Writing is as important a tool in your toolbox as molecular biology, chemical analysis, statistics, or other purely “scientific” tools.
As the author, therefore, your job is to make the reader’s job easy.
Trying to get a first draft perfect can be paralyzing, a phenomenon well recognized by the best writers on writing.
Our characters, however, aren’t people; instead, they may be molecules, organisms, ecosystems, or concepts. Nitrogen cycling in the arctic tundra, benzene and its reactions, or genes and their functions can be characters that we “listen to” by carefully analyzing our data with an open mind. Then we can develop these characters in a paper as we discuss them and what makes them tick.
