Friday Night Lights, Bissinger’s iconic story about high school football and race and class, was born there in Odessa and laid the foundation for the rest of his career. His books have covered a failing Philadelphia (A Prayer for the City, about then-Mayor Ed Rendell’s rescue attempt), the St. Louis Cardinals (Three Nights in August, about the Cards’ three-game series against the rival Chicago Cubs), and, now, the relationship between father and son.

In Father’s Day, published last week by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Bissinger chronicles a cross-country drive with one of his twin sons, Zach, a 24-year-old savant. The trip is the narrative spine, interwoven with the story of Bissinger’s career and family, and laced with the history of the treatment of premature infants in this country. The narrative heart is disillusionment, loss, pride, fear, wonder and straightforward, angry reckoning with reality:

Like everyone else, I will one day become too old and sick for my own good or anyone else’s. I think it’s a pretty good guess I will be a cranky son of a bitch. Lisa has told me several times that she is determined to die first to avoid the misery of taking care of me. Like my father before me, I will be terrified. Like my father before me, I will know that I am dying. Like my father before me, I will lie awake thinking about what I did in my life and think about the terrible mistakes I made. But unlike my father, I will also think about what will forever reside in my heart. It won’t be the sweet but ephemeral irrelevance of the Pulitzer and Friday Night Lights. It will be the times I broke through to a place I never knew existed. My beautiful Gerry and Caleb will be with me. So will my beautiful Zach. He will take my hand in his. His grip will be gentle. Neither of us will ever want to let go.

You can read more of Father’s Day in the excerpt that we ran yesterday.

Today we bring you Bissinger’s conversation with Nieman fellows, staff and curator Ann Marie Lipinski, who happens to have been Bissinger’s editor at the Chicago Tribune. This talk is a long one – pace yourself, people! – but we wanted it to run as one piece.

The conversation came on a bittersweet afternoon for the fellows – it was their last scheduled day as Niemans. After their year studying at Harvard, some were planning to go back to their former journalism jobs and others were heading off into the unknown. We’ll start there, with Bissinger talking about his own Nieman experience, and about how the fellowship year helped enable him to embrace the unexpected, and to go on to produce some of the world’s most widely acclaimed works of narrative nonfiction.

Ann Marie Lipinski and Buzz Bissinger (photo: Jonathan Seitz)

Bissinger: The Nieman year was probably the most special year of my life. The intimacy, the stimulation. The stimulation was powerful and intoxicating both in the classroom and out of the classroom, in seminars. The people I met, particularly the foreign Niemans – they knew much more about the United States than we did – it was fun. People say, “Why’d you begin to write books?” The reason I really began to write books is that after my Nieman year I felt I owed it to myself to go and do something out of the box, and really, really do something different, not simply go back to my paper with the sort of glow of a great year. So that’s what I did. I think if I had not been a Nieman I’d either still be at the Philadelphia Inquirer, probably laid off from the Philadelphia Inquirer. I was lucky enough to get the idea for Friday Night Lights and everything broke perfectly. Without the Nieman I really think I would’ve just stayed where I was.

Lipinski: I met you during my Nieman year.

This is true. And you still like me.

(laughter)

Lipinski: Maddy Blais, Madeleine Blais, who had won a Pulitzer for feature writing at the Miami Herald, was teaching at, and may still be teaching at –

She is.

Lipinski: U Mass, at Amherst. And she had a conference and a bunch of the Niemans went up for it. She had a reception at her house afterward, and that’s where I met you. You had a galley of what would become Friday Night Lights. And you said that you were living in Milwaukee; your then wife was doing a medical residency I think –

She was going to med school.

Lipinski: And I said, “What do you want to do?” You said you wanted to go back to writing for a paper because you didn’t know what would happen with the book. So I said, “Oh, so you want to go work for the Milwaukee Journal,” and you said “Well, I’d actually like to work at the (Chicago) Tribune.” I said, “But you live in Milwaukee.” And you said, “I’ll commute.” And you did, for a year or two.

I think I was there for about two years.

Lipinski: So we worked together. I met your boys then because they were around the office a lot. But the book took off in such an extraordinary way, which I think you’ve regarded as both a blessing and a curse. But before we talk about that – you talk about launching out of Lippmann House feeling this need to do more or different. Can you just go through the process of how you alight on Odessa, Texas, and those kids in that season?

Literally – like you guys – the last day of the Nieman program I got into a car with a fellow Nieman who lived in Seattle and drove across country with her. We took the southern route, so we went through a lot of small towns, small places – Main Street was obliterated then. JC Penney (had been) there and that was gone, Sears was gone. We went through Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and then Texas. You would come upon high school football stadiums and they were gorgeous. A lot of them had been built in the 1930s and literally even if there was a drought they would water the fields and they’d be glistening green. They were painted. They were shrines. They were shrines in these small towns, these isolated places, and I just had the sense that this was where people came. I had read about high school football in Texas and it just stayed with me. I like sports, but I really thought of this (idea) in much more sociological terms: Why do (sports) have the impact that they have and what would it be like, then, to live in that town for a year and simply use the team and the season as the glue to write about all sorts of different things? So the genesis of the idea came literally two weeks after I was done with the Nieman.

Now what I do is, I get excited about a lot of ideas and I just let them sit. I’m sure most of you do that too. You let them sit for a week, months, three months. For me I can really sort of feel it in my heart – I get a sort of pulsating feeling in my heart, my chest, this excitement, and if the excitement lingered that meant I was onto something. Because I only do books that I feel – well that’s not true, one book I did, which was a piece of shit, I did for money –

Lipinski: Which one, LeBron?

We don’t want to talk about it.

Lipinski: I saw you trash your book on Twitter.

I did. Because it was terrible. And I felt like a sellout, because I was a sellout. But the money was really good, so. You know, you have to live. But I was ashamed of it. Anyway. We hate that book. So I went back to the paper and I covered different things. I covered politics. I had done a lot of investigative reporting so I was trying to do a lot of different things at the paper and then I became an editor – they had Neighbors sections back then. And that I really hated.

Lipinski: Because you’re not a neighborly guy.

I was actually a good editor but it was like taking D’s and trying to make them into B’s or A’s, and then the reporter gets all the credit. I mean who needs that shit?

(laughter)

I mean seriously. I mean they prance around: ‘Hey, look at this great story.’ If everyone only knew how fucking bad it was before.

Lipinski: Some of us actually enjoy that work.

You did. You were good at it.

Lipinski:  Your copy was at least B, B-plus, when you turned it in.

Yeah right.

(laughter)

Lipinski: It wasn’t the editing, Buzz, that was the challenge. It was the sitting next to you.

You liked that!

Lipinski:  I did. It was perverse.

(laughter)

And we could smoke back then. Those were the good old days when you could smoke in newsrooms and drink and fuck and all that. Now they’re like insurance companies. Anyway, I found the town of Odessa. It’s not a quintessentially small town – it’s about 100,000 – but it felt like a small town because it was so isolated. It also was big enough that I hoped there would be themes that I could grab onto, whether it was race or educational priorities or the boom and bust economy, and it was a matter of getting permission from the town and the team to spend a year there. And off I went. I ended up quitting my job at the Inquirer.

At that point in time they were giving decent advances, so I got a good enough advance – it wasn’t as much as I was making at the Inquirer but it was enough to live on. But I would’ve done that book for nothing. I just had a passion and a feeling in my heart that this was the right book for me to do. And then I got lucky. As my father says, “You have to be close to be lucky.” But everything felt right. Everything. If you were writing fiction you could not have made up a better season. The characters were distinct, there was tremendous tragedy with Boobie Miles, the black player (at the center of the story). Some people said, “Did you really feel you had to stay there a year?” The answer was yes because it gave me the ability to write with much more authority when I finally sat down to write. I really knew that town. It wasn’t a matter of spending every day reporting – when you write a book a lot of it is the feel of what the town is like, because you’re living there, and your kids are going to school there, and you’re really a part of the fabric of the place.

Lipinski: A lot of people know this (book) from the television show or the movie. What gets lost in that is this extraordinary reporting and writing that birthed the movie and television show. I thought it would be good for you to read something from it. It’s a section about when Boobie Miles, around whom much of the action for the season and book evolves, is injured. Do you want to set it up and give a little context about how you covered racism in this book and the use of these young kids as athletes – the promise unrealized, most of them, for a pro career?

My background was as a reporter. I had worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer at a time when it was an exciting newspaper. It wasn’t perfect but it had great talent, and it really did teach you how to report. So I went down (to Texas) as a reporter. I never went down there as a sports man, and I never saw it as a sports story. To this day I’m called a sportswriter but I’m not. There’s a difference between writing sports and writing about sports. I always saw (the story) as much more sociological. In any book or any story you write you’re looking for narrative glue. You’re looking for a narrative skeleton. In this case it was easy: It was the season. Now the problem was, what if they go 4-6? What if they go 3-7 and I don’t have a season? So one of the reasons I picked Odessa was because they then were the most successful team in Texas history. They had made the playoffs nine or 10 years in a row, they had great players coming back, one of whom was Boobie Miles, the black running back.

But it wasn’t just a matter of – you’ve seen movies about this: You’re a rock star at 17 and you’re washed up at 18. I was there in 1988 and they’d built a stadium in 1985 that cost $5.6 million – it’s the only bond issue the town ever passed. They flew to several away games by charter jet, which cost them $70,000. But it also became apparent they only cared about these kids for as long as they played football. College, or taking the SAT, was not encouraged. The academic lives of these kids was a joke. They were treated as gods. At school they basically had these geisha girls who’d bring them cakes and cookies and beer every Friday. But you could smell tragedy. One of the neat things about writing is the stuff you don’t put in, the stuff that you remember that informs what you write, and I would watch some of the kids who had played the year before and they would come back to the locker room, and you could see the misty look in their eye. They were has-beens. They really were in effect dead.

In the case of Boobie, the racism of the town became very, very apparent. This was a town that had not integrated its school system until 1982. It had been forced by court order. Then when it did integrate, football was such a priority in this town they drew this really weird sort of square (boundary that included) the black housing project, because that’s where the good football players were.

(Bissinger reads from Friday Night Lights.)

Well, the saga of the story is that he tore his anterior cruciate ligament, which is a very serious injury. To recover from it takes tremendous willpower, which Boobie never had. His career as a football player basically ended. It particularly ended in terms of the coaches when they found another running back who was almost as good. Boobie came back for a little bit, which was ridiculous, because he still had not had his knee repaired – he couldn’t cut. It was wincing, to watch him. So he quit the team, and when he quit the team he started flunking every course. As I (wrote), the coach called him a “big dumb ol’ nigger.” I remember the boosters hanging out one day and laughing and joking around and them saying, “You know, maybe Boobie should do what you do to a horse that’s pulled up lame. He should take out a gun and shoot himself.” They thought that was funny.

He fell apart, but he really had fallen apart before, and this is why the town I guess hated me, but that’s OK. I saw what happens: He was treated as a football animal. That’s what they felt he was. They felt he was a dumb-nigger football animal who had no use in life except to play football. He could not be educated; he was not worth educating. Nothing was demanded of him. He had a tutor who would give him the (answers) to all the tests beforehand. He was actually getting paid to play by an unnamed booster – he would get as many dollars as yards that he carried. This was a poor black kid from the bad side of the tracks and he gained 1,500 yards or 1,200 yards, which was 1,200 bucks, which was a lot. So there was no incentive to get an education. He was encouraged not to. But the problem with football animals is that when the football ends, you have nothing. Nothing.

Now, he wasn’t meant to be a physicist, he wasn’t meant to be a journalist. He wasn’t meant to be a lot of things, but he was not stupid. He had a certain intuition. But when you have no education – I knew when he got hurt, because obviously you can tell I was right there – I looked into his eyes and I knew that his life would be nothing but tragedy. I knew. And that’s what it has turned out to be. I’ve stayed in touch with him.

Lipinski: Can you talk about that a little bit? You write about that in the new book, which we’re also going to get to. We had Alex Kotlowitz here recently. There Are No Children Here is a book in which the author develops very intense relationships over an intense period of time with the central subjects of the work, then the book is published, the book is very successful, the writer goes on to do great work and these kids are left in a different place than they would’ve been had the writer never met them. Paths diverge and a lot of these relationships end, and for you and Alex it’s been different. You write about it very openly – not just the emotional aspects of your relationship with Boobie but the financial aspects of your relationship with Boobie. I wonder if you can talk about how you made decisions about what kind of relationship that would be.

I’ve given Boobie a lot of money over the years – not that that makes me a hero or a good man or a bad man. I think he needed it, although sometimes I think he was just playing me. I never paid him during the season. I never paid him when the book came out, because I felt that would be unethical. But as he began to disintegrate and to sell drugs and to not hold a job he began to call me. I knew that he was drowning: “Buzz, I can’t pay the rent, if you could just help me out, I’m about to get evicted.” I would call the landlord and he’d say, “Yeah, he hasn’t paid rent in two months” so I’d send it to them. Over the years, I don’t know, I gave him 50, 60, 70,000 dollars. I think I did it initially out of guilt out of a large degree or some degree. The subject-journalist relationship is, for me, made complex – Boobie’s argument was, “Well, if none of this ever happened to me there wouldn’t be a book.”

Boobie has the worst kind of American celebrity that you can possibly have, which is very typical now in the American culture. People may not know his name but they know his story. In the TV show he’s Smash Williams and he’s had T-shirts emblazoned with his name, he recently had a rap song that was named after him. He got fucked by the movie people. What they do is, they invite you to the set and you hobnob with Billy Bob Thornton and you touch Tim McGraw’s hat and they put you in a scene. Meanwhile at night Boobie was slinging drugs to try and take care of his twins, and he loves those kids. He had no job but he was a celebrity. He’d go to the mall and it would be, “Boobie, can I have your autograph?” But it was bringing him nothing.

Part of it was his difficulty in accepting responsibility. The other thing that happened is – you gotta remember: He’d been robbed of his dream when he was 18. He’d always had this vision of himself: I’m gonna be a pro football player. It was hard to get that stardust out of his eyes, and it was only enhanced after the movie. Double whammy. But what happens is, they don’t give a fuck. They get up and leave and go make other movies, and there he was.

But (our relationship) evolved from guilt into really caring. I was concerned. I would get phone calls where he was not only desperate for money, but desperate: “I got no place to run, my wife’s in prison, I’ve got these kids and I love them but I don’t know how to support them, I’ve even thought of suicide.” I did dread getting a phone call one day where he’d gotten shot or killed because he committed some type of serious crime. And what After Friday Night Lights is about – it’s a short e-book – it’s about my relationship with him, which I think has developed into one of love. It’s a complicated kind of love, because there were moments when I felt played, and there were moments when I was so eager to help him that I did no due diligence.

I saw him recently and he was doing better. He was working. He’s been in and out of all types of jobs. Every shit job there is, he’s done. He has no education. Now he has a felony conviction, for (aggravated) assault, because he does have an impulse issue; he gets angry very easily. There’s a limit to what I can do because I’m 2,000 miles away. I tell him, “Boobie, you gotta just suck it in, stop fighting.” But I do love him and I think he loves me. We’re splitting the proceeds of the e-book, so he’s gonna actually get some decent money. And it’s his. I’m not gonna tell him how to use it. Why are we sharing the proceeds? Because, once again, without his story there would be no e-book. And I could argue just as vociferously that without me there would be no e-book, without the reputation of Friday Night Lights. So you could play this game back and forth. I would love to see him make it. I hope he doesn’t spend it all at once. I’m not gonna put it in trust because it’s just too complicated. I don’t want to be the administrator of it. I do tell him, “You’re getting a lot of money. Do not spend it all at once. You need a cushion.” I’d like to see him have some stability in his life.

Lipinski: So after Friday Night Lights there were a number of things. There’s A Prayer for the City, which is your immersion examination of Ed Rendell’s term as mayor in Philadelphia. There’s the LeBron book, and some other things. But I want to touch on the new book and then open it up to fellows. I want to talk about Father’s Day not just because it’s the new book but because it’s the work in which I think you are the most raw, the most personal, the most revealing, in some cases in sort of embarrassing ways. You talk about your psychoses, you talk about your divorces, you talk about really rough moments in your relationship with your parents, but the central story, of course, is your relationship with Zach. So, Buzz and his wife had twin boys who were born – was it 13 weeks?

Thirteen and a half.

Lipinski: Thirteen and a half weeks prematurely, and both of them weighing under 2 pounds

And this was in 1983 –

Lipinski: Can I just – just stop for a minute –

(laughter)

She like this all the time?

Lipinski: I usually get a few more words in –

She’s gotten much more sassy –

(laughter)

Lipinski: But the fundamental difference is three minutes. Gerry is born and yes he’s small and yes he’s early but he goes on to graduate school at Penn, to become a teacher. Zach is born three minutes later and it’s three minutes that cost him a lot, and cost you and your wife a lot. There’s been oxygen deprivation and he is born with a lot of serious burdens, which will define the rest of his life and change your life and your wife’s life and his twin’s life, and everybody who knows you, their lives, in very profound ways. So Father’s Day really is a book about a road trip. It’s the trip you and Zach take to kind of rediscover each other and for you to try to understand your son. The best way (to convey this), really, is for you to read this conversation that the two of you have, and it’s one of many conversations you recount quite literally in the book. You are with your son as you are with the world: You are volatile, you are loving, you are profane, you are difficult, you are supportive, you’re all these things, and you’re very open about it in this account, which I think must have been very hard to do. So maybe just set up where we are at this point in the trip and then read that conversation, where you’re speaking very directly to Zach about what happened to him. He knows his birth story, so this isn’t a surprise to him by any means, but it’s a tough conversation.

I just wanted to do something different with him. I got this idea to drive across country, which I thought was great until he told me that he hated being in the car and wanted to fly. But we did it and the first half was pretty rocky. I was pretty stressed. And I say this – he was not the child that I ever imagined having and he’s not the child that I wanted. I sort of cringe when I say that, but it was true. He had trace brain damage so his disability is particularly in the area of comprehension. He’s very verbal, he’s social, he loves people. He’s a savant. But his comprehension is limited. But not only did I really want to discover or rediscover him, I felt I had to tell him what he was like. I could no longer hide it. I didn’t want to hide it. First of all, I felt he had the right to know. Second of all, I’m not an outsider. I’m his father, and I’ve always believed in openness with my kids. And I didn’t want this thing where I’m gonna treat Gerry this way and Caleb this way and Zach’s over here.

I also wanted to know, because it would inform our relationship in the future, how much did he really know about himself? So this a moment and – and I’ve been criticized for it by critics, who are fucking assholes –

(laughter)

Lipinski: You’re on the Indiana Skyway or –

On the Indiana Skyway. It’s pretty early in the trip, and I am trying to find a moment – it was hard: How do I bring this up and where do I bring this up? So this is where we are. I think it was the second day of the trip:

Some people said, “How could you ask your son a question like that?” I wanted to know who he was, and I also wanted to converse with him as I conversed with my other children. Part of the problem with a child like Zach is that as wonderful as he can be, you have this constant sense of being stuck: We’re playing the same games, the same routines, that we’ve played for 15 years. As a parent it drives you crazy because you don’t want your children to become stuck. We all have hopes and dreams for our kids; we all have aspirations.

As a journalist, all I ever do is try to get people to be honest about themselves and open up. Sometimes I do it, sometimes I don’t. I felt, well if I’m gonna turn the light on myself I have to be honest, because I think there’s purity in honesty. I think that’s where you learn. This wasn’t some conceit, some attempt to draw negative attention to myself. Because the way I am informs me as a father, as a parent and as a man. If I was more cheerful, if I was more optimistic, I probably would’ve thought of Zach very differently. If I wasn’t impulsively volatile I would’ve thought of Zach very differently. So I put that in. Because I thought it was important. Some reviewers have understood that and some reviewers have said, you know, that I’m dysfunctional, a basket case or cruel. And that killed me. Because I’m many things, but I’ve never ever intentionally been cruel to my son. Ever.

I knew that that (reaction) was the risk. But to me, what’s the point of writing a memoir – and I’d never written one before and I’m not gonna write one again; my life is not that interesting – what is the point if you’re not honest? I think most memoirs are not honest. I think too many memoirs are piped. I think they make up shit to make themselves look better and to give it more narrative drive. I didn’t want to do that. Ninety percent of the conversations in (the book) are taped. They’re real. They happened. There’s many people who say Zach is wonderful and his father is cruel and spouts a lot of profanity and treats him terribly, but that was not the intent; I felt I had to show myself as I was, just as I was showing my son as he was.

Lipinski: So let’s open it up to the fellows. 

Dina Kraft: I wondered what you learned about Zach and what surprised you.

It’s a good question and some people – you know, “I’ve learned this,” “I’ve learned that,” and it’s a contrivance, because you want some moral purpose to the book, but I did learn a lot about Zach. I learned many things. First of all, his ability for empathy, which I had never really seen. He’s very kind. He’s very ebullient. It is true that he was constantly steadying me, and he had an intuition for when I was getting upset just beyond getting lost and swearing. He just knew and he would put his hand on my back, or put his hand on my shoulder and basically say, “Dad, it’s gonna be all right.” He had never shown that.

But it was more than empathy. He knew: My father is upset, maybe there is something I can do to calm him down. As opposed to getting freaked out himself. He’s very, very steady, and I had never known that about him. Because he’s funny – like, he goes to a funeral – he loves wakes because he loves seeing people he knows. The death of a person doesn’t mean anything to him, really. He’s very observant, much more observant than I ever thought because half the time I don’t think he’s paying attention, and then something pops out where he’s paying close attention. I’ve found, too, that he has more than a yearning for independence. One of my goals as a parent within the limits of what we can do is to encourage that independence. He needs it. He wants it. Oliver Sacks says that within all of us, whatever the impairment, or not, resides this need to be whole. And that’s true. Part of Zach’s wholeness is that he’s mature. He doesn’t want parents hovering over him all the time. Now we’re not gonna be irresponsible about it – he’s not gonna live alone – but he really showed a responsibility. It excited him. It made him feel proud. It made him feel: I have an identity that’s my own.

So I learned that. I also saw the ways in which – he’s stuck in some areas and always will be, but he’s also maturing. His vernacular has gotten better, particularly in the Epilogue, as I get people up to speed. The book took so long to write – his vocabulary is better now, his conversational ability is better. Normally it’s kind of a rote routine of what are you wearing, where do you live, what’s your birthday, and then he’ll remember it for the rest of his life. He’s trying to negotiate more how to insert himself into conversations. Someone will mention a movie and he’ll mention a movie that he’s seen.

Did the book change me? Did the trip change me? I don’t think it did. I’m still ambitious. I’m still frantic the book will be a failure and if it’s a success it won’t be as big a success as I anticipated, and all that shit that I go through. But it did make me feel closer to Zach. We’re much closer. I once moved away to California to write for NYPD Blue for a year, and he didn’t care. It was about 10 years ago. Then at one point we were thinking of moving to New York, and it’s not that away from Philadelphia, and I said, “Zach, how would you feel?” He said, “I don’t want you to go.” I said, “Well, how long can I go for?” He said, “You can go for a weekend.”

(laughter)

And he meant it: I’ll never see you. I said, “I’m not going anywhere.” I love all my boys – Gerry is amazing, Caleb, the youngest, he’s at Kenyon, he’s beautiful, fantastic. He was on an exchange program to Cape Town University, so we were all gonna go see him. And Zach for the first time with legitimacy said, “I want to go.” Flying is really hard for him; he gets very antsy. I said, “Zach are you just saying that because we’re going or do you really want to go?” “No, I really want to go.” We figured out strategies for him to – you know, it’s a 14-hour flight – strategies – he loves Pee Wee’s Playhouse – it’s the only movie he’s ever liked. And he likes Angry Birds, which he can play on the iPad. We did pop him with a little Ambien, which certainly helped. And he was very reassured, sitting next to Gerry. He did great. Well, I think he did great. I was in business class and they were in economy –

(laughter)

So I don’t really know how he did. But Zach said he did great –

(laughter)

Gerry’s take is slightly different. He said Zach asked every two minutes, “Are we there yet?”

(laughter)

But you know, he made it. And I went back there occasionally.

(laughter)

Gerry had a really glum look on his face. I slept well.

(laughter)

But we got to South Africa and I have to say, it was like boys’ weekend. To have all three of them together, and for Zach to make that trip, was a big, big step for him. It was great.

Hope Reese: Was your family with you in Texas (for the Friday Night Lights research) –

Yeah.

Reese: — I wonder what that was like, and I wonder what it was like for the town to have you and your family.

They liked it. They – when you do books like this they’re looking for commitment. That’s one of the reasons – look, I was there to get people to open up. You want people to trust you, and they loved the fact that I wasn’t parachuting in and out. I’ve seen people try to do books like that and they really don’t work. (If you’re on the ground people say): This guy’s committed; this guy lives here; this guy’s gonna rent an apartment and live in this shithole for a year and his kids are gonna go to school. We were part of the fabric of the community and that meant a lot to the town. We had fun. Because there are a lot of good people in Odessa. You know, newsrooms are hard for me. Because I get jealous and I get petty and I hate it when someone else is getting attention.

Lipinski: Buzz, have you stopped not reading the New York Times book review section or can you read it again? He’s not read it in years because he cannot tolerate happy reviews about other people’s books.

(laughter)

No, I can’t. I just looked at the best-seller list to see if my little book was on it, which it was, for one week. I have not read – it’s pathetic. I haven’t read it in more than five years. My shrink told me to stop reading it so I stopped reading it.

Jonathan Blakley: Where would (Boobie Miles) be right now, had you not helped him?

I think he would be in prison. He thinks he would be in prison. I think he would have committed — out of desperation or taking too many drugs — an armed robbery. Or killed himself. So he does know that when push comes to shove – we’ve had a lot of fights, a lot of hang-ups, a lot of fuck-you’s but sort of like husband and wife we then reunite. It makes me feel that life is cool. Our backgrounds could not be more different. I grew up in a life of obscene privilege on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I never went to public school a day in my life. So I just think it’s serendipity, and cool, that you can love someone who came from totally, totally opposite conditions. People say, “What do you get from him?” Well, he’s funny, he’s sweet, he loves kids. Yeah, it makes me feel I’ve done something good. But then I get worried that – sometimes I do feel I’m aiding and abetting. He knows he can get money from me, he knows he can guilt me and that that’s gonna make him less responsible. It does make me feel good that maybe I’m really helping someone who I felt would always need help.

Tyler Bridges: I’m always interested in the question, as a journalist, when you get so close to people and you want to get the truth then you have to take a step back and potentially hurt people that you’ve gotten to know and like. How did you handle that issue? Obviously you wrote things in Friday Night Lights that pissed off people, but did you also find that – were you just cold-blooded about it and could do that?

It was hard. I began writing the book in Odessa, which was a huge mistake because I needed distance, I needed separation. They were hard decisions because the good thing about access is that when it works it works; the difficult thing about access is, you develop relationships, you make friendships. There are certain people who will never forgive me and never talk to me again. But other people knew I was there as a journalist. Then the question is: Saying a town is racist, is that gratuitous or is there real evidence? To me it was not simply the evidence of the word “nigger” – you go through the lawsuit that was filed to have them desegregate the schools in 1982 and it’s terrible, really terrifying. And as I say, I didn’t intend this to be a sensational expose but I did intend it to be an expose of a town that had become totally carried away by football, where it had become the reason to be.

Bissinger was a 1986 Nieman (photo: Jonathan Seitz)

The kids themselves, that I focused on, all supported me, which was very, very important. The older people, some of the coaches, you know, never forgave me. But one thing I did in After Friday Night Lights – (earlier) I did give people some passes. I never named the assistant coach who called (Boobie) a big dumb old nigger – I’d let it pass and that had bothered me for 20 years. And it bothered me because I remember talking to Boobie at one point and Boobie saying: Do you have any idea what it’s like to have someone call you that in a book, something that’ll be in there forever? And I’d never thought of it that way. The intent was not to shine on Boobie; the intent was that this was the racism. I thought, “If I’m not protecting Boobie, why am I protecting this coach?” So in After Friday Night Lights, which came out about a month ago, I named him.

David Skok: You wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about the Philadelphia Inquirer, about the (Ed) Rendell leadership group stepping in, and I’m just curious about what compelled you to take that stand and what the reaction has been. And how do you feel about the Inquirer today?

I felt compelled to take a stand because I knew Rendell and I knew the team he had put together. I thought it would be a blithering disaster, far beyond what other papers have had to do. I mean I understand that developers have bought papers, and Warren Buffet bought a paper, but I don’t know another paper in which you had a former governor, mayor, arguably the most powerful person in the state, running a paper, making editorial policy. Not only that – it wasn’t just simply a matter of what Ed might decide to do; it would be the thousands of people who would call Ed every fucking day because they would hear a rumor. And I know Ed – he would be very susceptible – sometimes out of kindness, sometimes out of whatever – to protecting someone. And I felt the influence he would have, that it would be a disaster, that it would be the worst-case scenario of a paper being taken over.

The reaction was predictable. I actually do think it did have something to do with (the fact that there was) increasing pressure and criticism and Rendell dropped out. I think he realized this was gonna be a can of worms that he didn’t want to get involved in. The consortium that bought it does include George Norcross, who’s a very powerful politician, and Lewis Katz, who I never really trusted. Norcross did actually do something that I did admire; he wrote a public letter and said, I will not in any way influence coverage in the paper when it involves me, any of my companies or any of my family. And if he sticks to that, that’s good.

Right now you can’t really tell. They brought back Bill Marimow as editor. Bill is a wonderful editor. Whether or not Bill is right – because Bill is very old-fashioned and papers are changing and papers need to change, and whether that type of old-fashioned editor is good for the paper, I don’t know. It’s bizarre – he was there and then got fired by the publisher and now he’s back and they fired the publisher. So.

To me the hope is – for these (owners) it’s a toy. They don’t really care about making money; they’ve made a ton of money in their lives. They do seem cognizant of not wanting to interfere. For now. The paper still does good journalism. But I don’t know what the future holds. Nobody does.

Anna Griffin: You mentioned that the Inquirer, when you were there, was a place that taught you how to report. Talk about what that means. Do you think newsrooms still do that?

What was great about journalism when I entered it, which was right after Watergate, in 1976, papers were hot, papers were making money, but beyond that they all wanted investigative reporting, they all wanted long-form reporting. So when I was at the Norfolk Ledger-Star I was doing 125-inch stories as a kid reporter. So even there you began to learn narrative – how to tell a story. When I went to the St. Paul Pioneer Press I wrote a 35,000-word story, seven full pages in the paper. So even before the Inquirer, the tools of interviewing, the tools of developing characters, the tools of telling a story, the tools of drawing a reader in were things I had already learned, and they were certainly honed at the Inquirer, which gave tremendous amount of time to stories. The stimulation for me was good and bad, being around other reporters who were superb. Gene Roberts is a complex man and he was great at the Inquirer – it’s a nice aphorism but it’s true: The key to reporting is to zig while everyone else zags. And I did remember that as I was in Odessa. The chips fell where they may. People accused me of betraying them but I had no idea Boobie was gonna get hurt, I had no idea what would happen. But I went in wanting to write a book that was simply more than rah-rah football. I knew that I wanted it to have weight, to take a subject and really try to elevate it to something special, something unexpected.

Do I think that can be done today? I think certain papers still do it, still try to do it. This is a generalization but I think the writing is just not very good. There’s fewer copyeditors, fewer editors; the 24-hour cycle, which I never had to deal with –  you’re writing for the web, you’re writing for this, you’re writing for that, you’re updating here, you’re updating there. The writing has really gone down, and that was the one thing that was really coveted at the Inquirer. Some papers are still doing some good investigative reporting. But papers don’t have the same relevance. Of course neither do books. Neither do magazines. I don’t know where we’re headed. Every portion of the printed word is in turmoil. News holes are getting smaller and smaller and smaller. But you know what? A lot of good things are still done. One of the things that I don’t miss about papers is the constant − you guys know − it goes up the food chain, one editor after another after another after another, and what I think happens is I think it loses its voice. Everyone takes a shot at it. It’s like making a bad movie. It’s better if you stick with one editor.

(To Lipinski): Do you know Larry Kramer, the guy who just took over at USA Today?

Lipinski: No.

He any good?

Lipinski: I don’t know.

I do think, whether he’s good or not, I do think that was an interesting choice, and a good choice, them picking someone who had not been in the news business since 1991. Papers have to think out of the box. It’s hard for journalists to think out of the box. One of the reasons I left print journalism was because I got a little bit bored of being reined in. But they have to (think out of the box). And they still may fail. What I worry about the most is that − there’s been so much negative written that readers may have said, “Well fuck it, they’re dead.” And if they die we’ll have these little websites but we’ll have no news. We’ll have no vigilance; we’ll have no reporting of any kind. And it’ll be fucking chaos. That’s more than a tragedy; that’s a social disaster.

Carole Osterer: Can you talk about what you’re working on next? 

Sure. Nothing. I mean, I’ll do magazine pieces. (Bissinger writes for Vanity Fair.) I may do something entirely different. I actually may do radio. I’ve done it before. I like talking, as you can tell. I have a lot of opinions. This book took a lot out of me. I get too wrapped up – this is the way I am, and I’m being honest: I am very, very negative, and I’m very, very hard on myself, and I’m sort of tired of beating myself up for nine-tenths of the book and then thinking, “Oh, maybe it has some potential.” And I’m lonely. Writing books is great, but I’m tired of just looking at the computer. I’ve done it by myself for, what, close to 25 years. And I love new challenges. That’s why I wrote this. I had never written a memoir. I mean, I just like new challenges. And I think it’s good to step away for a while. It’s not that I’m necessarily burnt out but I’d like to do something different for a while and then recharge. It always takes me a long time between books. For me, the older you get the less you feel that little palpitation in your heart. I’m not like David Halberstam, who said, “The first one I wrote for love, everything else I wrote for money.” It’s hard enough to write a book when you love the subject, and it’s impossible when you don’t.

Lipinski: Do you remember your last Nieman day? How you felt? 

I mean, you feel tremendously sad, and you feel you’ve been through something incredibly special. I didn’t feel that sad. I felt excited. I felt like I’d been through an experience unlike anything I’d had in my life. And I was revved up. I didn’t know when it would come or how it would come or why it would come, but I was revved up that I was gonna do something different. So I don’t think there really were a lot of tears that day. Everyone said, “We’ve been through something magnificent and we’re lucky to have had the privilege of being through something magnificent, so there’s no reason for tears.” There was reason to say, “We are very lucky because we are very good” – as you guys are – “and we’ve had a magnificent time, and now we have to take those moments and what we had.” You owe it to yourself to do something different. Because you’ve had such a marvelous year of stimulation – intellectually, socially – that’s what these things are about, getting away from it all. Even if you’re going back to your own paper, do something different. Do a beat. Write a book. Whatever. Just do something different.

He was talking about his new book, Father’s Day, a wrenching memoir about a cross-country driving trip with one of his twin sons, Zach, a 24-year-old savant with the comprehension skills of a 9-year-old. Check back tomorrow for that chat, and to hear Bissinger read a particularly moving passage from the book, which was published last week by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

In the meantime, here’s an excerpt, from Father’s Day:

We wake up. We dress. We eat the free continental breakfast out of fear of the desk clerk. Zach finds a computer in the lobby and checks his e-mail. His roster of contacts is impressive and ever-expanding. It is one of the reasons he compulsively collects business cards, to find e-mail addresses. If that doesn’t work, he takes to the Internet with relentlessness. He has taught himself to search exhaustively, part of his intrinsic process, as Oliver Sacks has said, to make himself whole and connected to the universe of people he likes. Because of his prodigious memory he often knows more about their lives than they do themselves. Waiting for the train one day, Zach saw a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer he had befriended. He asked him why he was there: it was his day off. Zach was right. The reporter went home.

Some e-mail exchanges continue for months or longer, until Zach cuts them off abruptly and without warning. A few gently ask if I can find out what happened, maybe get them reinstated. I feel like the father of the maitre d’ at a hot new restaurant, whom friends ask for reservations because of my perceived pull. I have none.

He doesn’t even let me read what he writes. I’ve only seen a small sampling that a few of his correspondents occasionally share with me. He writes in caps and always asks questions. Punctuation is optional.

DEAR ART WHEN CAN WE GO FLYING IN YOUR PLAN AGAIN HAVE YOU EVER BEEN UP TO NANTUCKET MEMORIAL AIRPORT OR TO THE NEW BEDFORD MASS AIRPORT OR TO THE HYANNIS AIRPORT

DEAR STEVE WHAT COLOR SHIRT PANTS SHOES TIE ARE YOU WEARING TODAY AND IM GOOD BY THE WAY AND WHEN ARE YOU TRAVELING NEXT FOR WORK AND WHO HAVE YOU TALKED TO FROM THE INQUIRER THESE DAYS AND DO YOU EVER TALK TO VERNON LOEB OR BILL MARIMOW OR MIKE LEARY OR PAUL MOORE OR TO JONATHAN NEUMANN

DEAR KEVIN HAPPY HAPPY BIRTHDAY AND BEST WISHES LOVE ZACH WHAT DID YOU GET FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY AND WHAT ARE YOU DOING FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY DINNER TONIGHT.

I try to take a peek at his current roster. He shuts down the computer.

—How come you never let me look at your e-mails?

—I don’t know because I don’t.

—You like to keep them private?

—Yeah.

—They should be private. You’re an adult now.

—Yeah.

—Are you happy?

—Yeah.

—Are you sad?

—I’m good.

—Did you have any dreams last night?

—No.

—Do you ever dream?

—No.

—Are you having a good time?

—Pretty good.

We find the minivan in the parking lot and climb inside. I still feel slightly blurry from driving the night before but I am determined to be upbeat.

—Ready for takeoff, captain.

—Yeah where are we going?

—Chicago, Chicago, a helluva town, a helluva town.

I repeat the chorus. I repeat it again, hoping in vain that Zach will sing along with me, just as I am hoping in vain that I will rejuvenate. I can’t get out of the parking lot. I take lefts when I should be taking rights. Arrows only take me in circles. We have not driven one one-hundredth of a mile yet today.

—WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS? HOW THE FUCK DO YOU GET OUT OF HERE?

—There’s an entrance over here yeah yeah here’s the entrance.

Zach guides me like a Good Samaritan helping a blind man cross the street.

—Sorry, Zach. I shouldn’t have gotten mad like that.

—Yeah.

—I love you, Zach.

—I did good didn’t I Dad I helped you get out because the parking lot was you know you know Dad it was kind of hard to get out of.

—That’s because your father’s a moron.

—Yeah.

Up ahead a sign proclaims WELCOME TO OHIO! An opportunity to make amends. I will yell the word Ohio with the ending slightly varied so Zach can correct me. We started playing this game sixteen years ago when he was eight, much like the rite of cuddies. He always finds it an invigorating dose of concreteness and reacts with uproarious laughter. His giggles are like hiccups at first, intermittent and inconsistent, then they start peeling off in rolls if I seize on a word that particularly strikes him. I have tired of this, just like I have tired of cuddies, but I feel repentance is necessary for the parking lot crackup. I must do a better job of controlling emotions.

I won’t.

Let the games begin:

—WELCOME TO OHIEE!

He gleefully responds:

—WELCOME TO OHIO!

Now it’s war.

—OHIEE!

—OHIO!

—OHIEE!

—OHIO!

—That’s enough!

Zach voice goes soft. But he persists.

—It’s Ohio, not Ohiee.

—I know, Zach.

He persists.

—It’s Ohio not Ohiee.

—What did I just say? That’s enough!

His laughter stops. I go quiet with my own duplicity. I am the one who always starts the game and then turns it off because I can no longer stand it because of the feeling of perpetual stasis. Then the guilt.

—You’re right. It is Ohio.

—Ohio.

—Yes, Zach, Ohio.

The fun has been drained out of the minivan. About seventy-five miles outside of Cleveland, Zach pulls out the Rand McNally road atlas and turns to page 91. He traces the blue line of the Ohio Turnpike in the northern tier of the state with his forefinger. The finger moves past the old iron and coal port of Ashtabula, and the Geneva-on-the-Lake amusement park and bumper boats and batting cages, and Conneaut with the four covered bridges that are always part of the Ashtabula County Covered Bridge Festival each fall. He notes that we are closer to Akron than we are to Cleveland. The car floods with nothingness.

I slip a disc into the CD player: Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” She sings in a melancholic, tuneless voice, the music simple except for some odd circuslike refrain in the middle with noxious calliopes. It is the kind of song that the Sex Pistols would have covered with more cheer. Or Frank Sinatra in some detached croon as destructive as his rendition of “MacArthur Park.” Here comes the famous refrain.

Is that all there is / If that’s all there is my friends …

—What does it mean to you, Zach?

—What?

—When she says that’s all there is my friend.

I rarely ask Zach to give his interpretation of something. It makes him nervous. His hard drive stores information only. But I vowed on this trip to probe Zach’s mind, find what is there, what is not there, and what never can be. He considers the question. He starts to answer. He stops. He answers.

—That’s life I guess.

For the first time I wonder if he understands on some level what he and I have been through to get here. His birth and near death, my two divorces and broken engagement. All our moving around. An ongoing earthquake of adjustment for somebody who craves stability and hates change.

That’s life I guess.

I guess it is.

Excerpted from Father’s Day: A Journey Into the Mind and Heart of My Extraordinary Son by Buzz Bissinger. Copyright © 2012 by H. G. Bissinger. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

The story aired on NPR’s “All Things Considered” on Feb. 27, as part of the ongoing project “Radio Diaries” produced by Joe Richman. Richman created NPR’s groundbreaking “Teenage Diaries” series after working on programs including “All Things Considered,” “Weekend Edition Saturday” and “Car Talk.” For the past 18 years, Richman has been giving recording devices to people − mostly teenagers − and crafting stories from the results. More below on what makes Richman’s genre of audio storytelling special. First, let’s look at “Teen Contender,” which Richman co-produced with Samara Freemark and Sue Johnson at womenbox.com.

Claressa Shields is a high school junior in Flint, Mich. Early in the piece, we hear her singing along with her morning alarm:

Claressa doesn’t have to tell us her life hasn’t been easy − we can tell right away, by listening to her describe her living arrangements. We then hear, through her energetic teenager’s voice, how she manages to set the chaos aside and focus on her goals. This establishes the narrative hook: The character wants something. How will she get it? What stands in her way?

She heads through the snow, singing a little, to her dad’s house. He’s a former “dirty fighter” who once made the rounds of illegal boxing matches in abandoned warehouses and Army bases. He served time in prison and got out when Claressa was 9, at which point they developed a rapport:

Claressa goes through all the things that boxers do: practice-sparring, working out, enduring endless lectures from coaches. But she also goes to a black church in Flint to raise funds for her Olympic trials. Claressa’s coach provides another layer of narrative substance by telling us there is much more at stake than a boxing match:

Claressa tells her own story in her own way, answering questions that have not explicitly been asked:

“When I step in the ring it’s like I step into a whole different dimension. It’s like everything outside the ring’s black. Can’t nobody else get in there and help you. Coach, he can’t get in the ring and fight with you. You don’t have your dad, mom. When you get in the ring, you don’t have nobody but yourself.”

What we don’t hear at all is Richman: He does not narrate any of his stories. He’s among a small, talented group of public radio documentarians (among them the Kitchen Sisters, Long Haul Productions, Love and Radio) committed to staying behind the scenes in their work.

People in the radio world call their work “non-narrated,” but this is a misnomer, since stories like “Teen Contender” do have narrators; they’re just the subjects of the stories themselves. I prefer the term “unscripted,” because what sets these stories apart is not their lack of narrator, but their lack of writing. And the script is the place where audio producers write, as opposed to fiddling endlessly with sound files on a screen.

For those of you who’ve never encountered a radio script, here’s the first page of one I just did for PRI’s “The World.” It maps out all the elements of the story: the reporter’s narration (tracks), excerpts from interviews (actualities, or “acts”) and natural sound (ambience, or “amb”):

Barton

As you can see, narration is a big part of the story, as it is for most public radio features. I came to radio from print, and I love writing the script. This is where I get to take control − finally shaping my mess of research, recorded interviews and observations into a story. I try to keep my voice tracks to a minimum but can’t help thinking of them as my little darlings. Yet as I listen to unscripted stories like “Teen Contender” I realize how much writing is the enemy of so many audio narratives.

First of all, words work differently on the page than in the ear. (For example, with its long introductory clause, not to mention parenthetical nature, this sentence that you are reading right now would be a broadcasting disaster. As are the estimated 145.7 million figures, percentages, and dates presented in the passive voice by radio reporters since 1968. Those numbers are total bullshit, of course, but were I reading this paragraph on the air, you wouldn’t be paying attention by now anyway. Wait, did someone just say “bullshit?”)

Also, writing can stand between us and our audio and tempt us to tell stories like a puppeteer. “I’ll use character A to make this point,” our writing brain thinks. “Then I want to get to this funny moment − that dude will crack people up.” Characters come and go without really inhabiting the listener’s mind.

Delivery can stand in the way of story power, too. There’s that whole voice-acting business of reading our writing aloud. A “natural”-sounding script takes more work − and creativity − than you realize.

Yet when a character like Claressa Shields narrates, we’re put directly into Story.

So why don’t more radio producers ditch their scripts and work with pure audio? Many reasons. First of all, it can be very time-consuming to do well. For “Radio Diaries,” Richman says he and his team sift through, on average, 80 minutes of recorded material for every one minute that makes a final piece.

Secondly, the form just doesn’t work for many types of stories, especially news features or stories with many characters or complicated timelines. Richman says he feels the strain when he produces historical documentaries. He and his team once spent a year and a half gathering stories and material about Nelson Mandela. They originally intended a biographical series, but the more compelling material revolved around the larger story of South Africa’s struggle against apartheid. Most of the biographical bits about Mandela eventually had to fall away. “You can’t do the tangents as easily,” Richman says. “You can’t do the side roads. With a script, you can say, ‘While this was happening, this was also happening.’ (Without a script) you sort of follow this one train, this one narrative train, and it’s hard to get off it.”

With unscripted work you’re stuck with what you’ve got, and woe to the producer who isn’t thinking ahead while out in the field. Interview questions need to elicit the complete responses that will stand alone. Subjects need to describe their worlds in a clear way, without all the digressions and backward references that muck up so much of our natural speech. The producer has to listen closely to help people open up in a way that will carry a story.

Producers who do unscripted work tell me there’s a certain joy in trusting their interview subjects that much. And that trust is clearly reciprocated in the stark, truthful moments that often appear in these stories. Producers Ann Hepperman and Kara Oehler once spent two weeks interviewing people in Chattanooga for an unscripted NPR story about homeless people who live along Main Street, resulting in a moment like this from a man named Ernest:

“I’m ashamed of it, but it don’t change nothing. I’m a drug addict. I’m going on a drug run. Honesty is what y’all are looking for in this, right?”

When audio storytellers disappear behind their narratives like this, they give the world a gift. In “Teen Contender,” by the time we hear Claressa actually fighting in the Olympic trials we’ve been living in her rough world for a quarter of an hour. We step into the ring with her. We want to see her make it to the Olympics. We want Flint, Mich., to watch her in the Olympics. My palms were actually sweating as the story built to its finale with suspense and grace and the hard exhalations of this teenage girl.

I still can’t say I’m a fan of boxing, but I’m now a big fan of Claressa Shields − and of producer Joe Richman for bringing me into a story I otherwise would have resisted.

Julia Barton (@bartona104), who writes Storyboard’s Audio Danger column, has been writing and producing for more than two decades. Her work airs on PRI’s “Studio 360,” “The World” and other programs including “99% Invisible.” She’s been an International Reporting Project fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, a staff reporter at WHYY/Philadelphia and an editor at American Public Media’s “Weekend America.” She’s also led extensive media training in the former Soviet Union. 

For more from our collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, see the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

A good ending absolutely, positively, must do three things at a minimum. It must tell the reader the story is over. Must do that. It also needs to nail the central point of the story to the reader’s mind. You have to be leaving him with the thought you want him to be taking away from the story. And it should resonate, it really should. You should hear it echoing in your head when you put the paper down, when you turn the page. It shouldn’t just end and have a central point. It should stay with you and make you think a little bit.

The very best endings do something in addition to that. They surprise you a little. There’s a kind of twist to them that’s unexpected. And yet when you think about it for a second, you realize it’s exactly right.

We’ve curated three of our favorite craft essays for your weekend reading pleasure, starting with a piece that defines the genre. As narrative journalism spreads worldwide, sometimes it’s good to go back to the basics.

Narrative 101, by Rebecca Allen
In “News Feature v. Narrative: What’s the Difference?” Rebecca Allen, now the Orange County Register’s deputy editor of features and business, cuts a clear pattern for anyone confused by anecdote and scene, by quote and dialogue:

A narrative is a story that has a beginning, middle and end. It engages the reader’s mind and heart. It shows actors moving across its stage, revealing their characters through their actions and their speech. At its heart, a narrative contains a mystery or a question − something that compels the reader to keep reading and find out what happens. Newspaper narratives are also entirely true and factual in every detail.

Long or short? Short!, by Jack Hart
In “The Art of the Short Story,” Jack Hart, author, most recently, of Storycraft, suggests building (or rebuilding) audience by assigning the great writers to more bursts of short-form storytelling, the way Hemingway used to do it in Kansas City and Toronto:

Sunday story that runs 3,000 words helps. But short daily stories that brighten the weekday paper may be even more important. Short stories reach more people. And they reach them more often. Besides, good storytellers can maintain a much more consistent presence in the paper if they write short – and often. Does a writer have more impact with something that appears once every three months or once every three days?

Seven building blocks of narrative, by Michael Pollan
 In “Natural Narratives,” best-selling author Michael Pollan offers principles for writing about science and nature, but the tips apply across genres:

You can also construct a narrative out of arguments, ideas. One of the more challenging pieces I’ve written was “An Animal’s Place,” about animal rights, published in The New York Times Magazine in 2002. The piece is an essay of ideas, but it’s also a narrative about an argument. It’s a play with Peter Singer, the animal rights philosopher, and me as characters. The first line of the piece is, “The first time I opened Peter Singer’s ‘Animal Liberation,’ I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium-rare.”

Here’s the whole drama of that piece: Do I finish the steak or not?

The Atlantic’s James Fallows, meanwhile, lamented that Daisey deceived not only a massive, presumably trusting audience but also threatened the credibility of the Western press and the efforts of human rights workers. And, he wrote, none of it had to happen: “If he had even once said that he was presenting a polemic, a metaphor, a dramatization, an ‘inspired by real events’ monologue rather than real ‘facts,’ no one could ever have complained.”

The conversation resurfaced this week with new questions about humorist David Sedaris’ essays, which have appeared on NPR and in the New Yorker. A Washington Post story probed the “gray area” of Sedaris’ work, raising “the question of what’s permissible in the context of a nonfiction program.” Paul Farhi wrote: “The immediate question is whether Sedaris’ stories are, strictly speaking, true − an important consideration for journalistic organizations such as NPR and programs such as This American Life. A secondary consideration is what, if any, kind of disclosure such programs owe their listeners when broadcasting Sedaris’ brand of humor.”

So what’re we talking about here, a story-rating system?

We seem to be pinwheeling toward that moment when publications and programs build windows into process for the sake of preempting attacks on credibility. In the meantime let’s keep talking about it, tedious though the topic may seem. (If the topic doesn’t seem tedious, congratulations − you are a narrative nerd!) How are you framing your storytelling? What decisions have you made about your methods? Are you, say, generally more comfortable putting reconstructed dialogue in italics or behind em dashes than in direct quotes, or in some cases are you so confident in your sourcing that you’ll use the sacred punctuation? Do you prefer to qualify some remembered or reconstructed actions with “perhaps” rather than state them as fact? How much of the reporting and writing process will you address in your About This Story box or your back-of-the-book notes? To what degree will you be transparent with readers? To what extent will you go to be transparent? If your publisher refuses to run the sourcing with the story, or at length in the back of your book, will you create a companion website or another online space and run it yourself? Don’t know how to do that? Here, watch: Tom Lake practically line-by-lines his marvelous Atlanta magazine story “The Last Heavy Footfalls of Doc Hullender.”

Even with a high degree of transparency, there may be questions. Now that trust is fluid, it must be guarded and earned and re-earned, even if you are a god. When Hampton Sides wrote the bestseller Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin, the New Yorker’s David Grann wrote, in a review: “Hampton Sides has long been one of the great narrative nonfiction writers of our time, excavating essential pieces of American history − from the daring rescue of POWs during World War II to the settling of the West − and bringing them vividly to life.” (Takeaway: Sides is highly regarded by one of the most acclaimed narrative journalists in the business.)

In a Q-and-A, Sides was asked, “The ‘Notes’ and ‘Bibliography’ sections … total more than 50 pages − how did you begin to tackle the wealth of information? What was your research process like?” Sides answered, in part: “I don’t think I unearthed any massive bombshells that will change the world forever − like, say, proving once and for all that J. Edgar Hoover actually orchestrated the whole affair. Instead, what I unearthed were thousands and thousands of tiny details that make the story come alive on the page and make it possible, for the first time, to understand the tragedy as a complete, multi-stranded narrative. The book’s packed full of novelistic detail − weather, architecture, what people were wearing, what the landscape looked like, the music that was playing on the radio. To get all this stuff, I had to do the usual sort of archival work − from the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin to the London newspaper archives − and I went pretty much everywhere James Earl Ray went, following in his fugitive footsteps: Puerto Vallarta, Toronto, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Birmingham, Lisbon, London.” (Takeaway: Sides sourced his material extensively, and to the satisfaction of esteemed peers.)

The New York Times gave Sides’ book a great review but for one line: “Beyond writing that ‘the kitchen was redolent with the tang of yeast,’ Mr. Sides goes mercifully easy on the made-up particulars, preferring to take a cool, clinical view of Galt and his subsequent travels.”

“Made-up particulars” − is this characterization fair? Did the reviewer carelessly damn the book’s (and therefore the writer’s) integrity with that one line? Or did the author undermine himself with his description of baked goods?

Here is the paragraph in question:

The prison bakers sweated in the glare of the ovens, making bread for the hungry men of the honor farm. Since dawn, they’d prepared more than sixty loaves, and now the kitchen was redolent with the tang of yeast as the fresh bread cooled on the racks before slicing. A guard, armed but not very vigilant, patrolled the galley perimeter.

“How could I know this?” Sides later told an audience at the Mayborn literary nonfiction conference in Texas. “Well, the prison bakers at the Missouri state pen interviewed after Ray’s escape said they expressly liked to work in the bakery because it smelled so good in there … and only minutes before Ray’s escape, they had just pulled 65 loaves of bread from the oven.”

A leap? No, the writer decided. In this case, he allowed logic to prevail. Had the bakers used yeast in the bread? Yes. Does baked bread have a fragrance? Yes. Since the bakers just moments earlier had pulled the fresh bread from the ovens and placed it on the racks, was it safe to assume the kitchen smelled of baked bread?

Risking absurdity, let’s push it: What if the bakers burned the bread that morning − not so redolent a kitchen then, was it? What if, by accident, they forgot to add the yeast? Or, referring to the first line of the paragraph, what if these particular bakers lacked sweat glands and therefore did not in fact glisten by the light of the ovens? Possible! But highly unlikely. The question for the narrative writer becomes where to lay bets − on the possible or the not likely? − or whether to gamble at all. Would it have been just as effective to say the bakers had just taken 65 loaves of fresh-baked bread from the oven and let readers fill in the rest with their senses?

Nearly a decade ago, we published a lengthy essay that paved this slippery slope better than anything we’d seen. We re-read it the other day, to see if it holds. It does. “… There should be a firm line, not a fuzzy one, between fiction and nonfiction and all work that purports to be nonfiction should strive to achieve the standards of the most truthful journalism,” wrote Roy Peter Clark. He suggested adhering to two principles:

Do not add. This means that writers of nonfiction should not add to a report things that did not happen. To make news clear and comprehensible, it is often necessary to subtract or condense. Done without care or responsibility, even such subtraction can distort. We cross a more definite line into fiction, however, when we invent or add facts or images or sounds that were not there.

Do not deceive. This means that journalists should never mislead the public in reproducing events. The implied contract of all nonfiction is binding: The way it is represented here is, to the best of our knowledge, the way it happened. Anything that intentionally or unintentionally fools the audience violates that contract and the core purpose of journalism – to get at the truth. Thus, any exception to the implied contract – even a work of humor or satire – should be transparent or disclosed.

So, how to do it? When to do it? Whether to do it? This is about to get interesting.

We were at the start of a storytelling revival, trying to find our way back to craft, and Walt’s book “Intimate Journalism” had just been published.

In the book, Walt quotes Will Durant, a famous historian and philosopher: “Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks.”

Now ask yourself: How often do journalists write about what happened on the banks?

There’s a lot of life that never finds its way onto our pages – virtual or otherwise. Which leads me to Tom Hallman’s Oregonian story about an apology.

It has resonated with readers (nearly 26,000 people have recommended it via Facebook alone), and it’s not hard to see why. Who hasn’t done or said something they regret? And how powerful are the words, “I’m sorry?”

Tom’s story – about a man who agonized over his actions as a boy and wanted to make amends – has a level of intimacy that we should strive for as journalists.

What stops us?

Perhaps we question whether this kind of story is newsworthy. Maybe we’re scared to get too personal.

But as Tom explains:

As the days passed, I thought about this strange tale. There was no news. If no one ever heard a word about James Atteberry and Larry Israelson, it wouldn’t matter. 

Or would it?

A good feature story is about something universal. When it comes to apologies, no one gets a pass in this life. Everyone deserves one, and everyone needs to give one. When I mentioned this letter to people, I found a story more universal than any that I’d written in years. Everyone told me they had someone they wished they could apologize to. And they told me that by the time they realized that truth, it was too late.

In my case, it was something that has haunted me for decades.

Three things struck me about this story, from a writer’s perspective:

First, Tom recognized there was a story. That is such the battle sometimes, seeing what is right in front of us. There was no news as we traditionally define it but definitely something compelling. I suspect Tom mentioned the letter to others because it resonated so deeply with him, and my guess is that it was almost tugging at him to not be ignored.

Second, Tom’s use of the first person. Sometimes reporters become characters in a story and have no business being there. In this case, Tom was clearly an important figure, as he became the way one man found another.

But also, his own story brought home the universal truth:

Months later, the girl left school. I never saw her again. The school I attended has been torn down. I have forgotten the names of many of my old classmates. But not hers. For years I wanted to apologize.

Third, this story reminds us that is it never too late to revisit the past, and in fact, sometimes years must go by before people can work up the courage to expose – and confront – their weakest moments. Again, Tom explains:

The beauty of an apology is that everyone wins because it reveals not only who we are, but who we hope we are. 

I’d argue that part of the reason newspapers are in trouble is that people rarely get emotional when they read our work.

I cried at the end of this story.

Maria Carrillo (@havana58) is the managing editor of The Virginian-Pilot and a two-time Pulitzer juror.

For more from our collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, see the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

We caught Thompson on the road this week in our mutually native Mississippi. He was driving from his home in Oxford to a story in Alabama, but didn’t want to say, at least publicly, what the story was. It was kind of hard to hear each other, and Thompson kept yelling things like “Oh look! The Natchez Trace!” but we managed to cover everything from story conception to deadline music. You may want to think of Thompson’s comments as part master class on narrative journalism and part travelogue.

I had just re-read his great piece on Junior Johnson, the godfather of stock-car racing, and was saying how fun it can be, covering NASCAR, and so we started there.

Paige Williams: Those guys are just not like anybody else.

Wright Thompson: And the way Junior Johnson talks – those are poems. It’s “bored-out” and “stroked” and “cammed” – they’re like the best kind of poems because it doesn’t matter what the words mean, it’s just how they sound.

Those boys are smart, too.

Thompson at Hemingway's house during a reporting trip to Cuba. The line above his head marks Hemingway's height.

Junior Johnson has an innate understanding of physics. I mean if Junior Johnson had been born to your family or my family, Junior Johnson would’ve been, like, a particle physicist. The things he invented!

The best thing about writing about racing isn’t so much the tech stuff or who won or lost, it’s the characters. I remember this thing about Richard Petty rolling a car pretty good – he went over an embankment and out of sight and everybody ran over to find out if he was dead or alive, and he was sitting there in front of the smoking wreckage and all he said was, “Anybody got a Coke?” 

They’re like that! It’s unbelievable! Like Junior Johnson threatening a U.S. marshal – Junior Johnson is not someone you want mad at you, even at 80. Junior Johnson would whip my ass. I wouldn’t fight Junior Johnson – are you kidding me? Like, the story about him cheating in his son’s soapbox derby, hiding the lead in the floorboard of the car –

They figured out how to get by.

I talked to Mike Krzyzewski, the coach at Duke – the thing that’s interesting is that Junior has an eighth-grade education and is really embarrassed about it. The thing he wants more than anything in the world is for his son to go to college, and so they went and toured Duke. And to hear people describe – Junior Johnson’s father had a second-grade education, so to go from a second-grade education to an eighth-grade education to touring Duke? I mean, the look on his face.

What about your family, if you don’t mind my asking? 

My mother’s side of the family were well-to-do Delta planters. My dad’s side of the family was sort of the opposite; they grew up in South Mississippi, very, very small farm. My grandfather was a really smart man who had to go home and run the family farm – I feel like there’s a little Willy Loman there, had to go home and do this job. And so they were middle-class as that era of Mississippi goes, but my dad and his brothers all went to college. There’s a doctor, a lawyer, an advertising executive. So in some ways it’s from the farm to working for a media company, with a generation in between – a pretty standard story. From making things to helping people who make things to working with ideas. Oh, hey, “Welcome to Okolona: the little city that does big things!”

Is that Monroe County?

I do not know the answer to that. My father, who could name every county in Mississippi, would be very upset.

Chickasaw County. I’m Googling.

Oh, look at this! This is the high school football field! It is the Charles Faulkner Field, “home of the Chiefs.” Faulkner died in Okolona, I think, right?

Byhalia.

Oh, that’s right, at the sanitarium, drying his ass out.

And he’d had a heart attack.

It wasn’t drinking that killed Faulkner, it was stopping. It was like: Heroin didn’t kill Jerry Garcia, quitting did.

Faulkner died at the Wright Sanitarium, Wright.

And this is the 50th anniversary of his death. He died 2 1/2 months before Ole Miss integrated.

Oh, he was only 64.

Yeah, well, those were 64 hard-ass years. Did you read William Styron’s obituary about him in Life magazine? It’s incredible. (His niece), Dean Faulkner (Wells), who’s just died, she had this great collection of first editions because every single writer who came to town came by to kiss the ring. She had this Gideon’s Bible inscribed: “Dear Dean, I wrote this book for you. Love, Bill Styron.” You know.

It’s 11:15 in the morning. How long have you been up?

Today? I snoozed until about 6:30.

Morning is your best writing time, right?

I want to be in the chair writing by 6:30, and I want to be done writing for the day by 2. There are always five or six stories going at once so I need to sort of do the daily maintenance on them. I’m just much better right in the morning. And also, I can have a day ruined very easily, which I’m trying to get better about because it’s stupid to be superstitious, but, like, if I oversleep the day is shot for me. I can’t go start at 10. It’s ruined.

When did that start for you?

It was by necessity. At the Kansas City Star I wrote a 3,000-word takeout every week. We would have a meeting on Monday – we would go out to lunch and plan. I would either stay in town or be on an airplane that night or Tuesday; I would report Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, usually come home Thursday or Friday. The story would run on Sunday, so I would wake up Saturday and write live. Every hour counted.

Yeah.

The difference between starting at 6 and starting at 10 was the difference between having a story that worked and having a hot mess. So I just got in the habit. And I just do better if I have a long stretch of day in front of me. To the eternal annoyance, I think, of my editors, I don’t want to conference-call about the presentation of a story before I’ve written the story. I like the long stretch of a day in front of me.

What do you do to get yourself into that writing space?

I drink an absurd amount of coffee. And I have a song mix that I listen to that I’ve listened to basically for 10 years. I mean, I add songs as I find them, but I listen to music.

Wait, wait, wait – you listen to the same song mix that you’ve listened to for the past 10 years?

Yes. That started for a very specific reason, though: I wrote in press boxes, where it’s loud as shit. And so you need something to drown out the noise. So I had a mix that I made that was calm. If I had 17 minutes to write I wanted a little soothing music.

Now you know that I have to ask what’s on that mix.

Hold on. Okay. (Reading from his iPhone.) “Writing Mix: Charlie Daniels Band, ‘Mister D.J.;’ ‘I Don’t Like Mondays,’ Tori Amos; ‘Little Rock,’ Collin Raye; ‘Hallelujah,’ Jeff Buckley; ‘Brothers in Arms,’ Dire Straits; ‘Good Ol’ Boys Like Me,’ Don Williams; ‘New Orleans Ladies,’ (LeRoux); ‘Good Riddance,’ Green Day; ‘This Old Porch,’ Lyle Lovett; ‘Sunrise,’ Norah Jones” – fuck, that’s an odd one – “‘Lonesome Blues,’ Shooter Jennings; ‘Stuck on You,’ Lionel Ritchie; ‘Walking in Memphis,’ Marc Cohn; ‘Photograph,’ Charlie Robison; ‘The Wrestler,’ Bruce Springsteen; ‘Amsterdam,’ Coldplay; ‘Little Motel,’ Modest Mouse; ‘The Freshman,’ The Verve Pipe.”

Well, now I have to make the playlist.

That’s embarrassing! Why couldn’t I have said, you know, Motley Crue, “Home Sweet Home?”

No! It’s great!

I’ve stolen songs. “Amsterdam” is Tom Lake. “Little Motel” is Chris Jones. Somebody’ll mention a song that they write to and I’ll go, “Ooh, I like that,” and I’ll put it on the mix. Sometimes I’ll take things off. I took off Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” because I liked it too much. It was distracting.

(Charlie Daniels is playing out of position on that list for now − clearly he doesn’t like being told what to do − but the others should work.) What else is on your list, from other writers?

I’ll have to do a reconstruction of it.

Do some liner notes.

Exactly. Liner notes. The Green Day song got added because I was writing a story about Tara Peck, a high school soccer star in Kansas City who was killed in a car wreck. Her mom was a nurse. Her mom was in the car, tried to give her CPR. I basically spent several days between Tara’s death and her funeral with her family and her best friend. They put together a playlist for her funeral and her mom sort of went through her closet, the whole thing. I was basically embedded with the family as I wrote this story, and all I remember is the last line: “She would have been so many things.” That was 10 years or so I guess. So they played that song at her funeral – it was her favorite song – so I put it on the mix.

See, it’s all connected. It’s not just a playlist. It’s not just a mix. There’s important stuff at work there. I have “Shadow Boxing” up (in which Thompson tracked down the boxer Jim “Sweet Jimmy” Robinson) and was reading that before we started talking, too.

That’s my favorite story.

Why?

Well, the persistence. I like that it worked. I mean, I chased that story for seven years. That’s an exaggeration because that’s not all I did, but every couple of months for a couple of days I would go look for Jim Robinson. And the thing that broke it open was, I figured out that he was in Miami. I write about this in the story, but I set up a 305 phone number and made up a flyer and put it up all over town, the last place he’d been seen. And I went home. And four days later the phone started ringing. It was just really interesting in terms of what it means to exist. It’s sort of a story about the effacement of memory and the nature of loss. My editor and I worked on that a lot. His name’s Jay Lovinger and he’s unbelievable. He’s a lion. He’s edited Gary Smith and David Halberstam and Hunter Thompson and Richard Ford. He was the managing editor at Life magazine and the No. 2 guy at Inside Sports. I’ve said this a lot but it’s true: He changed my life. The experience of doing “Shadow Boxing,” sort of walking around the block in the Bronx, where he lives, and talking about it – that’s a very, very special story to me.

And there are echoes of it in the Jerry Joseph story. How do you pronounce Joseph’s other name, (Guerdwich Montimere)?

GURD-witch Mont-a-meer.

Okay.

Although I slip up and still call him Jerry. It’s weird.

These stories sort of echo each other. They’re quest stories but they’re also about identity.

Identity comes up a lot in my stories. Because I like to write about place and all place is, is a way to code identity. People love a place as a sort of construct to pass things on. I wrote this thing about Nazareth, Texas, about the girls’ high school basketball team, and I’m sort of obsessed with this idea of reverse manifest destiny. Frank and Deborah Popper are professors – one’s at Princeton and one’s at Rutgers, they’re married, and they do all this incredible research about Buffalo Commons, but essentially – you’ve seen the end of “Dances with Wolves” where they have the quote, something like, “In 1890 the frontier closed.” The thing that’s interesting, the frontier is reopening. I mean there are counties now that were settled in this mad rush West – all these places settled in this mad rush West, and some of them are drying up and blowing away. If the central core of American identity is manifest destiny and if it turns out that we didn’t actually settle the continent in the way that we say we did, what does that mean? This is just a really interesting time for identity in America. The little towns are drying up and blowing away. If you’re from a place like Mississippi, you see it – everyone moves to Memphis, they move to Birmingham, they move to Atlanta, they move to Charlotte. All of the ways in which we learned who we are, they’re changing, and they’re changing very, very rapidly.

Do you look for stories that allow you to explore that, and are you interested in exploring that idea in a longer-form way, like in a book?

Not really. I mean my attention span is such that I’m sort of over it when I’m over it. You know?

Yeah. I do.

Maybe that’s bad but the last thing in the world I want to do is go revisit Jimmy Robinson. I mean that just sounds crushing to me.

It’s like you put all your energy into it for this one amount of time and burn yourself out on it.

Yeah, and then it’s over. And I want to move on to the next thing.

Jerry/Guerdwich: A lot had been written about the guy but no one had done a long-form narrative until Michael Mooney’s GQ piece – what did you want to do with your story that had not been done?

I love Michael’s piece. I thought he did a great job. And he also had a mission and I thought he nailed it. Everything that’s in the story I had, basically, when his came out, but I kept trying to fill the gap. I was really relieved that he didn’t have a couple of (my) people, because that would have killed (my) story. I remember when it came out – I was at dinner, I got a text message that it was out, I drove up to Off Square Books, I bought it, I drove back to Snackbar and I read it in the parking lot. And I immediately thought, “Wow, he nailed this.”

I was also relieved. There were so many different stories to tell and I think all of them are good. I just had to make sure he didn’t tell mine. That was the thing I was worried about. I was always locked into the twin-brother narrative. That was going to be my story no matter what.

The other thing was, I was coordinating with a television producer, so this was a TV piece too – I went to Texas as a print reporter, I went to Texas as a TV reporter, they went to Texas without me, I went without them, and so we were working on the story the whole time with Drew Gallagher, the producer, and then the people who shot it, the Texas Crew.

So it was a logistical challenge because the story existed – right now it exists in three forms. There’s the television story, the dot-com story that we’re talking about, and there’s the magazine story that’s totally different. The hardest part was sort of bringing it to the finish line in all of its manifestations. I’m glad we did. I could be wrong about this but I don’t think there’s anybody in media who’s doing it like this. Honestly, I think this is the first integrated newsroom. It’s not like having a photographer go shoot some video. It’s world-class producers and camera crews – it’s just an interesting thing that’s happening, and it’s cool to be a very small part of it.

The New York Times interactive team is doing some interesting stuff, but taking smaller pieces of big stories –

Yeah, but these are television networks. So it’s a little unfair. We have an enormous news-gathering operation – the walls are gone. Everyone talks to everyone. It’s totally exciting. It’s hard sometimes because you end up being the center of the hub and some of the logistics are difficult, but it’s fascinating if for no other reason than I have found out that a shot of tequila perfectly fits between the wings of an Emmy.

Good to know.

And you can spear the limes on the lightning bolts. It’s perfect.

So anyway, you knew you wanted to lock in on the twins narrative.

I wasn’t interested in “what happened in Texas.” I was interested in why. And then once I figured out the why it all sort of fell together. I thought the most interesting thing was that these two brothers switched lives, and I became obsessed with that. I have no idea whether that was the right call.

Not sure there is a right or wrong. You go with the line that speaks to you. At least it’s yours. It’s unlike anything else that’s out there –

Two people wrote really long magazine stories that didn’t overlap at all, which is a sort of testament to the complexity. The other thing that killed me on this, I wanted it to end with the trial. So we were waiting on the trial. I had a plane ticket for Texas and was all set, and two days before (I was supposed to leave) they pled it out. So the thing I had waited to be my climax was now gone.

You can never bet on a trial, though. They can always plead out.

I’d flirted with that thing, the trial, being the structure. None of this was written and I actually was lost for a while, trying to figure it out. The outline of this was especially difficult.

What did you do?

I had five or six hundred pages of typed notes and a huge stack of letters that (Montimere) and I had written back and forth and then, I don’t know, three, four, five hundred pages of public documents – I just carpet-bombed South Florida with (open-records) requests. The twins were juveniles, so their names were redacted, so you couldn’t search that way. So I basically got every address of where they’d ever lived and then filed (open-records requests) for every police call for every address where they’d ever lived.

I went through all the notes. The thing I always do is, I underline, I tab. I kept trying to go through the notes and write down on note cards everything I’ve underlined, but it just wasn’t working. I was 100 pages in, and I already had 300 note cards. I’m like, this is a disaster. So I went back to the Word doc of the notes and started making separate Word docs for everything that was related to either a certain idea or time period or character – they were all cross-referenced. I ended up with 30 different Word documents. Then I printed them all out and went back through them again and was able to outline. I mean, this was a nightmare.

Touch of the voodoo, maybe.

Voodoo’s one of those things I don’t believe in but that I don’t want to mess with, just in case.

In terms of structure, design played a cool role because your personal narrative plays out on the bits of “taped-up paper.”

Yeah, and thank God for that because in the outline those were called “Reporter’s Notebook.” Which I never liked. But you know how things happen – they’re in the outline and then they’re in the draft and then all of a sudden you’ve filed it and you’re like, “I hate these things.” It sounded cheesy, so I asked (the ESPN designers), I said, “Can you make them an actual notebook?” They’re like, “Yeah of course we can do that.”

The visuals flow nicely, whereas if you’d had a “Reporter’s Notebook” subhed –

It would’ve been needlessly meta.

Yeah. This solution is perfect because the “torn paper” is a visual cue that lets us know we’re back in your narrative. And then you can keep the other subheds, with the twins’ names and dates, which anchor us in chronological time. Easier on the reader.

And if you’ll notice we’ll call him “the twin,” instead of Guerdouin, because we worried about everyone getting confused. (Guerdouin and Guerdwich) had two names that were very strange but also similar. Somewhere an Associated Press editor died a little inside, because we went through every single reference to Guerdouin and changed it to “the twin.”

The change also sets up this eerie echo self, which is what a twin is.

Yeah. And it’s written as if they are one person.

In your opening sentence I like how you cue readers about exactly what kind of story they’re going to be getting with the phrase “weird true-crime story.”

This may be way too literal but I wanted people to know right off the bat that there was a crime and that it’s weird and there are gonna be twists and turns, and that it’s a mystery.

It’s a declaration. You’re establishing expectations: This may be a difficult story to unpack but at its essence it’s this.

You’re referencing a genre that they’re familiar with, so they’re on board from the beginning.

And the kicker of the opener – “In the beginning there was an impostor” – is kind of Biblical. It’s creation, it’s about self-creation. Echoes of identity.

The story was always called, when we had meetings or conference calls about it, “The Impostor.” On the whiteboard in my editor’s office in Connecticut, under my list of stories it was, “The Impostor.” Every time you can be reductive and simple, you should be it.

That’s what’s interesting about it – I don’t think you’re being particularly reductive with that line. What’s great about that seven-word sentence (seven also being a mystical number, by the way) is that there’s so much behind it. It’s a complicated idea.

A lot of things have to be true for someone to be an impostor. And it immediately poses a whole bunch of questions that you don’t have to ask because everyone else is already asking them, from “what is the nature of identity?” to “what the fuck?” I over-ask questions in stories – I go through and cut a lot of them, but I just think the beginning of a story should ask a question that the rest of the story shows the answer to. Sometimes I’m just so evangelistic about that. There are sentences in there that you’d want back after it runs, but in this one, I thought, made people ask questions.

You set up Part 1 with a short section called “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” a string of bumped quotes that functions almost like confessionals. You’ve got different people sort of stepping in front of the camera and saying who they think Guerdwich is. Everybody’s saying something different and it works.

I’d love to lie to you right now and take credit, but that was added just before we filed it, and it was entirely my editor’s idea. That was never the first section.

Really?

Yeah, and it changes the whole story. (Jay Lovinger and I) were on the phone and he said, “Something’s not right.” He called back later and said, “Here’s what you need to do: You need to pull a bunch of contradictory quotes that in effect put all of these different characters, like the blind men and the elephant, in a room arguing with each other. Because that’s what the story is.”

Yep.

He said it and I was like, “Oh my God.” Honestly, I did (the section) in 15 minutes. I knew what those quotes were gonna be. And then he flipped the order. He ended it with voodoo. I had ended it with the quote from the old basketball coach, about the JFK movie.

Why did he want to end with voodoo?

I think it was the punch in the face that he liked. If there’s a sentence he says to me more than any other it’s, “You’re stepping on your ending,” either in a paragraph, a section or a story. He’ll say, “Just stop. Don’t explain it.” And I have this sort of urge – I worked at a newspaper for a long time. I’m a newspaper guy. And so I think, “Well, what if they don’t get it?” He says, “Clarity isn’t God.” That’s not me. I want to hold somebody’s hand and explain it to them.

In newspapers we’re trained to close it out. But in this case, if you’d moved the voodoo line up somewhere within that montage and ended “I don’t think you’ll ever get a why,” the story shuts down, dead-ends. To me the reader could say, “Well, why am I even reading this then?”

Yeah, what’re we even doing? It’s funny, I’ve never even thought about why (Lovinger) said (to end the section that way), because when he says do something I just do it. You know how this works: Writers don’t trust editors up until the moment they earn the trust, and then you trust them implicitly. I’m so thankful for that relationship. It’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.

What was the original Part 1 opening?

“The Blind Men and the Elephant” was just inserted, so –

Oh, so the original start, just after the intro, was, “Two of the few certainties about Guerdwich Montimere are that he has a twin brother and that they are nothing alike.”

Yeah. Exactly.

The elephant sets up all the different possible answers and also creates a sense of chaos.

You’re getting questions. If you look at it, the story answers every one of those questions posed.

There’s a quote under “February 2007” – “The ball stops bouncing.” That’s sort of a transcendent quality of the whole thing: You’re gonna get found out, you’re gonna get old, you’re gonna die. It’s shorthand.

Yeah. What is it, “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.”

Nice.

There has to be a transcendent quality, some subtlety. What’s that Steinbeck quote? Something like, “A story has to be about everything or it’s about nothing.”

You hired an investigator in Haiti for this story. Why?

I’d just been to Haiti and wasn’t really looking to go back. I was gonna go to Haiti depending on what (the investigator) found. I just wanted someone to check first, before I flew to Haiti fishing.

How did that work? Did he send you tapes, or?

He sent me transcribed tapes and documents. He was unbelievable. He went to two different places and found me every family member in Haiti. He’s the one who got me the cellphone number for the dad. I wanted to know if someone could tell me for sure if the mom took Guerdouin to see a voodoo priest in Haiti right around the moment Guerdouin and Guerdwich started changing lives.

The mom is such an interesting character – now that you’ve had time to process all of this, what do you make of her?

There’s something odd that came through, and I still don’t completely understand what went on. From talking to sort of third-party people, she wasn’t really involved, but I don’t want to get in the business of insulting mothers. You know what I mean? Everything’s complicated.

Juxtaposed with Jimmie Wright (the Texas woman who took Montimere in as her own) she’s an especially interesting character. I wondered if you were tempted to make more of Jimmie.

I wrote the entire (earlier) magazine story only about Jimmie Wright. I didn’t leave stuff out of the main story, save it. She’s a fascinating person. She and (her husband) Danny are the only untarnished people in this whole thing.

And there’s interesting complexity and tension even within that relationship: She believes one thing about Jerry/Guerdwich and Danny believes another. That stuff about the lighthouses was great. She’s obsessed with lighthouses and the backstory is incredible. How’d you get it?

I was there and the house was covered in lighthouses and I asked why. I’m just like, “What’s up with all the lighthouses?” I’m a real Woodward and Bernstein. I’ll ask anything.

Not every writer asks, though.

You just cover yourself in the blanket of cute nosiness. You know? The true genius of Chris Jones is that he notices things and he always asks. So you end up with the girl in the flowered dress, or Roger Ebert’s wedding ring.

A lot of people notice details but don’t say anything, or, worse, they assume they know what the details mean. That’s dangerous, assuming that the lighthouses –

Yeah, that she always wanted to live in Nantucket, or something.

You reference a South Florida paper’s timeline of events –

To me there’s nothing more disingenuous than media, the most powerful force of dissemination of information in the world, pretending it doesn’t exist. People interact with the media. And to think that that doesn’t drive these things – this is my little diatribe but it makes me crazy. So you have the thing like with the Cambridge cops and Dr. Gates – you have satellite trucks camping out in each of their yards, yelling questions at them and their families, so somebody says something and then they air these things next to each other as if they’re arguing with each other, and then you have 6,000 television stations calling the mayor of Cambridge to give a press conference, and so he decides to do it all at once, and then the commentariat talk about should he have had a press conference. It’s not even an estate anymore, it’s a weather system. (Media presence is) driving the whole thing and pretending it doesn’t exist.

There’s this passage that functions as a sort of nut graf:

All these questions coalesce into one − crazy or con? − and in that reduction I finally understand that the most important thing Guerdwich Montimere and Jerry Joseph have in common is the reaction they inspire. People see what they want to see, maybe even what they need to see, and the longer they spend thinking about it, the more the focus turns inward. What does a name and a number mean? Do we really ever know anybody?

Up until very shortly before the story ran there was another sentence on the end of that, and it was, “Do we ever really know ourselves?” And I cut it because it just didn’t pass my own smell test. I could feel myself rolling my eyes at myself. Maybe I chickened out – I’m not sure that was the right call or not, but I just thought, this is just psychobabble –

The preceding sentence is enough.

Yeah, to me, that is the whole (story) – everyone was trying to see (Joseph/Montimere) through their own prism. I mean this may sound crazy but sometimes I Google his picture, just to make sure any of this was real. I go back and forth on the crazy or con, still.

A little of both, maybe.

Probably, as is everything.

Did those insights drive the narrative or did they bubble up out of you as you reported?

They were bubbling up out of me. None of that stuff was outlined, those sort of things. It would’ve just been “crazy or con?” in the outline. The reason I was wary about taking that (aforementioned) line out was because that’s what came out in the moment, and I sort of think that you should defer to how you feel in the moment. I had been thinking about all of these things.

There’s a layering of thinking here that gives the story heart.

Covering a bullfight in Mexico.

I try to seek out stories that make me think about things. Sometimes I’m drawn to ideas that are hard to wrestle into shape. Sometimes I kick myself because I’ve avoided a story because I thought the arc was too simple and I go back and read what someone else has done and they’ve just crushed it. And I realize I was wrong and the story wasn’t simple at all.

So if you did miss the meaning, or failed to think about it in the way you wish you’d thought about it, what happened there? Where did the breakdown happen? That’s happened to me too. You look back on some stories and think: I blew it.

It’s when you’re tired.

Yeah.

It’s when you’re tired.

Yes.

I’ve had a real long run – I’ve been on the road a lot. I have a vacation scheduled at the end of this month, and I’ll be a roaring freight train when I come back from vacation. But if you’re just tired, you just miss it. I just missed a great story and I’m so pissed at myself. Sugar Shane Mosley is a boxer who’s been a champion, who’s had doping things going on. I think he’s fortysomething years old and he fought sort of the younger version of himself Saturday night in Las Vegas. I watched that fight and you realize that you’re watching someone at the end or near the end of his career and at the end it looked to me like – he wasn’t even fighting to win, he was fighting just so he could walk out of the ring. There was something inspiring about it. I should’ve seen it. If I’d seen it two days before that, I could’ve been at that fight.

Totally get that. Don’t know what to say to make you feel better about that, so back to the thinking, which is probably 80 percent of writing: In all of your stories, not just this one, there’s something deeper at work than the basic arc of events.

You’re looking for stories about the larger human condition – that’s the prerequisite. It needs to be about something. It needs to be about something to me.

*The conversation has been edited lightly for clarity, length and, occasionally, for words that might displease our mothers. 

This mystery isn’t about the lives of Guerdwich Montimere and Jerry Joseph; it is about how other people perceive those lives. It’s the tree falling in the woods thing. What does it mean to exist? Is identity based on how you feel or how other people see you? Is the story Jerry told the newspaper a lie? What if the facts are false but the emotions are real? Would that make it partially true? Fiction written about combat is often more real than any journalism, so which has a greater connection to the truth: fact or emotion?

With more than 1,000 pages of typed interviews, notes and documents, Thompson might’ve found himself lost in reporting that stretched from the mountains of Haiti to Florida to Texas. Instead he pulled off the triple narrative of Montimere and his troubled twin brother, Guerdouin, and of Thompson himself, a journalist deeply intrigued by the nature of identity. Thompson’s appearance in the story gives readers a handhold, a point of entry, a relatable guide when we’re not quite sure where to put our alliances or trust. His skill for staying calm in the face of complexity shows in the consistent grace notes of his writing:

He paints a picture of South Florida hallways full of kids from Haiti, from Cuba, from the Caribbean and Central America, people with no past and no paperwork. Communities don’t care if someone is too old; a few years seems like a silly reason not to get an education. Entire neighborhoods become a haze of facts and dates. People learn to differentiate between the real you and the you that is constructed to make it through the world. Identities are fluid.

Other magazine writers, including Thompson himself, have told the Jerry Joseph story well, but “The Kid Who Wasn’t There” takes the story “to the finish line” for Thompson, as he puts it, by exploring the twin relationship and therefore the shadow self. We may never fully know why, or how, this man Montimere became a boy again, but as Thompson so beautifully shows, sometimes it’s enough just to ask the questions.

Coming Friday: Check back for our conversation with Wright Thompson about this story and his other work for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com.

If the flight attendant was concerned about my tears, or if the little girl in the pink hoodie across the aisle was curious: Reading at 13,000 feet makes one susceptible to mood swings. It’s a scientific fact. It couldn’t have had anything to do with the fact that Skip Hollandsworth of Texas Monthly had done a bait-and-switch on me.

Rehagen

On its surface, “Still Life” is “the tragic story of John McClamrock, a high school football player paralyzed during a violent tackle.” Hollandsworth plays to our expectations with the obvious construct of innocence approaching doom, particularly on the day leading up to John’s accident. The physical description − the bell-bottom jeans, patterned shirt, the red El Camino, the “china-blue eyes” and the long black hair − drops us into the 1970s and sets us up for loss. No longer will John be a 17-year-old boy eating a Whopper and cranking the volume on the Allman Brothers and going on mini-golf dates with girls who like him, not after that shattering moment that sounds like “a tree trunk breaking in half.”

Over the next 35 years, the media disappears along with John’s high school friends. Mac dies. Henry grows up and builds his own life. Only John and his mother are left. Suddenly Ann’s name appears in the story as often, if not more, as her son’s. In the archetypal details and routines of her life − the pantsuits, makeup, trips to the grocery store, monthly appointments at the J.C. Penney hair salon − we understand more and more of her character. Hollandsworth cleverly hints back to her first spoken line, that invocation of faith, with the subtle repetition of her favorite prayer of thanksgiving: “Lord Jesus, may I always trust in your generous mercy and love…”

Instead of pitying Ann, we begin to admire her because her actions − kissing John’s forehead, telling him how proud she is − so clearly illustrate her resolve. Together mother and son age, but Ann’s is the decline that we experience as readers. Hers is the true “still life” of the title:

Instead of getting dressed as soon as she got out of bed, she spent her mornings in her nightgown and her favorite green terrycloth bathrobe. She was having trouble hearing, and her eyesight was weakening. She began to wobble when she walked and once fell while cooking breakfast. A doctor told her that she had a type of vertigo and that she needed to stay off her feet. “Absolutely not,” she replied.

John becomes almost a supporting actor, even as he makes the decision his mother cannot:

“You have to admit, my body held up for a long, long time,” he said when Henry dropped by to check on him.

“Come on now, you can get through this,” Henry said, using one of their mother’s phrases. “All you have to do is keep fighting.”

“Why don’t you bring Mom over?” John said. “Have her look pretty. She’d like for me to see her that way.”

“John, are you giving up?”

There was a long silence. A food cart rattled down the hall and a nurse’s sneakers squeaked on the hallway floors. From other rooms came the beeps of heart monitors and the deep whooshing sounds of ventilators.

“We know about her prayer,” John finally said. “We know she doesn’t want to go first.” He looked at Henry and said, “I need to go so she can go.”

Henry takes Ann to get her hair done before taking her to see John, who is now back in a rehab facility:

“Mom, it’s okay,” John said.

She smoothed John’s hair along the temples. She touched his forehead, and she slowly ran her hand down one side of his face, past his cheekbones and the curls of his hair. She said, as if she knew what was about to happen, “Johnny, we’ll be back together soon.”

The action soon turns again, and then again, Hollandsworth’s camera all the while on Ann, knowing that this story is hers, that she will be the one who haunts us.

Tony Rehagen (@trehagen) is a senior editor at Atlanta magazine. His stories also have appeared in Men’s Health and Indianapolis Monthly. He has been a finalist for the City & Regional Magazine Association Writer of the Year in each of the past three years.

For more from our collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, see the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

Mauritania’s endless sand dunes hide an open secret: An estimated 10 to 20 percent of the population lives in slavery. But as one woman’s journey shows, the first step toward freedom is realizing you’re enslaved. (photo: Edythe McNamee/CNN)

Slavery 360°

For the CNN.com multimedia narrative “Slavery’s Last Stronghold,” reporter John D. Sutter and photographer/videographer Edythe McNamee spent eight days in Mauritania, the last country to abolish slavery but one in which an estimated 3.4 million people still live enslaved. Sutter and McNamee ferreted out an ugliness that the government denies still exists:

We ducked into the shade of a tent to muffle the sound of our potentially dangerous conversation. Within eyeshot was another tent camp, slightly larger. There, we met a man who appeared to be Fatimetou’s master. Mohammed, an older man with a toothy smile and slightly lighter skin, told us in a nonchalant manner that he holds workers on the compound without compensation.

“We don’t pay them,” he said through a translator. “They are part of the land.”

Moulkheir Mint Yarba, an escaped slave living in Noakchott, Mauritania (photo: Edythe McNamee/CNN)

Sutter and McNamee produced a prose narrative, photo slide shows and a 23-minute documentary film that tell the story of Moulkheir Mint Yarba, a slave who believes her baby was left outdoors to die:

The usually stoic mother … wept when she saw her child’s lifeless face, eyes open and covered in ants, resting in the orange sands of the Mauritanian desert. The master who raped Moulkheir to produce the child wanted to punish his slave. He told her she would work faster without the child on her back.

Trying to pull herself together, Moulkheir asked if she could take a break to give her daughter a proper burial. Her master’s reply: Get back to work.

“Her soul is a dog’s soul,” she recalls him saying.

The project’s massive audience – within the first three days of launch the piece received 2 million page views – owes to the importance of the subject matter but also to the powerful presentation. CNN.com broke from its regular design for this package, as Justin Ellis pointed out recently, with a magazine format that works: “big photos, big, full-width text, type treatments, dropcaps, integrated slide shows and video, and a general design depth that indicates this isn’t just another CNN.com story.” We’d add that the rapid-read sidebars wrap the story in quick (but not shallow) context. “Why slavery still exists in 2012” breaks down the politics, geography, poverty, religion, racism and education in one-graf nuggets. The sidebar on ethnic groups explains – sometimes in as few as 36 words – the interrelationships of white Moors, black Moors, black Africans and Haratine.

Altogether, as a model of multimedia narrative journalism, it’s hard to do better than this.

Fantasy baseball’s first pitch

In “The Lost Founder of Baseball Video Games,” from Grantland, Bess Kalb tells the story of John Burgeson, a Midwesterner who coded an early version of fantasy baseball for an IBM 1620 computer and who, at nearly 80, Wikipedia’d himself some credit. (Good for you, dude.)

Here’s Kalb:

The only 1620 in the country available for viewing is in a storage hangar at an IBM office complex outside Fishkill, New York. The complex is a sprawl of identical, brutalist buildings with labyrinths of corridors that lead to clean rooms and windowless offices and locked doors marked with biohazard signs. There, I’m greeted by Paul Lasewicz, IBM corporate archivist, who leads me into an enormous storage hangar where the old machines live under plastic tarps. It’s an eerie place, inert, echoing, cold.


A hundred or so grandfather clocks retrofitted with oversize rotary dials hang in rows from ceiling to floor on the far wall. Dissected typewriters are splayed out on shelves. There are old power cords peeking out from under the tarps, and Lasewicz tells me several of the machines could be fully operational if switched on. This is electronic computing’s zombie graveyard.


We step around a forklift parked in the middle of an aisle and stop in front of a covered mound the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. Lasewicz looks pleased. “That’ll be your 1620. Almost mint.” He unveils the machine. It’s a desk mounted with a cockpit dashboard attached to a typewriter. Nothing about it screams, “Play baseball on me.” Next to the “IBM 1620” decal on the mainframe, in faded pencil, someone had drawn a smiley face.

A cool story, well told.

Robert Caro, squared

Chris Jones has been such a Storyboard regular this past year we’re about to give him his own archive. Last July, he dissected the classic W.C. Heinz story “Death of a Racehorse” as one of our first installments of “Why’s this so good?” Last December, he visited Nieman Narrative Writing students as part of the class’ speaker series and hosted Gay Talese in conversation at Harvard. In February, we selected his Zanesville zoo-massacre story as a Notable Narrative. Just when we assumed him to be collapsed on a beach somewhere with a cold one in each hand, he turned out a magnificent profile of Robert Caro in the May issue of Esquire.

As it happens, the New York Times magazine published a stunningly good profile the same day. The Times magazine piece, by Charles McGrath, came with “Robert Caro’s Painstaking Process,” a slide show. And in a “Behind the Cover Story” Q-and-A on the Times magazine’s blog, The 6th Floor, McGrath was asked what attracted him to Caro as a subject. McGrath: Caro’s patience for “spending this much time on any one thing,” a trait not often found among newspaper writers. “He doesn’t need the crackhead fix of seeing his name in print,” McGrath said.

How do the two pieces compare? First, some basics plus analytics, as of this morning:

We included social media because it’s hard to talk about story power without considering reader connection, and Twitter and Facebook figure hugely in the metrics of impact and reach. We’d argue for the inclusion of visible social-media analytics on more stories, in fact. Comments, not so much. Sometimes reader feedback reveals true impact but other times the Comments section behaves more like a cesspool.

We also could compare the craft elements, or the story-building decisions each writer made, such as structure, voice and the use of first-person authorial presence (Jones: no; McGrath: yes), but instead, just have a taste of each.

Jones, in Esquire:

His research is finished, he says. “Mostly, anyway.” His outline is pinned up on the wall, and it will not change. He even has some sections of it written, first drafts — including the first of two chapters on Bill Moyers (“He wrote a lot of memos,” Caro says, “so I got him”) — and he knows what to do with the rest. Nobody believes it, but he writes very fast. “I think I can write the next book in two or three years,” he says. He tries not to think that people are waiting, the way he tries not to think about many things, but he knows that they — Mehta and Gottlieb and Hourigan, and Andy Hughes and Lynn Nesbit and Carol Shookhoff the typist, all the people who have touched his books from the beginning, who are touching this one now — are out there waiting all the same, just around the corner.

McGrath, in the Times magazine:

One reason Caro’s books are so long is that he does keep burrowing through the files, and he keeps finding out things he hadn’t anticipated. Before beginning the first volume, he thought he could wrap up Johnson’s early life in a couple of chapters, until he talked to some of Johnson’s college classmates and found out about his lying, conniving side, which no one had previously described. That volume also includes a mini­biography of Sam Rayburn, Johnson’s mentor in Congress, and a brilliantly evocative section about how electrification changed the lives of people in the Hill Country, much of it based on interviews conducted by Ina, who visited the women there with homemade preserves and eventually won them over, she says, because she was as shy and nervous as they were.

So, who “wins?” With two great writers on one legendary subject, readers do.