A New 'Covid Moment' for Writers
There will be more story ideas than you can shake a swab at
Writing is often an escape from realities I’d rather not focus on too much. I love nothing more than to dig into a story for several hours and not look up. Yet when I eventually do, the realities are all still there, and even if I don’t like them, I’m grateful that I have a skill that can be leveraged to help others grasp the good and the bad and the inexplicable in some little corner of reality.
I hope you find similar joy in your writing. Which brings me to this week’s post. This is a variation on a note I sent to the folks who write for my health publication. I’ve adapted it here to be useful to anyone who writes with words.
A little background:
At the dawn of 2020, I was a semi-retired yet incongruently full-time health writer, having been self-publishing on Medium full time for exactly one year after a long career in broader science and health writing, editing and managing. I was still sorting out exactly what beats to focus on, and I’d recently hitched a ride writing for a well-run Medium publication called Elemental.
I had my ear to the ground, as they say, and what I heard scared the crap out of me.
I pitched my first Covid story to my editors before anyone realized what a thing the coronavirus would become, before Elemental had written about it, before most US media had given it much ink at all. The story published on Jan. 21, 2020, preceding what became a special Covid section on Elemental and launching a new chapter for me as a Covid writer that lasted more than a year, until I got burned out on it (as did readers) and chose to jump off the coverage bandwagon and get back to writing about health and wellness more broadly.
But that’s how you do it, writers. You see something coming, you jump in quickly and with both feet, and seek to become as much of an expert on the topic as a writer can be.
Getting on the Covid beat early and sticking with it like glue—often multiple articles per week for months on end—generated a following of readers far larger than would otherwise have materialized. I learned a ton, and I like to think I did some good. Ultimately, the momentum propelled me to the next chapter in my career, after Medium scuttled its owned & operated publications: the launch of the my own publication, Wise & Well.
What’s this got do do with you?
Dear writers, we are in the nascent stage of another Covid Moment, thanks to a certain soon-to-be leader of the Department of Health and Human Services. It’ll be different than the pandemic in many ways, but from a writer perspective there will be one similarity: The next few months will be loaded with an equal dose of confusing, confounding and complex twists and turns in the health realm that make nonfiction writing a viable and necessary profession.
If you’re in need of a story idea, just read the news and look for hooks on which you can hang your expertise.
There are now an unlimited number of new and important health angles begging to be developed into stories by you, thanks to proposals and past statements by RFK Jr. and the general whirlwind of change coming to HSS.
Here’s what I want you to take away from this post:
Same goes for stories on many other topics—environment, energy, personal finance, business, you name it—given the entire new White House staff and monumental shift in federal governance.
A writer can make their career, or boost it significantly, by establishing themselves as an authority on any of these subjects. Think of Woodward and Bernstein and their months-long relentless single-minded pursuit of Watergate stories. You don’t have to be an investigative reporter to select a topic and pursue it with passion and commitment. You do have to immerse yourself in a topic to become expert enough at it for your writing to consistently rise above the competition.
If I were a young health reporter trying to establish a beat right now, I would put all my energy in the foreseeable future into stories about big and small changes to the US healthcare system—from drug development and pricing to vaccine requirements to health insurance and so much more. Specifically each story would dig into how it all affects readers’ own health and pocketbooks as well as the broader societal health system. The theme would be: how to make sense of all this and what it means to you.
This is how journalism trains us: When we see something big on the horizon, we don’t wait for it to sail our way. We throw all our resources at it and ride the wave.
Maybe you’re not that single-minded, not even journalistically inclined. No problem. There will be plenty of low-hanging story fruit to pick even if you dip in only now and then.
If nothing else, just know that times they are a changin’, and you can piss and moan about it or you can write about it. If you’re a writer, the latter can be your mental health salvation.
You can apply all this logic on story ideation to any genre, any subject area, any writing style, any beat. I’ve waxed on about the specific tactics behind story brainstorming several times in the Writer’s Guide:
Now back to RFK Jr. et al….
What to look for and how to suss out the angles
There will probably be some good proposals and good changes to the healthcare system. I dunno. Call me a skeptic! But there will be a lot of BS. Opportunities galore for debunking and reality checks—not to be purposely snarky but for the good of humanity. Here’s an example:
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