By Naomi Shavin
Moderator, DCSWA board member, and freelance writer and editor Mitch Waldrop began the afternoon break out session on narrative storytelling with an anecdote about boredom. The session, however, which featured Olivia Ambrogio, the manager of the Sharing Science program at the American Geophysical Union, and National Geographic contributing writer Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, was riveting.
“The power of narrative, the reason we want to use it, is because humans are built to hear stories,” said Waldrop in his opening remarks. “Our brains are designed to learn things via stories.”
Waldrop cited a Scientific American story by Maggie Koerth-Baker, which opens with a fascinating narrative about head trauma and chronic boredom. The opening of the piece serves as both a gripping, puzzling tale of injury, recovery, and its non-linear aftermath, and also as an origin story of how one researcher came to realize what he wanted to study.
According to Ambrogio, that’s pretty much the platonic ideal of what you can do as a science writer.
“One of the great things about the scientific endeavor is it fits into narrative themes,” Ambrogio said, providing examples. “Let’s talk about the journey or the quest. Often you have literal journeys, maybe they’re traveling to remote field sites, or even if they’re traveling to closer sites, hurricane chasing. There are the more metaphorical quests for acknowledgement or discovery.”
Ambrogio continued with another theme: mystery.
“What’s causing coral reef bleaching? How are these birds managing to navigate from one pole to another?” asked Ambrogio, citing writers like Primo Levy and Rachel Carson, who used mystery and fable, respectively, to draw readers into a story.
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, whose work has been published in national magazines including the New Yorker and Wired, shared a couple of humorous, self-deprecating stories describing how he learned to write narratively—and occasionally failed to do so along the way. He shared background on how he reported out two successful stories, for Discover and for the New York Times Magazine.
“Science does not happen in a vacuum, it is a very human endeavor,” Bhattacharjee said. “Every person has a human story and that scientist has a human story.”
Overall, the most crucial takeaway from the panel was that stories are essential to good science journalism. Every scientist should be thinking about how to tell their own story, and every journalist should make sure to report out the narrative aspects of the story they’re working on.
So what can you do when you’re reporting a story and want to elevate it to a compelling narrative? Ambrogio suggested asking simple questions, such as how the subject decided to become a scientist.
“What makes a story different from a litany of events is that you have to have change,” Ambrogio added. “The protagonist, society, something has changed.”
Bhattacharjee advised patience and recommended asking questions multiple times over several interviews to get more nuanced responses.
“Time is your ally,” Bhattacharjee said. “It is the definition of insanity: you ask the same questions again and again expecting a different response, a deeper and more meaningful response.”
“You have to have a lot of patience and they have to have a lot of patience,” Waldrop agreed.
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