Peter Brannen loves isotope geochemistry. Anyone who has enjoyed one of his stories may very well love it too—though they might not have realized it.
That’s because Brannen, a freelance science journalist and author, doesn’t write about isotope geochemistry as an isolated concept. He tells readers of The Atlantic about the life story of a single mastodon as revealed by the chemical makeup of its tusks. He draws parallels between modern trends in the ocean’s oxygen levels and the conditions that triggered a mass extinction 94 million years ago. And, in his 2025 book, The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything, he describes the history of our planet and of humankind through the chemistry of carbon dioxide.
These stories delight his general-interest audience even though they are built around a subject that, as he says, would make people’s eyes glaze over in other circumstances.
Anyone who has ever pitched a story has probably heard this question at some point: “Why should readers care?” For many journalists, the question can be hard to hear, since we tend to care inherently about what we cover. But it’s crucial to keep readers in mind—no matter how many interesting tidbits you pack into a story, all of it could fall flat if it doesn’t resonate with the person reading it. This is especially true when the story centers a more esoteric field such as geology, ancient history, or quantum mechanics.
Getting a story about such topics off the ground often means jumping over hurdles that might not exist for more relatable subjects like health, biomedicine, or even climate change. When readers are unfamiliar with a story’s subject matter, its relevance to their lives may not be apparent. These stories may require a lot more context to understand their significance.
Accordingly, pitching a story about obscure science requires a different approach than one about a more familiar subject. “These aren’t the kinds of stories where you go in and you say, ‘This is a serious unmet need,’ or ‘There’s a major scandal or a way things need to change,’” says Time staff writer Veronique Greenwood, who has written freelance stories about biology, prehistory, physics, and other subjects since 2008. Instead, you want to make people curious, she notes. “You’re trying to get [readers] excited about something that you know and they don’t.”
Despite these challenges, with a compelling angle and thoughtful storytelling, a determined and creative journalist can turn nearly any arcane subject into compelling reading. These stories can foster an appreciation of basic research and leave people more informed, more curious, and with a sense of wonder that will stick with them long after they’ve finished reading.
Making Any Science Story Relatable
When a journalist comes across an interesting story that they want to write involving an obscure branch of science, they are faced with an immediate challenge—most readers simply have no connection to the subject matter.
“You need to get people engaged on something [where] you’re already at a disadvantage, because they either wouldn’t be instinctively interested or they literally have no idea what you’re talking about,” Brannen says. Therefore, an important first step is finding a way to connect the story to a reader’s interests and experience. Finding this connection, too, is a good “check” for whether the story you are developing will work for your audience.
One way is to tie stories into larger questions about the nature of existence: What was the origin of life? How did the universe form? Why do we have sex? These questions interrogate things that people might usually take for granted, which prompts readers to suddenly feel like they need to know the answer. “[It] makes them, in a way, sort of vulnerable. It makes them sort of wonder what else they don’t know,” Greenwood says.
Another way to make your stories relatable is by evoking a sense of curiosity and wonder through revealing how little we understand about the world.
Greenwood wrote one such “fundamental question” story for Quanta Magazine in 2024 that explores how the physics of cold water may have contributed to the rise of complex life. The story focuses on an emerging theory that suggests colder temperatures around 700 million years ago made water more viscous. Larger, more complex life-forms would have had an advantage getting nutrients out of this “thick” water and would have been able to move more easily, the theory posits.
Greenwood was captivated by the ideas this sparked. When she pitched the story to her editor at Quanta, they remarked that it was an interesting notion they hadn’t thought of before—exactly the type of response, Greenwood says, she hopes to provoke in editors and readers.
Another way to make your stories relatable is by evoking a sense of curiosity and wonder through revealing how little we understand about the world. One story of Greenwood’s for Quanta Magazine used a controversial new study as a hook to discuss the debate about how the brain clears out its waste. Another looked at the discovery of microscopic bridges that link the insides of open-ocean bacteria, suggesting they may be operating as one mega-organism.
These stories have a “wow” factor that can excite everyday readers. But not every obscure science story needs to have profound implications.
“People love things that are really ugly or really gross or scary or really cute,” says Rose Cahalan, a senior editor at 5280. Cahalan was formerly a senior editor at Texas Monthly focused on the magazine’s Critters section. A story about hammerhead worms that can reproduce by being cut in half ended up being the most popular story she ever wrote for Texas Monthly, she says, because “it’s just a creepy-looking creature.”
Many of the Critters stories highlight things readers might find in their own backyard. She assigned a story about the gangly, massive insects called mosquito hawks after she started seeing them outside her backdoor. “[If] I’m seeing a lot of this animal … that probably means people are curious about it,” she says. Her instincts paid off, and the resulting story did quite well.
Since Cahalan typically writes and edits for more local and regional outlets, she also looks for place-based connections that can be a jumping-off point for deeper science stories. When a dinosaur fossil was found beneath the parking lot of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science earlier this year, she asked one of her 5280 writers to investigate whether that was luck or if there are countless more dinosaur fossils buried beneath the city. The resulting story went beyond the newsy headline to discuss the paleontological history of Denver in detail, connecting millions of years of prehistory to the streets that readers walk on every day.
Similarly, arcane results can become more relatable if they tie into an everyday sensory experience, such as smelling, seeing in color, or sleeping, Greenwood says. Incremental advances may be more engaging when they relate to something that most people experience, she says.
Caring Through Characters
Another valuable way to make an esoteric science story approachable is by probing the lives of the scientists who are excited about arcane research. “The interestingness of the people and their passion can be really useful tools for the writer,” Greenwood says.
Scientists who are on some kind of quest can have an infectious appeal, Greenwood says. To find these stories, she conducts long interviews where she asks the scientists about themselves in a way that goes beyond their research—why they choose to do things, what they think is beautiful, how they view themselves and their work. These sorts of obsessions, she says, can form the basis of really compelling stories.
Introducing scientists as characters can allow you to discuss their relationships—including antagonistic ones.
Brannen often likes to center the ingenuity of the scientists in his stories. “Seeing how creative scientists can be in teasing apart the story of our past is really inspiring,” he says. For his story about the life of a single mastodon, for instance, he described how scientists realized they could use a map of strontium isotopes found in lakes and vegetation across the United States and compare it with isotopes within different layers of a mastodon’s tusk, allowing them to track where the animal was at different stages of its life.
For Cahalan, a Rice University professor who used humorous, jargon-free language carried a 2022 story about the new wasp species he’d discovered. “[It’s] hard to get readers interested in wasp research otherwise,” she says.
Introducing scientists as characters can also allow you to discuss their relationships—including antagonistic ones. Essayist, screenwriter, and New York Magazine features writer Kerry Howley does not describe herself as a science journalist and typically writes about politics and culture. But she was captivated by the intense controversy between two paleontologists over who deserved credit for the hypothesis that, based on their findings at a unique North Dakota fossil site, the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs hit Earth in the spring.
“I find both of the characters deeply compelling and likeable, so their rivalry is kind of gut-wrenching,” Howley says. Layering the article with both the personal disagreements and the fundamental scientific questions were what made the story work. “You have basically the destruction of most of life on Earth, and then you have these little arguments, which are deeply important to the people involved,” she says. “That contrast was really exciting to me.”
Highlighting tangible experiences can also help bring the science to life. During Howley’s reporting, she asked a litany of concrete, detailed questions to understand exactly what was happening visually—what the processes and techniques looked like, how scientists moved and held themselves, and what exactly they were looking at. These questions helped her paint vivid scenes that made the science less abstract and easier for both her and the reader to understand.
How to Pitch Esoteric Science to Editors
A lot of the advice that Cahalan gives people pitching esoteric stories is exactly the same as for any other story: Highlight a news hook, show you’ve done your research, and add some writerly flair. Likewise, Greenwood says, it’s important to research the publications you want to pitch to ensure they publish the type of story that you want to write.
But some key elements can boost pitches about this type of science, Greenwood says. She likes to begin her pitch with a fact, moment, or idea that is really surprising to catch an editor’s attention. Then, she spends the next two paragraphs fleshing out that idea to lead into how the story relates to a more fundamental underlying question.
In a pitch to Quanta Magazine in 2025, she introduced tiny creatures that live in deep-sea mud, which no one knew about until 15 years earlier, that share a lot of their DNA with us. From there, she built into how studying these creatures, known as the Asgard archaea, could reveal the origin of all complex life, including humans.
When pitching tough subject matter, the quality of your writing plays an especially important role.
“Most people don’t even know about archaea to begin with,” she says. “There’s a lot to explain here, but if you do it in a way that people are intrigued, and then they start to wonder, and there’s a mystery there for them, they’ll keep following you.”
Freelance science journalist Virat Markandeya says that you need to communicate to an editor that there is something new about your reporting, but notes that the threshold for what a news hook looks like may be less strict in more esoteric fields. “What’s interesting to a general audience might not necessarily be the latest incremental advance,” he says. Vox, for instance, routinely gets millions of views on videos about physics, astronomy, and linguistics because even well-established science in these fields will be novel to a vast majority of their audience.
Markandeya also emphasizes that pitches should include specific, tangible moments in your story to bring it out of the realm of the hypothetical. “Magazine writing is cinematic,” he says. “If you’re able to paint enough of a picture” in a pitch, you’ll have a better chance of landing the story.
His 2013 story for The Caravan, a long-form journalism magazine in India, begins with a scientist bumping across a remote Siberian steppe in the back of a vehicle called a snowcat. This unusual scene sets up the search for a natural occurrence of a rare form of matter known as quasicrystals. “That is something that would capture your imagination, right?” he says.
When pitching tough subject matter, the quality of your writing plays an especially important role. “If you can really write beautiful, thoughtful, smart prose, that will absolutely make you stand out from the crowd,” Cahalan says, regardless of subject. To sharpen your skills, she recommends reading great writing, including fiction (her favorites include Ann Patchett, Margaret Atwood, Donna Tartt, Patrick Raden Keefe, and Joan Didion).
Communicating the Science to Readers
Once you land a pitch, complex science stories often require more context and background to communicate their significance. If you regularly cover a particular field, you might need to repeat things you have written in previous stories to get the reader up to speed.
When delivering background information, be careful not to talk down to the reader.
One key to good background is being selective about what information you give the reader. As the writer, you are like the Great and Powerful Oz, Greenwood says — you can “draw curtains” in front of the material that would be confusing and extraneous to include. Figure out which bits are absolutely essential, and trim everything else. Greenwood also likes to use quotes from the sources in her story to deliver background context, since having interesting people describe the science in their own words can make it much more readable.
For guidance, keep what you find interesting about the science at the forefront of your writing, Howley suggests. “Excavate what you find deeply thrilling about it, and … write into that relentlessly,” she says. “The writing dies when there’s a sense of dutifulness.”
When delivering background information, though, be careful not to talk down to the reader. “I imagine the reader as someone who just happens not to know something that I do, rather than [thinking], ‘Oh well, they wouldn’t be interested in this to begin with,’” Brannen says. Keep your audience on the edge of what they understand, he says, as that makes them want to know even more.
Writing for someone who is interested in how the world works but is unfamiliar with a given topic is one of the joys of covering science, Greenwood says. “That’s part of the fun of it, right?” she says. “To take something and be like, ‘You don’t know about this, but man, I’m going to blow your mind.’”
William von Herff is a freelance science journalist and former staff writer at The Provincetown Independent. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, WIRED, Smithsonian, Atlas Obscura, MIT Technology Review, and other publications. William is a TON early-career fellow sponsored by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Follow him on Bluesky at @willvh.bsky.social.