Excerpt:

Spectator question:

I think of you two as being on opposite poles stylistically. Like when I read Tom I’m just sort of dazzled by the prose; when I read (Colloff) I can’t believe the restraint. I’ve haltingly attempted to try both things. And I wonder if you think that as writers we need to make a choice whether or not we’re gonna try to be very restrained or just sort of go for it in the way that Tom does…

Junod:

I think in most cases you have to let the story determine your approach. I mean you are who you are as a writer. There’s no way of getting around that. Just like your singing voice: It is your singing voice no matter whether you decide to sing high or sing low. So you’re stuck with that. But at the same time, I think it’s the song that determines whether you do sing high or sing low.

Colloff:

I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Tom Wolfe, which you might not expect, reading my stories. I started off trying to … do a very baroque sort of writing. As I’ve gotten older it’s gotten sparer and sparer, for better or for worse. I’m not sure I can totally articulate why that is, but I like to pick stories where the material is so good that my main job is to kind of get out of the way. … The power of the material hopefully carries it.

The minutes:

Colloff

11:55: Junod calls Colloff’s “The Innocent Man” a master class in narrative journalism.

12:55: Junod says despite “radical assault on people’s reading time” and sea change in journalism, the case for longform is strong.

16:00: The decision about when to reveal a key fact of the Michael Morton wrongful-imprisonment story related to structure but primarily to point of view.

16:45: Junod’s “Mercenary,” piece on a “shooter for Blackwater.” By “shooter” he does not mean “photographer.” He had been “working as a contract killer for the United States government for 20 years,” Junod tells the audience. The story, if you haven’t read it, is not what it seemed. The story’s opening:

The Palisades Nuclear Plant in Covert, Michigan, is real. It produces 778 megawatts of electricity, and the electricity keeps the lights burning for about half a million residents. The nuclear reactor inside the nuclear plant is also real. It gets really hot, and anyone driving on Interstate 196 on his way to Grand Rapids or St. Joe can see thin clouds of steam rising from its cooling towers, as constant a presence as the weather. The steam is real; it’s water from Lake Michigan, pumped in to keep the reactor cool. The nuclear power plant is on the shore of Lake Michigan, right next to the tourist town of South Haven and about eighty miles from Chicago as the crow flies. Lake Michigan is real, definitely, though it comes off as an illusory ocean, offering the horizon as its only boundary. South Haven is real, too, although it empties out in the cold of winter. And Chicago? As real as the millions of people who live there, and the strange American fervor they generate. Chicago is so damned real, and so damned American, that it’s hard to imagine an American reality without it — it’s hard to imagine an American reality if, say, a terrorist attack on Palisades Nuclear contaminated the big lake for the next thousand years or so and emptied out Chicago, not to mention St. Joe and South Haven and Covert.

Junod

21:45: Advocacy journalism. “I mean I wrote the story so that this guy was not gonna be the head of security at a nuclear plant on Lake Michigan. That was my whole goal.” (Junod)

23:10: On outlining. Colloff didn’t.

24:35: The John McPhee pieces about writing, in The New Yorker. “His argument for outlining was one of the most definitive arguments against outlining I’ve ever read.” (Junod)

26:04: Junod once said that his “Rapist Says He’s Sorry” story “exploded his writing process,” Colloff says. “I was so interested in that. We all look at the people who we admire who write and we picture them just sitting down at their computer very peaceful, and they’re dressed, and in a good mood, and they type a few words and then have a healthy lunch and then come back and write, and stop at five. It was sort of refreshing to realize oh, even this guy, who talks about things like self-loathing … in the process of writing.”

29:15: “The Abortionist” is the only one of Junod’s career that had no alterations. “It’s a perfect story,” Colloff says. “Yeah, it was kind of a gift,” Junod says. “It really was. No alterations in punctuation, spelling, anything else. The one I gave to the magazine was exactly what was printed.”

36:02: Colloff likes Junod’s descriptive abilities and makes him read aloud a paragraph from a 1999 story about Hillary Clinton’s mouth:

That slight palatal overbite — it gets to me. She seems expert at marshaling her mouth’s resources, at inspiring its ingenuity. She can fold her lips into an origami of fleeting smiles. Her basic smile is sort of chipmunky and schoolmarmish, but sometimes, when she is pouncing on the possibility of an idea, her lips extend their reach into her cheeks and carve out a wolfish, carnal line, as though nothing could please her more than her own hunger. Her mouth is enigmatic in its capacity for adjustment — it seems both the origin and repository of her secrets. Sure, when she is under duress, it can appear small, pinched, grudging, harsh, unforgiving, and grimly determined — nippy — but when she is at ease, free to discuss, you know, the issues…well, then her mouth becomes the very instrument of her freedom, and her laugh rings the bell of her throat. Her laugh is the sexiest thing about her, in fact; it packs a lewd wallop because it seems to take her by surprise. There’s a wickedness about her laugh, in its offhand suggestion that she is willing to be entertained, to be pleased. It’s quick and sudden, an unabashed, throaty gargle, and it seems to put dazzle in her eyes from below, like footlights.

40:00: If he meets you, Tom Junod will study your face.

43:00: The objective tone of Colloff’s voice in “The Innocent Man” isn’t in fact, to Junod, objective, and he applauds that. “I said it has a neutral-sounding voice and an objective-sounding voice, but there is not one paragraph in there that’s not patterned in order to make the reader ask questions and later on to reach conclusions.”

43:50: “Trial by Fire,” by The New Yorker’s David Grann, changed Colloff’s life.

50:55: Colloff wants to know about the restraint/economy in Junod’s classic “The Falling Man” (the annotation of which is coming up on Annotation Tuesday!, so check back).

57:20: Colloff wants to know how Junod crafted a 6,000-word Leonardo DiCaprio cover story from the following access, or lack thereof: two hours in a conference room.

58:30: How Junod’s editor got him to do three celebrity profiles in a row this summer. “He wouldn’t just say, ‘You’ve got to do three celebrity profiles.’”

1:03:00: Junod liked Brad Pitt better than DiCaprio, and the experience made him remember something about storytelling that he’d forgotten: “You should really go into it with a sense of generosity…. There’s a place for generosity in journalism.”

1:07:30: Colloff shuns tape recorders, to listen better. After interviews, she gets in the car and turns the tape recorder on and “narrates” her impressions. “That helps so much.”

1:08: Colloff asks Junod about story regret.

1:18:30: The future of longform.

We’re a Nieman Foundation for Journalism publication, with two sister sites:

Nieman Journalism Lab, edited by Joshua Benton, covers the future of news with daily online posts and a dynamic Twitter stream. Sample story: emerging links between civic engagement and the revival of local journalism.

Nieman Reports, edited by James Geary, the foundation’s deputy curator, is the foundation’s quarterly magazine — also available online — and has covered the journalism industry since 1947. Sample package: “The signal and the noise,” about coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing.

Here at Storyboard, we cover the craft of narrative journalism and the future of storytelling. On our site, you can find more than a decade’s worth of material related almost exclusively to story craft. Our contributors represent every medium and have included Pulitzer and National Magazine Award winners, industry icons, and game-changing up-and-comers. You might recognize some of the best names in storytelling, including Chris Jones and Tom Junod of Esquire, GQ‘s Amy Wallace, Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger, Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden, best-selling science-narrative writer Deborah Blum and food journalist Michael Pollan, and Pulitzer winners Amy Ellis Nutt, Isabel Wilkerson and Jacqui Banaszynski, plus storytellers as diverse as Evan Ratliff, Gay Talese, Adam Hochschild, Starlee Kine, Alexis Madrigal, Wesley Morris, Maud Newton, Adam Penenberg and Jenna Wortham.

Our burgeoning Pinterest site is updated almost daily with writing inspiration, interviews, gear, reporting resources and more.

Three of our most popular series:

— “Why’s this so good?” features writers deconstructing their favorite pieces of storytelling. Example: the Nieman Lab’s Justin Ellis on David Grann, on a real-life Sherlock Holmes mystery:

A chateau! A curse! Deception and a Russian princess! And Grann’s just getting started. He’s clearly in the process of spooling up the thread to lay out the stakes of the story. Once the prized documents take a turn for Christie’s auction house the Sherlockian scholar grows more desperate and paranoid. The paragraphs race forward, the pace quickens, each sentence becomes so compressed and descriptive you feel like you can’t breathe. (In a good way, of course.) You’re worried about Green and what will happen to Conan Doyle’s archive. And then, just after you’ve gotten 1,000 words deep into the mystery, the body shows up. Boom.

— Annotation Tuesday! goes line by line through stories with their authors. This newer feature got a shout-out from the New York Times magazine recently when the 6th Floor blog referenced a Pamela Colloff series that she annotated for us in March, about a wrongful imprisonment in Texas. Colloff’s story won the National Magazine Award for feature/profile writing in May. (Check back Friday for a City & Regional Magazine Association talk — recorded exclusively for Storyboard by the Atlanta magazine crew — between Colloff and Junod.)

— Narrative Speakers Series Q-and-A’s feature a growing lineup of notable writers — Michael Paterniti, Junot Díaz and more — who visited the Nieman Foundation and Harvard through the other wing of our operation, the Nieman Narrative Writing seminar.

You’ll also find archived essays on craft, featuring speakers and tip sheets from our former Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference (which ended in 2009); an occasional series on story mining, called, “How’d you find that story?”, in which successful narrative journalists demystify the hunt for great stories; and “Work the problem,” in which Amy Ellis Nutt recently wrote, for instance, about how to look at your own stories more objectively.

To browse the archives, see the “Medium and Message” index. And feel free to write to us with story ideas and pitches anytime at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

Thanks for reading!

Left to right: Swartz, Colloff and fact checker David Moorman at last night’s festivities, courtesy the @TexasMonthly Twitter feed.

Colloff recently annotated “The Innocent Man” for Storyboard, as part of our growing Annotation Tuesday! series. Here’s a snippet from Part 1, with Storyboard’s comments in green and Colloff’s in blue:

A running gag between them involved Michael calling out, “Bitch, get me a beer!”<Interesting details, because this moment (and their history of squabbling) was turned against Morton in court. What was your perception of Michael Morton before you began your reporting, and how and why did your opinion change, if it changed at all?/pw I’m using a detail that later is cast in a very dark light by the prosecution, but I’m presenting it here as Michael and Christine saw it, which was as just a joke. A lot of the media coverage following Michael’s 2011 exoneration made him appear almost saintly, because he did not want revenge and he handled his wrongful incarceration with such grace. But that’s not who he was back in 1986. I wanted people to see his rough edges and his imperfections so that he would be a real person. Also, I wanted to provide some context for the way that investigators in the case saw him. His crudeness was, I think, part of what led investigators to think he was capable of violence. As for where this detail came from, the marigolds came from the trial transcript, and I asked Michael about it in more detail, which is when he explained their placement in the yard./pc —something they had once overheard a friend of a friend shout at his girlfriend. Christine would respond by telling Michael to go screw himself. “He teased her a lot, and he would go right up to the line of what was acceptable, and sometimes he went over it,” Gersky said. Referring to an attractive friend of theirs who stopped by the house one day wearing shorts, he told Christine, “Now, that’s the way you should look.”<Great detail; source?/pw A friend of Christine’s told me this and our tireless fact-checker, David Moorman, ran it past Michael before publication./pc

And from Part 2:

“When I got here, they used to put all new arrivals in the field force,” Michael<One thing I meant to ask in Part 1: How did you decide to refer to him as “Michael” and not Morton?/pw Excellent question. I always wrestle with whether or not to refer to a protagonist by his/her first or last name. In this case, there were practical reasons to go with his first name. Christine had the same last name, so it ended up being an easy decision. (Calling him “Morton” and her “Christine” seemed awfully weird.) But generally speaking I like the immediacy of using someone’s first name, when it’s appropriate./pc wrote, referring to inmates who were assigned to work on the prison farm. That had been three years earlier. Now 47, he was too old to be doing hard physical labor all day long, he told Garcia. His face had settled into the softer contours of middle age, and his sandy blond hair was going gray. “Try to imagine twenty to forty men,” he continued, “shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, swinging their [hoes] in unison and chopping weeds that are, I swear to God, six to ten feet high. Or, on the bad days, working in a huge irrigation ditch, skinning the banks down to bare earth<Hey, not bad, the writing./pw I know! I get a lot of letters from prison, and I can assure you that none of them sound like this./pc and then dragging the chopped-up vegetation back up the banks. It’s long, hard, backbreaking work.

A few other Colloff favorites from the Storyboard files:

-Her piece “‘Why’s this so good?’ No. 65: David Grann and the death row prisoner.” In our ongoing series, Colloff wrote about Grann’s treatment of the questionable case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas for killing his children.

-Her chat with Storyboard about her story on a mother convicted of killing her son with salt.

-Her piece about the innocence of death row inmate Anthony Graves, which we included in a “What we’re reading” post.

Congratulations, Pam, and thank you for your work!

First, a quick look at last year: Julia Barton started covering audio narratives for us, and we brought the New York Times’ Sean Patrick Farrell on board as our Viewfinder columnist, covering video journalism. We added a tips category to help you find craft guidance more quickly, and broadened our speaker series coverage by including the narrative nonfiction legend Buzz Bissinger and National Magazine Award winner Luke Dittrich, and Pulitzer-winning fiction writers Paul Harding and Junot Diaz, all visitors to Lippmann House, Nieman headquarters. We expanded our popular “Why’s this so good?” series by bringing in dozens of new writers, including Eli Sanders, Jennifer B. McDonald, Pam Colloff, Ann Friedman, Wesley Morris, Ben Yagoda and Peter Trachtenberg, who, along with other contributors, covered the work of everyone from Joan Didion and Nora Ephron to Dan Barry and Roy Blount Jr.

And now, some new columns and features to tell you about:

>Just One Question, by the stellar Tampa Bay Times and Grantland reporter Michael Kruse, poses a single question to a single writer, either about a specific piece of work or about reporting/writing in general, and delivers the answer. Kruse started JOQ on his personal blog and kindly agreed to let Storyboard adopt it.

>Liner Notes, by Sports on Earth writer Tommy Tomlinson, looks at the elements of narrative journalism via songs. His 2012 breakdown of “Ode to Billie Joe” was such a hit with readers, we’re developing his idea as a regular column. Narrative works best when you tune up all the senses, so get ready for a multilayered reading experience.

>Work the Problem allows writers and editors to ask top narrative journalists for help unraveling an issue. Maybe you’re grappling with a structural situation or wish you’d written better descriptions in your last piece, or maybe you take all the wrong notes, or maybe you’re wondering how to jump-start narrative culture in your newsroom – tell us your problem, we’ll try to help you solve it. Email:  contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

>Annotation Tuesday! explores one writer’s winning story line by line, with Storyboard asking the questions and the author giving precise, in-text answers. The series recently had a popular Tumblr following and now moves to Storyboard, with upcoming annotations by the science writer Mary Roach, GQ’s Amy Wallace, National Magazine Award winner Ben Ehrenreich, Esquire’s Chris Jones, and more.

>How’d you find that story? Ever wonder where writers find certain great stories? We ask, they answer, with a little something extra. The sources may surprise you.

Don’t forget to stay connected by following us on Twitter and Liking us on Facebook, and subscribing to our free newsletter. In the meantime, if you’d like to contribute to “Why’s this so good?” or to suggest a story for annotation, or to see coverage of certain narrative issues, ping us here.

Happy New Year!

10. “What’s on your syllabus?”

Assigned reading lists from narrative journalists/professors Jacqui Banaszynski, Mark Bowden, Madeleine Blais, Rob Boynton, Jeff Sharlet and Rebecca Skloot — and why they’re important

9. “Stories from the edge of listening”

Storyboard’s debut Audio Danger column by radio producer Julia Barton, who writes about audio narratives

8. “The essence of story, in a 358-word song”

Sports on Earth writer Tommy Tomlinson unpacks elements of narrative via Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe.”

7. “Nora Ephron on writing: seven insights”

Ephron died unexpectedly in June but her creativity and wisdom will live forever.

6. “‘Why’s this so good?’ No. 39: Gay Talese and Frank Sinatra”

Pulitzer winner Maria Henson tells us what makes “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” a classic.

5. “Buzz Bissinger on heart, luck, honesty, critics and the importance of switching things up”

The narrative legend and Friday Night Lights author in conversation with Nieman Foundation curator Ann Marie Lipinski

4. “Notable Narrative: ‘Fear of a Black President’ by Ta-Nehisi Coates”

MIT’s Tom Levenson talks with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates about his powerful Atlantic cover story on race in America and the challenges of being Barack Obama.

3. “‘Why’s this so good?’ No. 35: Malcolm Gladwell on ketchup”

Tim Carmody lists what the New Yorker‘s Gladwell does so well, focusing on “The Ketchup Conundrum.”

2. “Building better sentences: Connie Hale on verbs, nouns, Vikings, scenes, geekspeak, grammar wars and rewiring bad lines”

Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch author Constance Hale on the marvels and mysteries of writing

1. “David Grann on the making of ‘The Yankee Comandante’”

The New Yorker writer and author of books including The Lost City of Z talks with Storyboard about the reporting and writing of one of the year’s most memorable narratives, about an American expat fighting in revolutionary Cuba.

Colloff

Being scooped by arguably the best magazine writer working today turned out to be a wonderful thing. “Trial by Fire,” was published in The New Yorker in September 2009, and it is, to my mind, a masterpiece of both reporting and writing. Grann begins with three perfectly crafted sentences:

The fire moved quickly through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward, seeping into each room and through crevices in the windows, staining the morning sky.

I’ve revisited this story many times since first reading it, and have marveled at Grann’s decisions about when and how to reveal certain critical details. Toward the start of the piece, he places us inside the scorched house with two fire investigators who are trying to piece together what happened, describing the scene so vividly that it’s easy to forget he was not actually present that day:

The men slowly toured the perimeter of the house, taking notes and photographs, like archeologists mapping out a ruin…The air smelled of burned rubber and melted wires; a damp ash covered the ground, sticking to their boots.

As the investigators move through the house – “ducking under insulation and wiring that hung down from the exposed ceiling” – we follow the blaze’s path to the children’s bedroom. The investigators’ observations of burn patterns there lead them to believe that an accelerant was used. Willingham, they deduce, torched the house. Grann does not give us much reason to think otherwise. We learn that Willingham drank too much; cheated on his wife, Stacy; and even beat her when she was pregnant. Grann notes, “A neighbor said that he once heard Willingham yell at her, ‘Get up, bitch, and I’ll hit you again.’”

But Grann, whose best narratives involve misdirection, also drops details here and there that suggest another story. He tells us that Willingham rejected a plea deal that would have allowed him to avoid a death sentence. He points out that there was never an obvious motive. Almost as an afterthought, he mentions that Willingham’s 2-year-old daughter had been punished previously for playing with a space heater that was in the kids’ bedroom. He does not call attention to these details; he just presents them without fanfare and moves on.

He builds on these inconsistencies as the narrative continues, using two people – a teacher named Elizabeth Gilbert, who corresponded with Willingham in prison, and Gerald Hurst, an acclaimed fire investigator – to introduce us to critical evidence we were not previously informed of that points away from Willingham’s guilt. All the while, Grann doles out new facts in a nonlinear way, circling back in the middle of the piece to tell us more about the trial, which he already described in the first section, and enhancing our growing realization that the state’s case was seriously flawed. He also expands upon his portrait of Willingham, slowly shifting our perspective. When Gilbert first meets him, Grann writes:

He was wearing a white jumpsuit with “DR”—for death row—printed on the back, in large black letters. He had a tattoo of a serpent and a skull on his left bicep. He stood nearly six feet tall and was muscular, though his legs had atrophied after years of confinement…He had committed a series of disciplinary infractions that had periodically landed him in the segregation unit, which was known as ‘the dungeon.’

But as our understanding of the case deepens, and we become more uncertain of his guilt, Grann makes his portrait of Willingham more empathetic and nuanced:

Over the years, Willingham’s letters home became increasingly despairing…Since the fire, he wrote, he had the sense that his life was slowly being erased. He obsessively looked at photographs of his children and Stacy, which he stored in his cell. “So long ago, so far away,” he wrote in a poem. “Was everything truly there?”

The notion that Willingham might have been innocent is introduced halfway through the story, with what appears at first to be an abrupt digression:

In the summer of 1660, an Englishman named William Harrison vanished on a walk, near the village of Charingworth, in Gloucestershire. His bloodstained hat was soon discovered on the side of a local road. Police interrogated Harrison’s servant, John Perry, and eventually Perry gave a statement that his mother and his brother had killed Harrison for money. Perry, his mother, and his brother were hanged. Two years later, Harrison reappeared. He insisted, fancifully, that he had been abducted by a band of criminals and sold into slavery. Whatever happened, one thing was indisputable: he had not been murdered by the Perrys.

Grann builds on this idea – that it is possible for an individual to be executed for a crime he did not commit – by examining the scientific evidence in the case. He avoids bogging the story down in a tedious examination of the way in which arson investigation has changed over the past three decades; instead, he devotes more than 1,000 words to another, strikingly similar case out of Jacksonville, Fla., which allows us to see that all of the investigators’ initial assumptions at the crime scene were based on a false understanding of how fire behaves.

Grann never overtly states that Willingham has been the victim of a wrongful conviction; he avoids the pitfalls of advocacy journalism by allowing us to arrive at our own conclusions. This makes the article’s end – which describes Willingham’s execution – all the more affecting:

The warden told Willingham that it was time. Willingham, refusing to assist the process, lay down; he was carried into a chamber eight feet wide and ten feet long. The walls were painted green, and in the center of the room, where an electric chair used to be, was a sheeted gurney. Several guards strapped Willingham down with leather belts, snapping buckles across his arms and legs and chest.

The article concludes with Willingham’s own words from the gurney – “I am an innocent man convicted of a crime I did not commit” – which Grann lets stand without any commentary. The effect is hard to shake.

Pamela Colloff is an executive editor at Texas Monthly and has been writing for the magazine since 1997. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker and has been anthologized in three editions of Best American Crime Reporting as well as the e-book collection, Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. She has twice been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, first in 2001 for her article on school prayer, and in 2011 for “Innocence Lost” and “Innocence Found,” a series on wrongly convicted death row inmate Anthony Graves.”The Innocent Man,” her two-part series on Michael Morton, who served 25 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of his wife’s murder, was just published in the November and December 2012 issues of Texas Monthly. Colloff lives in Austin with her husband and their two children.

For more “Why’s this so good?” see our archives. And check back each Tuesday for a new shot of inspiration and insight.  

“Why’s this so good?” No. 35: Malcolm Gladwell on ketchup, by Tim Carmody

Malcolm Gladwell does so many things well as a feature writer that it’s embarrassing to mention them all. I’ll list a few of them anyway:

Malcolm Gladwell is astonishingly quotable. He writes graceful, intelligent sentences. But he’s also something better than quotable; he’s paraphrasable and anecdotable. He gives you words, ideas and stories drawn from ordinary life that you can recall and retell, and which also seem relevant to a huge range of conversations with unusually broad intellectual consequences. His language becomes portable in order to replicate itself.

Malcolm Gladwell is a master of misdirection and the slow play. He bluffs, demurs, head fakes and suddenly raises the stakes. His stories have threads that weave in and out, and he can fool you as to which thread is the “A” and which is the “B” story. He can fool you about his thesis, and even more astonishingly, he can fool you about whether or not he actually has one – in either direction.

Malcolm Gladwell is known, for better or worse, for books, stories, and essays that identify something counterintuitive. At first you think it’s like this, but really it’s like that. But his best feature writing, again, is better than that. Even as illustrative chunks fall out of them, the essays as a whole don’t come with easy, business-retreat-ready takeaways. They’re neither intuitive nor counterintuitive, but engage in acts of intuition, a playful oscillation between irreconcilable poles. They clarify your perceptions by revealing the inadequacy of your concepts. They are intelligence-games.

“Why’s this so good?” No. 34: Buzz Bissinger trails a fabulist, by Deborah Blum

As Bissinger writes, Stephen Glass, an aspiring writer from the wealthy Chicago suburb of Highland Park, was far from the first journalist to invent a story. Perhaps the previous best-known case is that of Janet Cooke, a one-time Washington Post reporter, who was stripped of her 1980 Pulitzer Prize after it was learned that she’d made up an 8-year-old heroin addict. Reportorial history is scattered with other examples – but no one on the scale of Glass, who wrote 31 stories for The New Republic, of which 27 were at least partly fiction and some entirely so. Or as Bissinger puts it:

But none of these journalists approached the sheer calculation of Glass’s deceptions. He is the perfect expression of his time and place: an era is cresting in Washington; it is a time when fact and fiction are blurred not only by writers eager to score but also by presidents and their attorneys, spinmeisters and special prosecutors. From one perspective, Stephen Glass was a master parodist of his city’s shifting truths.

In that context, it’s probably not surprising that Stephen Glass and his family chose not to talk with Bissinger. A story centered on a wholly uncooperative source presents a storyteller with a distinct challenge. The writer Gay Talese famously overcame this through brilliantly detailed observation of his uncooperative subject in the piece “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” Bissinger obviously doesn’t have that option here; Glass’s “crimes” are long past when he approaches the story and Glass himself is in hiding.

He decides instead to focus on another character in the drama, that of Chuck Lane, the New Republic magazine editor who stumbles slowly, reluctantly – and even painfully – into a realization of the problem.

“Why’s this so good?” No. 64: David Grann and Sherlock Holmes, by Justin Ellis

A chateau! A curse! Deception and a Russian princess! And Grann’s just getting started. He’s clearly in the process of spooling up the thread to lay out the stakes of the story. Once the prized documents take a turn for Christie’s auction house the Sherlockian scholar grows more desperate and paranoid. The paragraphs race forward, the pace quickens, each sentence becomes so compressed and descriptive you feel like you can’t breathe. (In a good way, of course.) You’re worried about Green and what will happen to Conan Doyle’s archive. And then, just after you’ve gotten 1,000 words deep into the mystery, the body shows up. Boom. …

As Grann begins his inquiry we’re introduced to a cast of family, friends, and spurned colleagues. Each has their own theories and supporting evidence. And you begin to see why Grann got behind the wheel, and why describing these people and places is so important. By sitting them down in their own voice and space, they gain a little more gravity, or at least legitimacy, for us as the reader. It’s also the way Grann can employ another literary trick, where each character provides a new clue to advance the story:

Gibson glanced at his notes. There was something else, he said, something critical. On the eve of his death, he reminded me, Green had spoken to his friend Keen about an “American” who was trying to ruin him.

Like any good mystery, things seem to become clearer, and yet murkier at the same time. We think we’re on track to finding Green’s true killer and saving Conan Doyle’s archives. But that’s not exactly the case. Just like in any detective story, or any episode of Law & Order, in the second act the hero has to re-examine the facts of the case. And when Green does, we begin to see that this is a study in obsession, not just an unsolved murder.

“Why’s this so good?” No. 39: Gay Talese diagnoses Frank Sinatra, by Maria Henson

Talese’s gift for observing detail gives us immediate, vivid imagery that put us right there in the room with Sinatra. The tension is palpable as Talese recounts the poolroom scene in which one of “coolest” in the bar, writer Harlan Ellison, drew Sinatra’s ire for wearing Game Warden boots, “for which he had recently paid $60.” Talese has Sinatra gazing at those boots, turning away, focusing on them again and then firing questions at Ellison about the provenance of the boots. “I don’t like the way you’re dressed,” he tells Ellison. Throughout the slowly evolving, hostile scene, Talese conveys the precise action in the background −  from the man who was bent low with his cue stick and then froze, to the “hard tap of Sinatra’s shoes” as the singer made his way with a “slow, arrogant swagger” from his stool to face off with Ellison. In simply writing what he saw and heard, Talese built scenes around straight action, which builds drama, emotion. In one scene, Talese conveys the “kind of airy aphrodisiac” of Sinatra’s music through young couples moving languidly on a dance floor, holding each other close.

By giving us a portrait of Sinatra, Talese also gives us a portrait of L.A., “a lovely city of sun and sex, a Spanish discovery of Mexican misery, a star land of little men and little women sliding in and out of convertibles in tense tight pants.”

“Why’s this so good?” No. 61: John McPhee and the archdruid, by Adam Hochschild

I’ve always felt that when we think about writing, we pay too much attention, in these terms, to the architecture, and not enough to the engineering. We focus on the outside of the skyscraper – the sparkle of someone’s prose, images, metaphors, bits of description – and not enough on the innards: the structure, the plot (a word that applies to nonfiction as much as to fiction), the careful doling out or withholding of information to create suspense, all of which, in the long run, ultimately determines whether or not we keep on reading. A piece of writing can sparkle aplenty from one paragraph to the next, but if the inner engineering isn’t there, our attention wanders. This is all the more important when someone writes, as McPhee usually does, of relatively unknown people, in whom we have no interest to begin with. For the writer, this sets the bar higher.

A key secret of McPhee’s ability to make us care about his vast and improbable range of subject matter lies in his engineering. From the pilings beneath the foundations to the beams that support the rooftop observation deck, he is the master builder of literary skyscrapers. Other writers may have more glittering prose (although his often glows bright) or weave more elegant metaphors, but no one has built such an interesting and varied array of structures. With many authors of narrative nonfiction, even well-known ones, I often feel that structure is almost an afterthought: An array of lively scenes is arranged more or less chronologically, with one that feels like a good place to start placed at the beginning and one that seems to wrap things up placed at the end. But when McPhee picks up his pen, I sense a writer thinking long and shrewdly about structure before he even puts a word on paper.

For more “Why’s this so good?” check our archives, and check back for new installments by new writers. If you’d like to write one, let us know.   

Ellis

In 2004, David Grann wrote about an unsolved crime that hit all the salacious notes: A victim killed by garroting, a misplaced inheritance, and British people. And in the most perfect twist, the case all centered around Sherlock Holmes.

Grann’s piece, “Mysterious Circumstances,” for The New Yorker, is an enthralling investigation into the, well, mysterious circumstances that lead to the death of the world’s foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes, Richard Lancelyn Green. In writing about Green’s death, Grann found a story befitting the full narrative treatment, not simply because it involved the world’s greatest fictional detective (sorry, Batman), but because the case – and it is that – is rich with characters, high stakes, and gobs of British intrigue. In Grann’s hands, the story unfolds in ways similar to the formula that made Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famous: An inexplicable crime takes place, Scotland Yard is befuddled, and a series of suspects awaits questioning.

But this being a magazine article and not pulp, Grann can’t just dive into the action. We’re first introduced to Green and his work, most importantly to the fact that the late scholar believed he was on the verge of securing a long-lost collection of personal writing from Conan Doyle himself. There is, of course, the small matter of Conan Doyle’s heirs. And so Grann begins unfolding the scenery and players:

Green then learned that Adrian had spirited some of the papers out of the chateau without his siblings’ knowledge, hoping to sell them to collectors. In the midst of this scheme, he died of a heart attack—giving rise to the legend of the curse. After Adrian’s death, the papers apparently vanished. And whenever Green tried to probe further he found himself caught in an impenetrable web of heirs—including a self-styled Russian princess—who seemed to have deceived and double-crossed each other in their efforts to control the archive.

A chateau! A curse! Deception and a Russian princess! And Grann’s just getting started. He’s clearly in the process of spooling up the thread to lay out the stakes of the story. Once the prized documents take a turn for Christie’s auction house the Sherlockian scholar grows more desperate and paranoid. The paragraphs race forward, the pace quickens, each sentence becomes so compressed and descriptive you feel like you can’t breathe. (In a good way, of course.) You’re worried about Green and what will happen to Conan Doyle’s archive. And then, just after you’ve gotten 1,000 words deep into the mystery, the body shows up. Boom. Crime scene:

The same evening, Priscilla West phoned her brother, and got his answering machine. She called repeatedly the next morning, but he still didn’t pick up. Alarmed, she went to his house and knocked on the door; there was no response. After several more attempts, she called the police, who came and broke open the entrance. Downstairs, the police found the body of Green lying on his bed, surrounded by Sherlock Holmes books and posters, with a cord wrapped around his neck. He had been garroted.

And with that – who gets garroted anymore? – the story begins. Or, to quote the detective, “the game is afoot,” and Grann shifts gears, inserting himself into what had previously been a strict third-person voice. He drops himself onto the stage the next paragraph, beginning with a phone conversation with one of Green’s close friends. Before you know it, he’s off into the rolling British countryside for interviews. With the narrative shift comes even more scene-setting, something that feels like the establishing shots you’d see in a movie. Grann is the inspector, and you his faithful sidekick. He’s deliberate as he walks us up to each new location and new character:

Not long after, I travelled to Great Bookham, a village thirty miles south of London, where Gibson lives. He was waiting for me when I stepped off the train. He was tall and rail-thin, and everything about him—narrow shoulders, long face, unruly gray hair—seemed to slouch forward, as if he were supported by an invisible cane. “I have a file for you,” he said, as we drove off in his car. “As you’ll see, there are plenty of clues and not a lot of answers.”

Everything up to this point feels like a glorious, and elaborate, setup. As Grann begins his inquiry we’re introduced to a cast of family, friends, and spurned colleagues. Each has their own theories and supporting evidence. And you begin to see why Grann got behind the wheel, and why describing these people and places is so important. By sitting them down in their own voice and space, they gain a little more gravity, or at least legitimacy, for us as the reader. It’s also the way Grann can employ another literary trick, where each character provides a new clue to advance the story:

Gibson glanced at his notes. There was something else, he said, something critical. On the eve of his death, he reminded me, Green had spoken to his friend Keen about an “American” who was trying to ruin him.

Like any good mystery, things seem to become clearer, and yet murkier at the same time. We think we’re on track to finding Green’s true killer and saving Conan Doyle’s archives. But that’s not exactly the case. Just like in any detective story, or any episode of Law & Order, in the second act the hero has to re-examine the facts of the case. And when Green does, we begin to see that this is a study in obsession, not just an unsolved murder.

It’s a story about men chasing men. Grann purses Green. Green was on the hunt for Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle was chasing Sherlock. The investigation, as it were, begins to give the reader two histories that feel parallel, Green and Conan Doyle, both devoured by their task, often foiled by the cold, logical nature of their subject. And staring at this reality, not to mention the alternating theories around him, Grann pauses at a point in the final act to try to make sense of things. He’s asking for himself, but also the reader, does any of this make sense?

I wondered if he could have tried, in one last desperate attempt, to create order out of the chaos around him. I wondered if this theory, however improbable, was in fact the least “impossible.”

A nod to one of Sherlock Holmes’ more famous quotes, at the precise moment where Grann wants us to think more broadly about what he’s assembled in front of us. Like Holmes chiding Watson, he’s trying to tell us something without explicitly explaining it.

Literary mysteries and their nonfiction counterparts may have a lot in common, but we know in the real world sometimes you don’t get all the answers by Page 100. And this is what Grann wants you to know. The great game, the chase, can sometimes be an elaborate invention that captivates or consumes us.

If you remove everything else from a story, however improbable, what do you have? What if a dead guy in his bedroom with a rope around his neck is just a dead guy in his bedroom with a rope around his neck?

Justin Ellis (@JustinNXT) is a writer at the Nieman Journalism Lab, where he covers the future of the news business.

For more “Why’s this so good?” see our archives. And check back each Tuesday for a new shot of inspiration and insight. 

Gardner

I do know that sensation is why, when asked about my favorite nonfiction writers, I rarely mention Gary Smith. I suspect I’m not alone. Listing Gary Smith comes with the obligation of explaining why Gary Smith. And anyone who’s been affected by his stories in Sports Illustrated – about coaches flattened by cancer, say, or an integrated high school team during segregation – knows that the pieces are hard to describe, that by the time you reach the end you’re emotionally drained but unable to articulate why. So I’ll talk about Tom Wolfe’s explosive sentences or David Grann’s knack for plot twists or John Hersey’s masterful pacing. But I’ll hardly ever refer to the guy at the top of my list, and that, I suppose, is a lie of omission.

My favorite Gary Smith story, as it turns out, is about a liar. On Dec. 13, 2001, George O’Leary lost his dream job as Notre Dame’s head football coach after a reporter discovered lies that had skulked in his resume for decades: a fictitious master’s degree from NYU and a bogus stint as a college football player. O’Leary became an instant national joke, the subject of newspaper cartoons, a punch line on Leno. Five months later, Sports Illustrated published Smith’s chronicle of the coach’s rise and “flaming fall from grace.” I first read the story shortly after it won the National Magazine Award for profile writing and was struck by the way Smith employs questions to both fling the narrative forward and slow it down. There are 64 interrogative sentences in the piece, beginning with, literally, “Where, then, to start the story…?”

Smith knows damn well where the story should begin, but he asks his audience anyway, in order to gun rapid introductions to a handful of characters, starting with O’Leary himself, whom we find in a hotel room, rubbing his face and contemplating suicide. Or do we start with this other guy over here? Smith probes, and drops us into another scene only to yank us out just as quickly – a gambit he pulls off three more times, until we’ve met the characters most crucial to the plot.

And that’s just the first six paragraphs.

The lens finally settles on O’Leary’s former boss, Luke LaPorta, a 77-year-old Italian who’s known about the coach’s penchant for fabrication for more than 20 years. As a high school athletic director, LaPorta chose not to rat out O’Leary, allowing him to steam ahead toward his date with disaster. Smith frames the piece by placing us in LaPorta’s head, as the old Italian considers whether he made the right choice all those years ago. It’s a subject we’ll soon revisit.

The bulk of the remaining story, though, loosely structured like a resume, takes us through the life of George O’Leary in more or less linear fashion, starting with a lie he told at age 7. But Smith isn’t done with the question marks. No, as we root around in O’Leary’s past we hit questions that ping us past less consequential or nonambiguous nodes in the coach’s biography and onto the deeply psychological scenes that Smith is known for.

And that’s where things get interesting. The questions cease to be pistons in Smith’s plot engine, and instead deepen our involvement with the story:

Have you located it yet? Where could a lie, an exaggeration that would make a national disgrace of a man, take root in that house?

We sink further and further in. The coach considers what to tell his team about his college playing career, which he deserted before it even began, and we hear his justification for the con:

A man who made quitting seem so repulsive, so weak, who convinced so many boys that anything was possible if they refused to quit…. Why, he couldn’t have quit, could he?

The thing is, we like George O’Leary, especially after hearing from men whose lives he changed for the better. Unfortunately, O’Leary thought that he could gain their respect only by puffing up his past. But we learn that no one gave a shit about his past:

The lies had been wasted. George O’Leary: the chipmunk trying to pass for a squirrel, when everyone saw him as a lion.

Though Smith has significantly slowed the pace, we are reminded that catastrophe looms. “It was ticking now. So softly that even he couldn’t hear it. So softly that no one could, and nearly every article and anecdote about George hinged on his extraordinary honesty, his painful honesty, and all the perpendicular adjectives – upstanding, upright, up-front, straightforward – echoed again and again.” Our fondness for O’Leary makes Smith’s clock, as we see the day of reckoning ahead – and hear “those last… few… ticks….” – all the more heart-stopping. I always find myself almost yelling at the page: George! Stop!

But here it comes. We wend through the coach’s many jobs and deceptions until we reach his hiring at Notre Dame, the quick discovery of his deceit, his resignation, and near-suicidal ruin. We read five paragraphs about O’Leary’s redemption, or at least the closest he’ll come to redemption in this story: another new job. Then we’re back with LaPorta, who asks himself again if he was right not to derail the fib-prone coach’s career back in the day. He decides he was. But the most important question in “Lying in Wait” is yet to come.

It turns out that the question of whether to cut a liar some slack, after taking the full measure of his life, isn’t for athletic directors or college presidents or O’Leary’s family members to answer. After more than 9,000 words of endless inquiry, it’s not even presented in the form of a question.

No, Smith ends with one staccato line:

“So. That was Luke’s choice. Now it’s your turn.”

James Ross Gardner (@jamesrgardner) is a senior editor at Seattle Met magazine. His writing has also appeared in Esquire and GQ. “The Girl on the Bridge,” his story about the race to stop a suicide, was a finalist for the City and Regional Magazine Association’s 2012 feature writing award.

For more installments of “Why’s this so good?” see our archives. And check back each week for a new shot of inspiration and insight.

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