How did you first hear about Ben McDaniel, and at what point did his disappearance become a story?

In late February. I’m trying to read the papers out of the Panhandle, large and small, because of my work on Dozier [School for Boys] and also because there are places along Florida’s hidden coast that are untapped. There’s very little news coverage, and what’s there often gets overlooked. It’s golden for someone like me who has the freedom to go up there and do work. I caught a small story in, I think, the Jackson County paper.

McDaniel’s family, Patty and Shelby, had announced a $10,000 reward, and the story was about Edd Sorensen, who in fact is in my story. He’s a pretty fantastic recovery diver and cave diver. Sorensen had told the local paper that this was dangerous – basically, “I can understand them wanting to find their son, but they’re going to get someone else killed by putting up this money.”

I immediately recognized that this was a pretty fantastic story, and that if the material held up, it could be really great. You have a mystery, first of all; the guy went in and hasn’t been seen since. Hanging onto that mystery, you have some really interesting human conundrums: the grief of the parents and friends, and the risk for the cave divers.

Pride was involved as well, for the divers who’ve gone in and come out empty-handed. They’re saying, “Look, take our word for it. Trust us. We’re the best of the best, and Ben’s not in there.” They felt like the McDaniels’ insistence that Ben was in there was sort of an insult to them: “They don’t believe us. We’ve told them, and now they’re putting up this reward.” There were strong feelings of hurt and embarrassment as well on the part of the divers.

So it seemed like this whole mess of emotion swirling around this great mystery. I kind of held onto it for a little bit. I think I brought it up at one of our weekly meetings, just to see how people would react to it and whether they would have the same reaction that I did, which was “Wow, this has real potential.” I heard that out of the people in the room, so I took the opportunity to go out and do some real reporting.

How long did you take to report and write the story?

I was working on some other things at the time. I’d say probably I took a trip up there for three days. And then maybe another four or five days on the phone back home, reporting. And maybe four or five days writing. So two weeks, 2 1/2 weeks in all.

When you sat down to write, you had this material – I don’t want to ruin it for any readers – but when you sit down to write, you have a mystery without a simple solution. How did you approach structuring the story?

That was cause for great anxiety in the beginning, because I had the ambition to find Ben McDaniel myself. That was a real desire. I was thinking, “Maybe if I talk to enough people, I can find this guy.” Or at least find some evidence that he met his demise or that he still exists. That was the mindset that I went in with.

Three-quarters of the way through the reporting I was like, “I still don’t have an ending. I don’t know where he is, and people are still going to be disappointed if they read this story and then get to the end and there’s nothing to tie it up. It’s still as much of a mystery as it was in the first section.”

So driving back from the Panhandle, I called a friend, Michael Brick, who is down in Austin. We talk about stories a lot. I kind of called to hear myself tell him the story, to see where it went. We had really bad reception. Because of the spotty reception, I had to be brief. We kept getting disconnected. And so each time I would be like, “Forget all that. Dude’s missing. I don’t have an ending.”

And at some point I started to think of this story in a different way: This is a story about grief and how the dominoes fall when a man goes missing. And that helped, because then it became not a story about Ben specifically, but a story about all the people left behind to try to solve the mystery. Then it was just thinking about the story through that prism. Because there’s no ending with Ben, it gave the rest of us the ending.

You focus on Emily. Did she give you that ending herself?

Gene Weingarten sent me an email yesterday, and I think [Tom] Shroder may have put him up to it. Weingarten loved the ending, and he was wondering if that was mine, or if I just went there.

It came from her, but I felt like quoting her there would have screwed it all up. She is thinking very seriously about diving into that hole to see for herself if Ben is in there. She’s an open-water diver, and it takes a long while to get cave-certified. She’s thinking seriously about saving up the money to get cave certified and to go down in search of him. That came at the end of our talk.

We were supposed to talk at 7 on a Wednesday night. We had a hard time getting in touch. Our conversation wrapped up about 11:30. So 4, 4 1/2 hours on the phone. She and Captain Hamilton and Ben’s parents, they all entertain these theories. They’ve entertained some really wild theories: “Could he be in witness protection?” “Could his ex-business partner have followed him to Florida and killed him?” But after they run through the theories, it all circulates, and one theory leads to the next.

Near the end of our conversation, she was going back and forth about whether Ben had the capacity to commit suicide through going through the hole, or whether he had the capacity to leave and put everybody through this incredible grief. She was saying, “If only we could see down in that hole, then we could rule that out as a possibility.” It struck me to ask, because she had mentioned that she was a diver, “Have you ever thought of going down there?”

She said, “Yeah, I sure have. I know it would take a lot of money, and I know it would take some time, but that’s a serious part of my thinking right now.”

When I heard that, it gave me that – I don’t know how to articulate this, but there’s a spot that I hit sometimes in reporting… It’s like I have to stand up. It’s almost a mix of anxiety and happiness and sadness, these things that typically exist on opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. But I felt that, and the light came down on me, and I thought “That’s perfect.” If the possibility exists that Ben went through the hole because of his brother, then the possibility exists that she’s going to go through the hole and pursue Ben. It just felt like the right way to end the thing.

So you realized that was an important moment right then?

When she said it, when that came out of her mouth, I thought, “That’s the end of the story.”

I noticed that midway through the story, you start throwing out questions. There are no questions asked in the first half, but the second half has 13. It’s an unusual approach to writing a mystery narrative.

That’s news to me, that there’s such an extreme change. I do know that up to a point, we know exactly where Ben was leading up to his disappearance. We have an unlimited amount of facts about the days and hours leading up to that dive. And after that it’s eight months of questions. So it’s not surprising to me that the story changed in that regard, because the rest of the story can be one giant question mark. It’s just a matter of handing it over to the readers to entertain the same questions that I had and the same questions that Ben’s family and the people trying to find him had.

Did the story change drastically in the process of writing or editing it?

The one big change was really just a matter of adding a line of the section about three-quarters of the way through the story that solidified the idea that if Ben was grieving his brother’s death so much that he abandoned this life, whether purposefully or with disregard for his own safety, if he went through the hole to deal with that grief, then it’s the same kind of grief that might bring Emily into that hole.

I wanted to make that as clear as possible without being ham-fisted. And so I added a line about something his parents had entertained and said, maybe not directly but close: maybe Ben wasn’t running from something; he was running to something. I wanted to put that thought in the readers’ minds before I hit that beautiful monologue that Chuck Cronin delivered about why people go into these crazy caves, and then sort of bring it down with the powerful ending that belongs to Emily. So it was just a matter of adding that line.

I overwrote the thing, which I always do, I think the first draft might have been 6,000 words, and it ran at 3,400. It wasn’t Bill [Duryea, my editor,] who cut a lot out of it. It was just me trimming a lot of stuff and removing the scaffolding – a lot of self-editing. And I had turned it over to some people, which is not uncommon, for general thoughts.

I got some good advice from Jon Jefferson, who’s half of the writing team of Jefferson Bass. He regularly makes appearances on the New York Times bestseller list for a series of books called “The Body Farm.” He writes with the guy who started that body farm at the University of Tennessee, Bill Bass. Jon just has a way of applying fiction techniques to nonfiction that I’ve come to appreciate. He offered some feedback and some good advice.

You mentioned overwriting. There are so many approaches writers take to organizing their stories, from meticulous six-level outlines to just sitting down and starting. How does overwriting fit in with your approach?

I outline, so I had an outline. I knew where I wanted to go. It’s weird, because the overwriting is not the excessive use of adverbs for me. It’s including too much information, stuff that might be unnecessary distraction. For instance, the first draft included the theory that Ben could have gone into witness protection, which is something his parents were leaning toward for a while. I reported that out, and figured out they don’t do that. The federal government doesn’t fake death to protect people. And beyond that, there’s nothing in Ben’s history to suggest that he may have needed to go into witness protection.

That theory was pooh-poohed, but I included it in there, because I thought readers might have the same question themselves. It was just four or five paragraphs going down that rabbit hole, and then shutting that idea down. So going back to trim, it seemed unnecessary. I thought, “I’m not sure people will make that jump, and if they do, that’s OK, I’ll just disregard it in its entirety, not even bring it up. It’s not going to hurt the story.”

There were a couple paragraphs in the first draft about why north Florida has so many underwater caverns. I talked to a geologist at Florida State University to set the scene a little more, including this chunky bit about how these caverns are formed over the years. I was trying to teach people about geology that I was curious about. And then I thought, “There’s not a place for it. I want it to be really tight.” Even if it’s 3,400 words, I want it to read like it’s 20 inches. It’s a lot of cutting and stripping away everything that is unnecessary.

Anything else you’d like to say about the piece or about narrative journalism more generally?

I find it so incredibly useful, beyond the editors who work at the St. Pete Times, to have a team of people who aren’t going to bullshit you, who don’t mind taking a look at what you’ve written and giving you feedback. I think I sent this [Michael] Kruse, Konrad Marshall, who is in Australia now but is a great feature writer. Wright Thompson read it. Jon Jefferson read it. And each of them had a different thing to say about it, like “in this part, I think you should go here.” “I need you to establish better the dimensions of the cave at the restriction.”

This is before I even turn it over to Bill. At the point that I feel like I have a solid draft, I want feedback from people who aren’t reading it for grammar mistakes or for style and spelling. I just generally want to know “How did this story make you feel? How could it be better?”

Some of it you use, and some of it you disregard. I don’t know if I’ll ever turn in a story that I feel might be important without having distributed it to a few trustworthy friends to offer feedback early. I want to make that a regular part of this process, because I found it to be really useful.

That’s a new part of your process then?

It’s not totally new, but I think I probably sent this to more people than I have before. Normally, it’s one or two. Kruse is my regular go-to guy for feedback; we talk stories all the time. But sending it to five people? At first I thought that everybody would say something different, and it would confuse me. That’s not the way it went at all. Everybody did have some different thing to say, but I found it all useful.

The monkey story seems like a very traditional assignment that any metro desk might have to cover, but you tackled it in a different way.

A couple months ago, there was a story by Emily Nipps, one of our reporters here. And Vernon Yates, this character of a trapper from Seminole, had a quote maybe ¾ of the way down the story. I’m not looking at it, so I’m going from memory—something like, “The monkey’s not necessarily having a good time out there, you know. For him, what this is like is if you were dropped onto a desert island with no other humans.”

I read that quote and thought, “That’s kind of interesting. I wonder if that’s true? Because I would look at the story totally differently if that were true.” And it made some sense—monkeys are like us.

So that’s what started my interest in the monkey. I would bring it up from time to time in our meetings for the enterprise team. “I want to profile the monkey. I want to take it real seriously.” And people would laugh. And I would sort of laugh. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it, but it was something along these lines: “Is the monkey lonely?” How can I get at that? Because obviously, I’m not going to be able to talk to the monkey.

At one point, you talk to a loneliness expert, which was great.

I got to the point where I was feeling good about the monkey, and I needed to know about what loneliness does to people and to primates. I actually tweeted and said I needed a loneliness expert. Pretty quickly I got a tweet back from one of our news researchers here, Shirl Kennedy, saying she had the person. He was this guy John [Cacioppo], from the University of Chicago—he’d written a book called Loneliness. So I scooted over to the local Barnes & Noble and bought their one and only copy and read that. Then I felt like I was ready to have a conversation with him.

The subject line of my email to him was “A story about a monkey.” I’m sure the nation’s leading loneliness expert has never gotten an email with that subject line. But he got back to me immediately and he was totally on board with the idea. There were some things in his book and in our conversation not just about primates but about Rhesus macaques—the effects of social isolation on that particular kind of monkey.

It’s easier to make the case that the monkey is isolated than to make the case that the monkey is lonely. The monkey is not going to go down to the bar and have a drink because he’s lonely. But the monkey is isolated, and the chances are good that he hasn’t seen another monkey of his kind since he’s been on the loose. So he’s definitely isolated, and that definitely has physiological effects on him—the same way it would have effects on us if we were dropped on a desert island or put in solitary confinement.

How long did you take to research and to write the story?

I’d say for two weeks, the monkey was my primary focus as far as reporting is concerned. I went up to a conference in New York then, too, but it was a couple weeks of reporting and reading and talking to people.

One afternoon, I took a few hours and drove the route of the monkey—where he’s been this calendar year. I started from the first address he was spotted at and drove from address to address, just to get a sense. Obviously, I’m driving on roads and the monkey isn’t, but I can kind of envision where he might have gone. That was really helpful. Looking at yards where he was spotted, patterns started to develop. The monkey likes the same kinds of yards, the monkey likes the same kinds of trees. That’s a little speculative, but at least it’s kind of an earned speculation.

The actual act of writing typically isn’t a huge commitment of time relative to the total time spent on a story, at least for me. At some point when I thought I was ready to go, I headed over to a coffee shop with Bill Duryea, my editor, and said, “Here’s what I’ve got, and here’s what I’m thinking.”

We almost never don’t do that. We talk about the story to work out kinks in structure before I ever put anything to the page. It probably took me a day and a half to pull it together. And then Bill, as he always does, came back at it with some wise suggestions and made it better than it was when I sent it to him. I basically wrote it on a Tuesday, and then Wednesday we went over it, and by Thursday it was sitting in the can ready to go.

You’ve done narrative in a lot of forms, not just for the Times, but also your book and feature stories for Charlotte magazine. Does a narrative approach come by habit now, or is there a mindset you have to work to get yourself into?

It’s kind of interesting to me that you wanted to talk about this story, because there are certainly parts of narrative in this story, but I don’t think it’s a “pure narrative”—whatever that is. There’s some essay in there, there’s some science in there.

But I think, to answer your question, anywhere there’s movement, there’s possibility for narrative. I knew I had that to work with—there’s nothing but movement: the monkey is moving from point A to point B to point C. So there were possibilities.

I guess at this point, it’s how I think about stories. I always want to have narrative components in a story, because that means a story is moving. And if a story’s not moving, a reader is probably stopping.

Maybe I’m less wedded to the idea of narrative for the sake of narrative than some people are, but I think it’s the most natural, most obvious way to tell most stories. I’ve done what lots and lots of people have done—read the people who do this the best, go to conferences to hear the people who do this the best, pick the brains of the people who do this the best, and hopefully over time, some of that rubs off.

Your story has some clearly narrative elements but could have run in any of a number of papers around the country. It seemed like a good model for journalists interested in doing this kind of writing but working for papers that may not encourage it.

I don’t know the end inch count on this. It’s long-ish for some places, but it’s not overly long. It’s certainly not long for us.

There’s an idea behind this story, and that’s something that is really stressed here in St. Pete. And I feel like I’m really lucky to work in a place where that is encouraged, where the editors I get to work with are always pushing it. Mike Wilson always says, “What’s the big idea?” I guess the big idea here—if it’s not too presumptuous to call it that—is the tradeoffs we all make between wanting to be free and wanting to be part of a greater whole, whether that’s valuable space in a community or a healthy, loving relationship.

You brought up my Charlotte magazine work. There was a story that I did in it last year called “After the Crash.” That story is totally an idea story, to a point that is unique for any story I’ve ever done. I didn’t talk to anybody, not a person—I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s a 5,000-word idea story that was reported by reading for months, on and off: NASCAR coverage, NASCAR books, magazine stories about NASCAR, stories about the housing crisis and economic collapse, and American studies. And then going to Daytona for the weekend and just walking around with a notebook, just walking and walking and literally resisting the urge to talk to people. Some people liked it, some people didn’t.

Why did you decide to take that approach?

Because what am I going to ask people? What am I going to ask the man on the street? “Can we have a conversation about the ways in which NASCAR at this current moment is similar to the housing bubble?” How do we even start that conversation? I just had to recalibrate my idea of what reporting is, or was, for that story.

This is something that I’ve been having some internal conversations about recently: the idea of thinking as reporting, which sounds ridiculous when I hear it come out of my mouth. Because of course you think when you report. Sometimes I think the more people I talk to, the better reporting I’m doing. Well, maybe. And for some stories, the more conversations you have, the more you’re learning.

But to really stop and consider the whys and the whats: I felt like I was getting the whats over the weekend and over the course of reading for that story. What I had to do was to start to tying together the ties of the whys. That was something I had to do on my own, in my head, and I had to organize it in a way that worked for that story.

What is your process for tying together the whys?

I brought up the NASCAR story because it is the most extreme example. I think the monkey story is definitely an example, too—it’s just they’re two different stories, two different approaches. In both cases, it was, as it always is, important to learn as much as I can about those different pieces of the story, those dots. For the NASCAR story, those dots are—I’m painting with a broad brush here—NASCAR, the economy, the highs and lows of American real estate. For the monkey story, those dots are rhesus macaques as a species, this rhesus macaque and loneliness.

So whatever it takes to learn as much as you can about those dots, that’s what you do. For the NASCAR story, it wasn’t talking to people, it was reading, reading, reading, and then really observing that weekend, walking in Daytona with a notebook.

For this piece it was also plenty of reading, but it was also visiting the yards where the monkey’s been spotted, talking to experts. Once you have all that, you can start putting some meat on those connections. You have a sense of where those connections might happen, but you can’t support those connections without that learning.

That’s maybe one difference in how I approach stories now versus how I approached stories five or six years ago—now I’m reporting stories as little self-taught, self-put-together seminars. I’m making a syllabus as I go along. And once I feel like I’ve learned the material on that self-inflicted syllabus, I can then make those connections and tie those ties of the whys in the most illuminating, most concise ways.

“What” is everywhere—more than it’s ever been. It’s still our role, but one of our additional roles, perhaps more than before, is making sense of the whys, or the reasons.

What journalists are most inspiring or most interesting to you these days?

I really like reading Michael Lewis, because I feel like he combines some of those things: narrative movement, big ideas, characters, and does it in an enormously readable way. I’m unbelievably lucky to share an area of the newsroom with people like Ben [Montgomery] and Lane [DeGregory] and John Barry. Somebody that I read a lot of and admire who used to work here is Tom Lake, who’s now at Atlanta magazine.

There are so many people, and you start throwing names around, and you don’t want to leave anybody out…

Like the Oscars. You don’t want to forget to thank somebody…

There are so many different kinds of work. I love Gary Smith’s long stuff in Sports Illustrated, and I love Tommy Tomlinson’s short stuff in The Charlotte Observer. They’re almost two different forms, but they end up doing the same thing—they make you think and they make you feel. Charlie Pierce is one of those journalists—I don’t care if he’s writing in Esquire, for The Boston Globe, or on his blog. I don’t care what he’s writing about. I read everything he writes.

There are others, like Elizabeth Gilbert—pre-Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert. Not that I didn’t enjoy and read that, and her last book, Committed, too. I’ll read everything she writes. But some of her work from 10, 12 years ago—magazine work—I just pick that up from time to time and reread it. The people who hide—maybe that’s the wrong word—big ideas and big stuff in unbelievably readable stories, that’s what we’re all trying to do.——

[For more, check out our commentary on Kruse’s monkey story.]

Melissa Lyttle/St. Petersburg Times

You’ve done reporting from war zones before, haven’t you?

Yes, Afghanistan and Iraq. I’ve been to Haiti a bunch of times, but not for about 10 years.

How was Haiti the same or different, in terms of the humanitarian crisis versus the war zone?

The magnitude of the disaster and the number of people whose lives were destroyed felt much greater in Haiti. When I was in Iraq and saw so many injured Iraqis, it was very often the U.S. who was injuring them. So there wasn’t that sense of guilt in Haiti, but in other ways it was much worse.

You sometimes offer a small and positive note to end your stories. How do you straddle that line between reporting on the magnitude of the suffering but also offering something else? I’m thinking of the birth of the baby in the story about the missing brother.

I was really happy that that happened the way that it did because I was having trouble seeing my way out of the rubble. That was a moment that helped me to do that.

In reporting on humanitarian crises, sometimes there’s a worry about dulling readers’ response to the survivors by making it seem like they come from the kinds of places where this is just how life is. Did you struggle with that?

I did try to pick really small things to tell the big story. Like the amputations piece—a little girl in a body cast with the lower half of her body crushed putting latex gloves on the feet of the naked Barbie and screaming “Socks!” I was showing that this is the face of the nation now, but let’s look at it with this guy coming from Tampa to find his brother. Let’s look at it through the eyes of this nursing student who’s just had her leg taken off. I don’t know that most of it was very upbeat, but I did try to tell it in a very personal way.

You did more than one account with a storytelling approach while you were there. Was that your decision, or did your editors ask you to focus on narratives?

The assignment was that there would be so much coming out of Haiti, so much wire news, that I needed to tell stories about people from this area, from the Tampa, St. Pete and central Florida area—or from Florida. So I was always trying to find people and focus in on what someone from Florida was doing. That in itself made it more of a narrative, because I wasn’t telling the big news story. I was writing about a person doing something.

A lot of reporters seemed to find that amputation theme at the same time. A few stories ran that were about the same length as yours that were straight news pieces. But your piece was a real story. How long did you have to turn that around?

Every piece I did—except for the last one— I had one day. On the amputation story, I got to the hospital in the afternoon, and I had to file fairly early in the evening. I had no time, and the logistics were terrible. I had no idea how I would get from the hospital back to where I could sit and write. Often I was writing in a moving car. It was really tough, the logistics of trying to get those stories done.

I had set a goal of trying to get a different story every day: search and rescue, amputations, relief, someone trying to find a family member.  And then I had the added challenge of trying to find someone from this area. So I was running around madly trying to find a story, trying to take notes and make it personal, and then finally trying to get it written and filed. It was very, very rushed.

Was there anything you wish you had been able to do? I was wondering if you had even had time to confirm the cannibalism story about Fenel, Daniel Thelusmar’s brother. In that situation, where you didn’t have access to resources you would normally use to check things out, did you find it hard to check your stories?

I had heard that things like that were happening [back then]. I had been in Haiti around that time and knew that story wasn’t that far-fetched. I had also found Daniel Thelusmar, who was the subject of that story, to be very credible. But you’re right, I could not go pull clips and talk to people to confirm that had happened in that market at that moment.

But you had been in Haiti before.

Yes, and I knew at that time there were reports of that kind of thing happening. I also found Daniel [Thelusmar] to be laid back, low key and not sensational. And that helped.

You asked about regrets. I think my greatest regret is that some of the people that I wrote about and was so worried about, I lost track of. They were carted in trucks out of the hospital. I’m very worried about what has happened to them. I’ve asked people to try to find them and see if they’re okay, but I haven’t had much luck, and that’s really concerning to me.

Is there anything else you’d say to someone else who may be sent into this kind of situation? Do you have any tips?

One of the things is if you’re not trying to do a story every day, you have a little more time to get the story and sit down and write it. We were just so rushed. So trying to arrange to have a little bit of time would be good.

The editor on these stories was Bill Duryea, which really helped. For instance, on the amputation story, I was at this hospital, trying to see amputations, going around talking to people and trying to get to know them, so that it wouldn’t be just one more leg removed, but it would be the story of the nursing student who’d come out of poverty and had put her life into her career and now it was over. I was doing that on my end, but he was seeing it as the new tragic face of Haiti. Having him on the [other] end with an overview was really helpful.

How did you get the stories to him?

I had a little tiny notebook computer that was not connected, so I would type into that, then put it on a Zip drive and run it over to the photographer who had a satellite phone, and she, Melissa Lyttle, would send it.

Running, rushing, not eating, it was nonstop. Phones go dead all the time, so you can’t get to people. You’re trying to call in something or letting them know you’re trying to do this piece, and you cannot get in touch with your editor. Or you’re in a car and you can’t use the satellite phone. There would be hours where Bill wouldn’t know if we even had a story. I’d say, “I’ll call you at 4 and tell you,” and then I couldn’t get through till 7.

The logistics are much harder than you think they’re going to be. You think you’re going to get there and have people who are going to take you places, and that you’ll leave at 6 in the morning and it will take two hours and you’ll be at this place at this time. But you leave at 9 in the morning and it takes four hours, and the people who were supposed to be there aren’t there, so you wait another three. Everything takes much longer than you think it will, so allow for that. We couldn’t. That was tough.

[For more on Laughlin's reporting from Haiti, read our commentary on her amputation story.]