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!

“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.   

I have a kind of love-hate attitude concerning the writer H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger. Hate’s probably the wrong word here. Love-annoyance. Love-if-you-would-just-quit-spouting-off-and-let- me-appreciate-you-as-a-writer. A “noted curmudgeon” is the way Deadspin describes him. “A professional crank,” says Business Insider. And I do wonder if the rants are just professional provocation. Because in so much of his work, Bissinger writes not just beautifully but with warmth, compassion, insight and a sense of fundamental decency. His portrait of Philadelphia, “A Prayer for the City,” is still one the most haunting tales of urban decay that I’ve ever read.

“Shattered Glass,” the 1998 story he wrote for Vanity Fair, also displays Bissinger at his best, a perfect balance of dogged research, astonishingly well-realized characters, told with a thinker’s narrative voice, one that muses, and ponders, and shares in the struggle to understand how a young writer could go so wrong. That’s undoubtedly one reason the piece fostered an art-house film of the same name.

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.

The story begins with Lane forcing Glass to revisit the scene of a recently published story, a hotel conference center. It turns out to have been closed on the day that a reported meeting allegedly took place there. According to Lane’s notes, Glass expressed bafflement, insisting that the events were real. And from that point on the narrative shifts back and forth continually between Lane’s story and the story of Bissinger hunting the elusive Stephen Glass.

This kind of structure is sometimes referred to as a zipper structure – essentially two narratives that interlock throughout a story. It’s a slightly imperfect description because the zipper image suggests that each section is of a very similar length, which is rarely true. But it does give you an idea of how neatly the writer has set up his tale. Lane’s investigation of Glass, Bissinger’s investigation of Glass – both move forward in tandem.

Lane is an entirely sympathetic character in this telling, an editor shocked by his discoveries, a man desperately trying to do the right thing. “As Stephen Glass spun feverishly,” Bissinger writes, “Lane anguished.” But as we follow Lane through his own investigation, we also come to see that despite the cost, the editor is also determined to see this through: He keeps notes, makes recordings, checks facts, meets with his reporter’s critics.

One of my favorite scenes is a moment of realization. The story begins when Lane is trying to verify a recently published tale of a California software company victimized by a hacker and eventually agreeing to pay extortion money. As it turns out, Glass has invented the company, along the way creating a fake website for it. During Lane’s investigation, a man calls him from Palo Alto, claiming to be the company president.

As Bissinger tells it:

He had no doubt the hacker story was trash, but he was still bugged by the calls from George Sims of Jukt Micronics.

At about 11 p.m., Lane spoke on the phone with senior editor [Margaret] Talbot. He filled her in on what had happened, and by chance, Talbot mentioned that Glass had a brother who lived in Palo Alto, California.

The second she uttered it, Lane knew.

You might think that devious and uncooperative Glass would end up simply the evil counterpoint to the dauntless Lane. But Bissinger doesn’t cheapen the tale. One of the things that elevates this above a standard retelling of a sordid story is that the writer shows such a serious, almost nonjudgmental effort to understand what he comes to see as a very troubled child.

Bissinger does indeed end up on a street in Highland Park, pondering the influence of neighborhood and upbringing. He looks at old yearbooks, college newspapers, the history of Glass’s professional career. He talks to friends and former colleagues, (a few actually go on the record). And he puzzles with all of them over the destructive habits of “the sweet and nice boy, the hardworking boy who could never be what he wanted to be, the boy who couldn’t live up to the expectations he had inherited.”

But he never forgets that whatever the excuses and explanations, the result was damage to people who trusted Glass, to people wronged by the stories and to Bissinger’s own profession. Thus the story ends on a pitch-perfect note with an ironic tribute to Glass’ improbable career: just a damning list of stories, published as nonfiction but real only in the inventive mind of Stephen Glass.

Deborah Blum (@deborahblum) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of “The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.”

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

A golden moment, you might think, in which nothing can go wrong. Or, in the tradition of classic literature, a sucker-punch moment after which all will go wrong. And in Barry Siegel’s 2002 Pulitzer-Prize winning piece for the Los Angeles Times, “A Father’s Pain, A Judge’s Duty and a Justice Beyond Their Reach,” everything does go wrong.

This is not, though, a tale of the Fates idly spinning out mortal threads. Siegel’s story is one of human decisions and their consequences. It is, in fact, the story of a single choice that ripples, stone into water, into a widening circle of lives. And it’s within that ever-expanding circle that this story of a local tragedy – the too-familiar tale of a careless moment and a dead child – becomes something bigger.

I’ll confess that as the mother of two sons, this is not the kind of story that I necessarily look to read. But I’ve come back to it repeatedly, partly because it’s so compelling, partly to figure out what makes it so compelling. I especially admire the way Siegel structures his narrative. He doesn’t follow people as much as he follows decisions, and the consequences of those decisions continue to unfold until the very last line of the story.

Siegel makes his vision of the story clear from the start, beginning not in that humming moment in the wilderness but later in the chambers of the presiding judge in the case of little Gage Wayment. The judge is waiting for the father, Paul Wayment, to begin a brief jail sentence. And as he waits, as the day lengthens, Judge Robert Hilder begins to worry about Wayment.

He’d sentenced Wayment to jail even though the prosecutor didn’t want this distraught father to serve time. Hilder felt he had to. Wayment’s negligence caused his young son’s death. There must be consequences, the judge ruled.

The story moves forward, exploring the reasoning behind decisions, from police to prosecutor to judge. As it does so, a haunting question emerges: What defines the limits on our ability to live with consequences, to bear up under the results of the choices we make?

“The first choice, though,” as Siegel notes, “had been Paul Wayment’s.” As 2-year-old Gage slept in the truck on that shining morning, a trio of deer drifted past into the forest. Wayment decided to follow them, just for a little bit. And then another a little bit. By all accounts, he then lost track of time. It was one or two miles later when he realized how long he’d been gone. When he hurried back to the truck, Gage was gone, apparently off looking for his father.

It took five days to find the child, and in that time period an autumn squall swept through the mountains, leaving almost half a foot of snow behind it. When a searcher found the little boy huddled under the scant shelter of a tree, he was long dead. His father had anticipated it, feared it from the moment he reported Gage missing:

“I’m responsible for his death if he is dead,” Wayment said. “I’m responsible for his death. I don’t think you can put it any other way … I had custody of him. I was supposed to look out for him. He was under my care.”

Siegel places that story, the judge’s story, the story of the criminal investigation, the decision of the prosecutor to charge the grief-stricken father, and the community uproar surrounding the death all within the suspended time period in which Judge Hilder waits for news of Wayment. There’s an astonishingly good section in which the members of the prosecutor’s office debate whether charges should be filed at all – what could be worse punishment, after all, than the death of a beloved child? When they decide to move forward, it’s with resignation: “If they didn’t, they’d be saying it was OK, or at least not criminal, to leave children alone in a remote area.”

By this point, Siegel has clearly established Hilder as the narrative focus for the story. He’s told the judge’s life story, built a thoughtful portrait of the man who must decide the unhappy father’s future. He’s also used the judge’s story as something of a narrative device: Hilder expects the Wayment case to come to him, dreads it, follows it, and as he does, so do we. Eventually, inevitably, the story reaches the point where Hilder learns of Wayment’s fate.

What I love about this story is that it’s an entirely compassionate look at a world, our world, in which decisions – careless decisions, carefully thought-out decisions – can and do go wrong. Wayment is never anything less than a father who loves his child. Hilder is never anything but a judge trying to make the best decision possible in the midst of a genuine tragedy. Both of them are forced to live with terrible consequences.

In the end, this is a story that looks for resolution. Hilder tries again to make the best possible decision, not just to live with his choice but also to learn from it. “It’s not a bad thing,” he says, “to have Paul Wayment’s face forever part of my life.”

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of “The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.”

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

“A Dirty Business,” by George Packer in The New Yorker. The rise and fall of Galleon, a multi-billion-dollar hedge fund.

One day, in the eighth-floor cafeteria, I noticed Rajaratnam standing alone by a refrigerator case, contemplating the beverage choices. By unspoken agreement, reporters had refrained from approaching him, but it was a chance that seemed unlikely to come again. In court that day, he had been carrying a small paperback. I walked over and asked what he was reading.

Rajaratnam recoiled. “Why?”

“I saw you had a book. I just wondered what it was.”

He smiled in a shy way that seemed self-protective. “No, it was just some papers.”

In a mere ten seconds, Rajaratnam had managed to lie.

“The Blink of an Eye,” by Tony Rehagen in Indianapolis Monthly (via @williams_paige). A decade after diagnosis, a young man stricken with ALS gets on with his life.

In his mind, Matt has it all laid out: captain booked, schedule set, supplies inventoried. Everything down to what he will wear. All he has to do now is relay that last bit of information to Shartrina.

She emerges from the walk-in closet, frustrated. She bends to look into her husband’s bright blue eyes. “Wind shirt?” she asks. “What is it, a jacket?”

He stares back at her.

“A pullover?”

He blinks once.

“What color is it? White?”

He doesn’t blink.

“Blue?”

No blink.

“Black?”

Blink.

“One Army, Two Failures,” by Megan McCloskey in Stars and Stripes. Did harassment provoke an Army suicide?

Army officials often profess bafflement over the causes of the suicide epidemic, and they have spent more than $75 million on studies to try to understand the problem and reverse the devastating trend.

In Anderson’s case, at least, there was little mystery.

An Army investigation into Anderson’s unit following his suicide concluded that he had been hazed on multiple occasions and subjected to “cruel, abusive and oppressive treatment.”

“Immigrant Misappropriations: The Importance of Ishiro,” by Jay Caspian Kang for Grantland. A decade later, Kang recounts his cultural tension and baffled pride over Ichiro Suzuki playing baseball in America.

It finally occurred to me that I had been ignoring the elephantine irony of this happy scene: I was born in Korea to Korean parents, meaning the only history I share with Ichiro is that on several occasions over the past thousand years, his people have brutally occupied my home country. Rooting for a Japanese baseball player because he fit in the same constructed minority category was like if an Irish ex-pat began rooting for Manchester United because the good people of China couldn’t distinguish between his accent and Wayne Rooney’s. And in most ways, it was a lot worse than that.

“The Baby and the Baath Water,” a multimedia essay by the innovative filmmaker Adam Curtis on his BBC blog (via @TheBrowser). A surprising chronology of U.S. involvement in Syrian affairs.

Between 1947 and 1949 an odd group of idealists and hard realists in the American government set out to intervene in Syria. Their aim was to liberate the Syrian people from a corrupt autocratic elite – and allow true democracy to flourish. They did this because they were convinced that “the Syrian people are naturally democratic” and that all that was necessary was to get rid of the elites – and a new world of “peace and progress” would inevitably emerge.

What resulted was a disaster, and the consequences of that disaster then led, through a weird series of bloody twists and turns, to the rise to power of the Assad family and the widescale repression in Syria today.

I thought I would tell that story.

“Death in the Pot,” by Deborah Blum in Lapham’s Quarterly (via @somethingtoread). Yes, it smells like rotting corpses, but is it safe to eat? Adventures with “The Poison Squad,” pioneers of food safety.

“A Rough Guide to Disney World,” by John Jeremiah Sullivan in the New York Times Magazine. An odd story of parenthood and illicit substances colliding at the House of the Mouse, written by the author of the strangest essay we’ve ever read.

One night my wife, M. J., said I should prepare to Disney. It wasn’t presented as a question or even as something to waste time thinking about, just to brace for, because it was happening.

Skloot used the film "Hurricane" as a model for the multi-narrative structure of "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks." Above is her coded system breaking down the stories of both (click to enlarge).

When you turned the book in, what were your hopes for it, and have they changed given its success?

My hope when I turned the book in – which I think is the hope of any writer when they turn their book in – is that it would get out there into the world. I know so many writers who’ve spent decades of their lives working on books that are incredible and that don’t ever get press coverage, or the book just doesn’t take off because of the time of year that it’s published or because of the other books published at the same time. There are so many factors that are out of the writer’s control.

I knew all that going in, but for me, the story itself – just the facts of this story – were so incredible, I always felt like if I could get them out to people, if people could read them and learn this information, they’d have the same reaction I did, which was “Oh, my God. I have to tell people about this.”

As a writer, one of the things that I thought a lot about and that weighed on me as I wrote and revised was wanting to do justice to the story. The simple facts of the story and the narrative of the story are so amazing that I felt in some ways like the only thing I could have done was to screw it up. And so much of my job was to take this incredible natural story and tell it in a way that let readers experience it in the way it really happened, to bring it to life as much as I could while staying out of its way.

And now that you’ve met your original goal?

My hope is that it keeps going. I’m thrilled that it’s still on The New York Times bestseller list. How many months out are we? Like six months – so I’m thrilled that it’s still there.

A lot of people say, “So now that you did this, what’s next?” But I’m still working on this one. I still feel like it’s part of my job to keep it alive and get it out to more readers.  I’m moving the day after tomorrow, and I’ll take a few weeks to settle down. And then I’m going to be on the road once the academic school year starts, basically September through December, talking about the book at schools and doing events.

Henrietta Lacks’ story has been a part of your life since you were a teenager, and you’ve researched her life and its aftermath for more than a decade. Were there ever crisis points at which you doubted your story, or wondered if you would actually be able to tell it?

It’s not so much that I thought, “I can’t do it.” There were crisis points, though, and a lot of them had to do with being completely overwhelmed by the story. There were so many places where I wondered, “How is it humanly possible to put this all in one book?” There are so many different storylines, and so many different amazing things that happened, and there’s the science, too. Figuring out the structure of the book was maddening, and it took me a very long time.

I never really felt like, “I can’t do it.” It was more like, “I may be 90 by the time I finish it.” I was so determined it just didn’t cross my mind to quit. One of my closest friends is a writer also, and there were many times when I called or sent him emails and said, “Oh, my God. I can’t do it. I’m never going to finish this thing.” It was mostly the feeling of the size and scope of it. My dad was a big supporter – both my parents were – and he would say, “It wouldn’t have been like you to pick a small straightforward book as your first book. Of course you picked this complicated, monumental story.” So it is sort of my personality to do something like that.

My mother’s helpful piece of advice was, “When you sit down to eat an elephant, don’t think of it as eating the entire elephant. Think of it as eating one bite, and then another bite, and another bite.”

Until you’re 90.

Exactly! Those were more the things that I wrestled with. For any writer, when you’re sitting down and looking at this vast, complicated project, it can be really daunting. Also, I felt the burden of history. I was lucky to start working on it long enough ago that Henrietta’s immediate family was still alive. Her husband was alive; her cousins she grew up with were alive. There were actually a lot of people who remembered her and the time, and George Gey, but they were dying as I was doing my research.

There was one time when I had interviewed a guy who was just an incredibly important source for the book, and he died soon after. There was another time when I had been scheduled to interview a guy, and he died before we could talk. So I constantly had this feeling of scrambling to get the story before it disappeared. And then also being aware as time went on that I was the only person with this information.

The combination of the sheer complexity of the narrative combined with that feeling of wanting to do justice to the history – that was rough sometimes.

Moving on to the structure a little bit: in one interview, you mention the book “Fried Green Tomatoes” and the movie “Hurricane” as inspiration for structure, and it’s apparent that such an attentive approach to the story made it comprehensible for readers. Did you give anything up in exchange for adopting the model you did?

[Laughs.] A few years of my life?

Really – no, I don’t think so. I knew that the structure was going to have to be complicated, and I’m just very into structure. I think structure is one of the most important tools a writer has. When I teach, my students get so sick of me harping on structure, structure, structure. I read and dissect a lot of things. I teach John McPhee’s stuff because he uses these very complicated structures you can pull apart. Structure is all about making the story more rich.

What I thought all along was that if I couldn’t find a way to do a structure that jumped around in time like that and told all three narratives at the same time, I’d lose a lot of the story, because the story of the cells and what happened to Henrietta take on such a different weight if you learn about them at the same time that you’re learning about the science, the scientists and her family, what happened to them and where they are now. To me, it was that I would have lost those things if I couldn’t have done the more complicated structure. But there was never a point where I thought, “I have to leave out this one really important part of the story because it doesn’t fit in this structure.”

There were some hard decisions, like where do you put the backstory of Elsie, Deborah’s sister? You really don’t get that story until pretty late in the book. Those were conscious decisions about what could wait, but I never felt like that was a sacrifice.

You have a triple narrative running in the book. Did you worry about showing change or transformation within each of the three narratives?

No, definitely not. I actually feel like the book has three narratives woven together, but the storyline for me is the story of Deborah. You meet me before you meet Deborah, but I’m only a vehicle to get to Deborah, to show where she is today and the impact that all of this has had on her. That was very much one of the reasons I was in the book – to show the way she responded to me and the impact I had on her, with us traveling together, her going into laboratories to see her mother’s cells for the first time and learning some really hard information that had some essentially life-threatening effects on her.

The story is about a lot of things, and there is an undercurrent of the impact journalists have on peoples’ lives. So I felt like I couldn’t leave it out for a lot of reasons, but in terms of the narrative arc of the book, for me, it was really the story of Deborah: her struggle to learn who her mother was, to come to terms with the cells. To essentially move on from them and let go of the cells and her memory of her mother as a traumatic thing and to get to the place where she does in the end, where she’s pretty happy about the cells.

That’s the big narrative arc with a climax, and the rest of it is, in a sense, backstory that’s woven in throughout, as chronological narrative. They do each have their own ups and downs as narratives, but as far as feeling like all the parts had to have a climactic moment,  I felt like Deborah took care of all that, and it would have felt forced to do it any other way, because it didn’t happen with the other ones.

You’ve explained on your site why you put yourself in the story, a practice you often discourage in your teaching. Did you develop a rule for yourself about how present to be?

Basically my rule for first person in the book was that it’s only there if it’s relevant to their story. I spent so much time fighting against being in the book, thinking, “It’s not my story, it’s their story. It’s not about me.” And I was right, it’s not. It’s just that I became a character in their story. So many other journalists, doctors and various other people came before me in similar circumstances, wanting something from the family related to the cells. I realized I couldn’t leave that out. Then there would be this obvious question: “Well, what about you?” And what happened with me was in some ways much more complicated and potentially dangerous than it was with any of the other journalists, because there was so much time together and because Deborah got so involved.

For that reason, I could never leave it out, but in my head, the way that I always thought about my role was as a character in their story, not as me telling my own story of my quest to find this stuff out. That made it challenging, because for me, writing the first scenes, where I’m first trying to get in touch with the family, Deborah’s not there yet. And so I really struggled with those — what those are about to me is the family’s resistance and trying to understand where that came from.

So you don’t learn anything about my backstory unless it’s relevant to Deborah or to the family’s story in some way. In the prologue, you learn that I didn’t come from a religious background, that I came from the Pacific Northwest, and that I’m white – and those are specifically juxtaposed against Deborah. You don’t really learn that much about me as a character outside of their story. That was what I constantly had in my head, that it only belonged if it was something relevant to their story.

At first, I was barely present in any of the first-person parts of the book, because I was really holding back and not wanting to have it be about my emotions. It took a lot of revising to let myself have some reactions. Some of that was my editor. When she read the first version that I gave to her, she was like, “OK, you seem like a psychopath in this scene, because Deborah just threw you against the wall, and she’s screaming at you, and you don’t react. You have to react.” My editor drew out a little of that emotional stuff that I was really hesitant to put in.

What advice would you give to someone looking to tackle a big, comprehensive story like this that spans decades?

Within the big sweep of history, there usually is – not necessarily a moment, but there is a story that’s not the whole sweep of history that you can use to hold it all together, and then some of the sweep of history can be told in flashbacks.

One of the things that often doesn’t work about big sweeping books like that is that they start in the beginning, and they tell the whole thing, and there isn’t the narrative or the central character or characters in the book that you follow through the entire story as you learn the history. I think that narrative exists in every story in some way, and finding it even in a multiple-part narrative is really important.

And organization, that was one thing that I didn’t know about early on and wished that I had. I didn’t have any sense of just the sheer volume of stuff I was going to accumulate related to the book and how important it was to organize it thematically and narratively, to have narrative in mind at all times as I accumulated things. Eventually, I went back and I cataloged everything that I gathered and put things on color-coded index cards. I had a system for using key words for coding things that I could search on my computer.

Watching for thematic and narrative elements and trying to organize your materials will save a lot of time and help you look at the story in a narrative way. It’s really easy to get caught up in the day-to-day reporting and the details, everything you’re gathering, and not sit back and think, “What’s the actual story?”

I’m always looking for narrative with every story that I write. All great stories tell a sweeping story through one small story. Among other things, my book is the history of tissue culture and the evolution of bioethics told through the story of a family. With “Seabiscuit,” it’s the story of a horse, but you learn the history of racing. All great nonfiction does that. In “The Orchid Thief,” you learn everything about the world of orchids through this one guy. It’s looking for that one family, that one person, that one moment that will help hold everything together.

Fiction provided your structure for this particular book, but in addition to the writers you just mentioned, can you name other nonfiction authors who’ve inspired you?

I think in terms of character, Alec Wilkinson, he’s a New Yorker writer. He did this incredible little book – I’m sure it was a New Yorker story before it became a book – it’s called “Moonshine.” I’m sure it’s out of print, but you can get it used. It’s just a brilliant character study. In everything he writes, he’s very good at using voices to make three-dimensional characters. I think he’s fabulous.

Also Burkhard Bilger, who’s at The New Yorker. He was at Discover for a long time, and he does a lot of science writing. He’s a great narrative writer. And Anne Fadiman – “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” was a great influence on me in part because of the content. It’s a similar story.

That was the book I most thought of when reading yours.

In some ways, it’s an obvious comparison. I read that book when I was in grad school, and I was like, “She gets it!” Part of what spoke to me about that book was that she tells this incredibly complicated story of the clash between the family and the world of medicine, and she doesn’t demonize either side. I think that’s really important, and it’s not always done in science writing.

And there’s John McPhee – I’ve read everything he’s written, and as I said, I dissect his stuff a lot. He thinks about structure in such a direct, almost methodical way. It’s a mechanical thing, structure. It’s something that’s artistic, but it’s also a puzzle.

One of the biggest influences, who I think was an incredible science writer, was Randy Shilts – he did “And the Band Played On.” He was really talented at weaving story and science. Deborah Blum, too.  She’s done a lot of great books. “Love at Goon Park” is wonderful. And also Jonathan Wiener. Lewis Thomas is one of those that I say every time someone asks this question. Linguistically, he just wrote about science in such a beautiful way.

Is there anything about the book that you’re surprised no one has asked yet?

Not exactly, but one thing has cropped up now and then – not in interviews, but every once in a while online or at readings. As someone who has spent 11 years working on a book like this, I find it fascinating. When you write nonfiction in a way that will hopefully read like fiction, with scenes and dialog, there’s an assumption that you made it up or made some things up. When I do Q&As, people in the audience will ask, “So how much liberty did you have to take?” Not did you take any, but how much? There’s this assumption that it’s impossible to recreate history in a way that reads like a story.

And I actually talk about this in the end notes and in the little note at the beginning of the book, where I say that none of this is made up, it’s all documented fact, which is why it took me so long to write the book. In the opening scene it’s raining, and the room looks a certain way, and her husband is parked outside under an oak tree. The weather came from the weather bureau. I saw archival pictures of the tree and took it to an expert, who said “Yes, that’s an oak.” I saw archival photos of the room.

Rebuilding that kind of narrative uses historical documents and interviews where you cross-source it. There’s just one moment in the book that only had one person who recalled it, and I said that in the book. But other than that, multiple sources verified all the information.

I think it’s interesting that people assume that when they read dialogue that took place in the 1950s, it was made up, because I wasn’t there. But in fact there are ways you can recreate that accurately in reporting. It is absolutely possible to recreate nonfiction in a narrative way and still be factual. It takes a heck of a long time, but it’s worth it.

AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen

Summer is upon us! Well, actually it’s kind of cold and gray outside here, but as you, our imaginary beachgoer, break out the sunblock and pack the Cheetos and flip-flops for a day in the sand, we’d like to introduce the first in an ongoing series of posts listing stories we’re reading, watching or listening to—stories we think you might want to check out.

Sometimes the events themselves make a piece worth a look. In other cases, the skill in storytelling catches our collective editorial eye (the baleful gaze of which resembles something from Tolkien).

If you want to pass along stories you think we should see (and should perhaps include in future lists), please don’t hesitate to send them to us. And yes, we’ll be rotating media, so there will be posts on “What we’re watching” and even “What we’re listening to” in future weeks. Stay tuned…

ARTICLES

“The Spill, the Scandal and the President” by Tim Dickinson from Rolling Stone (via The Browser).

According to reports by Interior’s inspector general, MMS staffers were both literally and figuratively in bed with the oil industry. When agency staffers weren’t joining industry employees for coke parties or trips to corporate ski chalets, they were having sex with oil-company officials. But it was American taxpayers and the environment that were getting screwed.

“School of Fight: Learning To Brawl with the Hockey Goons of Tomorrow” by Jake Bogoch from Deadspin.

Tom Bloomberg decided to teach me how to punch another kid unconscious on a hot summer day in rural Manitoba.

“Stranger-than-fiction Manhunt Ends in Skwentna” by Joshua Saul from Alaska Dispatch (via Gangrey.com).

Ben remembers breaking into one lodge and finding a stuffed moose and a well-stocked medicine cabinet inside. He said he took eight big Percocet and four or five Oxycontin—a pretty decent amount of synthetic heroin. “I threw up on the moose,” he said.

“Christina Finds Her Voice” by Jo Ciavaglia from the Bucks County Courier Times.

In an emergency room earlier this year, a young woman listed her symptoms, then explained why, if a CT scan were done, doctors would see that half her brain is gone.

“Chosen, but Not Special” by Michael Chabon from The New York Times (via David Quigg).

The presence of Jews among the not-yet-extinct peoples of the world can no more be credited to any kind of special trait or behavior than the Tasmanians or the Taino ought to be blamed for their own eradication.

BOOKS

The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum.

Until the early nineteenth century, few tools existed to detect a toxic substance in a corpse. Sometimes investigators deduced poison from the violent sickness that preceded death, or built a case by feeding animals a victim’s last meal, but more often than not, poisoners walked free. As a result murder by poison flourished. It became so common in eliminating perceived difficulties, such as a wealthy parent who stayed alive too long, that the French nicknamed the metallic element arsenic poudre de succession, the inheritance powder.

Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present by Hank Stuever (Christmas in July June!).

Before the Black Friday dawn, the sky is still a mix of dark blue and the sick sodium-vapor saffron of the suburban night. I park by the Beijing Chinese Super Buffet and walk across the lot to the Best Buy, where hundreds of people—some in their twelfth or thirteen hour of standing in line—await the day-after-Thanksgiving doorbuster sale.