Writer
Heal Thyself
Panelists: Terry Murray
has been a medical journalist for more than 20 years. Currently
clinical editor of The Medical Post, a weekly newspaper for Canadian
physicians, she also freelances for U.S., European and Australian
publications. She's been a member of PWAC
for more than 10 years.
Mark Witten is a long-time PWAC
member who has written many feature articles on a wide range of medical
and health topics for leading consumer magazines over the past 20
years. His health articles have appeared in Saturday Night, Toronto
Life, Chatelaine, Canadian Living and ClickSmart Living, where he
writes a regular wellness column. Mark has won a number of Gold
National Magazine Awards, and national awards from the Canadian Science
Writers' Association and the Canadian Nurses Association for health
writing.
Judylaine Fine is an award-winning
author and medical journalist. Her books on cancer and back pain, which
are written for laypeople, have been published in the U.S. and
Australia as well as Canada. She is also the founder of the Back
Association of Canada and its journal Back to Back, which published
educational information for sufferers and health care professionals for
22 years.
Writer, Heal Thyself: Writing for Health/Medical
Writing & Markets
January 13, 2004. The notes paraphrase the talks of each
speaker
Judylaine Fine: Medical/Health writing is a
nightmare from an economic view. My opinion is that the web is
responsible for much of it. My impression is that people who pay for
the sites have a product to sell. The health info is secondary. I run a
website for one company that gets more hits on product information than
the health education articles. I've been in the industry for 30 years.
When I wrote a book on cancer, it took a year. I spoke to 50 families
before writing it. One company who hired me to 'write' for them told me
to just cut and paste from other sites. That's not what I do. Actually,
it's not really what they wanted, either, but that's what they wanted
to pay me for. Some of the sites are bogus. The information is wrong. I
have found sites that publish information that's the opposite of what
the research shows, to promote their own purpose.
Where's
the money? [Judylaine holds up several pamphlet-sized booklets.]
These booklets are on back pain. I'm proud of them, got paid for it,
and feel I did a good job. [She holds up a newsletter in the
form of a tabloid-size newspaper.] This was published in
French and English. It contains a non-smoking message, but it's not
obvious about it. Instead, the health information is delivered in a fun
way.
One
of my books was republished in a new edition. I was surprised to see a
quote from a review that appeared in the New York Times printed on the
back cover. My publisher hadn't mentioned it. I could have used the
positive feedback two years earlier! My book was published in Canada
and the United States. Word for word, it's the same. The only thing
that was changed was the title. The Canadian title was Coping
with Back Pain. The American title was Conquering
Back Pain. Shoppers agreed to publish and distribute a
pamphlet I wrote about back pain. They have a bad habit of putting
their copyright on other people's work. When I looked it over for
mistakes, etc., it was fine. But on the day it was to go to print, I
had a bad feeling about it. I called the printer and told them I made a
terrible mistake that had to be corrected before getting printed. They
sent the proofs over, and sure enough, Shoppers had put their copyright
on it. But they didn't own the copyright. I hit the roof and called
Shoppers. They refused to take it off. If they were going to print it,
they were going to own it. So I took out a loan and published it
myself.
Terry
Murray: [Terry's handout is reprinted, below.]
Even if you don't want to become a medical writer, you can write about
medicine for many places. For example, sports. I received a degree in
Journalism and ended up doing clinical writing. You're not going to
want to buy all the references
unless you really, really want to be a medical writer. One dictionary
(Dorland's, Steadman) can cost over $100. These two
are used as the standards in medical writing. Tabers
Encyclopedic is written for nurses, and is a good place to
start. If you stick with it, you'll want to upgrade to Steadman
later.
Online
medical dictionaries can also be quite good. Apply critical thinking to
each site, and check to see who is sponsoring the website. If you can't
find out who's sponsoring it, move on to another site. Merck manual is
available online however, you might as well buy it. The paperback
version is only $10. If you know the name of a doctor you need to talk
to, you can find everything online. You can also find contact
information through the licensing bodies for doctors whether you're
trying to contact someone from Ontario, or anywhere else.
When
writing articles, avoid using abbreviations because they cause
problems. If I find information or charts I think I'll use later, I put
it in an A-Z file and it sits on my bookcase. News and Numbers is a
good source (abridged version on web) and Health Writer's Handbook by a
Texas teacher of Health Writing. The best chapter is about statistics.
Very user friendly. There's the Medical Post, which I write for. At a
smaller edition, it runs 60 to 90 pages. Clinical media coverage (i.e.,
American Heart Association, Canadian Cancer Society) have annual
meetings where new medical information is presented. We cover these
meetings so We get the information 1 to 1-1/2 years before it hits the
mainstream media. Mainstream doesn't cover it until it's been published
in the Medical Journal.
Make
sure you know what the publication is like. Read it. We write for
physicians. Our coverage is very targeted. The Medical Post is a
40-year publication and we have not and do not write from the patient's
perspective. Anyone who takes the time to get to know our publications,
who reads it on a regular basis or reads back issues, will know that.
If you have a great idea that you want to do something on the Romanoff
Report, for example, you don't want to send it to us. We've done it to
death. Take the time to get to know a publication before you send in an
idea.
There
are lots of places where you can get published. Some examples include
the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Nurses publications, MD
Canada, and a new publication, The National Review of Medicine
published out of Montreal. Payment: Medical Post pays 40-cents a word.
Our assigning editor decides what goes in. "The only way to make money
in freelance is to recycle your stories," and she suggests tweaking
them to fit different markets covered by different publications. Check
out the news sites. PR companies Medical Education companies. You may
end up writing teaching kits, slide sets, proceedings of a conference,
etc. Pharmaceutical companies are looking for promotional material and
educational kits. Associations tend not to pay well.
Medical
writing includes many topics: clinical writing, political writing,
financial (i.e., pay for doctors). Medical writing is fascinating. I
spent two years writing for a trade publication on refrigerators, etc.
Medical writing is so much more interesting. If you've never done any
medical writing, try writing a profile of a doctor. Don't cover those
people who have already been done. Find someone who is doing something
of interest that would interest people all across Canada. It's a good
way to get in and get known. Don't pitch doctor stories to nurse's
publications and vice versa. Don't tell editors what their publication
should be covering, especially one that's been successfully meeting a
niche market for years.
Mark
Witten: If you do have a story about being a patient, pitch it to
consumer magazines. There is a fascination with medical writing and
problems, and you have to get that fascination across to the reader.
There's a new magazine called the Walrus, and some well-established
magazines like Toronto Life and Saturday Night, where you can write
3000 words or longer to tell a narrative. You can tell a story in your
own voice. They want you to come up with the best way to tell your
story to their readers. 3000-60000 words. Fees: $3000 to $10,000. You
won't get rich but it's nice to get paid for your work. They offer some
of the best challenges and best editors in the business. Health writing
is very well suited to storytelling. There is usually a life and death
struggle, a human interest, and a good narrative. You're not just
communicating information.
The three elements of a good
feature story are:
- good
narrative
- fascinating
people
- an
interesting discovery
[Mark
had written a dramatic narrative about a doctor who had discovered a
new way of doing heart surgery on infants that saved lives. He wrote
about how she discovered this, and how it related to the life and death
of the infants and parents.]
Do
the research first. Is there an interesting story how they did it? I've
heard it said that you should never do a story proposal more than one
page. That's true, if it's less than 500 words. If you're writing a
feature, it's very hard to put these three elements into a one-page
proposal. The lead in the proposal should be as intense as it would be
for the story. The editors need to visualize the story to get excited
about it. You can do service pieces for Click Smart, Homemakers,
Canadian Living -- it's faster to do, you're just conveying
information. It's important to have the bread and butter stuff (the
stuff that pays your rent) but it's also important to do feature
articles that fill your need for more creative expression.
The Panelists took questions from the
audience:
Q:
Online writing: are there paying
markets?
A: Judy--they usually have a
webmaster. I don't think they'll pay well. How much will they pay for
100 words for a week? It's through advertising where you can make
money. I admire Richard (I forget his last name) who writes his own
website. He gets all these pharmaceuticals to pay him to advertise on
his web site, writing his articles.
Q:
Some people write the article first then
look for the market, others query first. Which is best?
A: Mark--the
query has to be targeted to a specific market. If you know an editor,
you can pass the idea by them first, to see if they give you
encouragement. You can give them a certain amount of time and then
follow-up after three weeks.
Judy--I've never done a query. I
use the telephone. I don't think you owe anyone anything. I've heard
back on something like a phone call and submission eight months later.
ALL-- agree that three months is
too long. Follow up with a phone call after a couple of
weeks.
Judy-- has a little doll she has
hangs near her computer. She envisions that this doll is her audience.
Helps her to really focus on who her audience is. She wrote an article
for one magazine that sent her to Northern Manitoba to write about
women who worked in the mines. It was a great article, but then the
magazine wanted her to write up what recipes these women used. She
fought about this and won the argument 'by the skin of my teeth.'
Q:
Trends?
A: Mark:
Chatelaine, Canadian Living, it's been popular for awhile to write
about health in consumer magazines. Terry: the
Globe expanded their health coverage to four pages a few years ago.
They had four on-staff people writing health coverage. Judy:
I once read an article about colostomy, for the people who have
everything, you can buy them a colostomy, somewhere in Alberta. The
point is, the article was charming. It wasn't just fluff, but it
bothered me that there was no mention about the fact that approximately
90% of diagnostic in the US are not necessary.
Q:
Do you have to tell the people you query
that you've already been published somewhere else? Do you need to tell
your first publication that you're shopping the story around to other
places?
A: No. It's not anyone's business
that you're writing for more than one magazine. However, if you're a
staff writer, you don't want to write for the competition. And you have
to keep in mind where your main cheque is coming from. The 'new' editor
doesn't want to buy stuff that's not 'fresh" so you don't want to tell
them it's a recycled article. Who is paying your salary? It's a
judgment call. If you can get away with it, don't tell them.
[From
Audience: One suggestion is to take same article and sell it
to different, non-competing markets. As long as you own the copyright
you can sell it to whomever you want and recycle the articles.
Freelance writers are paid so little that you have to sell your
articles to as many markets as you can. Try to recycle your material as
much as possible to make it worth your while to write. Don't sell all
rights. Try for 10-15% extra is they want web rights.]
CLOSING COMMENTS:
Mark:
When you're writing for consumers you're writing about health, more so
than medical.
Sometimes it's not a news story that just happened. If you look in the
paper and see something that was just touched on, you can explore it
and see if you can turn it into a feature. For example, I read in the
New England Journals of Medicine about the doctor who had saved at
least ten infants. I approached the families through the doctor. It's
often easier and if the doctor is the subject of the article, you don't
want to go behind their back. The doctor asked others if they were open
to being interviewed. I was able to interview more than those first ten
who were originally written about. You don't have to have all the
interviews in place for the query. [When Mark decided to focus on
writing features, he worked towards it by focusing on the three key
elements and wrote his proposals to help the editors envision the
articles. Terry has met some writers through networking. Mark says the
best way to get work from someone is to show how well you write and
when you get work from them, do a great job.]
Terry:
Look for things that are becoming prominent, but it's hard to avoid
what's been written to death, like childhood obesity and diabetes.
Think outside the box. Brainstorm the different types of magazines you
can write for. You can write about folic acid for medical magazines and
for food magazines. Think of offshoots; trade and consumer, food and
medicine, doctors and nurses and specialist markets, etc. Business mags.
Judylaine: Don't get your back
up when someone is editing your work. They're not being mean. They have
questions, and they're trying to make your article better.
BACK TO TOP
Handout from Terry Murray:
Medical Writer's REFERENCE SHELF
The Basics:
Compendium of Pharmaceuticals
and Specialties:
Other Medical Reference:
- Canadian
Immunization Guide (6th ed.) - Health Canada
Statistics:
-
Victor Cohn and Lewis Cope:
News & Numbers : A Guide to Reporting Statistical Claims and
Controversies in Health and Other Fields, Iowa State University Press;
ISBN: 0813814243; 2nd edition (August 2001), Paperback: 224 pages.
Older, abridged version available on the Web site of Foundation for
American Communications (FACS, an independent, nonprofit educational
organization based in Pasadena, Calif., founded in 1976) http://www.facsnet.org/tools/ref_tutor/newsandnumbers/index.php3
RECOMMENDED READING:
Medical reporting/writing
Barbara Gastel: Health
Writer's Handbook
Iowa State University Press; ISBN: 0813821134; November 1997
Paperback: 204 pages
(especially the chapter on statistics)
(Dr. Gastel is currently preparing a revised edition)
Deborah Blum and Mary Knudson (editors): A Field
Guide for Science Writers
Oxford University Press; ISBN: 0195124944; November 1998
Paperback: 287 pages
Daniel Wartenberg, Doug Ramsey and John Warner,Doris Ober: Epidemiology
for journalists.
Foundation
for American Communications (FACS), an independent, nonprofit
educational organization based in Pasadena, Calif., founded in 1976
http://www.facsnet.org/tools/ref_tutor/epidem/index.php3
Posted April 23, 1996 / Revised Jan. 24, 2000
Gordon Guyatt, MD, Joel Ray, MD, Neil Gibson, MD, Deborah Cook, MD,
Barry Ashpole, Cornelia Baines, MD, Candace Gibson, PhD, June Engel,
PhD, Bruce Histed, RN, MA, Joan Hollobon, David Spencer, PhD, Paul
Taylor: A Journalist's Guide to Writing Health Stories, AMWA Journal,
Volume 14 Number 1, Winter 1999
Trudy Lieberman: Covering medical technology.
Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 2001
http://www.cjr.org/year/01/5/lieberman.asp
Melinda Voss: Clinical Trials.
Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 2001
http://www.cjr.org/year/01/5/voss.asp
Writing
Paula LaRocque: Championship Writing : 50 Ways
to Improve Your Writing
Marion Street Press; ISBN: 0966517636; December 2000
Paperback: 212 pages
Paula LaRocque: The Book
on Writing.
Marion Street Press; ISBN: 0966517695; September 2003
Paperback - 260 pages
Some Canadian markets for medical/health
writing and editing
NOTE: Specific publications, Web
sites, etc. listed here may not currently be using freelancers
Professional publications
The Medical Post
Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ)
Canadian Family Physician (CFP)
Pharmacy Post
Pharmacy Practice
MD Canada
National Review of Medicine
Consumer publications
Daily newspapers
Chatelaine
Flare
Canadian Living
Homemakers
Today's Parent
Today's Grandparent
Elm Street
Saturday Night
Maclean's
The Health Journal (PharmaPlus magazine) ?
News services
Reuters Health
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation - Radio, Web site
Doctor's Guide (Web site)
Other
Public relations companies
Continuing education companies
Pharmaceutical companies
Associations - publications and Web sites (e.g., arthritis, diabetes,
pharmacy, pharmaceutical)
Book publishers
