I’m starting a science blog and I’m struggling with tone. You have such a wonderful voice, I was wondering if you had any advice in addition to practice. I know I’ll get more comfortable with time and practice but right now it’s robotic and not interesting. Thanksssssssss.
That’s extremely kind of you to say. I’m glad that you like it. While I am grateful that you like my writing voice on Tumblr, I am sure that your own is equally valid if not more so.
I feel that before opening a discussion of tone and science writing, I have to disclaim this: it is not my actual writing voice professionally or on other platforms. And the risk of having a distinctive/recognizable voice is that the more distinctive it is, the more divisive it is. The stakes are higher - some people may REALLY appreciate your voice - but some people will also REALLY hate it. So it’s worth thinking about platform before you go in.
One key thing is that I stick pretty close to the standard Nature Essayist Tradition, of factual writing mixed with personal experience and presented in a specific prose style. The style is usually called a “journey through” the facts. This often makes informative stuff more relatable and accessible for people, but carries a lot of risk of failing in its goal, or calling my personal character into question. (By talking about my personal experiences, I create myself as a narrator/character, whom many people may not like.) This style raises the stakes, meaning that my core messages can be changed by people’s feelings about me-as-a-character. Some people like my voice; some dislike it; some find it distracting.
If I write about how important nature conservation is to me, via a story about the Lessons I’ve Learned From the Wild Blingle, and dress it up as a Standard Reflective Nature Essay ™ … then I may deliver the message straight into your heart, where it will have a powerful impact and make you fall in love with the Wild Blingle too; or it may fail completely and make me look like a fool, so Fuck Elodie And Her Stupid Wild Blingle. If people decide they don’t like me or my tone, they may discard the entire message. When the message is important, this is the opposite of what you want - it’s too much of a risk.
Most science writers do not try to deliver a message straight to your heart, and for very good reason. Most science is too important to muddy up with personal voice. If a message is delivered by a messenger that the audience decides to dislike, the message fails. And most messages are too important to risk. So the messenger is rarely a character in the most professional science writing, and isn’t a part of my professional work. The idea is that the facts should stand by themselves; the voice of the person journeying through the facts would be a distraction.
So it’s really important to think about what goals you want your writing to meet. I’m sure your writing is actually quite accessible and interesting for its audience, but I hear that you’re frustrated with it, and I trust your opinion - it’s not what you want it to sound like! That’s frustrating! But it’s ALSO possible that your writing is perfectly good for the job you intend it to do. And, in fact, it may be a lot more suitable for its goal than the stuff I produce here, which is meant for my friends’ amusement on Tumblr. Not everything has to be in a distinctive voice in order to be valid, important and successful. And in many scientific settings, it really is better to bury the personal voice.
Hopefully that makes sense.
(also note: the fact that I write a six-paragraph reflective response, disclaiming my answer to your question before I answer your question? Not normal. This is literally what you asked for, and it’s my platform, so it’s what I’m giving you. But it would be a shit newspaper column, and it wouldn’t get me paid. It’s already going to look stupid on people’s dashes. You see?)
That being said, you know your platform best, so many you DO want to write in the Nature Essayist Tradition (or another distinctive prose style)! In which case, COOL! Here are some books that I read recently that made me run around in circles going “YEAH!” They are pretentious Nature Essayist Tradition books about the writer staring at a piece of nature, having a weird conversation with someone, explaining a piece of natural history, and spinning out 300 lines of prose about it. Then the writer has a meaningful snack and does it again. This is almost always done by British people eating a scone on a sea cliff, but is occasionally done by Americans eating a granola bar on a mountain. All of them are divisive in their own way, and all of them have a similar voice to the one you like here (although they are obviously better, more experienced, and a lot more serious about it. Basically, whatever I do that you probably like, these people are much better at:)
H is For Hawk by Helen MacDonald. A woman grieves her father by training a goshawk to hunt, while pondering T.H. White’s own journey in training a goshawk to hunt, which was in its turn a metaphor for his own sexuality. Vastly poetic writing - you’ll either punch the air with exultation, or go “Oh what pretentious tripe.” I loved it.
Raptor: A Journey Through Birds by James MacDonald Lockhart. Mostly poetic: a man wanders around Britain looking for birds of prey, and when he finds them, he looks at them. Again, critics were divided, it won a lot of awards for being what it is, while others complained that it is what it is. But he had a lot to say about raptors and he said it and it’s done.
Gossip From The Forest: the Tangled Roots of our Forests and Fairytales by Sara Maitland - A woman wanders around some forests in Britain asking people what they do. Amazon calls it “A magical exploration of the ancient landscape of forests and the ancient genre of fairytales, drawing fascinating and surprising connections between the two.”
Wild: A Journey From Lost To Found by Cheryl Strayed - a woman grieves her mother by hiking the Appalachian Trail, written by the lady who wrote Dear Sugar, got made into a movie. Not so much science writing, but very clear.
Literally just go into a bookstore into a section that has a lonely table full of Worthy Looking Books with a picture, of, like, a single beetle on the cover, with titles like Blingle: The Journey Of The Lost Blingle and there you go - there’s that same kind of voice, it’s almost guaranteed - I certainly didn’t invent it. But there it is: writer-as-observer, participating in the personal “journey” through the science.
And here are some books that were pretty formative when I was developing this current iteration of voice, and which I identify as influences when using this voice:
Last Chance to See, by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine - conservation writing by a man more famous for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Writer as narrator, journeying around making witty comments about animals.
A Brief History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Writer as narrator, journeying the world and making witty comments about geology.
The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm by Stephen Jay Gould - I’m sorry but I guess we all have to read a lot of SJG if we want to write about science.
If you really like this voice, then just read stuff like this, and you’ll start absorbing it and making it your own. That’s it, that’s the trick: read the stuff you like, observe the mechanism, borrow it, and eventually build your own.
If you’re interested in taking apart the mechanism let me know and I’m happy to talk about it.
Best of luck to you.
And please send me links to your stuff, and keep me updated. Let me know if there’s anything I can do, as well. I can’t wait to have new and wonderful things to read and a new science writer to admire and shout about.
