Health professionals often email me to ask how to break into journalism. I love these emails, and I’ve noticed that in the conversations that follow, I often end up giving people the same advice. 

A little over a month ago, I had the pleasure of speaking to the students in Columbia’s Narrative Medicine Journalism Workshop as part of their monthly Dialogues on Medical Journalism series. The program trains Columbia University health professionals and trainees how to do health journalism.

Program director Stephen Fried was a remarkably thoughtful interviewer whose questions took me into self-reflective territory I’d never explored. But when it came time to tell people what actually worked for me over the years, I found that my answers hadn’t changed much from when I first started getting asked for advice.

Here are three things I’d tell someone in medicine or public health who tells me they want to start writing.

Although I’ve always loved writing, I did not teach myself to be a journalist. I learned the craft in a structured program — a journalism fellowship at the University of Toronto. The program taught me the basics of ideating, sourcing, reporting, writing, pitching, and working with editors. We pitched real editors on a real schedule starting basically the first day, and by the end of the 10-month program, we each had a portfolio of real work.

I realize not everybody needs that kind of structure to figure out how to do something. Every now and again, I come across an outstanding journalist whose origin story involves stumbling into journalism and picking up the necessary skills along the way. If you have the confidence and chutzpah to get into journalism that way, shkoyach! But I’ve always been someone who wants to know what the rules are before I break them, and having a safe place to figure out annoying obstacles and sticky ethics questions was priceless for me.  

Even once I was an established freelancer, I found the pull of classes irresistible: I craved the structure and access to expertise they offered, and I loved getting to hear from others how they worked. I should be clear here that not everything that functioned as a class for me was technically a class: In 2019, I took a weekend workshop with a nonfiction writer I idolize; in 2023, I won a spot in a weeklong fellowship near Boston that was honestly more like health journalism summer camp than anything else; last year, I took a newsletter course delivered as weekly webinars; a few months later, I took another webinar course aimed at teaching journalists to make TikToks. (Laugh all you want, it only makes me stronger.) I’m taking another invite-only class this summer.

Not all classes are gold: classes that don’t allow much interaction among participants, or that are too big and impersonal to let you get vulnerable with each other, might not yield as much as the smaller ones. So read the reviews and think about what makes a learning environment feel safe and enriching for you before you leap.

For me, these programs, however they were structured, allowed and occasionally forced me to assume a beginner’s mindset, no matter how far along I was on my path. They gave me contacts and connections who’ve become bosses and colleagues. They also, critically, put me in contact with other people who, like me, had questions and self-doubt and needed help. Which leads me to my next bit of advice:

Freelancing is lonely in a way that's hard to convey. Even if it’s only your side gig, most of the people at your day job don’t really know what your work or ambitions are, or how to support you. And if it’s your main gig, the isolation is multiplied: Nobody helps you decode the editor who bought your piece and then ghosted you for six months. Nobody confirms that the weird contract clause is, in fact, weird. Nobody sees your wins. 

You have to build that scaffolding yourself — and while you can do that with local writers’ groups and various online gathering places, the easiest place to find the people you’ll click with — and who you trust to think the best of you — is a class.

Every program I've ever done has spat out a little group of people who wanted to keep meeting after the class ended for accountability, for workshopping, for a frantic "is this normal??" This group is the kiki. Our meetups have led to durable personal and professional relationships that wouldn’t have been sustained by the container of the class alone. Some of my classmates in the Toronto program met every week or so for years after the course ended, and many of us are still in touch. I now freelance for someone I met in the weekend workshop 7 years ago. Going Solo came with a creator Slack I still live in. That TikTok class led to a weekly social video meetup without which I probably wouldn’t be on Instagram.

Many of us are waiting for someone to invite us into the creative community we dream about. But the reality is, you’ll get into those groups faster, and they’ll give you more of the nourishment you want, if you make them yourself. Don’t just join the kiki — be the kiki.

Here's the one that took me the longest, because it runs directly against everything my training rewarded.

When I started out, I was convinced my expertise was my superpower. I was an ID doctor and a disease detective; surely that's what editors wanted. Sometimes it was, but mostly my expertise was a burden. It set my bar for a "pitchable" idea absurdly high — I assumed every story needed a sexy news hook and three layers of complexity, when editors mostly just wanted clear, ground-level coverage from someone who knew what they were talking about. It smuggled jargon into my copy. Worst of all, it quietly corroded my story judgment and interfered with good interviewing. I was so busy knowing things and making sure I sounded smart that I forgot to stay curious about them.

The fix for all of this is the same, and it's a little humiliating, which is exactly why it works: act dumb.

In interviews now, my most useful sentence is, "I'm going to play naive here for a second — explain this to me like I'm eight." When a source gives me something stiff or scripted, I'll say, "I really don't get it. What am I missing?" The best dynamic you can have with an expert is for them to think you're a little slow, because then their guard drops and they explain things in plain, vivid, occasionally faintly annoyed language — and that language is almost always better than whatever they'd have produced while trying to sound smart.

Depending on what kind of health professional you are, and what the culture was like where you trained, you might have spent years learning never to admit you don't understand something. Unlearning that is the job of a good journalist. The doctors who think they know everything make terrible journalists, because they never ask the right questions. And even when they get lucky and get the right answer, they’re too self-conscious to explain it in a way that makes sense to the non-expert audience. Curiosity and humility are the entire qualification. The expertise is a bonus — and a liability you have to keep on a tight leash.

So: Take the class. Keep the classmates you love close. And when you sit down across from someone who might know more than you do, let them think they do.

Are you a clinician trying to build a writing life? I'd love to hear what you're wrestling with. Email me at [email protected], fill out this form, or find me on Signal at kerenlandman.07.

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