of Asheville and into the Piedmont in the back seat of a dear friend’s car. He delivered it to the University of North Carolina Press in Chapel Hill, where it’s currently in the skilled hands of my editor.

In my next post, I’ll share some of the lessons I learned about book writing while endeavoring to produce this project and make it the best it could be. I think of myself as a “young in my career” writer — I know there’s still lots for me to learn — and writing this book was entirely unlike any writing project I had ever undertaken previously. As such, it stretched me in ways I never imagined: both in terms of managing massive amounts of notes, research and information, and in terms of learning different aspects of writing craft to better deliver scenes, dialogue, and information in ways that strengthened both the reader’s connection to the story, and their understanding of red wolves.

Breeding red wolf female of the Northern Pack, released after the batteries on her telemetry collar were replaced in January 2011. Somewhere west of Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, North Carolina. Photo by DeLene Beeland.

There is a season for everything, I’ve heard, and right now it is the season for losing myself in writing and research. I’m in the thick of things with my book and there never seems to be time left over to devote to anything else. (The book I’m working on is a story about native wolves of the East, Canis rufus, also known as red wolves.) Hopefully late in 2011 I’ll pick back up with blogging. Until then, thanks for reading and make use of Wild Muse’s archives.

Cover to The Species Seekers, by Richard Conniff

The Species Seekers: Heroes, fools, and the mad pursuit of life on earth, by Richard Conniff, is a delightful natural history story that toes the line of an adventure book. The theme of the text explores various historical characters — their personalities and their deeds — who discovered a wide variety of nature’s bounty across the globe and across time. Conniff expertly weaves personality traits and anecdotes about the people who seek new species — the species seekers — so that readers learn not only who discovered what, but why they were driven to wander in new countries and trek through jungles and mountains to find new natural treasures. But it’s the way in which Conniff presents these characters, their travels and discoveries, that injects a fast-paced adventurous feel to the book.

He leads with a French colonel in Napolean’s army who spots an unusual beetle as he was about to lead his men to attack a Spanish line during the Battle of Alcaniz in 1809. The colonel dismounts, collects the beetle and pins it to a prepared piece of cork attached to the inside of his helmet. The cork was there for just this purpose, and the colonel had trained his men to collect interesting insects for him. His love for describing new species was so was so great that even his enemies sent him unusual specimens.

From this departure point, the narrative’s pace skips along like a light-hearted summer trip; the kind where you explore a multi-country itinerary in a condensed time period. The 1800s were, as Conniff dubs, a “species-besotted era,” and so he has a rich tapestry of characters to draw from. Many of the historical characters he writes about were completely new to me, and  they came across as lively real people. Although the content itself was fascinating in and of itself, Conniff expertly avoids the historical aspects feeling dry or dull. Rather, his clever turns of phrase and quick pace make the anecdotes interesting. Great Britain was experiencing a sort of fad for natural objects, which people liked to display in their homes, and so many men (and some women) would collect flowers, plants, insects, shells and such while traveling abroad and sell them through brokers back home. Others travelled specifically to collect and sell objects, such as Alfred Russell Wallace.

Conniff recreates the frenetic fervor of the environment and mindset these species seekers lived within. For the most part, the book is organized as a series of anecdotes that cluster around different themes or time periods. He analyzes what drove these seekers to the ends of the earth, and what forces compelled them to give up the hunt and stay home. He scrutinizes which ones got the scientific understanding of creatures right, and which ones compulsively hoarded specimens simply to have them. He looks at the beginnings of scientific attempts to not only name species, but to unify the naming conventions and to link provenance data with individual specimens to study geographic variation and, in time, evolution.

But the most interesting chapter for me to read focused less on the expeditions of the species seekers, and more on the methods they employed to preserve their bounty. Chapter Ten, Arsenic and Immortality, is a fascinating tale of how species seekers and collectors attempted to take the dead corpses of specimens and make them look alive again. Shipping specimens from the Amazon or Indonesia back to England was one thing — the objects had to survive weeks or months locked up in boxes to prevent rats and moths from defiling them — but if they did survive the journey, then it was another thing entirely to manipulate them into looking alive once more. The chapter also explores the contributions of Charles Waterton to modern taxidermy. (As someone who used to work in a natural history museum, I found this back-story of learning to preserve specimens to be a real gem.)

This was the first book I’ve read by Conniff, and I’ll definitely (ahem) seek stories by him in the future.

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(Spot an error in the text? Let the author know by July 6 so he can capture corrections for the paperback release: http://strangebehaviors.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/howlers-amid-the-howler-monkeys-errata/)

The Species Seekers blog

My friend, photographer Carlton Ward, has been experimenting with camera traps on many of these ranches for the past few years. The result has been a series of fabulous photos of rare Florida panthers, large black bears and their cubs, bobcats and foxes. These critters travel across the ranchlands and use them as both home and a wildlife corridor. An amazing camera trap photo of Carlton’s, of a black bear exhaling a fine mist in a cool dawn, graced the cover of Audubon magazine this month, and more were printed within.

Watch this video for more information on the proposed Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge and Conservation Area. To see the Florida panther photo, and to learn more details, read this in-depth op/ed Carlton wrote for the St. Petersburg Times. More information and videos are available at NorthernEverglades.com.

Cover of Shell Games, by Craig Welch

Shell Games, by Craig Welch, is hands-down one of the most interesting wildlife stories I’ve read in decades. (Admittedly, the subtitle, Rogues, Smugglers, and the Hunt for Nature’s Bounty, snookered me from the outset.) Welch is an environmental writer at the Seattle Times, and the book grew from stories he first reported for his newspaper about wildlife trafficking in the Puget Sound. The more he looked into it, the more convoluted the tales became. The result is Shell Games, a story of the shellfish industry in the Pacific Northwest, how it went horribly wrong, and the crazy, greedy characters that sped it on the path to illicit international markets.

The shellfish in question is a long-lived clam called a geoduck. They are the antithesis of the big, fuzzy charismatic megafauna that so many wildlife stories depend upon to generate interest. Geoducks are large burrowing clams that live immersed in mud on the ocean floor for decades, with only a fleshy siphon thrust up through the sediment. Through their long-necked siphon, they feed, defecate and expel gametes. They live up to a century and a half, all within their ocean floor burrow. So, why on earth should we care about a long-lived, sedentary clam that weighs a couple of pounds (whoppers weigh up to 15) and garners $6 to $12 per pound of its flesh?

How about, because they are dug up illegally by the thousands and smuggled out of the country to Asian markets — and because competition for them is so fierce that fishermen literally blow up each other’s boats, smugglers inform on their biggest competitors, and the industry garners millions and millions of black-market dollars. Criminal rings form to harvest these shellfish at night, with divers sucking air from secret lines drilled through the hull of ships to maintain clandestine secrecy. Some bandits even use re-breathers so that their illegal harvests can’t be detected by tell-tale bubbles at the surface. All this so that tasty geoduck can be served night after night in seafood restaurants, at home and abroad. Now that is pretty interesting!

In Shell Games, Welch follows several Fish and Wildlife Service law-enforcement agents, as well as state wildlife agents, who monitor the Puget Sound for illegal harvesting activity. They sleuth and cultivate informants that stealthily infiltrate the worst criminal geoduck trafficker rings. Some informants are even double agents, pilfering geoducks even as they inform on others. The law-enforcement agents take their time building huge cases against the biggest offenders, one of whom steals an estimated 125,000 pounds worth of geoducks and off-limit king crabs.

As the detectives seek access to the shady black-market world of geoduck traffickers, the threads they pick up lead them to a multi-million dollar international industry bigger and more convoluted than any of them had ever suspected. Along the way, Welch weaves in other tales of wildlife traffickers and their stories. Readers meet an Asian butterfly hoarder, surreptitious bear-hunters seeking illegal gallbladders, and a shark-nabbing pastor.

In addition to telling the geoduck story in a whodunit mystery framework, Welch does a wonderful job of crafting living, breathing characters that waltz across the page. He dutifully records sketches of what key figures look like, their dress and eating habitats, hair styles and quirky sayings. All of these details speak to important parts of the characters’ personalities and the result is that the reader becomes ensconced in sting operations and an analysis of personal agendas.

What truly makes this book a great story is that Welch researched 25,000 pages of records and documents (some of them court records unsealed by a judge at his request) and he conducted long interviews with key characters in order to reconstruct all the events and scenes — sometimes he narrates them in a minute-by-minute fashion. He tells the story from alternating points of view, and it’s so detailed that you get the feeling he shadowed the main characters for large parts of their careers. Because of Welch’s diligent and exhaustive reporting, the reader becomes a fly on the wall and many of the scenes roll across the mind in cinematic fashion.

If you are interested in tales of voracious greed and wildlife plunder, Shell Games is definitely for you.

What made you want to become a science writer?

For me, it was first and foremost a love affair with words and writing. In a tight race for second place, it was a strong hunger to learn more about the world around me, and I think science is the best tool for that. As an undergraduate, I flitted back and forth between biology, anthropology, and geology with no clear commitment to studying any single discipline. (I graduated with a Bachelor of Design from a College of Architecture. Go figure. But that is another story.) After finishing school and working in the real world for four years I had, as we call it in the States, a quarter-life crisis about what I wanted to do with my time on earth. I felt a strong pull to look back into the sciences, and ultimately decided to unify my dabbling under the single lens of writing. I entered an interdisciplinary ecology master’s program that allowed me to study both ecology and, as the interdisciplinary portion, journalism. It’s selfish, but writing about science allows me to learn with each and every story I work on, and that aspect is the fuel that keeps me running. It also gives me a small mouthpiece to communicate about issues I feel the general public ought to know more about: ecology, biological diversity and the affect of human development upon wildlife and natural systems.

What path did you take to get there?

Guess I leap-frogged into this question in the previous one, so I’ll pick up the story thread post-graduation. After finishing up my master’s of science in interdisciplinary ecology in the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Florida, I worked in a science writing position at the campus’s natural history museum. Actually, it was the state of Florida’s natural history museum, and actually, I kind of talked my way in to the job half-way through my master’s program (which I did part time because I liked working at the museum so much). For two years, I translated research from a dozen and a half scientific disciplines into stories for general audiences. These were published on the museum’s website through a platform I helped create, in an insert for a museum’s member-edition of Natural History magazine, in our university research magazine and as press releases.

I am very interested in writing craft, so while at this job I spent a lot of time studying how to write for a truly general audience — people that may not have had a science class since high school, for example. I integrated what I’d learned in journalism coursework about how to structure and organize an article. I treated each story like a learning experience. Some were better than others! For the most part, I wrote “explainer” pieces about new research, and research profiles that covered large spans of people’s careers. Shortly before graduation, I was asked to work for another another institute on campus, doing the same functions. But instead of natural history, this new institute dealt with emerging pathogens. The field was less intuitive to me, but it was fascinating. I probably would have worked for the emerging pathogens institute full time, they wanted to hire me, but for personal reasons I moved to a different state where my best option was to begin freelancing.

You have to be comfortable with a hardscrabble existence to jump into full-time freelance. (It’s best if you don’t require niceties like new clothes, the latest iTunes music and eating out.) I networked like crazy, began using social media like twitter and blogging, and went to as many local science cafes and university lectures as I could. I joined a local science writers group, pitched stories, stumbled across an idea for a book and got a publisher interested in it, and began writing for a regional newspaper. At the moment, I’m half-way through the book, which is due out in 2012 through the University of North Carolina Press. The book has kept me very busy, and I feel it’s curtailed my freelance writing output in the past year, but I’m thrilled to be working on it. (Most days. Some days I hang my head in my hands and curse that I ever wrote the proposal. But those days are few and far between.)

Are there any negatives to what you do?

Yes. Many. But the positives outweigh them, or I would not persist at it! (Which would be the definition of insanity, right?) First, there is the money. Writing opportunities that pay well are drying up for freelancers everywhere. The pay rates are all over the map for different outlets, so if you are going to try to make a living off of science writing, and freelance at that, then you have to be highly business-minded. You are a small business owner, and you must operate like one. It’s best to cultivate a few anchor clients that pay well and that offer regular work you can depend upon. Then, even when you have three stories due in one week and are busy pestering elusive sources to call you back, you still have to pitch new stories and market to line up your next batch of stories. Because if you aren’t writing stories, you aren’t getting paid. And even when you do file stories, you may not be paid for months so you must plan your financial landscape accordingly.

If you want to freelance full-time, I honestly don’t recommend jumping straight in. I recommend finding a part-time job and freelancing on the side until you have enough clients and scheduled work (and savings) that you can forecast going full time for six months. If you see that happening, then you can use that six months to secure the next few months and get the ball rolling. Then the trick is to keep the ball rolling month after month until you are firmly established. I do not consider myself firmly established, even after two years at it full time. It also helps if you have a loving partner who can help to support you through the first year as you get your financial footing, or a caring friend or roommate that you can live with to help reduce your overhead costs. Or, if you’re young enough to circle the nest, a basement room at mom and dad’s. Other than that, you just need a reliable computer, internet access, a phone and a voice recorder. (Who uses paper anymore?)

Second, there is the loneliness. Freelancers typically work from home offices. Which can sound divine if you currently work in cubicle-land or at a bench in a lab doing monotonous tests day in and day out. But working from home poses its own challenges. For one thing, you are by yourself all day most days. If your high school buddies pegged you as a lone wolf, freelance may actually be a great fit for you. But if you like to be around other people, it can be challenging. Social extroverts may want to consider renting office space somewhere so they can get the human contact they need. (Me, I’m a happy hermit.) If you go the home office route, your work is always near you. It beckons your attention at all times of the morning, day and night. A labyrinth of distractions are embedded in every home, laying in wait to suck your attention and drain your time: laundry, dirty dishes, a rag-tag yard, needy spouses. To work from home and be effective, you must be self-disciplined. Set a schedule, and stick to it; the rest of life be damned. The laundry and dishes will still be there later, the yard can wait till the weekend, and hopefully your spouse is forgiving.

Third, as a self-employed writer, no one is looking out for you and many potential clients may take advantage of you by trying to get you to work for free or reduced rates, canceling accepted stories, haggling contract rights, and so on. It’s best to join a professional writers society. Here in the States we have the National Association of Science Writers and the Authors Guild, which can be good resources for questions about contracts and gaining access to databases of who pays what and which clients have a bad track record with freelancers and that sort of thing.

What advice would you have for those want to follow a similar career?

Look at the field deeply before jumping in. Investigate it. And look inside yourself to an equal depth. What are your work and social habits? If you aren’t a self starter and need someone standing over you with a whip and a stopwatch to meet a deadline, then freelance may not be for you. But a staff job at an online or print publication may offer the rigors of a salaried job that better suit your personality. Or perhaps you could find employment working in public relations for a science institution, educational group, or non-profit organization.

Never assume that because you have scientific training you can, by default, write for general audiences or that you don’t need journalism training. That is the biggest mistake you could make. (Aside from staying in mom and dad’s rent-free basement room for too long.) The language of science is not always easily translated for lay audiences. And the more highly trained you are, the harder it may be for you to be cognizant of that gap. There are some rock stars that can straddle both worlds and the languages codified by each, but for the rest of us mortals, we need to study the language of popular media, the way stories are constructed and told, and how ideas are imparted in persuasive essays and objective news stories. There are patterns, hierarchies and formulas that work well, and it’s time well spent to analyze them, learn them, and harness them for your own work. Your audience, and your editors, will thank you.

There are many, many career avenues other than going freelance as I have. The National Association of Science Writers offers a book, “A Field Guide for Science Writers,” that discusses areas within the field with great clarity (journalism, public relations, education, and so on). I recommend it for a look-see into the various ways you can marry science and writing. Science journalism is but one slice of the science communication pie. After looking in to the field, and taking an honest look at yourself and your work habits, next talk to as many science writers and communicators as you can. Interview them. Ask them what they do on a daily basis, what they like and don’t like about it, what they wish they’d done differently. But most importantly, try your hand at it. Pitch a few stories, get some published clips. See if you like the experience. If you did, keep writing. And never stop learning.

Soldiers at Fort Bragg practice exploding munitions in artillery impact zones within the base. Smalls-arms fire practice takes place in firing ranges that ring the larger artillery impact zones. Native wildlife love these zones, and this is where populations of St. Francis’ satyr was found. Haddad and Brian Ball, an endangered species biologist at Fort Bragg, believe that fires sparked in these zones mimic the native fire regimes of old, and maintain small populations of once-widespread native species.

You can read the full story on this butterfly here. (Best read in “two-pages continuous” mode in your PDF viewer.)