It’s that time of year, where we take a break for a few days from the world of nonfiction storytelling to hit the beach, eat funnel cakes and read really bad fiction. (No way are we going to let a little hurricane interfere with anything as important as a vacation.)

If you’re longing for Storyboard material while we’re out, make sure you’re up to date on our “Why’s this so good?” series and the latest from our Editors’ Roundtable.

We’ll be back right after Labor Day with new posts on the wonderful world of narrative journalism. But if you want to find us in the meantime, you’ll have to hunt us down on the Tilt-a-Whirl or in line at the steamed shrimp shack.

For full bios of the Roundtable editors, see our introductory post.

Chris Hunt
Assistant managing editor, Sports Illustrated

On the importance of the setup and kicker:

This story reminded me of the French film “The Return of Martin Guerre,” in which a character who appears out of nowhere might or might not be who he says he is. Like the movie, the lede of “Blindsided” both makes you care about Jerry Joseph – an overgrown child of misfortune longing for a home and a family – and plants seeds of doubt about him. The supposed facts of his life are carefully attributed: “He said he didn’t really know what day he was born. His parents were both dead before he turned 5, he said. . . .  Jerry Joseph’s birth certificate read January 1.” The attributions indicate that we don’t know these things to be true. Jerry’s life, another character guesses, might be a dream.

Even Jerry’s feelings at his birthday party are either reported or imagined by others. This deftly tells us that this story will be substantially about the way people reacted to Jerry and that we may never hear the truth from him. We will learn it, though: A line about Jerry’s foster father, Danny Wright, hints that the mystery has been solved (“It’s a moment Wright keeps coming back to”). It’s logical to imagine right away that Jerry Joseph will turn out to be a fraud (especially if you’ve been reminded of “The Return of Martin Guerre”), but as a reader you’re in the same position as the people around Jerry, and you won’t know for sure until they do. You have to read on.

Even after the mystery is solved, the story’s final section keeps it alive. We know Jerry Joseph’s real name is Guerdwich Montimere, but we really don’t know who he is. We only know who he wants to be, perhaps even believes he is. The author repeats the theme of the story, which he stated once before, well into the narrative: “Every man dreams about it. … How much fun it’d be to replay the game of life if given a second chance.” We finally meet Guerdwich, and he says his name is Jerry.

Paige Williams
Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

On suspense:

This is worth repeating: We’re often too quick to refer to any long feature story as a narrative. Just because a piece is long doesn’t make it a narrative, and just because a piece is short doesn’t not make it a narrative. One of my favorite narratives is an 835-word story by the wonderful Larry Bingham, about a Texas man who, at age 98, learned how to read.

A narrative contains arc, character development (doable even in a straightjacket, as Bingham proves), nuance and, to some degree, suspense. By suspense I don’t mean sounding the Here’s Some Drama! gong via strained writing and an authorial desire to make structure do the hard work of reporting/writing; I mean perfuming the air with an intriguing question or two. A mystery on any scale keeps us turning pages.

Mooney’s piece lent itself to a slow tell because the story itself is a mystery – that always helps – but he easily could’ve ruined the thing by overwriting, which tends to happen when you’ve underreported or when you’re stumped by the mechanics of a story that’s missing some of its natural parts. The development of suspense started not with the writing but rather with the reporting. In keeping key questions in mind as the investigator/writer, he nurtured them on the page: Is Jerry a fraud? Who the hell is Jerry? If he isn’t who he says he is, why all the fakery? How will Coach Wright, and Odessa, handle the revelation?

Those answers are the destination; Mooney seeds the story with foreshadowing details that move us there. Details about trust. Details about warning pings that sounded when Jerry first took off his shirt. Think of these as Chekhov’s firecrackers.

Also, as crucial as it is to work toward a killer kicker, it’s just as important in a story of this length to hone section kickers. Individually, Mooney’s section kickers keep you reading; collectively they’re the dovetail joints holding the whole cabinet together.

Examples:

• “Who were we to question his story,” Anders says. “He was the first Haitian most of us had ever met.”
• Just when you knew where Jerry was going, he went in a completely new direction.
• He needed to know one thing: Was there a girl?
• “Where’s Jerry, Daddy? Where’s Jerry?”

His ultimate kicker is powerful in its simplicity and also in its complex message about human identity. Plus, it leaves us in a moment of currency and forward spin.

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

On the art of withholding and revealing:

A lot of writing involves deciding how to release information, what to reveal now, and what to conceal for later. The idea is both to make a complex set of facts painless for the reader to absorb by managing the download of information, and (as Paige notes) to create suspense. Michael Mooney proves to be a master of both in this piece, a mastery he demonstrates before you even get beyond the lede. In the very first paragraph, he jumps right in to the literal middle of the story, but by careful selection of what facts he presents, he manages to make a complicated story comprehensible.

He economically conveys, in this order; 1) the mystery, 2) the unusual circumstances, and 3) the foreshadowing that something is wrong with this picture.

The mystery is conveyed directly, but with sparse information: “He said he didn’t really know what day he was born. His parents were both dead before he turned 5, he said, and he’d never celebrated a birthday in his life.”

The unusual circumstances: “But Jerry Joseph’s birth certificate read January 1, so on New Year’s Day 2010, his family gathered around him. It would be a new year, a new decade, a celebration of Jerry’s brand-new life.”

The incongruity is the cherry on top: “There were flimsy cardboard hats and streamers and wrapped gifts. Jerry, who at six feet five and 220 pounds was several inches taller than anyone else in his adoptive family, was presented a white cake adorned with candles in the shape of a 1 and a 6.”

Note how he chooses to never actually say the age “16.” Allowing the reader to pick this up only by indirection ironically manages to magnify its significance. Without ever saying it directly, he’s assured that every reader will emerge from the lede knowing that the mystery of Jerry’s origins and his age will be the most discordant issues in what otherwise might just be a feel-good story about a privileged family adopting an underprivileged boy.

Two paragraphs in, readers are already far more involved and curious than if the writer had simply explained what the story would be about in a traditional nut graf. He has delivered a keen intuitive sense of what will make this story worth reading, and a sense of delight in anticipation of a story told in a dramatic, rather than pedantic way.

He keeps his narration steadfastly nonjudgmental by taking Jerry’s increasingly implausible claim that he is not a fraud at face value – a stance that pays wonderful dividends at the end, when we discover that Jerry’s insistence that “I am not that person” has taken on more than a literal meaning, that Jerry’s lie has become, on some level his truth.

The overall principle here is one of respect for the readers, and an understanding that the more you enable readers to divine for themselves, using expertly arranged clues, the more they will get out of the reading experience.  Of course, this is a risky strategy, because it requires unerring judgment to prevent the sense of enlightenment a reader experiences from degrading into mere confusion. Mooney’s sure hand here removes any threat that will happen.

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

On developing character without the character’s help:

The question that drives this story, of course, is “Who is this guy?” and not “Is he Jerry Joseph or Guerdwich Montimere?” Who was it that the people in Odessa met and became attached to – a decent person or a fraud? Or possibly both?

The writer here has to reveal character, and has to do it without the character’s help.

That’s a dilemma we find ourselves in from time to time. Sometimes, a person is reluctant to share his story. Or he clearly wants to embellish his tale, to make himself come across in a stronger light. Occasionally, we’re writing about someone who has disappeared or passed away.

It’s not impossible to succeed in those circumstances, but it is challenging.

A reporter is forced to ask people who crossed paths with the character to help provide the telling details.

Michael Mooney does a lot of work here. He shows us what they saw:

• Danny Wright … noticed the kid get misty-eyed, just as he had at his first Christmas a week earlier.
• Lots of people saw him out there in the hot August sun. Three miles each way, jogging through the streets like he was Rocky or something.
• He skipped down the halls when he thought nobody was watching.

He tells us what Joseph told townspeople:

• He said he didn’t really know what day he was born.
• He’d been homeless in Haiti, he said.
• He said that most of his life was spent herding goats.

He gives us physical description, mannerisms:

• The kid had all sorts of tattoos, inflated pecs, and shoulders like a racehorse.
• Jerry had a beautiful wide smile and what nearly everyone describes as an exotic “swagger.”
• Fans remarked that with his flat-top haircut and the way he always seemed drenched in sweat, Jerry looked a little like Boobie Miles, the star-crossed running back from the Friday Night Lights season.

He shares what people were thinking about this guy:

• A few of the teachers joked that Jerry was secretly an adult.
• Anders wondered if maybe the kid wasn’t some kind of prodigy.
• “He knew the game like a coach.”

And the nicknames they gave him:

• They called him Grandpa and the Haitian Sensation.

He describes Joseph’s actions:

• Jerry was popular with the teenage girls, a good employee – never late, never snapped at anyone, never had any money missing from his register.
• Just seconds into the first quarter, he snatched the ball and drove the length of the court, throwing down what several teammates describe as a “gorilla slam.”
• If he thought he’d miss church, he made sure to e-mail Pastor Skelton saying he’d be thinking of them.

Imagine the litany of questions Mooney had to ask – what did Joseph do and say? What did you notice about him? What were you thinking each time you were with him? What were your conversations like? How did you react to him? Why didn’t anyone challenge his account of his past?

All those answers built this story.

At the end, readers are left much like the townspeople, holding out hope that it wasn’t a total betrayal. But if it was, at least we can understand how a stranger managed to win this town over.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

On finding the emotional core of the story:

(Full disclosure: I was Mike Mooney’s editor when he was an intern at The Dallas Morning News in 2007.)

While the character of Jerry Joseph stands at the center of “Blindsided” – he is the reason for the story, after all – Mike Mooney develops the emotional heart of his story through another central character: Danny Wright.

As Maria Carrillo notes, Mooney paints the portrait of Joseph through the perspectives of people whose lives he touched. Still, Joseph remains an enigma. Is he the ultimate con man, or is he psychologically damaged, or is he both? We may never know, and that’s where Danny Wright comes in.

Most stories need a central character that readers can identify with, and it helps if the character faces a dilemma.

Wright is a good man. He’s the 50-year-old basketball coach who used to direct the local Boys & Girls Club. He’s known as “Dad” or “Pops” around town, and he and his wife have taken in as many as 18 kids over the years. “The oldest of five in a single-mother household, Wright has been taking care of kids his whole life,” Mike writes. “It’s why God put him on this earth.”

Wright always sees the good in people. The dilemma he faces is that, while he can see a lot of good in Jerry, he can’t decipher what’s truth and what’s fiction in Jerry’s story. His faith in people is shaken.

Mooney’s storytelling benefits from Wright’s ability to observe what’s around him and reflect upon it. For example, the first scene – of the birthday party – is based largely on Wright’s memory. And the question Wright asks in hindsight launches the story. “It’s a moment Wright keeps coming back to, when Jerry closed his bright brown eyes. What could the boy have wished for? he wonders.”

Like Wright, we are driven to ask this question throughout the story as we learn more about Jerry’s fabrications. When Wright finally learns the truth about Jerry Joseph, we feel his heart breaking – our hearts break, too – even as his anger rises.

“This is you,” Coach Wright said, barely able to contain his anger.

“That ain’t me,” Jerry said.

“Look,” Wright said, leaning in, “I’m not asking for confirmation. I’m telling you. I don’t know what you’re pulling, but you need to get your things and be on your way.”

By the end of the story, Wright’s family is torn – his wife and kids still love Joseph, but the coach has his doubts. And he’s no longer sure whether he can still help needy kids.

Mooney’s story, then, is not only about the mystery of Jerry Joseph. It also follows the emotional journey of Danny Wright, from faith through betrayal to doubt.

For more, read our interview with Michael Mooney about his story, or take a look at our previous Editors’ Roundtables.

Is there a story you’d like the Roundtable to tackle? If so, you can send a link to us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

How did you find Dan and Jenna, the couple fleeing Wisconsin to make a life in Florida?

We were actually with one of the girls we’ve been following for this project about drug court. She rides the bus to work at this pizza place every day. She said, “Hey, you should ride the bus sometime with us and see all the people pushing pills.”

So we just hopped on the bus with her one morning. Of course it takes an hour and a half to get 20 minutes down the road. But we were sitting on the bus watching the world go by. This couple was across from us, and they kept kissing and kissing. They were really young and cute and as pale as could be. They each had a little duffel bag and a backpack. She kept asking questions: “What kind of bird is that? Is that a gulper bird? What kind of tree is that? Oh, my god – do oranges grow on trees?” She was so in awe of the world going by.

So John [Pendygraft], the photographer, was sitting next to me, and he snapped a picture of them kissing. They looked up and smiled, and I introduced myself. They told us, “We just got to Florida for the first time. We’ve been on the Greyhound for three days.” They had switched from the Greyhound to the city bus right when we got on.

We left our drug court girl at her pizza place and followed them. They said, “We’re going to go find the ocean today. The first thing we want to do is find the ocean.” Of course, we don’t have the ocean here; we have the gulf. But we looked at each other, and went “Hmmm.” We asked if we could come along. So we spent the rest of the day following them, changing buses – basically doing the journey that’s in the story. We left them after they got into the water about 4:30 or 5that evening.

So it was one day of contact?

One day of reporting. And we got his aunt’s cell phone and called back and took them out to lunch and ferreted out more of the story. But we didn’t know until after that initial day that he was on probation. That came up after we backgrounded him the next day.

Did you ask him about it?

Yes. That story happened on a Friday, which is also perfect. We backgrounded him Monday and said, “Ay-yi-yi.” I asked my editor, “What do we do with this?”

My editor said, “Ask him about what happened.” Because most of the stuff that he had done was pretty minor. It’s not like he was an ax murderer. So we took him out and talked to him about it, and he said, “Yeah, I did some stupid things when I was young.” He went through the litany of each of the things. The worst thing he had done was steal a car. He told us vignettes about each one of them, which matched up with the police report we’d pulled. He said, “I just need to check in with my probation officer. I should have done that, but he’s not going to come looking for me.”

We said, “Well, do you want us to still do the story?” It was supposed to be a happy story, sort of a Florida fairy tale story. And so many people are running from something. My editor said, “If we’re honest about it, and he’s cool with it, we’ll put a line in there, saying we know he’s on probation, so we don’t get caught looking like we weren’t aware of that.” That’s where we left it. It was totally up to him if he wanted to do the story, and he did. He was excited about it.

In terms of the story itself, you weave in their backstories, but mostly you keep focused on this moment in which they’re suspended between the past and the future – a very narrow slice of time. Did you know from the beginning that you would frame it that way?

Yeah, I did. We have a thing in the Times called “Encounters” that runs on the front page. They’re usually 20 inches, but this one was a little longer. It’s just a moment when something happens, someone is on a precipice, or something is about to change. So from the first time they said, “We’re going to go to the ocean today,” I thought, “That’s a great Encounter.” They’re on a quest. It’s going to end – either they find the “ocean” or they don’t. It can be self-contained on this bus and this journey.

Some people commented and asked if I had ridden with them all the way from Wisconsin. Dang, I would have loved to do that. I had a lot more about their journey before they got here, but my editor thought I should frame it as tightly as possible and start from that moment they arrived in Florida – which I think was the right decision.

You create two levels of experiencing the story. On one level, we’re right there with Dan and Jenna, seeing Florida for the first time. And then there are two sentences tucked into the middle, where you speak directly to the reader, to the Floridians who read the paper. Can you talk a little about that?

I had more of that that got edited out, which in the end was probably a good thing. I had a whole section where I waxed about how Florida has hardly any natives. If they’re native, they’re my mom’s age – they haven’t been here for eight generations or anything. And most everyone has a story about the first time they visited Florida, and they fell in love.

That’s why I thought this was such a Florida story. Unlike any of the other places I’ve ever lived, there’s something magical about the first time you see a palm tree or the first time you put your toes in the sand. But when you live here for 10 years, and you don’t want to get sunburned, and you have kids’ soccer, and homework, and work, you forget. It becomes part of the background. So I wanted to incorporate some of that, something that would turn the camera away from them a minute and toward the reader and say, “Remember that? Remember what that was like?”

The kids seemed like everyman characters. I got lucky and ran into them on a bus. I couldn’t have gone out and found them, but every day there’s someone like that who lands here. I wanted it to be about the experience of coming to Florida as much as it was about those kids experiencing it.

What happened after the story ran?

It was actually really unsettling, the way things played out. The story ran on Memorial Day, which was a great beachy day for it to run. We had the day off. That morning I was with John, the photographer, at the beach. The kid in the story, Dan, called. He loved the story. It was maybe 10:30 that morning. He was asking if we could get extra copies. Could we bring him some pictures?

That afternoon he called back, and there were like 60 or 70 comments online. All of them were snarky and negative and saying his girlfriend was going to end up dancing on a pole, and they would end up pushing drugs. Readers can be mean sometimes. A lot of it had to do with the fact that since he’s on probation, “Do we want another loser living in Florida?” He got really upset about the story. We tried to talk to him about it, and we got the comments shut down and taken offline, so that wouldn’t be part of the context of it.

Before we published the story, I had called his probation officer. He said, “I know he’s in Florida. His boss called from Wendy’s. He’s not a big deal, he just needs to go register with the Florida probation people down there and let him know he’s there.” That was before the story ran.

They held it for a couple weeks – I don’t know why. They probably wanted it to run on Memorial Day. In any case, Jenna called me like three days after the story ran and said, “Dan’s in jail.” And she was crying.

We couldn’t figure out how that played out. She said, “You all turned him in.” I said, “No, we didn’t.” I was careful not to put his aunt’s last name or where they were staying in the story. I didn’t put where he was working or anything identifiable in there. Come to find out, his aunt actually turned him in. I don’t know whether that had anything to do with the story or not, but she turned him in for violation of probation, and they sent him back to Wisconsin.

You had talked to his probation officer before, but as far you know, it was due to his aunt making some more formal complaint?

As far as I know. And he also had missed a court date. He had up until his court date to register in Florida. You can just change your state, if you’re on probation – at least for some things. But he hadn’t done it. He hadn’t called in. I think that when he missed his court date, there was also some flag that went up – one that wasn’t issued by his probation officer but was issued by a judge.

It felt terrible. John and I were both so upset that this had happened, because it was never our intention.

You’ve done a lot of different stories over the years. Was there anything with this story that would make you approach reporting or writing differently in the future?

I think if I had known from the beginning that he was on probation, I might not have been as enamored with the “happy story” idea. I might not even have done it if he had told us that day on the bus. It doesn’t make me want to do these stories any less, and I’m really glad we backgrounded him. It would have been worse if his aunt had turned him in, and we hadn’t known he was on probation, and then we had to write a follow up.

It was hard not to feel guilty that in some way we had affected this kid, but once I found out it was his aunt and not some random reader or bounty hunter that had tracked him down, that helped a little bit.

These stories are out in our communities all the time. I give this little talk at newspapers and colleges about how to find stories. The first tip is to ride the bus. You can always find stories on the bus. People so often are at some kind of crossroads, and obviously, they’re on a journey if they’re on a bus. You have time to talk with them. It’s a whole different demographic than a lot of the people we write about.

I think it happens a lot to reporters, where you’re out on one story, and you see another story that’s a little bit more intriguing, or it’s something you’ve been thinking about for a while. You have to be able to turn the corner midstream.

Is there anything else you want to say about how the story came together?

One thing that’s hard to do when you’re on a story like that is to not interfere. We kept wanting to help them find the beach. It was really hard to let them take all these wrong turns. It was 100 degrees out and we were all dying to get out to the water.

Also, following the story in the moment is so important. We had other things we were supposed to do that afternoon. I was in a dress. I lost my watch that day. John got his camera wet. We were both in the water up to our chins in our work clothes just following them in for that last moment. It was so much fun. I was thinking, “Oh, yeah. This is how you go find a story in the world instead of sitting through another meeting and trying to pull something out of that.”

I think just being open to stories when they happen around you is probably the most important thing.

You went into the water up to your chin in your work clothes?

Oh, yeah. We wanted to hear what they were saying. John followed them way out – he was soaked. We ended up two hours away from our car. I had to call my husband to come pick us up, and we got the car full of sand and salt water. But it was just really fun. And it was great to see it through their eyes.

That’s why I think the unhappy ending made it that much harder. You don’t find a story like this every day.

Do you regret writing the story?

I regret what happened to Dan, but I don’t regret writing the story.

When did you find out that Kaila would be throwing out the first pitch?

She threw out Saturday, and I didn’t know about it until maybe Tuesday. I was working on a big crew story – on rowing – and so I didn’t get to really sink my teeth into it until maybe Thursday. It was a quick turnaround.

At what point did you find out about her medical backstory? Did you know that before you talked to the family?

Yeah, that was there on the front end, figuring out what her illnesses were and looking them up to get some idea of what they meant. The issue with her was that she lives out in Bellingham, which is a couple hours away from Seattle, and just getting to the story on Thursday, I didn’t have time to go up to Bellingham. So we actually had to do the interview a few hours before she threw out the first pitch. That kind of complicated things – not having a tremendous amount of time to think it out after doing the reporting.

When did it run?

It ran in the Sunday newspaper. The game was at 7 o’clock. She threw out the first pitch at 6:55, and it got filed at like 8 o’clock.

How long did you have to talk with her in that interview up front?

We did about an hour and a half, and there had been maybe 25 minutes of phone stuff done ahead of time.

You get a lot of medical information and character into less than 1,000 words. Do you have a strategy for how to weave it all together?

That was tough. Normally if I were doing something like that I would probably spend a couple of days getting to know the person. I’m a big believer in having a sort of intrinsic understanding in writing about people that simply comes through being able to be around them and study them.

In this case, it was such a quick hitter. With everything I was doing, I had to speed up. It felt like it was going 10 times as fast. I thought this was a beautiful story, and normally, if we would have had the time to really do it, the story could have been just as intriguing at twice the length. The challenge to do it in an 800-word column was interesting.

Do you have suggestions for how to build in the medical details while keeping the reader in the moment?

I think that the one thing that I always try to do in situations like that is that I don’t want the illness to define the person. I approach it asking, “Is this person interesting enough for me to tell as story about them that has nothing to do with their illness?” If so, and you have an understanding of their personality, when you add in the extraordinary circumstances that they’re facing medically, that just rounds out the story. I never look at it as “I want to do a story on a sick person and tell you how courageous they are.”

There are a lot of stories out there about how courageous someone is in the face of something. I’m way more focused on telling you about who this person really is, and what makes them click, what makes them special. Then when I bring in the medical problem, you’ll be hooked on who they are, and you’ll see them as a round character instead of a flat one.

What do you think a good column should do?

Everybody does it so differently, and there are so many different ways to do it well. Most of the time, I want it to educate, inform, provoke or persuade. And then the other thing that’s really key is to inspire. With Kaila’s story, I’m hoping that it shows people what an inspiration she is – her story is about finding something in life that is her passion, something that separates her and makes her special. That’s what I’m really hoping people got from that column.

If that’s what a good column should do, what’s the quickest way to ruin a column?

Well, definitely, even now, there’s probably once a month, where I say, “I wish I could get that one back.” Or, “I wish I’d thought that out a little bit longer.” That goes with the turf. You wind up learning a lot more about writing columns through something that doesn’t come out right than celebrating the successes of something you did correctly.

When things go wrong for me, normally, it’s a problem on the reporting end. You didn’t get that one extra source who could have illuminated the viewpoint or taken your thinking to another level. That can be an issue. And then sometimes I think you can get so caught up in how you want to structure a story that you focus so much on the writing and trying to be sharp that your opinion doesn’t come out well. It comes out nicely written, but in terms of being a true opinion piece, it’s flat.

I think column writing is the hardest form of writing in journalism, just because it’s a three-pronged thing: You have to be sharp on your reporting, your reporting has to be as good as your writing, and the writing has to be as good as your level of thought. Those three things really have to come together in a special way in order to have a great column.

We all know that the daily grind can influence all of those things. When you’re talking about having to write three or four columns a week, one of those probably isn’t going to come out the way that you hoped. And it bothers you a lot, in some ways more than if you’re reporting a story on something – a meeting or an issue – where you can fall back on the fact that at least you informed people as well as you possibly could, even if you didn’t write it as well you had hoped.

What tips should people keep in mind?

The first thing is don’t write simple opinions. The biggest mistake that we can make is to always want to be right. You want as many people as possible to email you and say, “You nailed that” – but that’s not the point of what we do. Don’t write simple opinions with the idea “Oh, this is foolproof. No one will ever second-guess me on this.” That’s not what we do. You want to take on different things that are more complicated, more controversial.

More than anything, your style has to equal your content when you’re writing columns. I don’t think a lot of people get that. They just want to write everything in the same style. But you have to mix it up, depending on if you’re writing about something very serious or something very funny, or something where you suppress your writing style a little because it’s a more informative thing.

The other thing is to really challenge yourself to get out of your comfort zone. That Kaila story, those are the kinds of columns I absolutely love to write, because I love writing about people. But for me the challenge is that I need to write something that’s different, that pushes me, because that’s just going to help with being able to mix it up.

Column writing is this long conversation with readers that goes on for years and years. It’s a very delicate thing, because you’re going to tick them off a good portion of the time. You’re going to have them praising you a good portion of the time. But what I don’t want is for them to ever know exactly where I’m coming from.

That’s just a huge thing when you’re writing columns. You can’t be the screamer exclusively, you can’t just be the guy who tells the touching stories exclusively, you can’t just be the deep thinker exclusively. One of those things can be your trademark, but you have to have more pitches. You have to learn to do other things.

Anything else you want to say about the Kaila story?

You know when I was sitting down and writing the column in the pressbox at Safeco Field, I put a lot of pressure on myself after that interview, because I knew that I had to file right away and didn’t have long to get it right. I was still processing the story. I had just met the girl.

I went back to the old basics: Keep it simple. Tell the story with your heart as much as with your mind. And just let it go. I was happy with the way that turned out, knowing that ordinarily I would have done the interviewing a week out, let it marinate, written it a little longer, maybe even written it more melodramatically. Staying in the moment was good; it taught me a lesson. Sometimes you’ve just got to let the story go and let it take you where it’s supposed to take you, instead of being so heavy-handed on how you want to guide it.

One classic daily newspaper narrative is the story of the very sick child. A member of the Roundtable suggested this Seattle Times column about a Girl Scout named Kaila Cove as an example of how to handle the topic without resorting to melodrama. After establishing her cookie-selling credentials by outdoing every other Girl Scout in Western Washington, Cove was invited to throw out the first pitch for the Seattle Mariners last month. Here, without knowing any of the details of how he did the story, three editors address various aspects of columnist Jerry Brewer’s work. Check back tomorrow for our interview with Brewer [update: read it here].

Laurie Hertzel
Senior editor for books and special projects, Star Tribune

It is hard to write a column about a sick child without becoming maudlin or sentimental. These stories are journalists’ stock in trade, and, sadly, have become almost a cliché. It’s so easy to stray into the tear-drenched world of adjectives and heroism. Jerry Brewer is careful to write about a sick child overcoming obstacles without descending into mawkishness. He does this in a number of ways:

He uses humor. Not belly-laugh humor, which would be inappropriate for such a topic, but gentle humor that makes you smile slightly. Such as: “There are many ways to illustrate Cove’s will to live, but let’s hurry up and get to the part about the Girl Scout cookies.”  The juxtaposition of “will to live” and “Girl Scout cookies” made me smile. It tells me that the story will be grounded in the realities of a child, not bathed in emotion.

He lists the facts of her situation without opining. No loaded words like “tragic” and “heartbreaking.”  Just concrete, straightforward statements: “Getting the flu could kill her … she can’t go to school because of the germs … she’s so small for an 11-year-old that other kids regularly and annoyingly think she’s much younger.”

He finds a story, and he tells it. It’s a small story, about how she got to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at a baseball game because she had been such a powerhouse at selling cookies. He puts her in motion: watching clips; practicing her windup with her dad and brother. The more concrete he keeps the story, the more Kaila becomes a real person, and the more you care about her. This is the best way to tell an emotional story: Don’t tell the reader how to feel (as Brewer doesn’t). Let the reader get to know the subject as a real person (as he does).

If the column allowed for more length, there are other things I’d like to have seen. I’d like to have seen her throw out that first pitch. I’d like to see her making her impassioned plea for people to buy cookies. I’d like to hear her talk a little more. But given the constraints of time and length that a column operates under, Brewer did a nice job.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

As a writer, I’ve often found it challenging to describe people. I can resort to adjectives and physical details. But how do you get beyond the surface details to reveal character? Jerry Brewer uses several techniques to capture Kaila Cove’s personality in quick strokes.

Quotes. Brewer doesn’t just use quotes to convey information. He selects quotes that allow us to hear a person’s voice. For example, you hear Kaila’s spunkiness – and the fact that she’s very much a young girl who’s concerned about what most young girls are concerned about – as she interjects herself into this passage: “Sometimes, if a lot of kids are sick, she must wear a mask. ‘Which I don’t like,’ says Kaila, who is from Bellingham. ‘It looks dorky.’ ”

Dialogue. Brewer uses a snatch of dialogue to give us a glimpse of Kaila’s relationship with her mother, who by now must be used to Kaila’s ambitions and strong-headed ways. Brewer writes: “Kaila sold about 2,900 boxes of cookies last year. She climbed to 3,503 this year. Her goal for next year is 4,000. ‘Or, actually, 4,200,’ she says. ‘Oh, geez,’ her mother replies.”

Anecdotes. Notice that Brewer doesn’t come out and say that Kaila has a fire in her belly. He shows it through an anecdote: “She knew throwing out the first pitch was a big deal. There are YouTube videos to prove it. She watched clips of everyone from President Obama to Justin Bieber perform the ritual with varying results. She decided she needed to do two things: Throw the ball straight and keep it from bouncing. She practiced so much with her father, Willie Cove, and younger brother, Jaiden, that she made her arm sore.”

I would have loved to read a description of Kaila’s pitch on that Saturday night – to hear more about her movements and mannerisms. How did she interact with her parents before and after the pitch? How did she walk out to the pitcher’s mound and steel herself? How was the pitch? How did she interact with the pitcher after the pitch? How did she react to the ballpark crowd? Brewer could have added just a touch more to describe this powerful moment.

Jacqui Banaszynski
Knight Chair professor, Missouri School of Journalism

(Full disclosure: I was still a senior editor at The Seattle Times when Jerry Brewer joined the staff. I did not work with him directly except for occasional coaching sessions, and to consult on his series, “A Prayer for Gloria,” which turned into a book, “Gloria’s Miracle.”)

This is an enchanting and disciplined piece. In barely 800 words, Jerry Brewer captures a newsy event, the context of that event, the special character and hard history of a little girl, and even a glimpse into a mother-daughter relationship.

Key to Brewer’s approach:

Focus: Brewer doesn’t try to tell everything about Kaila Cove. He zooms in on one moment, and writes only what is necessary to inform that moment. For example, he draws a straight line from the first-pitch ritual to Kaila’s story: “It’s a significant, century-old sports tradition that celebrates fame, achievement and inspiration.” (Take note that he ends that sentence with “inspiration,” which sets up the return to Kaila more effectively than if he had switched the order. He appropriately puts “fame” the furthest from her.) If you examine this piece for use of details and compressed background, you will find all of it in service of his primary focus.

Compression and selection: This proves the truth of “less is more” in the hands of a confident writer. Brewer is highly selective about the details that “show” the story, and delivers less important background in summary “tell.” For example, we know Kaila is homeschooled, but the detail is saved for her need to wear a mask around other kids. We know she likes to swim and play kickball, but the detail is saved for how hard she studied and practiced pitching. Brewer gives the briefest of litanies of Kaila’s illnesses, surgeries, treatments and limitations, yet drops in “congenital panhypopituitarism.”

He is equally selective with quotes. Many writers will turn a story like this over to quotes in the belief that they add more of the subject’s personality. But sparing use of the right quotes actually amplifies a subject’s voice and character. Kaila about her mask: “It looks dorky.” The mother about Kaila’s plan to sell 4,200 cookies: “Oh, geez.”

Brewer, who is a columnist, lets himself brush up against colloquialisms that could be considered clichés, most notably his use of “Never mind…” as a device in the third paragraph. But it fits with his conversational voice, and doesn’t tip over into maudlin. His reference to “blessing” and “miracle” at the end are drawn directly from the mother’s quote.

For more, read our interview with Brewer, in which he talks about the constraints under which he wrote this story, the best way to ruin a column, and his advice for writing about people with illnesses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So you realized that was an important moment right then?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s a new part of your process then?

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

How did you or your editor first hear about the relationship between Jawad and Montalvo?

Their story first came from my editor’s wife, who was working as a psychologist at Guantánamo. She was very close to Jawad, and it really had nothing to do with Guantánamo – it was just about Jawad.

My editor was Joel Lovell. He’s now at The New York Times Magazine and his wife is Kate Porterfield. She’s been working with a lot of these Guantánamo detainees, and Jawad was one of the detainees that she had sort of a special relationship with.

I started talking to Kate, and then to the defense team a little bit. I think [Eric] Montalvo was probably the first guy on the defense team that I spoke to, and from the first time I spoke to Eric, I was like, “Wow, this guy is in deep here.” And I was so curious about his motivations. By that time, they had gotten Jawad free, and Eric was in an absolute swivet about all of it. He was haunted by it and couldn’t let it go. He was planning this trip to Afghanistan to see Jawad.

I remember saying to him, “Why are you going? What’s the point of going over there?” And he said, more or less, “Well, really it’s kind of personal now. I feel so let down by my country that I want to make sure this kid doesn’t turn out to be the person they accused him of being, the person they potentially turned him into, because they surrounded him with other detainees who were more radicalized, and then they deprived him of some of his rights, at least his right to know what the charges were against him.”

That kind of shot me off into the story, and then it was a fair amount of gaining the trust of Eric, spending some time with Eric, so that he got a feeling for how I worked and maybe just talking our way into it a little bit.

Obviously a good chunk of it happened before you entered the story, but were you present for the late trip back to Afghanistan? What part of the story were you present for?

I was on that trip to Afghanistan. The whole second half of the story is firsthand reporting. The story went through so many drafts. There was a first-person version of the whole story, where I acted much more as a Virgil leading the reader into this world and trying to parse it in the first person, but that never quite worked.

The more I wrote, the more I felt like the stronger sections were the ones that weren’t first person. So then I had to go back and refashion the second half of that piece in particular, because when you’re there, and you’re in proximity to a suicide bomb going off or you think you’re about to be kidnapped, these things take on maybe a bigger importance for you than they deserve in the story.

By switching it out of first person, I was able to put those things in place, so the suicide bomb at the end is just that. It’s just a bomb going off around the corner. It kind of freezes everybody in place. Nobody can leave, because the city’s in lockdown for those few hours. How one responds to being in the proximity of a bomb going off and the actual actions surrounding it – people reacting, what phone calls get made and what the substance of those calls are – all that was very interesting to me and very germane in the moment, but afterward it just didn’t end up being important for the piece. So I had to make some tough decisions.

I think cutting back on that part makes it feel understated and powerful. But back to your mention of doing the piece in the first person – could you tell me more about the revising and editing? Were any other major changes made during those processes?

I had a draft of the story that was very much inside of Jawad’s head. It was like a shattered story: You take the windowpane and call it a story, and then you throw a rock at it. That’s what that draft looked a little bit like. It was a lot of half lines and broken thoughts. I was trying to capture him and the interior damage that organized his world, but it was not sustainable. I didn’t know him well enough to go all the way with that. You really have to live with somebody for a while before you can audaciously assume those interior thoughts. And usually when I’ve done it in the past, it’s because I’ve spent so much time with the people, and I’ve asked them very directly “What were you thinking then?” or “What was your train of thought there?” It takes a certain kind of person who can give it to you so that you can put it on the page and it can carry the narrative arc. That draft for me was important in a way and very freeing and experimental. I was very excited by it, but I had to abandon that.

And then at one point I had some sections with his mom, but because his mom was not able to be present at the big meal that we had when I was there, and there was no other way I was going to see her, I found myself in the end retreating from those scenes also. Trying to paint a character you haven’t seen – I didn’t even have photographs – something about that never felt quite right. But emotionally, that mother-son relationship was very important. And the way Montalvo echoes that when he finds out that his father is not his father, which left him wondering about his mother – again, all that ended up downplayed, but I wanted the intonations of it to remain. So I didn’t completely abandon it, but in the end it was much less than what I actually wrote.

You brought up the Montalvo parallels. How did you decide how many of the questions and mysteries in Montalvo’s life to let into the story? In the end, whose story were you telling? Both of their stories or primarily one of their stories?

Originally, I was telling Jawad’s story. I got so deep into the legal documents, a lot of depositions. I had a lot of material, some requiring certain security clearances. So I felt like I had this unbelievable line into how things worked at Gitmo, and how in particular Jawad had been treated. For a long time, all I was thinking about was Jawad, and trying to figure out how to tell the story, how to keep the forward action going, but also begin to build in some of these bigger ideas.

But then, I spent time with Eric when we were over there in Afghanistan. We were constantly talking, and I saw him a few times in D.C. afterward, and it was somewhere near the end when he told me – he mentioned something in Afghanistan, something that had happened, some revelation in his own life that he felt might be a partial motivation for why he was so attached to Jawad, but he didn’t tell me what it was until quite late in the process.

And then I suddenly felt like this was his story, too, and in some ways I had such deeper access to his thoughts and emotional life that I was able to use it and use him as a way to set up the emotional terms of the story, and then bring Jawad on behind that. It does start with Eric because I was able to get into his head, to have him tell me the things that Jawad couldn’t about that first encounter and how Eric came to be there. And then I had all the court documents and everything else I used to describe how Jawad had gotten there.

Jawad was never able, and probably isn’t able, to describe in the same kind of detail what happened to him as Eric could what had happened to Jawad, what had happened to him, how this case had affected his life, and how in the course of this case he found himself Jawad’s doppelganger in a way.

In another perfectly good magazine, the relationship of Jawad and Montalvo could have been played as a heartwarming bond between a man of principle and a boy who, despite his terrible treatment, could somehow connect on a human level. Someone could have fit that surface story into something closer to a Hallmark version. What you’ve written is much more unsettling than that. That’s not a criticism.

I don’t take it as criticism, and I appreciate that, because that’s what I was trying to do. I was only trying to reflect back what had been shown to me in the course of my reporting. I did think of it as a postwar story, that there is some wreckage that we leave behind. I was curious about it, and I was curious about it when I was traveling through the landscape in Kabul and traveling just outside of Kabul, that there were these remnants of decades of war, and the physical scarring matching some deeper emotional scarring.

Framing it as a postwar story, I was able to play with some of these ideas that were most important to Eric but clearly defined who Jawad was. And that comes down to some breach of faith that took place for Montalvo the uber-patriot, and then for Jawad, who was just a boy, and in a weird way trusted adults and authority figures and was betrayed by all of them, from the people he fell in with in Afghanistan and initially in Pakistan to how he was treated by the U.S. military.

There’s such darkness there. There was something inspirational about what Montalvo was trying to do, but he himself was pretty beaten up by it. He was, I think, in a state of disillusion. I really wanted to get that. I didn’t want to turn it into some neat parable about how in the aftermath of the war there is a chance for healing and reconciliation, because I do feel like that’s a knee-jerk media reaction. In the news cycle, you get the disaster and/or the precipitating event, you get the “what happened here?” And then it gets shoved into that reconciliation and healing framework. It’s never like that. People are haunted by things like this for the rest of their lives.

You’ve been writing narrative nonfiction for a long time, and I imagine that each piece offers its own challenges. Were there any unusual struggles with the piece? Any new problems to solve that you hadn’t thought about directly before?

I got a lot of help in conversation with Joel Lovell. He’s a brilliant editor. I think one of the challenges I felt most acutely in this piece was how to deliver so much information and how to cull the details of the story. I was absolutely fascinated by the underground that Jawad had traveled to be in the square that day, who these people were and how we came by our own information about them.

So some of it was trying to edit that down, but it was taking this wealth of detail and trying to constantly work it into something that felt like a story, that had a philosophy. To me, everything came to me with almost equal importance. At some point, I had to demote certain events and ideas and ditch reporting, and promote the narratives that felt most true to what I saw and, in the end, what these characters were trying to tell me, what they were trying to communicate to themselves even.

In some ways, the best reaction I could have had to the piece was the one that I got from Eric. He shot me an email, something like, “I feel like I’m standing in the middle of the street with all my clothes off, but you got it. You got something deep in there that I have a hard time talking about.” The other thing he’d said was that he’d given it to his wife – he’d had a hard time discussing a lot of this with her. He said she was really mad at him for the risks that he was taking and for this commitment he’d made to this boy halfway around the world when his own boys needed a father, too. But more than anything, she was incredibly proud of the principle he was trying to stand on.

Finally, that was the biggest challenge, to try to bring that forward ahead of other things that I thought were as important, or in some ways more important. Even my trip to Gitmo for the story, I thought, that could have been its own feature, just what I saw there. And I ended up just publishing the transcripts of that trip. I carried a tape recorder through the whole tour that I got and the interviews that I requested, and we just ran excerpts of those online, but I remember coming home from Guantánamo and saying “What if this is really a Guantánamo story?”

So Joel just kept talking to me, trying to help me sort through how to take all of these very big things and present them into a way that would be satisfying to a reader without getting too lost in the minutiae.

Is there anything else we wouldn’t know from reading the piece?

I am constantly amazed at the delusion that I suffer under when I begin to write a piece that somehow this is going to be easy – that somehow I think I know it well enough, that I’ve heard my own voice tell it to my wife, my friends or whomever enough times that I’ve got it. And then I sit down, and I am still banging my head against it drafts and drafts later. I’m always astounded by that.

Sometimes you’re lucky, and you just get it in one draft. But more and more, I find that it gets personal. You have to be willing to go to the third and fourth and fifth draft and see what you have even then. Some stories that’s how they work out. This was one of them. It felt like this was a Pyrrhic victory because it was very hard work. I wouldn’t say that about all the pieces I’ve done. Some of them have come from some other place, but this one was a lot of thought, a lot of conversation, and a lot of writing.

I do remember in my MFA program, people saying “writing is hard work.” It’s true, it’s like a blue-collar job. You’ve got to get up and do it, put the hours in and punch the clock. But beyond that, there are stories, whether it’s because you’re so emotionally connected or you feel that there’s some greater importance, some bigger thing that needs to be heard – for some reason sometimes those stories just take more, and you just have to have the energy and faith to carry on.

A really good editor is always a huge help. And this is one of those stories, where Joel and I were in this deep, deep conversation. In many ways, I felt like he was there in my darkest moments guiding where we were trying to get to. I don’t know if that makes sense.

We have readers who are writing professionally, but they may not get or take the opportunity to go that far into a story. I think the frank admission that it’s clocking hours and wrestling with it is hard for people to hear, but helpful. It disabuses them of the notion that people who get to write these stories are fundamentally different in any way from other writers.

This was an exercise in pure stubbornness. There’s no particular talent involved. It was just, “I’ve got to try to figure out how to tell the story.” If you talk to my wife, there were some weeks there where I sort of went to a different place. It was very hard work, wondering if I would ever get to the other side of this.

I like to believe that talent and all those things are overrated, and that there’s a point where you find your own voice, or you find the voice of the story, by being patient and being around it enough and then you begin to let it tell itself. Not in some mystical way. You’re writing the words down, you’re beginning to give yourself cues, and you create this atmosphere of words that takes on a certain valence. Once you have that, then things begin to happen that you never imagined.

Often it feels like someone just tossed it off, and you think, “Oh, my God, I might as well quit right now.” But sometimes that’s seven drafts in. Sometimes you’re luckier and it’s a one-drafter, but that’s so rare. And I know that I could count on one hand, less than one hand, the times something came out in a way that really didn’t need a whole lot in terms of a bigger treatment.

I think that’s sometimes what separates the writers I love from other writers. I can feel them doing that work and I can feel their commitment to making it work and taking the hard way to make it work. That is really gratifying; it makes for something totally different than you might otherwise find. It is easy, despite yourself, to boil these things down into clichés. If you try to resist clichés, then you’re already taking the rocky path, and that’s going to take extra work.

For more, read our editors’ comments on Pateriniti’s story or check out Paterniti’s discussion of narrative nonfiction during a 2010 session at the Nieman Foundation.

Today, we’re pleased to announce the members of the roundtable. You’ll see them in action at the beginning of February. In the meantime, you can read a little more about what kind of experience they’ll bring to bear on some of today’s most intriguing and impressive stories.

Jacqui Banaszynski worked as a newspaper reporter and editor for more than 30 years, most recently as associate managing editor of The Seattle Times. While at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, her series “AIDS in the Heartland” won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. She was a finalist for the 1986 Pulitzer in international reporting for coverage of the Ethiopian famine and won the nation’s top deadline reporting award for coverage of the 1988 Olympics. She has edited several award-winning projects, including projects that won ASNE Best Writing, Ernie Pyle Human Interest Writing and national business and investigative prizes. In 2008, she was named to the AASFE Features Hall of Fame. She is now Knight Chair professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, an editing fellow at the Poynter Institute, and teaches students and professional journalists around the world.

Kelley Benham is enterprise editor at the St. Petersburg Times, where she supervises daily enterprise and projects and edits the Sunday Floridian feature section. She edited “Winter’s Tale,” a 2009 Pulitzer finalist in feature writing; and “For Their Own Good,” a 2010 Pulitzer finalist in local reporting. As a beat reporter and feature writer, she won a number of national awards, including the Ernie Pyle award for human interest writing and the National Headliner award for feature writing. She is an adjunct faculty member at the Poynter Institute and teaches regularly at universities and workshops across the country. A former high school journalism teacher, she earned a master’s degree from the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, where she flunked the class on narrative writing.

Maria Carrillo is managing editor at The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., where she remains committed to craft, even in a Twitter world. Her exceptional writers have been nationally recognized as Pulitzer and ASNE finalists. Carrillo has worked at The Pilot for nearly 13 years, directing many of the paper’s projects and overseeing its narrative team for much of that time. That work has spawned five books so far. Carrillo has been a visiting faculty member for the Poynter Institute and the Nieman program, a lecturer for the National Writers Workshops and the American Press Institute, and twice a Pulitzer juror. Carrillo previously worked at The Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va., the Richmond, Va., Times-Dispatch and at the Pioneer Press in St. Paul. She is a native of Washington, D.C., where she was born two years after her parents fled Cuba. She lives in Norfolk with her husband and two children.

Laurie Hertzel is senior editor for books and special projects at the Star Tribune, where she has worked for nearly 15 years. Previously, she was a writer and editor at Minnesota Monthly magazine and the Duluth News-Tribune. Her journalism has appeared in newspapers around the country, including the Chicago Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News and the Philadelphia Inquirer. She has written for many magazines and journals, and is the author of three books — “News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist,” “They Took My Father: Finnish-Americans in Stalin’s Russia” (co-author, Mayme Sevander), and “Boomtown Landmarks.” Hertzel has been writer-in-residence at the James Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio; a fellow at Duke University; and has spoken many times at Nieman narrative conferences. She has won national awards for her magazine writing, her newspaper journalism and her short fiction.

Tom Huang is Sunday and enterprise editor at The Dallas Morning News and adjunct faculty at the Poynter Institute. In 2008, he taught sessions in ethics, diversity, writing and leadership as a fellow at Poynter. He was co-editor of Poynter’s “Best Newspaper Writing” book for 2008-2009. He has worked at The Dallas Morning News since 1993, first as a feature writer, then as features editor, and now as the Sunday Page One editor. His reporting has taken him from Bosnia, Vietnam and the Athens Olympics to the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 attacks in New York. He is past president of the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors and serves on the national advisory board of the Asian American Journalists Association. He is a 1988 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science and engineering.

Chris Hunt is an assistant managing editor at Sports Illustrated, where he’s worked the past 21 years. From 2006 through 2008 he was also the editor of SI’s Spanish-language magazine, SI Latino. At SI, his primary responsibility is the “bonus” piece, which appears near the end of each edition and is written by the magazine’s best long-form writers. Hunt also edits SI’s book excerpts; writes the captions for the Leading Off section; top-edits stories throughout the magazine; and serves as SI’s tennis and cycling editor. Before moving to SI he was executive editor of Travel & Leisure magazine, where he worked for 10 years. Hunt has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from Columbia University. He grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, and lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., with his wife and daughter.

Tom Shroder has been an award-winning journalist, writer and editor for more than 30 years, and is founder of the editing website www.storysurgeons.com. As editor of The Washington Post Magazine, he conceived and edited “Fatal Distraction,” which won the 2010 Pulitzer for feature writing. He also edited and contributed to “Pearls Before Breakfast,” which won the 2008 Pulitzer for feature writing. One of the foremost editors of humor in the country, Shroder has edited columns by Dave Barry, Gene Weingarten and Tony Kornheiser, and conceived and launched the internationally syndicated comic strip, “Cul de Sac,” by Richard Thompson. He has written three books, including “Old Souls: Compelling Evidence From Children Who Remember Previous Lives.” His latest book, written with former oil rig captain John Konrad, is “Fire on the Horizon: The Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster.” It will be published in March.

Paige Williams won the National Magazine Award for feature writing in 2008 and teaches narrative writing at the Nieman Foundation. Her magazine stories have been anthologized in “The Best American Magazine Writing” and, twice, “The Best American Crime Writing,” among others. She spent 10 years as a reporter at The Charlotte Observer, where her feature writing and investigative series won numerous state and national honors; before that, she worked as a reporting intern for newspapers including The Washington Post and The Clarion-Ledger. She has deputy edited and edited magazines in Atlanta, Portland and Boston, has taught journalism at New York University, Emory University and the University of Mississippi, and was the Robert Laxalt Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Nevada Reno’s Reynolds School of Journalism. A 1996-97 Nieman Fellow, she holds an MFA from Columbia University.

Check back in early February for the first installment of the Editors’ Roundtable. And in the meantime, if there are stories you’d like to see the group tackle, send them along to contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

Look no further. Nieman Storyboard is here for you. We’ll soon be rolling out a new offering on the site: an Editors’ Roundtable. The roundtable is made up of legendary wordsmiths who have shepherded unforgettable stories that made a difference in their communities, won Pulitzers, became books and otherwise saved the universe.

Once a month, the roundtable will discuss an intriguing written narrative. Editors will pull at the seams of the story to show readers how it works and what makes it remarkable (and sometimes what it might have done differently). It’s like “Car Talk” with Lamborghinis and red pencils.

And we need your help! In a few days, we’ll be introducing the members of the roundtable, but for now we want to extend an invitation. Send us links to the most interesting narrative journalism you’ve read lately. Submitting something you wrote is fine, as is passing along the work of others, whether you know them or not. What’s the best piece of nonfiction writing you’ve read in the past few months? Is it a story with scenes that made you dream, gave you nightmares, or just kept popping into your head in the days after you read it? Send a story you’d like to see discussed to contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org. If you like, tell us why you think we should use it.

We’re looking forward to seeing your submissions. In the meantime, we’ll be introducing you to the editors who will contribute their time and talent to the roundtable. Stay tuned!

Update: Please limit submissions to nonfiction stories that have already been published.

Image courtesy Megan Garber.