Tell me a little about the timeline for the reporting and the writing of this story.

I had been in Rainsville doing a couple daily stories and ran into this one in the course of reporting those. I met Corey Plunkett at a FEMA outpost and he mentioned the paystub situation. From that point it was three days of reporting, two days of writing.

You open with sentences that begin “on the first day” and “on the second day.” It feels like you’re reworking the Biblical story of creation – repeating order growing out of chaos. What were you trying to do with that lede?

I was trying to accomplish a few things at once. One was practical. This was in some ways two stories – the Rainsville side and the Hixson side – that were more or less parallel time-wise, and I thought the ‘on the first day’ phrase, and repeating it, would help orient the reader better than saying Wednesday or Thursday. The other thing has to do with thinking about the story as a whole, I mean what it felt like being in Rainsville, what people said about their experience, and of course the story of Corey and Charlie. Besides just being sad, there was a surreal quality to the aftermath – everything being rearranged and unfamiliar, and all these people trying in their own ways to reorient themselves, or as you say, create some order. That’s what people were trying to do, fundamentally.

Then there was this story of Corey and Charlie, which had an almost fable quality to it. So the phrase in the lede surfaced out of dwelling on all that. It seemed to convey an appropriate feeling to the story, which was almost archetypal, which is maybe why you’re saying Biblical. But I didn’t start off with that idea; I started out thinking about what people said, what it felt like, what happened, and the lede grew out of that.

One other point. With most ledes, I tend to focus not on the first or second sentence per se, but on where the opening needs to end up story-wise. In this case, the opening needed to end with Corey getting the first email. From that I worked backwards, orienting the first few sentences towards that moment, like steps in a process.

The story feels very spare – even the quotes are short. Did you start long and cut a lot out to get there, or did you just write it that stripped from the beginning?

I wrote it stripped. It seemed right, plus I fear overwriting. The degree to which a story is emotional is proportional to how much I tend to pull back, almost like I don’t want to invade the subject’s space or the reader’s. The danger of course is pulling back too far and draining a story of feeling by obscuring things or not giving enough information. So, while nothing was cut, the first editor, David Finkel, suggested adding a couple of key sentences to make certain important points sharper. Like in the second graph, he suggested adding one more ‘someone else’s’ as well as the last sentence in that graph to make the point clear. He knew exactly which parts needed a bit more elaboration or attention, and I think these additions made the story much sharper.

Barbara Vobejda, who was the second editor and moved the story, made a couple surgical changes – like changing particularity to peculiarity in reference to the tornados’ destruction, which was perfect. But overall, things were added rather than cut.

Structure seems key to this piece. At what point did you figure out the structure?

I figured out the opening, as mentioned, and then I knew the midway point the story should drive to this vulnerable feeling Corey described when he realized his things were out there everywhere for anyone to see, and then wondering about Charlie. To me, that was the hinge of the story. Once I had those two things decided – the opening and the mid point – the structure fell into place.

You knew hundreds of reporters had written or were writing about the same story. Did that influence your approach?

Not really. At the outset, we decided to avoid Tuscaloosa, because everyone was there. I also did not have the responsibility of wrapping in daily developments, so it was possible to just focus on trying to tell this particular story, the story I had, in the place where I was, as well as I could. It was great that the newspaper allowed that.

Is there anything else you want to say about this piece? Anything we wouldn’t know from reading it?

I went back and forth on putting the thing in about Charlie’s medication. But he was very open about his struggles, which was in fact what made him appealing, I thought.

Also, about the ending. A lot of times I just let a story stop, rather than really writing an ending or thinking about it the way you think of a beginning. It’s probably the fear of overwriting again, or not wanting to be definitive, in terms of meaning. In any case, I knew the story ended with Corey surrounded by other peoples’ belongings. That was the odd fact of what happened – this exchange that had taken place. It was touching, of course, but also somehow strange. So in the first version of the end, I had described the scene and just let it stop there. But David thought we should elaborate a bit, and asked me again what exactly happened. I told him about the “Oh, Corey” which was so purely beautiful in the actual moment. I had left it out, though, because I thought there was a danger it might not read right on paper, a notion that he found mystifying. So we put that in. Most importantly, he thought it was not enough to just have the description sitting there, and suggested the very last line, which was truly ingenious. It was satisfying because it spoke to the whole story, but without being too defining or confining.

Where did this story come from?

Like a lot of story ideas, it was kind of in flux up until the last minute. Usually my job at the paper is to come up with project-type narratives, but it’s also often doing news narratives and trying to find ways, within a week or less, to hit 2,000 words on something that’s happening.

I had actually been on book leave from the paper for nine months. I’ve been back for three or four weeks, and it’s a flaw, but I’m always antsy to get in the paper. I started at the paper doing sports writing and then covering politics, so I start feeling nervous about not being in the paper for long stretches of time.

As usual, I was driving my editor, David Finkel, crazy, but his instinct, wisely, is usually to wait until you find a thing you know is going to be right. In finding a midpoint between what he thought and what I thought, we decided that coming up with a couple of narrative stories off the federal budget was a way to make this dense, complicated and frankly sometimes boring stuff feel real.

So I started diving in on the budget and did one story in Virginia from a place where a poverty assistance program is still getting crazy high demand because of how the economy has been in rural places. It’s not really getting better. Now budget cuts mean they have less to give than ever. In some cases, the very people who have been giving out assistance are now about to get fired and now will be seeking assistance themselves.

I did a story on that. And the other one that seemed to make sense was going with Paul Ryan when he was going to talk to these small towns back in his district in Wisconsin. I went with an open-ended idea of what the story would be. He had like five town hall events on this one day. I flew out at 7 o’clock that morning, spent the day sitting in five of these events, basically farming for characters. The great thing about these events is that they’re interactive, so you get to hear all these different people talk. After each one, I’d run around frantically to a couple people who seemed like they might be interesting and collect numbers and then circle back with those people at the end of the day.

I sort of homed in on the Cammerses. They felt right. I spent a day or two with them, came back and wrote in a day or two, and then it went into the paper.

Even without what you just said, it feels like your story rises out of the news – Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, the town-hall style meetings over it, and on a larger level, the budget crisis. But it also feels somehow, along with reflecting the light of that news, the story takes a deliberate step away it. Was that intentional?

Yeah, definitely, and it’s something that I pretty much always try to do. It’s hard sometimes at newspapers now. There’s such demand to be instantaneous. Stories that used to be for the next month have become stories for the next week, and stories that used to be for the next week are now for the next day, and stories for the next day are now for the next minute. The news cycle is so fast, and we’re reporting on these tiny little gradients of things. It’s sort of the Politico model of “we’re going to report everything really fast,” without ever pulling back to think “what does it mean?”

Instead of writing about these incremental news items, what if we try to write a story about something that’s relevant and that’s happening now, but write about it in a way that people can read it two months from now or two years from now, and it’s still a story, and it still makes sense beyond comparing to what happened in the last hour and what’s going to happen in the next hour?

Did this story change a lot during the writing or the editing processes?

I had a pretty good feel for how I wanted to put it together, in part because I’m super lucky to be on this small enterprise team at the paper. The guy who edited it, David Finkel, is a tremendous narrative writer and thinks about stories really well. Typically while I’m out reporting, he and I might talk for 15 minutes a day just to kind of discuss what I’m seeing and where I think the story is going. And before I write, I’ll usually talk to him for 10 or 15 minutes about how I’m seeing it coming together.

Some people write through drafts and it helps them to get something down, and they can go back and tear it up or flesh it out. For me, by the time I have a sentence the way I want it, I’ve often written it 15 or 20 different times so that the pacing sounds right. By the time I get through a draft, it’s usually pretty close to what it’s going to be in the end.

So you self-edit as you go?

Yes, a lot of self-editing as I go. Definitely for me a part of it is reading out loud so I can hear how it sounds, and sometimes hassling and haggling my wife into listening while I read, because it really helps to hear it. By the time I turn a story in, I feel like the next day I could almost recite it from memory, because I’ve read through and thought about every sentence so many times before I move on to the next graf. Sometimes I wish, if something is stalling me out, that I could move on and write through, but it’s really just not the way my mind works.

So you talk with your editor as you conceive and report the story. Is there usually much editing from his end after you turn the draft in?

I think Finkel would say that the bulk of his work doesn’t happen once the story comes in. Finkel definitely improves the story once it comes in, because he always sees one or two things, or thinks of one or two moves. He knows words so well, and he’s such a careful editor, and he cares so much about precision. Sometimes Finkel and I will spend 20 minutes talking about what we feel is one key word in the third section of a 2,000-word story. I think everybody else in the newsroom basically thinks we’re crazy, but that’s the work that happens once the story is in.

Where any good editor is indispensible, at least for me – and Finkel definitely is – is that he’s super in-touch throughout the process. So that most of the time I’m coming up with the ideas, but if he’s not outright rejecting five ideas, he’s helping me home in on those ideas before hand, so that I’m going to the right place for the right reasons. Then when I’m there, he wants me to check in and talk about what I’m seeing, which is pretty much the same thing as reading out loud. Talking about it out loud helps me to begin to structure a story in my head and helps me figure out where to focus my reporting. He’s super-talented, even from afar, at having good ideas about what things to look for and watch out for.

I went back through some of your stories and remembered reading a lot of them before. From that story of a daughter forced back home by recession to a piece on a woman whose job it is to help companies lay off employees, you seem to specialize in micro-focused narrative portraits of people whose lives intersect with national events.

Yes.

The benefit of that, of course, is that narrative brings the story in close for readers. How do you think about the balance between each person’s complete self and the one aspect that makes him or her newsworthy?

That’s a constant struggle. I think if you write about somebody – no matter what person you’re writing about – you can still write about them in a true way. The honest answer is that writing for a newspaper, and frankly even if you do 100,000-word books on a person, you’re never going to get everything. There are always going to be pieces that you leave out, that’s part of self-editing, and that is what it is.

Sometimes it’s really hard. The story I did before this Wisconsin one, the one in Virginia, I was writing about a woman who works for an emergency assistance facility in Pulaski, Va., which is this place that’s been totally hammered by the economy. Now she’s very likely going to lose her job. I was writing about that part of her life.

But really, when I was there and spent time with her, it became clear that the defining moment in her life was that her only son, when he was 15 years old, hung himself from the tree in their back yard, and she found him.

It felt ridiculous to write any story about this woman that wasn’t a story about that moment, because it had defined everything about her since then: what she did, who she was. But things that are a really important part of people relate to everything they do in ways that are central. Her job is basically that all these people come in and she listens to them talk about their problems. In the last five years since her son killed himself, she’s much more patient than she ever was before, maybe in part because she thinks maybe she didn’t listen enough to him, and in part because she understands suffering even more than she ever did before.

The key was to find a way to bring that in that was true to what she had gone through and was continuing to go through and that also related to the story at hand. The truth is, especially in a newspaper story – and the stories I’m writing are usually around 2,500 words – you sort of have to accept going in that you have to self-edit and you’re not going to be able to do everything, and sometimes that’s enormously frustrating, but it’s a reality of newspaper writing.

You’re also doing a book, “Ten Letters,” about just these kinds of individual stories. Are they still these small portraits, or is the book very different?

The book is a chance to stretch. Instead of writing 2,500 words, it covers 10 letters across the course of 2010. All these letter writers are people who Obama interacted with and who became in some way central to something that he was doing.

The main characters in the book are these 10 people who wrote something during the course of the year. Obama is the constant secondary character. It’s definitely similar. It’s similar in that these are people who are otherwise not known, but they’re intersecting with something at an important moment. The device of the letters was a great way to go out and spend time with people and write about the things that they’re dealing with – whether it’s following a couple as they file for bankruptcy in Michigan, or a Mexican-American woman in Arizona who is trying to decide, as Arizona passes its new immigration laws, if she’s going to move or stay there with her family.

In each chapter you’re sort of following a narrative of what these people are going through and also cutting away to Obama and how he’s dealing with some of the things that these people face. It was a fun way to get out and spend time with people, which is by far my favorite part of the job. I like writing, but reporting days – I like them a million times better.

Back to the Cammers piece, this kind of portrait is a traditional narrative device, but in this story in particular, there is something almost fragile about this family. It’s a very interior story, almost internal to Cammers. Can you talk about how you did that?

The style of writing that I often appreciate the most and aspire to do well is writing where the writer is just not a part of it at all. And where as you’re reading a story, you can lose yourself in the character and forget about who’s telling it to you. The Post has a really great tradition of that kind of writing, so they kind of get it. But still, there are things in most of the newspaper that have a different sort of feel.

In a story, I almost never use quotes in the sense of I-asked-somebody-and-they-told-me-X. It’s all dialogue. If you’re asking the reader to lose himself or herself in a narrative, to come out of dialogue and have it suddenly be a quote that’s coming directly at you is a really jarring thing. So sometimes that’s a fight we have to have at the paper. When you are trying to ask people to read something like this, you want them to disappear into it.

Narratives can still be newsy. Statistics can be hugely helpful, for example, in trying to set up a story. We sometimes call it going big by going small – trying to write about a big issue by going in really narrow.

Anybody who reads you guys will already know this, so I’m not saying anything new, but the key always is details. It’s a very simple, simple rule – not details for the sake of show – but the right details are everything. That’s what keeps the story from feeling generic. That’s what makes characters feel real. What creates empathy in a story is having the reader feel at the end like they know somebody, and details are the way that happens.

Along those lines, I thought you did something interesting with Tim Cammers – you left the reader room to find him sympathetic or unsympathetic. Did you resist the urge to be more definite?

I did, yes – in some ways resisting some of the other people at the paper who saw the piece and felt like he should have read one way or the other. It never feels like my place to pass judgment, particularly in this story, where the crux of how you’re going to feel about a lot of this budget stuff comes down to “how do you feel about Tim Cammers?” Is he a waste on the system who’s using it for his advantage? Or is he someone who is in desperate need of a safety net and deserves it? I think a lot of readers will come and project their feelings about that onto him, but it’s certainly not my job to push them in one direction or the other. In the end, that’s one of the things I’m happiest with about the story.

When did the Times commit to doing the Deepwater Horizon project?

I had written, with some other reporters, a very long piece that ran in June of last year that really zeroed in on the blowout preventer. After that piece, I think a number of us felt like there was still more to be done, but we weren’t really sure what that was.

So it wasn’t until probably August when the big conceptual breakthrough occurred, which was that we thought that there was a really great story if we focused very narrowly on the crew and the last hours of Deepwater Horizon. We wanted to focus not on what everyone else was focusing on, at least in those summer months, which was “What caused the blowout?” – which inevitably took you into a very dense thicket of questions about well design and about cementing and all the things that happened below the rig, all the way down to where they were tapping into the oil two miles beneath the surface of the ocean bead. Instead, we focused on the rig itself and understanding the crew that worked on this rig, and understanding the systems that were engineered and were incorporated into the rig to protect these people from the very thing that occurred: the blowout.

There were three bylines on the piece, and a note about contributing material from another reporter. What were the mechanics of the story? Who actually wrote it?

I wrote every word of it. I think the byline in the paper was clear on that point. It was written by me, with reporting by myself and David [Rohde] and Stephanie [Saul]. The reason I make that point is that this is a narrative, in a way. And I think that we all realized and could see the importance of having a coherent and single voice carrying this story. It’s been all of our experience that at the end of the day, you can’t write narrative by committee. So I took on that task of being the writer, and then of course, we all divvied up various aspects of the reporting.

I noticed that in the actual structure of it, loosely speaking, a third of it leads up to the blowout, and then a third is that nine minutes between the blowout and the explosions, and the last third is wrapping up. Did you divide it that cleanly on purpose? How did you decide on the structure?

I think the biggest thing that drove the framing of the story was actually that “nine minutes” idea. There was this period of time when a whole bunch of things could have occurred or maybe should have occurred that might have saved lives or prevented explosions or minimized explosions. That was the absolute crucial period of time: the time between when the crew had the absolute first obvious evidence that they were experiencing a blowout – which was actual mud and oil coming up on the rig itself – and when the big cataclysmic explosion occurred that basically eliminated any chance of the rig coming out of this OK.

And yet, what made this particular narrative extremely challenging is No. 1, you’re dealing with an awful lot of technology, a very complex system. The fire and gas alarm system alone has a phone book-size instruction manual. That’s just one. There’s the ventilation system, and the systems that allowed the crew to communicate, and the warning system, and the gas sensor – all of that stuff was really important to the story.

Handling the complexity of the technology, along with the number of different characters on this rig that in and of itself is a foreign place for most readers, this was the narrative challenge. How do you structure the piece so that you create a sense of pace and narrative and keep people going through this experience and put them as much as possible in the shoes of some of the people on this rig during this couple-hour period of time?

The way I tried to deal with that was keeping the focus relentlessly on the one day and on this one 9-minute period of time. That was the frame that helped anchor the piece.

You have this chunk of technical material you’re trying to get across, and then you have all these narrative details. Inside that larger frame, how did you approach bringing the technical material and specifics available in hindsight into the story about the people?

It’s not like there was some master narrative out there somewhere that said when one event happened compared to some other event. So in fact, part of the challenge was constructing that narrative and knowing what went on in that nine-minute period of time with over 100 people on the rig reacting and doing different things. One of the most important challenges for us was, through the reporting and interviews we did with more than 20 of these crew members and a really careful sifting through of all the public testimony, putting together an incredibly extensive narrative that zeroed in on this very compressed period of time.

Once you have that, of course, it makes it a lot easier to zero in on the moments that seem most critical. The trickier part was how to hit the right tone, where you’re looking at the actions of members of this crew who in some cases froze in the moment or were overwhelmed with the complexity of the systems they were trying to operate.

You could make them look like idiots. There are a lot of ways you could slam people with 20/20 hindsight. For me, it felt more important to try as best I could to put myself in their shoes and take into consideration and into account the chaos and the horrific circumstances under which they were asked to make rapid decisions – sometimes with incomplete information. And all the while worried that everything around them was going to blow up. On the one hand, it was about being fair to them and trying to bear witness, but also doing something bigger with the story.

In terms of which narrative details you chose to use, did you have any concerns about what is sometimes called disaster porn?

I didn’t worry about that because I felt like there was an enormously consequential story at the heart of this. That story is one that I think ought to really inform our discussion and debate going forward about deepwater drilling.

In this particular case, if there was one overarching narrative that emerged in the first month, it was this idea that BP as a corporation was cutting corners and sacrificing safety, and that was the root cause of what happened there. To an extent, people would look at the Texas City explosion in Alaska and say, “Here’s this rogue corporation cutting costs, and then there’s this disaster.”

What was interesting in terms of what emerged from our reporting is that it’s a more difficult problem than that. If you have one rogue company, you can force change on the part of that corporation, but in this case the Deepwater Horizon rig was a Transocean workplace. Transocean owned the rig. There were only a couple of BP employees on the rig. It was a culture shaped by Transocean.

What was significant to us was that when it comes to deepwater drilling in the Gulf, this is the best of the best, the A team, in theory. It was a sophisticated rig with an experienced crew on board. Despite that and despite having a potent safety culture and having the best technology that exists to prevent a blowout and an explosion that could kill people, there were failures. And that raises questions about our ability to do deepwater drilling in a safe manner. That issue was at the heart of the story, because it raises an important question as we go forward with deepwater drilling.

You’ve done a lot of narratives, as well as large investigations, at the St. Petersburg Times and The New York Times. Did reporting or telling this story present any particular problems that you hadn’t faced before?

Coming out of the St. Pete Times, I sort of grew up journalistically around people like Tom French, Anne Hull and David Finkel. What I’ve spent the bulk of my career trying to do is to take as much narrative storytelling as I can into the traditional investigative reporting mindset. You’ll see a similar kind of thing in a lot of my stories.

This one actually felt like a really comfortable fit with that approach: going in a tough-minded and investigative way to understand what went wrong and hold accountable the various actors in this story and the forces that contributed to this disaster. And trying to do it through a narrative that can help people not just absorb the information at an intellectual level but feel it at a gut level, in a way that hopefully a reader comes away from the piece with a much clearer detailed, vivid sense not just of the kind of people who worked on this rig and the culture of this rig but the very complex sequence of events and technical failures that fed into the tragedy.

Do you have any suggestions for reporters tasked with telling a story that has already been covered by so many outlets?

Yes, a couple. There’s one easily overlooked point about this story: the point about space. This story really couldn’t be told if the newspaper weren’t willing to open up, in this case, four full pages. We had these amazing photographs, but the story needed space, too.

The thing I would tell younger reporters is that if this were a 2,000-word story as opposed to an 8,500-word story, you couldn’t even think about it. The most important point, the most obvious point, is that in this case, we were able to persuade our editors here to give us the space. We don’t run many double trucks, and this was actually a quadruple truck. You have to get that kind of space, and to understand how space does or doesn’t limit what you do as a storyteller.

The other thing I would say is that sometimes even when stories are covered quite intensively for a couple months or similar period of time, if you’re paying close attention and looking at the way the story is being covered, sometimes you’ll see things that weren’t doable in the first months become doable over time.

In this case, the flow of coverage organically shifted to things like the cleanup, the extent of the pollution, the effects of the pollution, and then to BP and BP’s safety record – and to what caused the blowout, the well design, and the cementing job. I remember thinking at one point, “It’s weird after all this that I don’t think I’ve read or seen something that put me on the rig in the lives of the people there on that last day.”

You set out, and maybe the people who didn’t want to talk in the first week – maybe they were traumatized, hunkering down or finding lawyers – some of those people with time, you can get them to open up. It’s good to look and be thinking about any new layers that can be peeled back once you’re past the immediate aftermath.

Boston University Narrative Conference – April 29-30 at the Photonics Center in Boston. Speakers TBA. Last year’s group included New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, Gay Talese and Adam Hochschild, among other notables.

The Muse and the Marketplace – April 30-May 1 at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston. Grub Street, Inc., offers up New York Times contributor Pauline Chen, nonfiction writer Alexandra Johnson and “Hiroshima in the Morning” author Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, among many others. (Actor and short story writer James Franco will be there, too, so we’re half expecting him to announce the start of his new career as a narrative journalist.)

Biographers International Organization Conference – May 21 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. For writers limning the lives of the famous and infamous, Robert Caro (“The Power Broker”) and Stacy Schiff  (“Cleopatra”) headline the speakers at BIO’s one-day affair.

Great Storytelling Every Day – July 17-22 in St. Petersburg, Fla. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tom French leads this Poynter Institute week-long workshop on conceiving and framing deadline narratives for print and online. Some scholarships available.

Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference – July 22-24 in Grapevine, Texas (outside Dallas). The Mayborn 2011 roster includes poet and essayist Diane Ackerman, two-time Pulitzer winner Gene Weingarten, “The Good Soldiers” author David Finkel, and NPR commentator Frank Deford, among many others.

We’ll post information on other upcoming conferences and workshops as we get details on them. If there’s an event you think Storyboard readers should know about, please don’t hesitate to e-mail us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

You started thinking about telling the story of a zoo after reading “Life of Pi“ in 2003, and your big series for the St. Petersburg Times appeared in the paper to a good deal of attention in 2007. What story were you hoping the book would tell that hadn’t already been told?

Well, there are a couple things. It’s a totally different audience between the series and the book, although different people around the country and other parts of the world see the series online. It was primarily a story that was available to people in the Tampa Bay area. But beyond different audiences, I wanted to go deeper into the moral ambiguity of what a zoo is and what it means and its place in a world where so many species are becoming extinct.

So, one of the things was I did a ton more research. I think I read every book ever written about the history of zoos, the culture of zoos, the politics of zoos, zoos from a veterinarian’s standpoint, zoos from a keeper’s standpoint. I also did a ton of research on the different species that I was writing about, especially on elephants, tigers and chimps, and a lot of research into extinction. What that really did was allow me to write with a lot more depth and with a different sense of authority. The first two thirds or three quarters of the book are the same dramatic narrative arc, but they’re told from a different, more informed context. I feel like it really makes it read in kind of a fresh way.

The other thing is that after I began it, all this stuff happened with Lex’s downfall. I already thought I had a pretty strong ending with Herman and Enshalla, and Lex kind of barreling forward despite those losses. But then when Lex gets knocked out by the monkeys and by the other primates in Tampa society, it was just this amazing new ending – it was like a triple ending. And so I called my editor at Hyperion after Lex got –

So you already had the book contract at that point?

Yes. I was already working on the book. And I called my editor at Hyperion and said, “We have a new ending.” She asked, “Well, does it change your arc very much?” I said, “No, it’s a very natural resolution of the arc from the first page.” Lex’s ambition is really what powers that opening scene of these elephants coming over on the plane. The word hubris comes up in that chapter – actually a later chapter – just this idea that what’s involved in a zoo, period, involves a certain level of human arrogance and a presumption of supremacy, as the book says. But then to actually make elephants fly, to do this really unnatural thing – since he’s bringing over these wild animals to be the centerpiece of a new vision of the zoo, that was an audacious move.

He got tripped up on these conflicts of interest and the other stuff at the end, but I actually think that’s the most audacious thing that he does in that time frame. And certainty PETA went after him with a lot of fervor. But that ending really felt like the arc was complete, and the circle really came around. That makes it a very different read to me.

“Zoo Story” balanced two stories – that zoos are magical places of animal preservation, and that they are exploitative and sometimes detrimental to their residents. A lot of long-form newspaper stories and books seem to have a narrative and then a counter-narrative that pushes back on it a little bit, but you seemed to be trying to keep the two on equal footing throughout the book. Can you talk about that a little?

I’m so glad it read that way to you.

That’s a hard thing to do.

One of my pet peeves in narrative reporting is – it’s not just narrative reporting, but in American culture – we tend to be this culture where everything is presented in really black-and-white terms. I really wanted to avoid that kind of simplistic thinking, either that “zoos are terrible” or “zoos are wonderful.” The truth is a lot more complicated than that.

I was determined not to make a book that was either an attack on or a defense of zoos, but instead asking “What’s it like?” What’s a zoo like, and how do the people inside the zoo grapple with these very complex moral and ethical questions? And what do those questions mean for the animals, and what’s the relationship those animals have with their human keepers? Should they even have a relationship with them? The complexity was just beautiful, and I really wanted to map that.

In the book, you mentioned being aware of the dangers of anthropomorphizing the animals. But at several points in the book, you actually de-anthropomorphize the people. Did you struggle with how much to make the humans part of the animal kingdom?

That wasn’t a struggle. That was, to me, one of the most rewarding things to do in the book. We are human. We look at the animals, and I think it is almost impossible to remove our human perspective as to how we see them. I did try. I have one moment near the opening, where I refer to the orangutans sighing their philosophical sighs. “Philosophical” is an anthropomorphic word. But by God, if you watch them – it feels that way. So I allowed myself that moment, but I tried hard otherwise to limit that as much as I could.

One of the things that was stunning to me, that I found so powerful, was that I didn’t have to guess what was happening with the animals or about their personalities. They could be reported out. It was factual. You could see the things that I was describing and observe it in their behavior during the time I was there — and with creatures like Herman, in the decades he was at the zoo. And I just thought that was fascinating. There are a couple moments where I wonder what’s happening inside the animals, but I was bowled over by how much you could actually prove and nail down through factual reporting, good hard reporting. And that was just really fun.

But at a certain point, once I get you thinking about the animals in terms of species, it was really fun to shift into looking at the humans more closely, and seeing us as another species. That was, for me, a revelation. It shouldn’t have been, because I’m not the first person to do that by any stretch of the imagination. Lots of people have written some really powerful stuff about that. But for me it was a revelation, and the key happened at that black-tie fundraiser.

I hate getting dressed up. I hate formal events. I certainly don’t want to go to them, and I especially hate trying to cover them. And so I was really dreading going to that fundraiser. I knew I needed to, but then at a certain point, I thought, “What if you just think of yourself as a primate anthropologist, and you’re going to study your species in the field? And you’re not even going to interview people. You’re just going to watch and listen and observe.”

And the night became just beautiful to report. It was so much fun to report it that way, and so revealing. That made a big shift, and then of course, that shift really led me to being able to contrast and compare Herman’s leadership and alpha status with Lex’s leadership and alpha status. Once Lex went down at the end, it became clear that they were both going to pay a price for their leadership styles. There were benefits to how they ruled, but they both ultimately paid a price.

Turning to the big picture, the publishing industry is having its own share of troubles right now, but it seems like many long-form journalists who would have written for newspapers in the past are now going to books. What do you see as the future of narrative nonfiction?

Narrative is going to be part of journalism long after newspapers have become extinct, and long after the Internet evolves into whatever it evolves into next. Narrative has been a part of human experience since before there were newspapers. It’s not going to go away. Some newspapers have pulled back on narrative, and I think that’s unfortunate. I was very sad to see the narrative conference at Nieman dropped, because I think it was a terrific conference. That was a real service – one that really made a difference in American journalism.

Some newspapers have pulled back on narrative, but a lot of newspapers have realized that it’s like saying you’re not going to do interviewing anymore. It’s so much a part of what we do. It’s woven into every newspaper every day. The entire sports section is essentially narrative. The comics page is narrative. The political coverage of a campaign is narrative. It’s woven into what we do so tightly that I think this notion that it’s something we can get rid of is very muddied in its thinking. But some newspapers have deliberately decided “We don’t have enough resources for that.” If you really study narrative, as Nieman has, there’s a lot of narrative that’s still done daily, beautiful narrative done every day, under very tight deadline with minimal resources being committed.

Big, long-form narratives – yes, those have taken a hit. But the best newspapers continue to do great work of all kinds, including narratives. I just read a powerhouse piece by Anthony Shadid in The New York Times, a week ago, I think it was, or a week and a half ago, on this one Iraqi family’s quest to find out what happened to their father, who was taken away by people dressed as police officers in the middle of the night – a brilliant, gorgeous, heartbreaking piece. If you go back and read the Walter Reed series by Anne [Hull] and Dana [Priest], that was clearly a marriage between classic investigative thinking and classic narrative strategies. If you read The Virginian-Pilot, they have a real serious commitment to narrative. They have, for decades, done narrative projects and narrative dailies.

And if you go to the St. Petersburg Times, the commitment to narrative is still very much in evidence . Lane [DeGregory] won a Pulitzer writing the long-form narrative “The Girl in the Window.” Ben Montgomery and Waveney Ann Moore were Pulitzer finalists earlier this year with “For Their Own Good,” where they used a combination of classic investigative techniques with very smart narrative strategies. It’s not going to go away. It can’t go away. The stories will become just become boring, long, jumbled articles of statistics if there’s not a human story unfolding and illuminating that larger issue.

Yes, narrative has taken a hit, no question, but in the best newspapers, it’s still very much part of the fabric. Still, some journalists who previously would do this work in a newsroom are now going straight to nonfiction books – but that’s actually problematic, too. That’s a difficult model economically. I can’t imagine a publisher giving me an advance large enough to cover the amount of research and reporting for all those years that went into this book. It was through the good graces and the support of the St. Petersburg Times that I got to do all that reporting. I hope and believe that they feel it was to the advantage of their audience and the St. Petersburg Times to do it, that it was something that they believe in – that kind of work. But they were very gracious to allow me to expand on that work in this book.

I’d be very surprised to see publishers being able to fund this depth of research for very many people. But certainly there are some journalists who are doing this work for books. I’m not sure yet how that will work economically. Publishers are struggling, too.

Is there anything else you’ve been reading lately that’s really exciting? Who do you think are some of the storytellers we should keep our eye on in the future?

He’s a friend of mine, so I’m a little biased, but I think Ben Montgomery is a very exciting young reporter – he’s not that young, like 30 or something, but he’s really somebody to watch. He and Waveney and Edmund Fountain, the photographer, they have done such beautiful work there. I read “The Lost City of Z,” which knocked me over, it was so amazing. I also read David Grann’s piece in The New Yorker where they executed the allegedly innocent guy.

I also read a lot of fiction. I recently read Colum McCann’s “Let the Great World Spin.” It’s really an astonishing, transcendent, jaw-dropping piece of work. I told my friends that reading it was like listening to “Born To Run” for the first time, which is the highest praise I can give. I’ve never met Colum, I don’t know him. He definitely has a novelist’s way of seeing, but there’s a lot of reporting in that book, too. He chronicles people from totally different walks of life. There’s a monk, there’s a judge, there’s a prostitute, there’s an artist. There’s all these different people whose lives he has to get into. I’ve never read this in an interview with him, but I’d be willing to bet a lot of money that he did research and reporting about those lives, even as he’s writing fiction.

You see something like that and it just blows you away. I read “The Good Soldiers“ last year – one of the best books I’ve read in years. That’s a classic nonfiction book, but you know, one of the quotes in the book compared it to “The Iliad.” [David] Finkel would never say something like that, but I think it’s easy to see why the writer who said that used that comparison, because there’s a certain scale of ambition, and I think he succeeds beautifully.

Finkel covered the 2-16 battalion for more than a year, eight months of which he spent embedded with the soldiers. Acknowledging the personal nature of storytelling, he says,

You could have given another journalist the same access I had during the same time period with the same battalion with the same series of events, and that journalist would have written a story just as true but very different from mine.

So what happens? You go over with a certain amount of curiosity, and things start to take shape, and patterns emerge. You find yourself moved by certain things and paying more and more attention. A story develops from that. You spend enough time, and eventually you gain some confidence in the notion that what you’re paying attention to is the thing worth writing about.

Published in 2009, his book was hailed for its intimate look at war. Finkel re-entered the spotlight last month with the April release of a Wikileaks video showing American forces shooting two Reuters journalists and several Iraqis in a suburb of Baghdad—an incident he had described in The Good Soldiers.

During a WashingtonPost.com chat about the video, Finkel offered context he felt was missing from the edited Wikileaks video  He later described his disappointment about the use of a George Orwell quote at the beginning of the video, as well as his issues with how the piece was edited:

I might have said this in the chat, but I’ve certainly said it to friends: “That was a bad day for Americans, it was a bad day for Iraqis. It was a bad day in a bad war.” One of the guys involved that day, Josh Stieber, who got out as a CO, says about the video, “It’s pretty awful, and if people think it’s awful, they ought to think about policies that put Americans in situations like this again and again.” That’s pretty provocative.

I’m glad the video is out there for people to look at. I just wish the people putting it out there were a bit more old school in their journalism. It’s not like you can put the thing out there with no context—it needs context. But the context ought to come from reporting, not from something pulled out of another time and place.

(For Wikileaks editor Julian Assange’s thoughts on the video, see his April interview with Stephen Colbert.)

Finkel won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting in 2006 after being a three-time finalist, and has reported from most continents and many war zones during his 20 years with the Post. His long commitment to narrative journalism has been featured in the Narrative Digest, which previously highlighted a 2007 Post piece that became part of The Good Soldiers, as well as “The Meaning of Work” from 2006.

In the following Q&A, taken from an April 30 interview, Finkel talks about the pros and cons of first-person journalism, the obligations of journalists and storytellers, and the line he almost didn’t include in his book.

There have already been a lot of books written about soldiers and war. What made you want to write one?

Well, I read a lot of them, and they affected me growing up. And this is a big war in my lifetime, an important one and a consequential one. By the time I went overseas in 2007, there had been so much literature on this war already, great policy books that had had an effect on the war, memoirs that were coming out. But other than Dexter Filkins’ book, really, I had not seen an on-the-ground account by a journalist. So I decided to try to do it.

Did you know when you went in what story you wanted to tell?

I had no idea what was going to happen—it’s the journalism I’ve always done, where you just show up and stay. At least so far in my career, a story seems to occur eventually. But I didn’t know what it would be, except that I was interested in seeing the far end of policy.

The other thing about early 2007—it was an interesting moment for a writer, because the war seemed all but lost. As I said in the book, the tragic moment seemed to be at hand. That’s a pretty inviting moment to go into as a writer.

In the end, you cut it down to a book with a tight focus. Was there a point at which you said, “I can’t possibly write about all of this” and realized you had to leave some things out?

In the beginning, you’re just writing everything down and looking for clues, for anything anywhere that begins to take on a narrative frame—a constant searching and vacuuming up of everything.

I went over there after promising the commander of the battalion that I had no agenda in mind. I wasn’t writing a polemic. This was not a first-person book. My intent was not to pronounce the surge a success or a failure, or to declare the war won or lost. The idea was to use the book to write about the experience of a battalion of infantry soldiers, to write intimately about character in this seemingly lost moment.

The guy said, “If that’s your promise, no agenda, then come on over, and I’ll give you access.” Still, just because he said that didn’t mean that I dropped into the middle of this thing knowing what I was doing and having the trust and cooperation of soldiers. They were quite suspicious of my motives for a long time.

How did you deal with that?

I guess I expected it somewhat. In many ways, that seems to be almost what any story involves now. Every year there seems to be more distrust of a journalist’s motives. These were kids that not only did they not know what war was, but they also didn’t know what journalism was or what it could be. They expected me to have an agenda, which was to paint them as war criminals or whatever.

It just took a lot of time. The more bad things that happened that I was in the midst of as a reporter, and I didn’t become a problem for them—I think trust developed from that. So, number one, I didn’t become a problem. And number two, I stayed. I didn’t come in pretending to know anything and then stick around a couple of days and take off and write a story declaring this or that.

I reported on their entire deployment of 15 months, and I was in Baghdad with them for about eight months, through some of their best days and their very worst days. So trust develops.

How do you gain confidence in the story you decide to tell? For me it’s showing up with a question in mind that I want to answer: “What is this thing?” And then thinking, “Well, I’m going to stay around long enough until I have what seems an authentic answer.”

You noted it’s not a first-person book, but you seem to have kept yourself pretty relentlessly out of the story, even at one point when it seems like you’re in the middle of a conversation with a soldier. There, it felt like you went beyond not making yourself the center of the book—it seemed like a deliberate strategy of keeping yourself out.

I don’t want to say I don’t like first person—I really like Dexter Filkins’ book, for instance, as a recent example of first-person journalism. I’m just not good at that. I would read Dexter’s stuff and say, “I was there. He just said that perfectly and beautifully. I wish I could do that.”

I’ve always written third person. At this point, I’m a pretty old dog. That’s just the approach I brought to this as well. I’m not terribly interested in what I’m doing there. What I’m doing is pretty easy. I’m just going there to see the thing and try to write it.

The main character is the war, the soldiers. It was their transformation, their degradation in many respects—that’s the thing, and I didn’t want to do anything to take away from that.

People who cover subjects for this long tend to identify with their subjects, sometimes in a deliberate way, to be able to tell their stories. Did you ever feel like that was happening?

Well, I guess it could be a worry. Everything was ramped up in this case, because everything was so extreme from the weather to the consequences to what a day entailed. It was the most extreme experience I’ve been a part of.

With every story, I always start my stories the same way. Part of narrative is getting to know someone, so they get past their stereotype of you and they begin to relax enough to move past answering questions and entering a period where there’s a conversation. I explain to people, “I’m thinking about writing this story, and I’m interested in writing about you. You have to understand for one thing that you’re not going to see the story until it appears. If it’s a story in the Post, for instance, and it comes out on a Sunday, you’re going to see it the same day that a million subscribers see the story. And you have to think about that.

“You have to understand that my obligation isn’t to you. It’s not a story for you, it’s a story about you. You need to think about that as well. Here are a few examples of my work. Think it over. If you feel like being part of the story, that’s terrific, and we’ll go from there.”

I did the same thing here. But again, it’s a more extreme version, because I’m sure there were days when soldiers were acting in a way that may have saved me from some harm. So who is my obligation to—is it to the soldiers who may have saved my life? Well, yes and no. The obligation is to the story that they’re part of. And if the day comes that a soldier who did something to help me on a particular day turns out to be a terrible person, a criminal, then that’s where the story goes and that’s what the story is.

Whenever I work, I make sure there’s some clear visual signal I’m there as a reporter. There’s always either a tape recorder in sight, or I have a notebook out and I’m taking notes. I always want people to remember I’m there to do a specific job as a reporter.

On a related note, I read your WashingtonPost.com chat about the Wikileaks video when it came out.

That was a terrible chat. I was hoping to clear something up, and I think I just became part of it in a way that day.

You covered the same incident in your book, and it seems like you had seen the video back then. Is that true?

I never said in the book what my sources were. Not to be coy here, but if you read the book, it certainly tracks what the video shows. All my stuff was unclassified—I do need to point that out. The main source of information that day was that I was there. I was present.

It was interesting to me that as the chat developed, you began posting the comments that other people were sending in, sharing them with the whole audience.

That’s because I had no idea how to respond. And I just thought, “Different people are writing with different opinions. Let’s just post them and get the discussion out there.” I didn’t like that chat very much.

It was an interesting position to be in, because what I wanted to do was say, “There’s a larger context here.” If you saw the video, and you’re one of the six or seven million people who clicked on the 17-minute version, the context for that video was a great George Orwell quote. And editing done by someone who basically told The New York Times, “I’m a journalist and an advocate, and if I have to choose one over the other, I’m an advocate.”

So here came this video of this day that I was intimately aware of. And people were willing to judge so much by this edited 17-minute clip that was preceded by an Orwell quote. There was other context for that day, and I just wanted to get that across—that there was an operation going on, that there was a reason for the operation, that the area this was in had been a tough area all morning long.

But it became clear that the more I tried to explain the context, the more I was being seen as an apologist. And so I just decided, “There’s no ‘win’ here.” Let the book speak for itself. If people want to take shots, let ‘em take shots. I’m not going to do any better at explaining it than I did in the book.

You pointed out some things that had not been included in the edited video.

I told that story in the context of what the soldiers went through that day, because that’s the book I was writing. For a book that’s a narrative, that’s a soldier’s story—these soldiers’ story—then let’s explain that day and what happened to the Reuters guys in the context of what went on that morning and what preceded it and how they felt afterward. They went to dinner. That’s just the way it was for them. That’s a different world than the world of Wikileaks.

Let’s imagine something between the two worlds. If you were there reporting the story—you had been somewhere nearby, and the Post sent you to find out what happened, and you had no role or history with these guys, would you have reported it differently?

Let’s see. It depends what info was available to me. I would assume if I were on site, and some people from Reuters were killed, I would write that story. I would also write it in the context that it was part of an operation that was begun to calm down an area that in the previous weeks had been especially vicious and had caused a lot of injuries. I’d like to think if I had all the material, the way I wrote it in the book would be the way I would write a newspaper story.

What is a newspaper story? At least as a narrative, you tend to start at the very last moment before transformation begins, before action begins, you set the stage, and then chronologically, you go through what happened next, based on the information you can get your hands on when you write.

I guess if I were doing for the newspaper, then I would have contacted Reuters, I would have tried to get on-the-record reaction from them. I would have tried to find the family. I would have done the whole thing.

This gets back to my earlier point. With the same set of facts and a different journalist, you get a different story. For the book, since the story I was telling was the soldiers’ story, I wrote something that I think is an honest piece of journalism that fits in the framework of the story I was telling, which was the soldiers’ experience that day.

If I were just over there as an embedded reporter, and this happened, and I was writing the story that day, I’m sure then I’d track it down, go to the far end to find the families, to try to find the kids, and the rest of it.

Let me make one last point, even if I’m repeating. To me the context for a responsible news story is the actual context. It’s not a selective quotation by somebody from another time or place that sets the framework for what you’re about to see.

In your book, you use George Bush’s statements to launch each chapter. Can you talk about choosing that particular context for your story?

Those were directly relevant statements by a main character in the story—it was his war. I’m saying that’s what the war was to him on a particular day, and here’s what it was to these guys.

You chose a chronological structure, linking the end of one chapter in clever ways with the beginning of another. Was there anything you struggled with structurally in putting the story together?

Well, coming up with the structure. There’s a piece of old advice—I always say Maddy Blais said this, and I hope I’m right: It’s helpful to choose a simple structure to tell a story. If you’re trying to show off by choosing a complicated structure, you’re going to spend most of your time just trying to get yourself out of corners. If you choose a simple structure, you can do the most within it, and sometimes you can be the most honest to the story. I thought that was great advice.

So this was in many ways a very simple structure. Some guys left, things happened to them, and they came home.

Did you commit pretty early on to that structure?

Fairly early. I think that’s done in tandem with deciding the story you want to tell and then deciding on the structure you want to tell it in. In this case, when things began to happen and I saw the soldiers changing, that become important to me.

So, if what I’m going to see is a transformation of character, and that transformation takes place because of certain events and takes place over a period of time, then maybe the best way to tell the story is the simple time-honored way of saying who they were, what happened to them, and then who they became.

But it’s not like I went over with that in mind. I went over with the idea of chronicling what happened to them, but I didn’t know if anything would happen to them. And then it began happening.

But even along the way, I would take breaks once in a while. I think I was out at Stanford doing a week-long fellowship, and I did a talk out there, and I sort of previewed my thinking on the book. It was the first time I’d really talked about it out loud to anyone. And one guy in the audience said, “I have a son over there, and he’s building schools. Why aren’t you focusing on the positive things? Why are you writing about so many bad things that have happened?”

That pierced me a little bit. “Am I tilting the story unfairly to something? Am I just taking the easy way out by concentrating on injuries and tragedies rather than the other things going on?” But the fact is that what his kid was going through wasn’t happening where I was. There were versions of it, but they never went very well.

The other thing that happened is that I began gaining the trust of the soldiers. They began coming over and confiding in me and saying things like, “The true story of what’s going on is how hard this has turned out to be and the way we’re getting torn up. if you’re going to spend all this time, and you’re going to tell a story, I hope the story you’re going to tell gets to the truth of that and doesn’t gloss over it.”

In some ways, that was helpful to hear, but I still had my doubts. And then interviewing Kauzlarich, the main character, I said, “Tell me about your worst day here, so far.” And we had a long conversation about that. And I said, “Now tell me your best day so far.” And he said, “There isn’t one. It’s not about the best days. It’s about these worst days.” And that was very interesting to hear from this incredibly, ceaselessly optimistic man.

I’m not obligated to these men, but I do want to tell a story that they recognize. I don’t want to be accused of being a downer and only concentrating on the stuff that translates well to narrative, the tragedies. But that seemed to be the story that developed in the end—not only to me but to the characters themselves.

What has their response been?

There are two parts to it. It’s not like every email I’ve gotten has been “Thank you for writing this book.” But almost every email, especially from soldiers and soldiers’ families has a version of that. The typical email basically says, “Mr. Finkel, I was over there. I came home. Everyone wanted to know what it was like. I can’t talk about it, and I don’t talk about it. Now I give people your book and say, ‘Read the book, and you’ll understand what it was like and why I can’t talk about it.’” That’s not just this battalion. It’s soldiers from all over the place who have written to me with the same version of that email. So that says something.

And then the other part of it is that there’s a part of the book that’s so intimate in the way it chronicles the death of a soldier. At one point, there’s a frantic effort to keep this guy alive in the aid station, and they’re performing CPR on him. And basically every time they push on his chest, pieces of him drop to the floor. Then a nurse inadvertently kicks something on the floor while she’s moving about, and this thing skids across the floor and it comes to rest against my boot. And the soldier next to me looks down and he says, “That’s a toe.”

Of all the lines in the book, that’s the one I hesitated the most to include, because you want to include details, but you don’t want to include needless details that degenerate into war porn. I went back and forth on it. The way I was thinking about it was, “This is a good soldier who was survived by loving parents and a loving wife who knew that he was dead but didn’t know any of the details. If they’re going to pick up this book and suddenly they’re going to be reading about the death of this man that they loved, and they get to this line, “That’s a toe,” is that just too much? It gets back to our obligation. In the end, I thought that line needed to go in the book. So I put it in.

A couple months later, after the book came out, I got an email from that soldier’s father. It was an amazing email, very heartfelt and long, and somewhere in there, he was talking about that and he said, “I want to thank you for writing about what happened to my son. Because of it, we got to spend the last few hours of his life with him, and our family’s grateful to you for that.”

That’s the response I got, but it certainly could have gone the other way from another family. In intimate narratives, those are the moments, aren’t they? Where you know you have something on your hands that you want to include, but you really have to explore your motives for doing it.

Were there things you decided to leave out of the book on that basis?

As far as details like the one I just described, no, I didn’t leave any out. The question became how to use them properly, so they wouldn’t come across as “Look what I saw! Look what I saw!” but would fit in and be as intimate as possible while still falling on the correct side of the line of dignity.

It’s a judgment call. That was the thinking behind a lot of sentences that I wrote, but it’s a pretty brutal book.

It’s a hard book to read. It’s in some ways harder because you’re not giving the reader the relief of a direct argument. There are undertones, of course, like the part with the spaghetti factory, where the story almost descends into farce and becomes more horrific. We get a sense of how awful you think it is.

I go back and look at certain lines—it’s so evident that I was angry about something when I wrote the line. There’s a bit at the end, when everything falls apart, when the last two soldiers are about to die, and a great guy named Patrick Hanley was about to be grievously injured. I think I say something like “who was about to give part of his brain to the cause of freedom” or something like that—I can’t remember the exact line. When I wrote that, I thought, “Is this over the top? Am I going past my promised agenda?” By then, it was the end of the book, and I thought the case had been made to let something like that in, to let that come through without betraying the rest of the book.

I remember very clearly writing this book, where I got hung up and the decisions I made. Every word in there was a deliberate choice.

Are there any regrets now that it’s out? Something you wish you had put in or wish you’d left out?

There are certain sentences that are just godawful pieces of writing. I regret them, but I had a deadline—I guess we always have that excuse.

But it’s the story you wanted to tell?

It is. It’s an honest piece of journalism. I think I got it right.

That sounds so self-serving; I’m sorry about that. I don’t want to boast about it. The book is what it is. I think it’s correct. It’s not the only way it could have been written. Somebody else could have done the same everything and written a different book that would have been just as true. But for what I saw, for what I felt, for the conclusions I came to, I wrote a piece of journalism that I think is authentic and honest.

Tell me a little about your background and what you’re doing now.

I’ve been an editor of a Sunday magazine—first for The Miami Herald and then The Washington Post—since 1985. And I’ve been editor of the Post Magazine for the past seven years. I just took the buyout, and I’ve now founded a website called StorySurgeons.com.

You’ve no doubt read a lot of submissions from experienced and beginner long-form reporters. When stories don’t quite work, is there a common point at which they fail?

There are a million places a story can fail, from the initial conceptualization all the way through to the final execution. I think that the most important thing is for someone to understand what the story actually is and the nature of a story. I think that most people, especially inexperienced people, who send stuff—they’ll have no idea what a publication actually does. It’s amazing how many submissions we got that had no relation to the kind of work that ended up in our pages.

Is there a template you have in your head for how you approach editing narrative work? What usually comes first, and what comes last?

What you want is to very quickly understand why there might be some promise in investing time in this thing. You want something to engage your attention. Usually that involves conflict or something unexpected, even just tension between ideas and characters in the scene itself.

Recently on Nieman Storyboard, Tom Hallman of The Oregonian said that there will be problems in newsrooms whenever editors divide staff into two camps, the writers, who are coddled, and the reporters, who work the night shift. Do you find good reporters to be a separate group from good writers?

I’ve never believed that good writing exists independently of what you are saying in your writing. What makes good writing is tremendous understanding of a subject and attention to detail. What good reporters do is dig up incredibly powerful and meaningful detail.

Not all reporters know how to tell a story very well, but you can help them with that as an editor. You can help a good reporter to tell a good story. What you can’t do is tell a good story if you don’t have the facts lined up behind it—in nonfiction, at least.

Where a lot of narrative journalism went wrong was that it became all about the writing, and not about the details for the story and the facts behind it. People felt they could throw some words at people and dazzle. But even good writers need to start with an exceptional set of facts.

You’ve edited a lot of newspaper humor, from Dave Barry to Tony Kornheiser. Is there anything fundamentally different between your approach to editing humor stories and long-form narratives?

The humor things are usually much shorter to begin with, but I approach all editing the same way. I look at something and demand to be engaged from the first word to the last. I have no tolerance for being bored. I read through things and take note of where my attention is being lost. In humor, it’s because the joke isn’t working, either because it doesn’t scan logically, the idea is flawed, or it’s too expected, too clichéd.

I’m thinking of Gene Weingarten, whose best stories seem mash up comedy and tragedy. The Battle Mountain piece that ran not long after the 9-11 attacks, in which he tried to find the armpit of America. And the profile of the great Zucchini, a children’s entertainer with a very complex personal history. Is there a secret to making that comic-tragic mix work?

The secret is a deep understanding of where humor comes from. Humor comes out of our very vulnerable and frightening position in a huge and uncaring universe. What humor does is turn the table on our fear. By laughing at it, we make ourselves feel better about it. We’re all made so we desperately want to live forever, but we’re all going to die. If you step out yourself a little, you can see how ridiculous it is.

Gene is very aware of the absurdity of an individual’s position in life, and he uses it to create humor at the same time that he’s putting together really moving material, and—

And poop jokes. Weingarten seems to like those a lot.

Absolutely, if you think about why poop is funny. Here we are. We’re all going to die. And in order to make ourselves feel better about it, we pretend that we are these pristine vessels. Yet every day we wake up, the first thing we do is emit this bolus of decay.

Poop and mortality are metaphors for each other. That’s why poop is funny. The absurdity of our condition is that we walk around with this absolute conviction that we’ll live forever. Poop jokes are a way of reminding you in an irreverent manner that you’re mortal. So even the poop joke has a serious role to play in telling a story.

How have newspaper narratives changed in the three decades you’ve written and edited them?

Back when I started at the college newspaper in the 70s, that was the heyday of what was then “new journalism,” though of course, the new journalism really wasn’t new.  Narrative was not an invention of the print media. Which is good news, because as print media is struggling and contracting, people think that it could mean the death of narrative journalism as we’ve known it. I don’t think that’s true.

Narrative is the way that human beings are genetically coded to understand the world. From the very beginning of the human ability to communicate, the way we’ve understood each other is through story. You can get a bunch of information together and try to communicate something, but you aren’t going to feel you really grasp an issue until you see it unfold in story form. The most meaningful conversations you have with your friends are you telling them stories of your experiences. People who are good at telling narratives will always be valuable.  

What’s happened is that newspapers were this huge economic engine, bringing in money that was used to support all sorts of things. There was no reason a newspaper had to be the primary vehicle for narratives. Now with the financial contraction of the industry, a lot of places that were able to afford the resources, they don’t have the space. They don’t have the salaries for the best practitioners of it.

My friend David Von Drehle had this great analogy about how when he was a kid, when they needed a set of matching dinner plates, they’d buy gas at the same station over and over again. The same place, and they’d get another matching plate every time.

But just because people don’t get their dinner plates at gas stations anymore, it doesn’t mean they don’t need plates or gas. I think that could be true about narrative. Just because a lot of newspapers aren’t able to do it anymore, that doesn’t mean that people don’t need narratives, or news.

When there’s both a set of amazing facts and a manner of putting them in a narrative so that they have maximum impact, people remember these stories for decades. They don’t forget.

The question is who’s going to support the professional collection and craftsmanship required to tell these stories. I think more of this kind of thing is going directly into books. Look at all the books on the market that are talking about the financial collapse. And look at the great books on the market about the war. They’re narratives. The classic statement, “Unless you were there and saw for yourself, you can’t possibly know”—well, great narrative lets people be present at events and situations they could not actually be present for.

So books are one thing that’s going to happen. Another thing that’s going on, instead of sitting at your personal computer, more and more people are getting news on their handhelds. But when you’re talking about a handheld, they’re going to be reading maybe five sentences max. That makes the contrast all the way clear. You can’t say, “We’re satisfying their need.”

In order to satisfy a deep need, then I think there will be a lot of opportunities for niche magazines—maybe not the ones that exist now.

These new technologies are not an enemy of narrative, even if they might appear to be. You cannot stamp out that genetic coding to understand the world through narrative. It’s not going anywhere just because we’ve had a digital revolution. People who are panicking about this are taking much too narrow a view of a snapshot from a time of upheaval.

The need to understand the world through story is not going away.

What was the last narrative that knocked your socks off?

I’ve just read Finkel’s The Good Soldiers. It was devastating. I was just reading the paper and wondering, “Should we send 44,000 troops to Afghanistan?” I think we’re all guilty of this. You think of those 44,000 solders as little markers on a Risk board. But when you read Finkel’s book, you’re seeing people staring at their naked wrist, the hand blown off by an incendiary device. The guy is saying, “My hand is gone.”

Finkel makes it so you can’t think of them as markers on a Risk board anymore. These people have so little to do to protect themselves. He makes you think about it in a whole different way. It rips away that distance between war versus the reality of war.

Also, I just got through rereading—Weingarten is coming out with an anthology of his best journalism. He’s such a master storyteller. It starts with Zucchini.

That story is one of the best pieces of narrative journalism I’ve ever read.

That gets at something else about really fine narrative, which is almost mystical. I’ve already said you can’t have good writing in the absence of what it is you’re writing about. You have to have something to reveal, something to tell. Otherwise no amount of wordsmithing will save you.

We started that story with a conflict. Gene didn’t just randomly pick this guy. He heard from this friend that the Great Zucchini was coming to people’s doors at night asking for advances in cash for the party he’d be doing next Saturday.

[SPOILER ALERT!] We started with this conflict of the children’s performer with the hint of something dark there. He could have easily have reported a little and written a perfectly nice feature story without ever discovering the gambling addition or the horrible thing that happened to him as a kid with his neighbor being murdered. But because Gene reported this so deeply and was willing to spend the time talking to everyone about this guy and because his presence was so acceptable, he got to the heart of it.

Gene called me from the road and says, “I’m going to Atlantic City with him.” There was just more and more. When we started out that story, what are the odds that the guy would turn out to have all this going on? What are the odds that there was going to be this unbelievably tragic experience?

Any really great narrative journalist understands that there are no bad stories, there are only incompletely understood stories. That idea—that everything in life is going to be one hell of a story—is what drives the best. And what makes them deliver so consistently. If you look at somebody like Gene or Finkel, you might ask, “How is it that something perfect always seems to happen to them to make the story great?”

Gene and I call that the god of journalism. But the god of journalism pays off the persistent.

Is there anything narrative journalism does that can’t be done by some other type of print or online story?

Narrative journalism is not about delivering information. It’s about delivering the experience of something. That’s what other kinds of journalism, with sidebars and timelines and hypertext and graphics and mapping—all the wonderful things that journalism can do to convey information—none of those things even attempts to deliver the sense of experience. There are some exceptions to that—video, of course. But video is narrative. Also long-form Q&A’s, but those are an excuse for the person being interviewed to tell a story.

One thing I’m trying to do with my website is create an infrastructure for doing fine, nonfiction narrative. It requires time, talent and experience, and newspapers are losing the ability to provide those resources as much as they have in the past. The fact is that technology has enabled people to move it outside of newsrooms.

What stories would you like to see written that you don’t see out there today?

I’m worried about changes at the Post. I think that the Zucchini story—there’s not a place for the Post to run it, as the Post exists today. Given the requirements of the day-to-day, and the resources that have been cut, and the direction that they fell for a variety of reasons, I just don’t see those stories happening in the Post in the immediate future. There is something that’s important that’s being lost.

I understand, of course, how dire the situation is. You’re in a situation where you’re cutting a huge piece of your resources, and you have to do it. And that makes it really, really hard. But right now, I do not see a venue for a story like Zucchini to arise and develop. They’re thinking, “We don’t have the space, and we don’t have the time to spend.”

The magazine still runs stories, but they’re not as long. And they’re not going after that connection to the meaning of life that we aimed for.

You don’t know when you start doing a story like Zucchini that it’s going to wind up like it is. Of course, editors will say, “If we knew this story was out there, we’d run it. We’d find the space.” But you have to invest in it at first, when it’s just a story about a clown.

When you’re in the practice of doing deep and meaningful narrative, the success rate is remarkably high. But it’s not like you know for sure at the outset that it’s going to pay off. You have to be able to take those risks.