Shayla Love had lingering questions about psychedelics. As a writer for Vice during the “psychedelic renaissance” that took off in the 2010s, she had been chronicling renewed interest in the drugs’ potential therapeutic benefits—and noticing an interesting assumption that accompanied it. People using psychedelics often report feelings of open-mindedness, so some advocates argued that if more people tried the drugs, society as a whole might shift toward more compassionate and progressive values. The idea had been popular since at least the 1960s. But Love wasn’t so sure she bought it.
In a 2021 paper, for example, researchers argued that political shifts tied to experiences with psychedelics can happen in any direction. This and other pieces of evidence inspired Love to dig into the long history of associations between psychedelic drugs and dreams of utopia. That messy marriage sprawled through popular culture, health, politics, technology, and business. Love followed, drawing from the experiences of boxer Mike Tyson and beat poet Allen Ginsberg, from conversations with anthropologists and psychedelics researchers, and from a novel by Aldous Huxley set in a community where psychoactive drugs cultivate mindfulness—but also complacency. Her resulting 2021 piece synthesized a dazzling array of material to challenge the utopia assumption and show how psychedelic drugs intertwine with regressive, fascist politics and plain old apathy, too. It’s also a classic example of a reported essay.
The reported essay is slippery to define, falling somewhere between an opinion piece’s clear-cut argument and a news feature’s focus on factual reporting and narrative storytelling. The form takes readers on a satisfying journey, propelled by the author’s own well-informed ideas and writing style as much as by facts and information—and not necessarily toward a definitive answer. Love, now a staff writer for The Atlantic, finds that this embrace of uncertainty does a good job of holding the contradictions of her beats. In an essay, she can explore the complicated interplay between neurological phenomena and our social and cultural lives—without writing any one piece like she has the final word.
Used as a verb, the word “essay” means “to try.” That notion of an attempt describes reporting for an essay particularly well. In gathering information, journalists tease out and test their ideas, taking a kind of trial run of the piece they will write. Love likens this process of selecting material to share with the reader to a game of “show-and-tell.” The metaphor is apt, she explains, because it illustrates how much an essay’s outcome relies on a writer’s particular eye. “Somebody else would assemble maybe a different collection of items,” she says. So, how do you build a great collection, and turn it into a great essay? As Michelle Nijhuis, author of The Science Writers’ Essay Handbook, wrote for The Open Notebook in 2016, “like good science, good essays start with a question.”
Refining Your Question
Journalists come by essay questions in many ways. Some use personal experience as a unique lens through which to examine interesting science. Others become curious about issues and ideas that emerge from their regular beat reporting, untangling a conundrum or pulling at a loose end with an essay. Both approaches reward a desire to learn something new, and offer opportunities to explore.
By taking time to understand the science your essay deals with, you can show editors that you’ll back up your innovative ideas and distinctive voice with substance and evidence.
Often, following your curiosity means you don’t know where your reporting will take you. For freelance journalist Brandon Keim, good essay questions are those with interesting journeys to their answers, no matter what those answers turn out to be. Keim typically writes what he calls “essayistic features, or feature-y essays” about animals and nature, balancing “both the official scientific, expert perspective and the perspective that people just get from their own everyday lives, and knowledge of animals, and relationships to them.” For an upcoming piece, Keim is delving into an interest he’s had for years in comparative thanatology—the study of how different creatures respond to death and dying. He’s talking with experts from the sciences and humanities alike, seeking to triangulate their perspectives with his own hypothesis: that philosophers are pushing the field in new and interesting directions. Even if he doesn’t yet know precisely where his sources will land on that idea, he knows exploring that question in essay form will lead to an interesting piece, balancing the overlaps and tensions between people’s views across disciplines.
If you’ve struck on an idea that seems too open-ended, try dialing in on the specific reasons behind your curiosity. Harnessing your personal insights and experience with a topic can make for a stronger angle, and make clear to an editor why you’re the right person to write the essay. After taking a workshop on science essays, for example, biologist-turned-science-writer Diego Ramírez Martín del Campo wanted to explore how silence has shaped human evolution and culture. Fascinating—but there wasn’t a lot of research on this to dig into. A workshop editor suggested a different approach: Ramírez Martín del Campo should ask how tinnitus—the constant ringing in his ears he’s experienced since age 23—affects his own relationship with silence. “I should write about how I lost my silence,” he realized. His resulting “Eulogy for Silence” appeared in Aeon in 2024.
As you home in on an essay question, consider how you might sell it to editors. Some pre-reporting is necessary to show that your idea stands on a strong foundation, Orion’s science editor Natalie Middleton reflects. By taking time to understand the science your essay deals with, you can show editors that you’ll back up your innovative ideas and distinctive voice with substance and evidence. Develop a clear plan for how you’ll gather information and include those details in your pitch, Love says. Then, once you land an assignment, start reporting as quickly as possible, in case your findings are not what you expected or your approach needs some tweaks. You can communicate with your editor, “pivot, and change directions,” she says.
Since an essay’s success depends both on its execution and its concept, some editors may ask you to write a pitched essay “on spec”—meaning to submit a full draft without the guarantee of an assignment. This is particularly true for green writers with fewer clips—but it’s important to weigh how comfortable you are working on a piece that an editor might end up turning down. Not all is lost, though, if that’s the case. Hold onto completed or unpublished pieces and keep an eye out for well-aligned publications and relevant submission calls, Middleton advises. “Sometimes it takes a little while” to find the right home, she says.
Curating a Collection
Coming up with and selling ideas isn’t the only stage of developing an essay where flexibility is important. Essays offer lots of freedom in where to find information and what to ask in exploring your central question. Science writers can draw from pop culture or literature, consider their own experiences or perspectives, and ask open-ended questions about their sources’ work and interests to leave the door open for surprising details. To prepare for the sometimes nonlinear process of essay reporting, it’s wise to cultivate an open mind about what—and who—might inform your work.
Just as the people we speak with for features enrich an article’s scenes and narrative beats, human sources can help journalists establish a stronger understanding of the landscape around their essay subject.
Reading widely about your interests is one way to build a library of potential insights that you can draw from in an essay—whether you already have an assignment or not. With his essay idea on silence in the back of his mind, Ramírez Martín del Campo read scientific studies, poetry, fiction, and reported features. He found gems in seemingly unrelated texts: “I’d have a notebook next to me, and if anything about silence came up in the book I was reading, I would just write it down.” When writing his piece, he braided many of these varied insights with his own experience of tinnitus.
Turning your reporter’s eye to your own life can also yield details that help immerse readers in essays. For example, Miles Griffis, independent journalist and co-founder of the long COVID–focused publication The Sick Times, didn’t have an essay in mind when he traveled to California’s ephemeral Lake Manly, which emerges only when heavy rainfall fills the Badwater Basin. He and his partner were following the footsteps of the artist David Wojnarowicz, who’d journeyed there before his 1992 death from complications related to HIV/AIDS. During this personal trip, Griffis journaled about how it felt to raft on the temporary salt lake, reflecting on the ways Wojnarowicz’s life and work overlap with his own, as he grapples with long COVID. Griffis also took film photographs along the way. He says he favors this reporting technique because seeing the photos again, after waiting for them to be developed, “pushes you back in the moment.” Later, when drafting his 2024 High Country News essay, “Learning How to Live and Die with Long COVID,” Griffis revisited the memories he’d captured to transport himself—and his readers—to Lake Manly.
Reporting trips, even unintentional ones like Griffis’, can enliven essays—but writers can also find exciting details in seemingly dry or technical material. A study, for example, could reference other texts and research, allude to an interesting anecdote, or illuminate a potentially intriguing idea—all stones which writers can turn over to find details for their essay. Kim Todd, a professor in the University of Minnesota’s Creative Writing Program who writes literary nonfiction, loves finding “rabbit holes at the bottom of rabbit holes.” She teaches her students to probe newspaper archives and databases for details that will enrich their writing. She also illustrates for them how conversations with sources can in turn lead them to more compelling research materials.
Conversations for Essays
Not all journalists interview people for reported essays, or quote from those conversations. Some essays, like those by Griffis and Ramírez Martín del Campo, tell a more explicitly personal story. But just as the people we speak with for features enrich an article’s scenes and narrative beats, human sources can help journalists establish a stronger understanding of the landscape around their essay subject. Experiencing another mind grappling with the topic and joining in the serendipity of conversation can offer journalists new, enticing material.
In reporting an essay, thinking about the role a source’s voice or insights could play in the piece—whether more abstract, or more explanatory—can help you guide the conversation. Todd’s students practice asking open-ended questions of each other in the classroom, to identify which framings will help their sources reflect and tell stories in interviews. This approach can be particularly useful when interviewing scientists—to draw out the depth writers seek in essays. Laurie Winkless, a physicist-turned-science-journalist who writes books and essay-style explainers about topics such as sticky surfaces and the technology behind city life, asks researchers to tell her “something weird” about their work or what preoccupations keep them up at night, in addition to her more technical questions. The combination helps Winkless get more conversational answers from her sources, and so communicate complicated topics to her readers as a “friendly guide.”
When your own perspective will mediate, shape, or appear alongside a source’s ideas, it behooves you to make sure the people you’re speaking with understand your essay’s angle.
When sourcing for reported essays, it’s also a good idea to define expertise expansively—much like extending your reading beyond scientific literature. Keim, for example, has spoken with lawyers fighting for animals’ legal personhood and people who work in wildlife rehabilitation, to help his readers consider animal personalities more deeply and cultivate care for animal livelihoods.
Speaking with sources who possess multiple kinds of authority can also help you make big-picture connections in your essay. Griffis wrote about New Mexico whiptail lizards—an entirely female species, who reproduce asexually—for a 2023 installment of his column Confetti Westerns, about queer natural and cultural histories of the Southwestern U.S. To illustrate why people love the reptiles some call the state’s “gay icons,” Griffis spoke with queer biologists about their experiences in the field—and about the radical significance of acknowledging queerness in the wild. “One of the first things that they teach you in a college biology course,” one source remarked, “is … that nothing ever fits into nice, neat boxes.”
Given the winding reporting paths you could find yourself traversing, some sources might be surprised when you approach them for an interview, or unsure how you will use their voice. Doing the legwork to explain why you’d like to talk puts interviewees at ease, and can help them connect dots you may otherwise have neglected. When reporting her 2024 Atlantic story on how diet drugs like Ozempic inhibit feelings of desire, beyond just appetite, Love wound up at a Buddhist monastery. Her prospective interviewees were confused at first, but when Love said she felt Buddhism could offer interesting insights on Ozempic because of the religion’s focus on desire as one root of suffering, the nun she spoke with “was so interested and game to go there with me,” Love recalls. Their conversation helped Love understand how losing desire in an instant, and without work, might leave people feeling psychologically adrift instead of enlightened.
When your own perspective will mediate, shape, or appear alongside a source’s ideas, it behooves you to make sure the people you’re speaking with understand your essay’s angle. Disclosing one’s perspective isn’t just a necessary ethical step. For Keim, sharing “what [he’s] thinking and where [he’s] going” with sources can lead to breakthroughs in his own understanding—he’s getting to “stress-test” his ideas by seeing how sources respond.
Drafting Your Essay
After gathering your collection of essay materials, there’s still a difficult task in front of you. How will you sift through notes and quotes from multiple disciplines, perspectives, and texts to draft a readable piece? And how will you balance those reported facts with your personal perspective or experience? The beauty of writing an essay is that there’s no single template, but there are some techniques to help you overcome the dreaded blank page.
One thing to consider, as you decide to what extent you will appear in a piece, is what might help your essay’s themes resonate for a reader. Since Griffis started reporting on long COVID, for example, he’s gravitated toward sharing more of his own experience in his writing. His story can hold people’s attention where statistical analysis or a more distanced voice might lose it—all the more valuable because misinformation and misconceptions about COVID persist. “Sometimes having these really personal narratives of what it’s like to live with the illness is super important,” he reflects.
Editors can help you kill unnecessary darlings. After all, an essay can never include every precious fact or favorite insight.
If you’re feeling unsure of where to start after reviewing your materials, consider whether you’re missing what you need to frame some part of your reporting. “Usually, when I’m struggling with writer’s block or not able to get words on the page, it’s because I didn’t do enough of the work yet,” Griffis muses. A little more focused reporting in areas that still feel murky can help you visualize your essay.
But heaps of research can also make getting started more daunting. For Middleton, setting aside the material she’s gathered, at least at first, helps her find her way in the first draft of a reported essay. “I’ll freewrite to see the shape of what I want to do, and then I’ll actually plug in the research,” she says. She finds that she sometimes writes more personally in this initial stage. As she adds more concrete details, she “sculpts” and “smooths” the writing around them: “It’s not a linear process.”
When in doubt, turn to an editor or trusted reader to advise on your approach. For a 2024 piece on the Western iconography of blue jeans, Griffis initially drew on years of wide-ranging research—which made it hard to close in on an angle. Brainstorming over the phone with his editor at High Country News helped him find the right scope, by focusing more narrowly than he’d planned to. By not trying to do too much, he could bring in “more Miles”—a note she frequently gives him.
Editors can also help you kill unnecessary darlings. After all, an essay can never include every precious fact or favorite insight—it’s probably why many essayists love the reporting stage so much. But, “keep all those [cut] paragraphs,” Middleton advises. “There’s something [there] that you wanted to say.” Scraps on the cutting room floor can be the raw materials for future essays—more questions to explore and journeys for writer and reader, at the end of which, as Love remarks, “science feels more connected to the rest of the world.”
Kate Fishman is a freelance journalist based in San Diego, California, and an early-career reporting fellow with The Open Notebook. She has covered local news in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and California’s Mendocino County, where she was a Report for America corps member and cultivated a love for writing about ecology. Her reporting has appeared in Sierra, Reuters, High Country News, and Atmos, among other publications. Find her on Bluesky @kaatefishman.bsky.social.