Storytelling for Science Journalists

8 STORYTELLING FOR SCIENCE JOURNALISTS What you will learn in this chapter : • Storytelling in journalism • Narratives in science writing • Categories of science stories • Employing literary techniques in science stories • The three-act structure for science storytelling • Identifying narratives in science writing • Case study: a debate over storytelling in science • Case study: understanding long-form storytelling Introduction Writing about science has a number of advantages. You will probably never run out of ideas and raw material, because there is an infinite pool of stories waiting to be told. Also, science has a potential to enthral readers. But science is also complex and often difficult to understand, which can scare many readers away. In fact, it is quite easy to write dry and boring science stories by simply enumerating the facts without a seeming connection. If that is not what you want, narrative structures and stories can help you carry the science and make your readers absorb even complex topics. “Storytelling is the most seductive art of all,” says Tim Radford in a video produced for the Wellcome Trust (Guardian 2013). In contrast to hard science, storytelling may seem like a creative but vague and often arbi- trary mechanism to convey facts. But a good story is no accident. Rather, it employs techniques and tools that you can learn. That is why the first section of this chapter provides a primer on the basic elements of good stories such as character, dialogue and action. Every good character has her own 200 Storytelling for science journalists agenda. In its most basic form, a story should contain at least one protagonist who wants to achieve a goal and opposing forces (antagonists with their own agenda) that try to hinder her from doing so. This formula sometimes can be perfectly applied to scientists: A good science story is like any other good story: it has tension and movement; it has conflicts the reader can relate to; it’s usually about someone who wants something badly and faces obstacles trying to get it. What does this palaeontologist want to figure out or prove, and why? What stands in the way of her doing so? (Dobbs 2013) Great stories also convey and evoke emotions. There are various techniques for achieving this, but in a nutshell, it is always better to let your characters express their emotions through their actions or statements than you just telling the readers. If you can connect facts to these emotions, your audience is quite likely to remember those facts. In fact, many Pulitzer Prize-winning stories consciously draw on emotions. The next section picks up this thought and shows that such emotions and great narratives are usually found through extensive reporting. Care- fully researched stories have the power to persuade your readers in and of themselves, regardless of factual errors. Hence, it is no wonder that scientists sometimes harshly critique storytellers who inaccurately depict science despite telling compelling stories. Also, you will find some basic story sten- cils that you can use to shape your own stories. Narrative journalism makes extensive use of literature’s arsenal of struc- tural and linguistic elements. That is why in this chapter you will find a section on which literary devices you can employ to convey science, such as metaphors. The three-act structure is a narrative building block that dates back to the ancient Greeks; a dedicated section on that structure outlines how you can subdivide it and apply it to writing about science. That section contains also a number of tools that help you find your story. Once you have written your story, you may want to check it for narrative soundness. The subsequent section points out a number of criteria that help you identify crucial narrative elements in stories. One of those techniques will also help you improve your literacy when reading about science. The penultimate section shows a debate between a scientist and a visual journalism professor over whether scientists should use storytelling elements to convey their findings. Finally, award-winning science journalist David Dobbs discusses one of his best works and explains how he applied a classical music work’s structure to write an emotional science story about depression. He explains how he changes rhythm, how you can seamlessly weave background information into your narratives and how he handled multiple narratives and protagonists in his story. Storytelling for science journalists 201 Storytelling techniques in journalism Applying fiction-writing techniques to journalistic stories at first sounds like a contradiction. But stories will help you make even complex science stick. At the heart of every good story lie emotions. As you will see in this chapter, this is no different for Pulitzer Prize-winning stories. In fact, it is the basic job of storytelling to make the audience feel something, says Garry Lin- nell, former editor-in-chief of the Australian magazine The Bulletin (Linnell 2014). Linnell suggests journalists could learn a thing or two from fiction writers: At the heart of great storytelling lies great reporting: picking up the nuances of the subject, having a great ear for dialogue. We read things every day, and sometimes we journalists are bad at quot- ing people, running long slabs that are meaningless. Our journalists have to get better – they have to develop a better ear for dialogue, like novelists. (Linnell 2014:113–114) In fact, what novelists and other fiction writers employ when they spin narrative yarns are characters, dialogue, conflict, and obviously beautiful prose. The idea to borrow fiction writers’ literary devices is not new: One of the precursors of today’s narrative journalism was New Journalism, which dates back to the 1960s. Famous writers like Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Gay Talese advocated utilising literary devices and tell in-depth stories from a subjective point of view: The New Journalism has been succeeded by narrative writing, storytelling that takes some of its components from the techniques of fiction writers, as Wolfe recommended. These tools include emphasis on individuals through whom the action is advanced, dialogue, scene-setting, suspense. It takes to the outer limit the injunction “show me, don’t tell me.” (Mencher 2011b:153) Mencher enumerates the three essentials of good fiction writing: character, action and dialogue. Do you remember Phil McKenna’s story on the gas-sniffer from the previous chapter? It contains all of these ingredients. Another important element is plot (see Chapter 5 ). Your story’s plot deter- mines the order in which the events unfold. A classical story could portray a single protagonist who is pursuing a goal and encounters obstacles along the way (conflict) that keep her from reaching that goal; moreover, a story needs a climax that shows whether the protagonist reaches her goal. By all means, resolve any issues you have raised, because unresolved issues do not resonate well with most readers. One rather formulaic story structure is the monomyth or hero’s jour- ney, as defined by Joseph Campbell: A protagonist goes on a quest, faces 202 Storytelling for science journalists obstacles, masters a major crisis and returns changed and improved. Some- times, no such structure may fit. Not all events lend themselves to storytelling; sometimes a news story is just a news story. In that case, narrative writing is not appropriate, and you should stick to the inverted pyramid instead Mencher (2011a). Most writers agree (including this book’s interviewees) that a chronological approach often works for writing narratives. In an essay for the New Yorker , legendary journalist John McPhee (2013) states that “almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme, and chronology tradi- tionally wins”; he adds that this is not always desirable. Incidentally, chronology does not necessarily mean you have to rattle down your story exactly as it unfolded in reality. When you apply structures like the AB structure that alter- nates between story and context, be sure to digress from the story at the right time: “Good storytellers often digress at moments when especially interesting action is pending, and not at the completion of action” (Kramer 1995). What good storytellers also do is evoke their readers’ emotions. In fact, the most successful journalistic stories draw on human emotions. In a study, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen (2013) scrutinised 101 Pulitzer Prize-winning articles for their use of emotionality. She found that journalists showcase emotions to engage readers, especially in their articles’ leads, but the emotions expressed are not their own: Even if journalists are restricted in their own emotional expression, journalistic genres remain infused by emotion because of a neat trick: journalists rely on the outsourcing of emotional labor to non-journalists – the story protagonists and other sources, who are (a) authorized to express emotions in public, and (b) whose emotions journalists can authoritatively describe without implicating themselves. (Wahl-Jorgensen 2013:130) Emotionality and objectivity do not mutually exclude each other. Rather, they complement each other: Objective qualities, like accuracy, balance, fair- ness and impartiality alone are not sufficient for producing award-winning stories (Wahl-Jorgensen 2013). In her study, anecdotal leads account for more than 60 per cent of the 101 examined stories across all genres (feature, explanatory, international, national, public service, investigative), while inverted pyramid leads are used for less than 20 per cent. When specifically examining the feature genre, the predominant type of lead within the examined feature articles is the anecdotal lead, with a share of almost 94 per cent (Wahl-Jorgensen 2013). For the most part, the leads she found draw on negative emotions, which falls perfectly into line with the according news value (see Chapter 2 ).

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