WHO: Juli Berwald
CLAIM TO FAME: Juli Berwald is an ocean scientist turned science writer. She has written for a number of publications, including National Geographic Magazine, Oceanus, Redbook and Wired.com. She is also the author of Spineless, which explores what the biology and behavior of jellyfish can teach us about everything from engineering to climate change.
WHERE TO FIND HER: On Twitter, Amazon, and her website.

Let’s start with the basics: What time of day do you start writing? Is it easier for you to write early in the morning? Late at night?

I’m a daytime person, though if I’m really working hard on something I’ll wake up early or write late, but that’s the exception. Usually, by the time my kids get off to school and I get the dogs walked, I finally sit down at my desk around 9:00. I try to check my email, take care of business-related things, and then turn it off by 10:30—I have to turn off my email to get any writing done. My work day cuts off when school’s out at about 4 pm and I have to start driving carpools. A lot of days I feel like I get into my best writing groove right around 3 pm. But that may just be because I know I have a “time’s up” facing me.

How many words a day do you produce, or try to produce? How much of that ever sees the light of day?

A lot of what I do requires research and interviewing people so I’m not really beholden to a number of words every day. I definitely give myself space to do those other parts of my job even though I sometimes go down rabbit holes that don’t pay off. I have a lot of documents in folders that say “really good extra stuff” that will live forever in the darkness. But when I’ve got the research in hand for a whole chapter or article, I’d say 800 to 1000 words is a great day. If I’m working on a shorter article 200 words could be a good day if they are really good words. I also do a lot of revising so I’d bet that very little of what I originally start with actually sees the light of day.

You’re an ocean scientist by training. How did you fall into science writing? Have you always wanted to be a science writer, or was it a passion you found later in life? 

From the time I could read, I’ve always been a huge consumer of books and I put authors on a pedestal. Writing seemed like something so beyond my capabilities. That intimidation was intensified in college because it seemed that all the people around me were such fabulous writers. So, in one of the less brilliant moves of my life, I became a math major to avoid the whole issue of writing.

The math came in handy when I decided I wanted to go to grad school for ocean science because I could understand and do technical work. But I also felt stifled because so few people could understand what I was doing. It was only after I fell off the academic path and into a job at a textbook company that I started really practicing writing. I had handicapped myself by avoiding writing for over a decade so I was terrible at it and had a lot of work to do to catch up. And then, there was a long period where I worked on mustering the courage to move from writing for state standards to writing from my heart. But once I started expressing things I felt strongly about and I started to find my voice, it was all I wanted to do.

What was the first science experiment you ever conducted?

In college, I returned from a study abroad program in Israel where I had gone snorkeling for the first time in my life and fallen in love with corals and became fascinated with how they grow. When I got back to the United States I wanted to study how water flow influenced coral growth, but I was a math major and had no clue how to do a scientific experiment.

Still, I was determined and I discovered that there was an abandoned swimming pool in an old gymnasium on campus that was now part of the geology department. Randomly, in the bottom of the drained pool was a flow tank, which was a long aquarium that could cycle water along its length at a constant speed. So I persuaded a geology professor to let me get the flow tank up and running and then borrowed some coral skeletons from a teaching collection. I wired the skeletons in position in the tank and injected food coloring in different places around the skeletons and timed how long it would take for the dye to diffuse away. I was trying to test if an individual coral polyp would “know” whether it was on the edge of the colony based on how fast the dye disappeared.

There are piles and piles of problems with my methods and I couldn’t draw any conclusions from the work, but the sheer bizarreness of working on corals in the deep end of a drained swimming pool still delights me.

Your book Spineless is a fascinating read about the biology and behavior of jellyfish. Why did you decide to write the book? Why are jellyfish important?

I stumbled on jellyfish working on a story for National Geographic about ocean acidification in 2012. The story had a winners/losers graphic in which jellyfish were thought to be winners in a future acidified ocean. I was curious about the data that backed that claim up and dove into the scientific literature. I found that there was a lot of discussion among scientists and the mainstream media about the ways that jellyfish were responding well in today’s over fished, polluted, acidified and warmed seas. Coastal development and increased shipping appeared to add to growing jellyfish abundances as well, at least in some places. At the same time, I discovered that jellyfish biology was astonishing and largely unknown to most people, including me. I discovered that jellyfish are the oldest animal to swim; they are the most efficient swimmers; they have eyes and complex nervous systems; and their stinging cells fire with the fastest motion in the animal kingdom. Every time I dug into any part of the jellyfish story, I found so much material that I realized there was a book there. The story of jellyfish was both fascinating and overlooked, and was an important signal of our collective spinelessness toward the health of our planet.

What’s your favorite thing about being a science writer?

Science. Science is an amazing muse that allows me to understand the world with complexity and wonder. Also, I love learning new things. Science writing lets me talk to scientists about their work, learn what they have discovered, and then try to translate it in a way that’s engaging and meaningful for the reader, which is a challenge that I find endlessly wonderful.

Many say that the first step to being a good writer is to read good writers’ writing, and then try flattery by way of imitation. Is there an author (or authors) you’re trying to emulate when you write?

So many, starting with my childhood favorite Louisa May Alcott right up through Barbara Kingsolver, Helen MacDonald, Cheryl Strayed, Andrea Barrett, Sue Hubbell, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Elizabeth Gilbert.

One writer I was directly inspired by was Rebecca Skloot, who wrote The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. She did a couple things in that book that I imitated. One was inject herself as part of the story, which is something I didn’t start off wanting to do—I hoped that I’d be able to tell the story through a quirky jellyfish scientist. But one never showed up. So I eventually took Rebecca’s lead and injected myself into the story too.

The other thing that Rebecca did that I loved was give her book a narrative arc. One type of science book I don’t like reading is ten essays that are basically stand alones on the same topic. I’m a sucker for a story so I knew that I wanted some storyline in Spineless as well. Rebecca has said that she modeled the structure of her book on the movie Hurricane about a boxer. I also borrowed from screenwriters to structure Spineless. It’s ostensibly structured on the life cycle of a jellyfish, but it also has a typical hero’s journey structure like you’ll find in Star Wars or even Finding Nemo. The section called “Planula” is the call to action. The “Polyp” section brings up challenges. The “Strobila” section is about transformation and revelation and then the “Ephyra” and “Medusa” sections are where I set off on a journey and eventually return to the place where the journey started.

Science writing is a niche occupation. What advice would you have for anyone trying to break into the field?

Read a lot of science writing. I think it’s really a heyday for science writing. What’s out there about science is written so well right now. There’s a huge emphasis on humanization and storytelling, and there are amazing writers telling beautiful stories. And then practice writing. Try to find a group of people to share your writing with and talk about writing. I don’t think I would have been able to write Spineless without the support of my writing group.

Nuts and bolts: The National Association of Science Writers is a great place to find out about science writing as a career. They support a website called The Open Notebook with enormous amounts of really fantastic information. There is a great book called The Science Writer’s Handbook, which is a compilation of advice from a couple dozen really successful science writers. And if you are still a student, there are great masters programs in science writing that might be a good way to jump in to the field.

What are you working on these days? Do you have any aspirations to write another book?

I just came back from the Netherlands where I’ve been researching the story of one of the minor characters from Spineless. He was a very prolific jellyfish scientist named Gustav Stiasny. Stiasny was also Jewish and it looks like he hid in one of Europe’s great natural history museums called the Naturalis to survive World War II. Not only that, he published more than two dozen papers during the war years, mostly out of journals in Berlin. As I tried to find out more about his story, I discovered that he wasn’t the only one hiding. It looks like about a dozen scientists hid in the Naturalis at different times. I’ve been trying to understand how they did it and who helped them survive. And yes! I hope it turns into a book.