“Don't pick the hard stories, sweetheart,” an editor told me long, long ago. “Those are the ones that will break your heart.” Nonsense, I thought. I was young and ambitious and eager to chase a story through multiple all-nighters. He was old and wily and appreciated those stories that would glide through the copy desk and get him home in time for a glass of scotch and dinner with the family. Now, more than 20 years after getting that good advice, I too appreciate the easy stories. But I'm still trying for the hard ones. Every few years, if I'm lucky, I manage to pull one off. When I do, the small, secret joy of having done so sustains me through months of too-short deadlines and too-tight space. In thinking about what elevates a story from okay to prizewinner, from another day at the office to the top of the clip file, I think again about that long-ago editor, a grizzled veteran of the Saturday Evening Post. Don't try to be different, he said. Write about what everyone else is writing about. Those are the big stories, the ones that matter. And he was right. In covering science and medicine, we're blessed with big stories galore. Cloning, cancer, Mars exploration, anthrax, the Big Bang, climate change, nanotechnology, heart disease—it's birth, death, creation, the meaning of life. If that can't get you on page Ai, what can? But that very abundance, and the flood of data that bears those stories along, make it all too tempting to settle for the easy get—to write off the journals, take your lead from the New York Times, and get by. A great story demands more. I like to think of journalism as bricklaying—a noble craft, but a craft all the same. To build a wall, I need bricks. To build a noble wall, I need the best bricks ever. Facts are the bricks of a story, and finding the right bricks requires serious reporting. I can't say that exhaustive research and reporting will guarantee a great story, but I've never been able to pull one off without it.