Interviewed by Heather Harris

from the Summer 2005 Issue (Vol IX, No 2)

Talking with Rebecca Skloot is like sticking your head out the window of a car moving at 70 miles per hour. It’s exhilarating, a bit disorienting, a little scary, and inexorably compelling. She is all kinetic energy, this 32-year-old member of the National Book Critics Circle’s Board of Directors and freelancer for such flagships as The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, and Popular Science. Fortunately for the rest of us writers, she is also exceedingly generous. I called her at her West Virginia retreat, where she is holed up working on her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (forthcoming from Crown, a division of Random House, in Fall 2006), and she told me without reservation how she has created such an enviable career.

Interviewed by Heather Harris

from the Summer 2005 Issue (Vol IX, No 2)

Talking with Rebecca Skloot is like sticking your head out the window of a car moving at 70 miles per hour. It’s exhilarating, a bit disorienting, a little scary, and inexorably compelling. She is all kinetic energy, this 32-year-old member of the National Book Critics Circle’s Board of Directors and freelancer for such flagships as The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, and Popular Science. Fortunately for the rest of us writers, she is also exceedingly generous. I called her at her West Virginia retreat, where she is holed up working on her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (forthcoming from Crown, a division of Random House, in Fall 2006), and she told me without reservation how she has created such an enviable career.

On Pitching a Story

Rebecca has built her career on queries and she always has at least a couple out there. She follows a few simple rules when she pitches a story. First, she knows the publication she is approaching and something about the person to whom she is addressing the query. She studies a magazine closely, and then begins her queries by telling the editor to whom she is pitching her idea why she chose him or her (usually because of something he or she wrote, said at a conference, or published). “There’s an element of flattery when you really focus in on one magazine – they can tell that you’re serious about their magazine.” Second, she structures the query (which she usually limits to one page) like a story – lead, nutgraph, back to the lead – to demonstrate that she knows how to put a story together. “Queries aren’t just about showing that you have a good idea,” she said. “They’re about making yourself stand out by showing that you can write.” Third, if a query is rejected or ignored, she forces herself to re-shape the idea for another magazine she is pursuing and send it back out within 24 hours. She learned that from her father, Floyd Skloot, who is also a writer.

On Rejection

Like every writer, Rebecca has received her share of rejection. “Breaking in to free lancing was incredibly frustrating. Getting that first national assignment took a long time. The key was coming up with an idea that they hadn’t thought of yet so that they had to try me.” Rebecca has four people in her life that hear all her ideas and read all her material. She trusts their feedback implicitly, which reassures her when she feels discouraged. “When I get rejections I think, but it is a good idea, all these people said it was a good idea. I put more weight on my peers than on the rejections because there are countless reasons magazines reject stories – many have nothing to do with the quality of the pitch.”

On Finding Stories

Rebecca is naturally social and outgoing, and she uses this to her advantage as a writer. She pays attention to the people around her when she is out in public. If someone says something interesting, she asks him or her about it. She discovered her story about goldfish surgery while sitting in her veterinarian’s office and listening to the doctor talk about a patient who was “up and swimming around.” She got a story idea a few days ago while sitting in a pub and listening to a man talk about rowing supplies out to workers on barges on the Ohio River. “I live life as a writer. Every moment is a potential story,” she said. When I asked if anyone had ever told her to mind her own business, she said no, never. “I don’t think it’s weird to walk up to someone and say, Excuse me, did you just say what I think you said, so it doesn’t come across weird to people when I do it. I’m just genuinely interested, and I let that enthusiasm come out.”

Rebecca also keeps track of what else is being written out there. She learned the importance of doing that the hard way after she pitched an idea to a publication whose competitor had just run a very similar story. She subscribes to multiple magazines on a rotating basis, scours the Internet for what is being written and published, and has a circle of writer friends who forward articles that may be of interest to each other. The articles interesting to Rebecca can be about any topic, but she reads a lot of science. When she started writing, Rebecca was strictly a science writer. She specialized in part because she loved science and had a degree in Biological Science, which gave her expertise. Specializing helped her convince editors that she, more than any other writer, was the person to write their science stories. “I don’t know how people break into freelancing as generalists,” she said. Though she still writes a lot about science – including a monthly column in Popular Science – Rebecca now writes about a wide range of topics from food politics to the pack of wild dogs loose in Manhattan that mauled her dog.

On Networking

“Writers don’t usually think to contact established writers and editors to ask for advice or help. But they should. There’s a long tradition of writers and editors nurturing other writers, and most are happy to give advice if asked.” When Rebecca was finishing her M.F.A. and just starting out, she spent a few days in New York. She called several editors and writers whom she admired and asked them if she could buy them lunch, meet them for coffee, come to their offices, or chat with them on the phone. And they said sure. “I didn’t call the editors-in-chief,” she said. “They would have been like ‘yeah right.’ I called assistant editors and associate editors and staff writers - they’re flattered that you want to learn from them. And chances are, someone helped them when they were starting out, so they’re happy to do the same. The key is to not waste their time: have specific questions or ideas, and be sensitive to the fact that they have to get back to work.” From those meetings Rebecca started to develop the personal touch that sets her queries apart from others.

On Marketing Yourself

Writers are notoriously techno-phobic. So Rebecca’s website (www.rebeccaskloot.com) and her new blog (accessible from her website) tend to intimidate. When I asked her who managed her website for her, she laughed. “I set up my own website with Microsoft Publisher. If you can create a Word document, you can set up a website.” All of her publications, honors, professional affiliations and lectures are documented on her website and she refers editors there constantly in her queries. “I don’t know that I do more than other people, I just have this understanding of how to market myself.” She believes that blogs can be particularly useful for new writers. Trying to pitch a story but you don’t have any published work samples? Why not start a blog? “Write scenes from life around you,” she suggests, “stories about whatever you find fascinating, create your own column. Then contact editors and say check out my blog. Voila, you’ve got clips.”

On Book Reviews

Rebecca got her first few breaks in the national market by reviewing science books for major newspapers. “A friend suggested I approach The San Francisco Chronicle about reviewing science books for them, so I did, and they were like ‘Thank God!’ because no one wanted to review these books.” She said that national publications are more willing to take a chance on a new writer with a book review than with an assigned story. “It’s easier to fix a bad book review or throw it out altogether, so they’re more willing to take the chance.”

On Research

Rebecca interviews and reports and researches a story until the same material keeps coming up over and over again. She knows that it is time to stop researching and start writing when she knows all the answers to her questions - when she starts jogging her subjects’ memories and telling them stories. She tape-records all her interviews, but she also takes notes. (By the way, she never calls them “interviews” when she is speaking with a subject – she finds that the word is intimidating for people and it causes them to be self-conscious. Instead she asks people to talk with her, and she calls her talks “conversations.”) She finds that tape recording conversations, even if you don’t transcribe the entire interview, is important for getting the dialogue right, for getting the subject’s voice onto the page. Rebecca also asks what she calls a “throwaway question” during each interview that she conducts. A throwaway question is a question whose answer she already knows or doesn’t need. While the subject is answering the question, Rebecca writes down all the physical characteristics of the person she is interviewing and the environment in which the interview is taking place. “It takes a little practice to not be obvious about not listening,” she said. But she finds this step in her interviewing process critical. “If I didn’t do that, I could spend six hours in a room with someone and leave not knowing whether the person wore glasses.”

After she has finished researching, but before she begins writing, Rebecca spends some time ruminating. She calls this process of not writing but thinking intensely about her story (both consciously and sub-consciously) “fomulgating.” It’s another concept that she got from her father, a mixture of promulgating and procrastinating and several other words they’ve long forgotten. Fomulgating, in Skloot-speak, is the “writing that happens when you’re not writing.” It’s the stewing, the fermenting, the knitting together of a story that happens when the writer is patient and in repose.

When she does start to write, Rebecca tries not to get mired in her research. “At some point, I just have to trust that I know the story and write, otherwise I’ll kill the flow of my writing by going back to my notes every few minutes.” She often writes her first draft straight through, making notations in her manuscript where she needs to go back and check her research and insert a quote or a fact. She writes her scenes first, structuring her story accordingly, and then she goes back and fills in the rest. From assignment to completion, Rebecca generally spends anywhere from several weeks to several months on a story. However, she has spent eight years writing her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which is due out next year. It’s the story of a woman named Henrietta Lacks, a tobacco farmer whose cells – taken without her knowledge before her death in 1951 – became the first immortal human cells. They’ve been alive and growing for more than 50 years. They were used to create the polio vaccine, went up in the first space missions, and are still one of the most important tools in medicine. But no one told her family the cells were alive until 25 years after her death, when doctors wanted to do research on her children to understand the cells.

Not bad for a girl who got kicked out of high school and who hasn’t kept an office job for longer than six months. Cliché as it sounds, Rebecca’s story is a testament to the power of being fearlessly true to yourself and psychotically persistent in pursuing your goals. Rebecca Skloot is living the life she wanted to live because she is willing to work very hard, to take risks, and because she believed it was possible.