Philip Ball: recommendation

Transcript context

…Now, you do not have a traditional academic post and for a long time have not had one. If you meet a young writer who’s very smart, great worker, and he or she wants to go into science writing, what advice do you give? What is it they should know that maybe they don’t know? Because you’ve done it. Well, I did it back in the day when one could just wander randomly into it, as I did, whereas these days, it’s much more professionalized. I think that’s very good that you can now take courses in science journalism and learn how to do things properly in a way that I had to learn on the job in a very messy way. I absolutely think that that would be something I would recommend, get a training in science journalism because some of them are very good. They will equip you to do what you want to do. I would say, for anyone thinking about wanting to go into science book writing, it’s really important that you aren’t doing it so that you’re going to become rich because it’s the same for any writer, actually. This is not a way to become rich. You have to love what you’re doing. You have to have a real passion for what you’re doing. Certainly, for book writing, it feels to me like you have to have something to say. It’s not enough to just do a translation job of a difficult field. You really need to have something to bring to it, some insight to bring to it. Figure out what it is you want to say, and figure out what kind of voice you want to say it in. The way to do that is to read, to read very widely, and to find out what works for you, what sort of voice works for you. With someone who’s written about 30 science books, and most of them have more than one thing to say, what trait is it in you that has given rise to you having so many things to say relative to so many of your peers?…

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