Three ways writing a book is different than covering news
When I set out to write a book, I thought it’d be basically the same as writing magazine stories, only much longer. On the surface, I’m doing the same sorts of professional tasks now that I’ve been doing for the last ten (!) years: reading scientific research, interviewing (mostly) scientists, and writing about what I’ve learned. My experience and skill doing these things are a major part of why I got a book deal in the first place. So I’ve been staggered at how different the process of writing a book feels from the inside, and how many changes I’ve had to make to my processes and attitudes in order to do it. Here are three.
1. I don’t have to fit the story’s schedule.
I’ve written a little bit about this before, and it continues to shock me and go against everything I’ve internalized over ten years of journalism. When you’re covering news, a big part of the work’s value is that it’s new. In breaking news, the subject of your writing literally just happened, or might still be happening. I rarely do that kind of journalism, but news of any speed generates its own timeline to which you as the writer must adhere. If you don’t, the value of your work drops significantly. News doesn’t wait for you to be ready. Feature writing has marginally more flexibility, but once the train is moving it’s your job to stay on it.
There are still deadlines in book world, of course. When your timely action determines whether your manuscript will arrive at the printer when your publisher said it would, you better meet that deadline or tempt the wrath of the supply chain gods and, worse, the many people working on your book behind the scenes. I’m not there yet. Not even close. To write the book at all, I can’t rely on panic and time pressure. I can only do it slowly, over many days, weeks, months, years. It’s not about producing something quickly and then collapsing until the next deadline prods me into action. It’s about coming back, over and over again. To be able to do that, I need to be the one who sets the schedule—and I need to make sure it’s a schedule I can follow without totally melting down.
2. My job is to build an argument, not tear it down.
Something happens during the reporting of nearly every news story: You ask, “Who disagrees with this?” And then you try to talk to them, to make sure their perspective is accurately represented in the piece. No, this doesn’t mean that any reporter is entirely objective, and yes, this can and has led to empty both-side-ism, as it famously did for years in coverage of climate change. But it’s still central to journalistic practice and journalistic ethics, and for good reason. It’s supposed to help you make sure you’re accurately capturing the way some event or change in the world is being received by the most knowledgable and/or most affected communities. It’s supposed to be a check on delusions and echo chambers, most especially your own.
I’m not saying skepticism or journalistic ethics go out the window when you’re writing a book. In a lot of ways, they become even more important. But a lot of that work ends up under the surface of the text, instead of being explicitly represented on the page. Nonfiction books live and die by their arguments. As I wrote last week, my book’s main argument is that apocalypses are transformations that put societies on new paths. Not everyone sees it like that. Not everyone will even agree that certain events I’m describing constitute apocalypses. And I’m positive lots of people won’t like that I’m using the word “apocalypse” at all. It’s my job to understand their arguments, in order to make mine as strong as possible. I also must make sure my facts stand up, as much as they can on the slippery surface of scientific debate. I don’t need to be out here undermining my points with avoidable mistakes or facile misinterpretations. It’s not my job, however, to write something in which you can’t tell what I think. It’s not my job to write something that prioritizes explaining other people’s arguments or ideas over presenting the strongest version of my own. Which brings me to…
3. I’m the author, and, therefore, I’m the authority.
This is the big one, the one that scares me everyday, the one that has sent me back to therapy. For the first time in my career—outside of maybe this newsletter—I’m not primarily curating other people’s expertise. That’s still part of the work, but I can’t stop at the point where everyone else’s voices are louder than mine. I have to step into my own expertise, my own authority, and trust that readers will follow me there. That means getting comfortable with taking up space, insisting on being heard, and opening myself up to potentially far more public, and personal, criticism than I’ve invited so far. It’s really freaking scary, all the time. But sometimes, in the right light, it’s also really exciting.