If this is part of her brilliance, and it is, it’s largely because of who she is as an observer; meticulous but detached, intimate yet removed. These paradoxes are how she draws you in.

Adrienne LaFrance

The penchant for counting reveals what may seem like another paradox, but is actually the lifting of a veil: Didion shows that her language is musical but also mathematical, that she engineers her writing to sing.

In her most recent book, Blue Nights, she describes the song of her prose as inextricable from its mechanics:

In fact, in any real sense, what I was doing then was never writing at all: I was doing no more than sketching in a rhythm and letting that rhythm tell me what it was I was saying. Many of the marks I set down on the page were no more than ‘xxx,’ or ‘xxxx,’ symbols that meant ‘copy tk,’ or ‘copy to come,’ but do notice: such symbols were arranged in specific groupings. A single ‘x’ differed from a double ‘xx,’ ‘xxx’ from ‘xxxx.’ The number of such symbols had a meaning. The arrangement was the meaning.

But long before Blue Nights, Didion was counting syllables in a New Yorker piece about how much control a writer has over his or her life’s work. The November 1998 essay, “Last Words: Those Hemingway wrote, and those he didn’t,” is vintage Didion; penetrating, deliberate down to the last comma, streaked with cynicism and flashes of earnestness — all qualities that echo Hemingway himself. The piece is so meta that it tugs the reader to the edge of the uncanny.

Didion writes about Hemingway but she is also writing about writing, and in turn writing about herself. In essence, this is three stories in one.

She sashays between the technical and lyrical. (The piece begins with her counting the syllables in Hemingway’s poetic first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms. This pragmatism gives way to her own fluid and descriptive style.) At first she appears to seesaw from writing to writing about writing. But by the end of the piece it’s clear that she’s been doing both, concurrently, throughout.

The structural latticework of the essay both lays out Hemingway’s style and adopts aspects of it to drive the piece forward. For example, she writes about Hemingway’s omissions as narrative choices, and then uses omissions just as he did.

First she’s examining “four deceptively simple sentences, one hundred and twenty-six words,” obsessing over Hemingway’s repetition of “the” and of “and” and about the rhythm he established by leaving out another “the” in his fourth sentence. (The power of such an absence, she says, is in the chill it casts. It’s a warning, a premonition, a “foreshadowing of the story to come, the awareness that the author has already shifted his attention from late summer to a darker season.”)

Then she’s describing the snapshots in our “national memory stream” of Hemingway’s life — “the celebrated author fencing with the bulls at Pamplona, fishing for Marlin off Havana, boxing at Bimini, crossing the Ebro with Spanish loyalists, kneeling beside ‘his’ lion or ‘his’ buffalo or ‘his’ oryx on the Serengeti Plain.”

Implicit in this string of collective memories is the question of omission — what have we left out?

The close reader will notice that this question is itself the device she’s described, a foreshadowing of the story to come. Didion next goes on to describe in arresting detail Hemingway’s 1961 suicide: the double-barreled Boss shotgun he emptied into the center of his forehead, how he became a “crumpled heap of bathrobe and blood, the shotgun lying in the disintegrated flesh.”

For the rest of the piece, Didion brings Hemingway back to life, lacing her descriptions of him with hints of who she is.

Consider how she casts his way of “moving through but not attaching, a kind of romantic individualism,” his writing as dictating “a certain way of looking at the world, a way of looking but not joining, a way of moving through but not attaching.”

Didion also writes of Hemingway as “a man to whom words mattered,” that “he got inside them.”

Hemingway, too, had a tendency to count. Didion presents this excerpt from a letter Hemingway wrote to his publisher in early 1961:

Have material arranged as chapters—they come to 18—and am working on the last one—No 19—also working on title. This is very difficult. (Have my usual long list—something wrong with all of them but am working toward it—Paris has been used so often it blights anything.) In pages typed they run 7, 14, 5, 6, 9 1/2, 6, 11, 9, 8, 9, 4 1/2, 3, 1/2, 8, 10 1/2, 14 1/2, 38 1/2, 10, 3, 3: 177 pages + 5 1/2 pages + 1 1/4 pages.”

Didion says she finds the excerpt alarming, though she never explicitly says why. Is she disquieted because his counting is impossible to understand? Or is it because Hemingway died before he finished the project he’s describing?

The project would be published posthumously as A Moveable Feast. But, as Didion points out, Hemingway never called it that. To him, it was just “the Paris stuff.” He never settled on a title. This paradox — what the writer called his work and what someone else called it for him — is ultimately an exploration of the writer’s solitude. The idea is that a writer’s intentions exist in one universe and everyone else’s expectations about the writer’s work exist in another. The only overlap is in the writing itself, an endeavor that Didion presents as potentially deadly in and of itself.

“The peculiarity of being a writer,” Didion says, “is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one’s own words in print.” (Just by making this statement Didion clearly inserts herself, the writer, into the story.)

Yet even worse than publication, she says, is the risk that something unfinished will be published.

The manuscript that became True at First Light, was some 850 pages long when Hemingway died. That this sprawling “African novel,” as Hemingway called it, would be “reduced by half by someone other than their author” meant that the story “could go nowhere the author intended them to go,” Didion says.

She sees this publication as a fundamental “denial of the idea that the role of the writer in his or her work is to make it.” A writer’s notes, she declares, are “words set down but not yet written.” But by referencing a writer’s unfinished notes in her final published piece, Didion raises the question of her own process. This suggests yet another omission: The process behind her story that the reader will never see.

Didion, not surprisingly, comes across as empathetic to the writer’s need to have authority over his words, and his need to sort things out on his own. Hemingway once wrote to his attorney that he had “a diamond mine if people will let me alone and let me dig the stones out of the blue mud and then cut and polish them.” Hemingway’s mine was deep, heavy and full. Yet for all of that darkness and weight, his writing — and Didion’s, and Didion’s writing about Hemingway’s writing — rings with clarity. (Hemingway’s reference to his “diamond mine” calls to mind something Boris Kachka, the New York magazine writer, once wrote about Didion. Kachka said reading her work is “like tiptoeing across a just-frozen pond filled with beautiful sharks. You look down and pray the ice will hold.”)

At the crescendo of Didion’s piece, as she describes what we know as True at First Light, there are moments that read as though she is talking about Hemingway and herself at the same time, about her relationship with him as a writer from the time when she was a little girl clacking out his words on her typewriter just to see how it would feel to write like he did. She’s writing about Hemingway, writing about writing, writing about herself:

There are arresting glimpses here and there, fragments shored against what the writer must have seen as his ruin, and a sympathetic reader might well believe it possible that had the writer lived (which is to say had the writer found the will and energy and memory and concentration) he might have shaped the material, written it into being, made it work as the story the glimpses suggest, that a man returning to a place he loved and finding himself at three in the morning confronting the knowledge that he is no longer the person who loved it and will never now be the person he had meant to be.

And then, another layer emerges, as Didion acknowledges that Hemingway had written this very idea into being, through the writer character in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

Didion quotes Hemingway: ”Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well.” She goes on: “And then, this afterthought, the saddest story: ‘Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either.’” Such fear of failure must feel even more visceral for a writer like Didion, who has said that novels are “about things you’re afraid you can’t deal with.”

The afterthought from Hemingway’s “Snows” character becomes the bookend that mirrors the beginning of Didion’s piece, the counting of syllables in the first 126 words of A Farewell to Arms.

“Only one of the words has three syllables,” she had written. “Twenty-two have two. The other hundred and three have one.”

Though Didion leaves it to the reader to find that solitary three-syllable word or not, it’s no mistake she both singles it out and never identifies it at the same time. The omission is a clue, a chilling premonition:

Three syllables: Afterward.

Adrienne LaFrance (@AdrienneLaF) is a national reporter for Digital First Media’s Project Thunderdome, where she specializes in investigative reporting and breaking news. She was previously a staff reporter at Nieman Journalism Lab. Before that she opened the Washington bureau of Honolulu Civil Beat, where she covered Congress, federal elections and the intersection of money and politics. She has also reported and written for the Washington Post, worked as a news producer at WBUR, Boston’s NPR affiliate, and as a local news anchor for Hawaii’s NPR affiliate.

Narrative news: Fresh quick reads, pinned daily. Up now: How Twitter is shaping the future of storytelling, via Fast Company.

Nieman store: Links to details about the great and growing number of works published or sold by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, including our popular Telling True Stories anthology and The Future of News as We Know It, by Nieman Journalism Lab, one of our sister publications.

Inspired: Storytelling curios in journalism and beyond. Hemingway’s recommended reading list for young writers; the nine stages of story as told by a vase of flowers; a Dorothy Parker telegram proving all writers suffer; Henry Miller’s writing commandments; Harvard professor Stephen Burt on the intersection of poetry and news (from our sister publication Nieman Reports); Nieman alumna Megan O’Grady on the beauty of the counter-narrative.

Interviewland: Q-and-A’s on narrative and more. Conversations, so far, featuring Joan Didion, David Finkel, Michael Paterniti, John McPhee, Hunter S. Thompson, Janet Malcolm, Chris Jones, Joshuah Bearman, and Junot Diaz.

Gear: We’re addicted to great pencils and pens and notebooks and gadgets and organizational ideas — and we like to share. So enjoy that.

Best of Storyboard: Good pieces you might’ve missed, including, for instance, a rollicking storytelling talk — plus a playlist — with ESPN The Magazine‘s Wright Thompson, and seven storytelling tips from Nora Ephron.

Wish list: We’re hoping someone writes a great narrative about … at the moment, cicadas. (The Radiolab Cicada Tracker is boss.)

Also: Syllabi, class props, tattoos and miscellany — with more to come.

Have fun in there.

Van Dyke

My favorite piece in this series of stories − collected into a recently published book, Hidden America − is “Empire of Ice” (entitled “The Rig” in the book). I read it in GQ when it was published in October 2008 and immediately photocopied it and filed it for future reference. Ostensibly, the story is about how we extract oil from the earth, and, indeed, that is a worthy subject. Oil is a big part of the magic of our modern lives. As Laskas writes:

We process it into gasoline, asphalt, plastic, fertilizer. We fill up our cars with it, drive on roads made of it. We use it to make all those soda bottles and all those Baggies holding our lunches, the foam in our mattresses, the padding in our running shoes. The vegetables we eat are fed with and protected from bugs by it. We travel because of it, drink out of it, sleep on it, wear it, eat it, whine about how much it costs, argue about it, hate needing it, love it, kill for it. It is our most ubiquitous natural resource, the juice that made the past century possible.

There is some epic writing about machinery and oil here; this passage in particular reminded me, in at least one sense, of Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River: Part II:”

The hole being drilled is an infinitely complicated place, full of mystery and challenge and all the tools the toolpusher sticks down into it. The drill bit isn’t the only thing going down the hole. It’s just the tip of the “drill string,” which contains the tools, or “jewelry,” the drillers need to keep the whole assembly stabilized, to help it get unstuck if it gets stuck, and to read the rock formations that might help explain what the hell is going on down there. 

Laskas can match the very best when it comes to writing about masculine activities that are rich with sexual imagery. So, there’s that. But “Empire of Ice” is not really a story about oil, or about drilling for oil as a metaphor for sex; it is a story about men, and a story about family. The patriarch of this makeshift family is a man who goes by the name TooDogs. Right from the lead sentence − “TooDogs is on the run.” − Laskas telegraphs one of the major thematic elements of the piece (running from … something) that applies both to TooDogs and his charges on the rig.

She also makes it clear that most of the piece will be from her distinct point of view. It’s a smart choice; not acknowledging her own status as “other” (i.e., a highly educated woman) in this environment might have created an unnecessary distance. By using the first-person pronoun in the second sentence, she quickly establishes that she is part of the story. (More on this later.)

What struck me most when I first read this piece is the tenderness with which Laskas renders the lives of these men and their relationships to each other. The men − and they are all men − work two-week shifts (two on, two off) on an oil rig in the frozen ocean off the coast of Alaska’s North Slope, an existence of extreme isolation:

A person can’t just drive around the North Slope, visit the locals, stop in at a burger joint. There are no locals, no burger joints, no houses, no cities, no churches.

The temperature is frequently well below zero. There is no booze on the rig. Laskas writes:

I learn of parties, such as they are. Guys gather in the dining hall for ice cream, or chocolate chip cookies they nuke for twelve seconds.

I couldn’t help but think: Maybe this is what the American Dream looks like today.

These guys don’t have much, but they have work, and they have each other — a haphazard band of mixed-up, messed-up brothers. Laskas expertly toggles between the present and past − and, toward the end, future − to give well-rounded portraits even of the minor characters. TooDogs is the “toolpusher” and “runs the drilling operation.” He’s a former coke and heroin addict. Rod is the “company man.” Turtle is a “roustabout,” a glorified janitor, who’s got a high school diploma and makes close to $70,000 a year (“That’s insane, stupid money,” he says.). Kung Fu is an ex-con who once tried to start a combo “strip-club/meth-lab” in Sacramento. Stubbs is a recovering alcoholic. These latter two men are “roughnecks.” Because of his compassionate personality, TooDogs has earned, or has fallen into, the role of chief roughneck. TooDogs reminds Turtle to clean his room and to bathe. TooDogs tells a dude named Melvis, “who parades around with suspiciously perfect highlighted hair,” that the guys are making fun of him when they all dye their hair copper. (Melvis had thought it was because they liked his look.) TooDogs softens the blow for the roughnecks when Rod lights into them after a mechanical mishap. Of TooDogs, Laskas writes:

He says he’s a loner, a person who hides, deals with the world only in manageable chunks. It seems an unlikely analysis when I watch how loved he is here, how all the guys depend on him, how he’s the glue holding so much of this operation together, a fact he readily if regretfully recognizes. “I’m the dad,” he tells me. “I’m the mom. I’m the jailer. I’m the bail bondsman. But mostly, I guess, the dad.” 

But like the other men on this rig, TooDogs is, as Laskas foreshadowed in the first sentence, on the run. (If you’re looking for parallels with Hemingway’s oeuvre, you could be forgiven for being reminded here of those “running” expats in The Sun Also Rises.) Laskas hints at this throughout the first half of the piece, but it’s not until the sixth section (of nine) that she finally reveals the backstory of TooDogs’ life. She keeps the reader waiting, wondering, and when she finally does recount TooDogs’ past, the details have a powerful effect. He was beaten as a child; was addicted to drugs and then got sober; and generally has trouble dealing with the messiness of life and relationships. (The rig is “workable.” Marriage, life as a human being: That’s “hard.”) His father committed suicide by shooting himself in the head one day, shortly after calling TooDogs and saying, “I’m at the end of my rope.” In a detail that is remarkable in both its specificity and its symbolic power, Laskas tells us that TooDogs frequently breaks out in hives:

And listen, when he hives up the way he does, it has nothing to do with allergies. It’s memories. It’s just bad memories popping up on his skin, and it only happens if someone touches him, so people here learn, they just learn, never to touch TooDogs.

The tragedy is that TooDogs doesn’t have anyone like TooDogs in his life. He has a wife (“a Slope widow”), but he barely sees her. He has kids, but he fears he’s been a better dad to the guys on the rig. He has the roughnecks, but the portrait Laskas so delicately paints shows the reader that, good Lord, TooDogs is not Jesus Christ. He needs someone, too.

In a way, Laskas turns out to be that someone. She listened to him. She asked him questions. She understood him. That’s all he ever wanted. That’s all any of us ever want, really.

When I picked up Hidden America, I wondered if Laskas might have edited the story significantly, or if there would be an update on TooDogs—that’s how much I cared about this guy. I found the update first in the acknowledgements, in which Laskas thanks the subjects of the stories. There at the end, the very last words of the book, I found this: “TooDogs, may you rest in peace.” TooDogs, after a hitch on the rig in Alaska, became a “company man.” He was based in Pittsburgh (not too far from Laskas’ home). And on the first day of his new job, he died of a heart attack. He was 52.

Geoff Van Dyke (@GeoffVanDyke) is the deputy editor of 5280 Magazine in Denver. His writing has appeared in Men’s Journal, Outside, Bicycling, and the New York Times.

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

Heckert, who has written for ESPN The Magazine and for Men’s Journal, among others, thinks about narrative in a way that can be helpful to others who’d like to understand how stories work, and to improve their own writing. Instead of highlighting one of his winning CRMA pieces, we’ve asked him to break down all five, from conception to reporting challenges to winning lines.

First, get to know Heckert a bit:

Storyboard: Why did you become a writer?

Heckert: My mother, Pat, was a writer. Is a writer. It starts there. Everything is from her. She was much more prolific when I was younger, writing stories, writing poetry, the best writer I know. And the most imposing figure in that sense. I have a baby book that is about 50 pages, and those pages are filled, top to bottom, with her tiny, impeccable, perfect script, stories about me being born and the first few months of my life. Those words brought me into existence. She has hundreds of poems, some published in literary journals in Missouri long ago. She has been an English lit teacher for 40 years now, teaching the great works to elementary, middle and high school students. The things that influenced her turned out to be the things that influenced me. To this day, I sometimes write a story, and then break parts of the story down into stanzas, like a poem. To get a grasp of the way I want it to sound, or the way it would sound. Also, it is very, very hard, in a way, living in the shadow of someone immensely gifted, a perfectionist. She is often the harshest critic. A few months ago, when I was helping my parents move things into the attic of their home, I discovered a time-capsule-type exercise from when I was in the fifth grade. When asked what I wanted to be, I had written, in capital letters, “A WRITER.”

You’re among a cabal of talented thirtysomething magazine writers who studied together at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. You, Wright Thompson, Seth Wickersham − who am I missing? How was that J-school, and fellowship experience, influential?

Tony Rehagen, Diana Raschke, some other people who were in our group, Steve Walentik and Daimon Eklund. Wright and Seth were mentors, absolutely, two of the biggest of my life. I gravitated toward them immediately. Honestly, being there, at this particular moment in time, on the sports desk (I chose sports because it was the only department that sounded interesting to me) − Wright and Seth were the most talented at the paper and in the school. They were a revelation. I had no idea what I wanted from journalism, or that I wanted to do it, until I met them and our sports editor, Greg Mellen. I’d never read a “long-form narrative” story until I met those guys.

I remember something Wright once wrote. It was a daily story about two football players, for anyone else a throwaway story. I was 19 and read this in the paper. This is almost exactly the way it appeared: “Ricardo Rhodes is built like an Ernest Hemingway sentence; short, yet power-packed. Travis Garvin, the other kickoff returner for the Missouri football team, is more like a sentence penned by William Faulkner: flashy, fluid, and known to run-on for days.” They were writing daily stories like this. Second-person stuff, crazy stuff. I can remember most of the ledes both those guys wrote from 1999 to 2001. They were writing columns and longform. I wanted to write like them very badly. I started really trying to find my own voice and immediately tried to write experimental stuff, too. Those years we were there, we would all hang out and talk writing and pick apart each other’s work. And drink, at a place called Widman’s. In my opinion, those guys − well, that’s one of the best classes in the history of the school, and I was there, with them. It was all luck.

You’ve mentioned to me the important role women have played in your writing career. Do explain.

Well, my mother, obviously. That’s the biggest influence and writing presence in my life. She loved Joyce Carol Oates. She taught some Oates, and at a young age I picked up a fiction collection she used to have, that featured the story “The Fine White Mist of Winter” that Oates wrote when she was 19 or so. Then “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Mostly her short stories. The writing is so deeply observant and naturally beautiful. Oates — and mom — were both manipulators of language itself. Banal things reminded them of something else, and they would compare objects to other things, colorful and alive. I always want to write this way. That has been one tremendous influence on my writing: the way I see objects, or things, or the way I think about things. I want to describe them how they appear in my head instead of the way they normally appear. This leads to similes, and metaphors, and I know a lot of writers hate that. I know a lot of younger writers (and this kind of depresses me) love to just write in what I would describe as a straightforward style. Also, Rebecca Burns, former editor of Atlanta magazine: She hired me out of school. A huge mentor, in life and in writing.

Why don’t women writers find that same kind of fellowship and support you’ve described, do you think, especially with regard to mentors? 

I can only speak from my perspective here, but I was very proactive about this. I sought mentors out. Seth and Wright. Luke Dittrich (now at Esquire, formerly at Atlanta), I picked his brain and pestered him at work, and we became friends. Lee Walburn, the sage of Georgia and editor emeritus of Atlanta, I drove up to his place on my own and sought out his guidance, repeatedly. He did not come knocking on my door. I was always in Rebecca’s office bugging her about something, asking questions, asking for advice. This holds true for everyone. Tom Junod came to speak at Atlanta magazine in 2003, right when I was hired; you damn sure believe I had 50 questions for him, right off the bat. I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone just come to me and offer to be a mentor, or give me advice. It seems like a very proactive endeavor that anyone would have to do in order to get real mentorship.

What’s your end game? What kind of writing life do you most want for yourself and how are you going to get there?

I’d love to be one of the handful of people who have a job at a general-interest national magazine, writing stories. I’d love to have just one editor who I communicate with constantly and who loves my work. Will that happen? I dunno. Seems less likely as time passes.

When young writers tell them they want to be like you, what advice do you offer?

I try and be very positive. I think young writers – in an even younger age group, the next generation – should just read. Everything. That’s one thing about me, and some of the people I know – voracious readers.  That’s the only way to learn, and to do this.

Here Heckert breaks down his five winning CRMA Writer of the Year stories:

“Her Own Flesh & Blood” 

What it’s about: A woman loses her husband and two children to AIDS and, discovering that she is also infected with HIV and on the verge of her own death, must remake her life.

What it’s really about: Survival, acceptance, self-acceptance, love.

A taste:

The Ferris wheel and a funnel cake, just after dusk at the fairgrounds. The big lights blink and the metal creaks to life as he scoots closer to her. After the ride she blows powdered sugar on him and he chases her over the mulch, holding a greasy paper plate, trying to blow some back. He helps her up the steps of the other rides; on the Scrambler he sits to her left, knowing the force will squish her into his arms. He wins her a stuffed horse, which she gives to a kid standing in line. The only thing he wants is to be with her—to be as close to her as he can. He is aware of her story, has heard about all the terrible things that happened to her. She’s sure that no one will want to be with her again.

How the story was born: For several years I’d wanted to write about HIV/AIDS. I find the topic easily one of the most compelling, and most important, stories of the past two generations. I have become obsessed with trying to learn more about its history. Right before I started on the story, before I even had the specific idea, I’d flown through two books − And The Band Played On (a huge book) and My Own Country; I’d watched Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt on Netflix and several other movies, plus a long PBS documentary. I was ingesting all this stuff, and I just knew I had to write a story — now. June of last year was the 30th anniversary of the first CDC report about what was at first called Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, or GRID. That was a time peg but it turned out not to matter at all, really, and the story ran in July. Of course, the story of AIDS has changed; the disease is no longer leaving death in its wake in our country. In the past 15 years, those infected with HIV have not been waiting around to get sick and die, they have been managing relatively normal lives with all the antiretroviral medication available (sadly, not true in third-world countries).

Writing for a city and regional magazine, I find that that’s how most of my ideas come to life: I have an itch to write about a broad subject, or I have a bigger idea, and all I have to do is find a compelling local story and focus. I spent a month and a half floundering, looking for something to stick. I have notebooks of unused material about places and people in the city. There are a lot of people in Atlanta living with HIV, and a lot of compelling angles. I was having dinner with a friend, Tom Lake, and I told him what I was doing. A month of research had gone by. In passing, he mentioned an old family friend, a woman who’d attended the church Tom had grown up in; he gave me her number. I called her. After I talked to Marianne once, I called my editor, Steve Fennessy, immediately.

Biggest reporting challenge: Compiling an accurate timeline of events throughout her life, or two lives, as it were. There were many important names and dates and it was nearly impossible to not become confused about what was happening when. This required hours of re-interviewing her, coming back, asking questions, transcribing, and then picking out and rewriting new questions out of what I’d just transcribed. It was extremely hard work for a 5,500-word story.

Heckert's color-coded dialogue system.

Solution: I transcribed about 35,000 words and then used different highlighters for all the names of characters in the story. I would highlight entire sections, a page here and there, or just a sentence, or phrase. Then I cut and pasted, physically, my interviews together so they’d be chronological. All this took up the entire top of our dining room table. This is one of the reasons I ended up using the dates, names, etc., as the structural frame for the story.

Biggest writing challenge: Finding the actual story. What compelled me, initially, was the shock of hearing about all the sadness in her life, the death. Losing two kids and a husband to AIDS? Man, what a story! Well, after I came home and thought about it, after meeting with her several times, and after I tried to write that story of death, it was just too sad. Literally. Too bleak. It wasn’t technically accurate in that way, either, because her current life isn’t sad. It needed some levity, some balance.

Solution: Stepping back, we’re talking about a successful woman here, who has a great job, and a son, and a husband (not that women need husbands). I have to give the credit here to Steve Fennessy, the editor of Atlanta magazine. He asked me to step away from the story several times. Actually, he allowed me to. I wrote about 10,000 words of this before I got an actual beginning. Some of those words made it into the story in other sections, some didn’t. Steve was like: What about now? I mean, what about the present? This has to be a modern story about AIDS. She isn’t dead; she survived. She is a remarkable, living woman. This is a sad story, but is it really a story about death? People don’t really die of AIDS anymore. You know? They don’t. We have to be truthful here. The truth is that she has a very good life right now. In her job, she counsels people; newly infected HIV patients who have no idea about the severity of this thing; she comes home from that job and takes these pills and she has this entirely new life, but reminders of her old life.

So, with Steve’s help — and honestly, I talked to some friends and other people about this story, I was struggling with it so much, but it was Steve with the lantern, leading me out of the woods — I was able to get that dual narrative thing going in the story. I worked so hard on this, I couldn’t look at it after it came out. Now, it may be one of the best things I’ve ever written and I’m super pleased with it, and having met someone like Marianne has enriched my life.

Nice line, editor’s pick: “In Belize, in a cave, they wear hard-hat lights that shine beams into a place as dark and sonorous as anywhere a person could ever imagine.”

Nice line, writer’s pick: “Near the end, she had visited him at Haven House hospice and fed him orange juice and tucked the blankets over his withered legs, had stared at him when his eyes rolled up in his head and sat quietly when he moaned for her to take him home.”

Why he likes it: I like the way it has rhythm. Also, it’s very difficult to boil down a relationship, to distill love and anger and all the little things that go into spending years with someone, and to try and write truthfully about something I’ve yet to experience — spending years with my wife, or having children. This sentence was an ode to them, to what I imagined they must’ve shared, which was gone. She was sitting there beside him as though he were a child, and after all that had happened — you know, he was in this desperate and pathetic state — she was by his side.

***

“Zombies Are So Hot Right Now”

What it’s about: The making of a TV show about zombies, and the author’s zombie obsession.

What it’s really about: The monetization of niche geekery? How much we like scaring ourselves either with what we are or what we could become? Or, hey: zombies!

A taste:

The moon has risen like a corpse from a tombstone and hangs gray above Newnan High School. During a break from eating people, zombies light cigarettes and sit on the grass. They lumber across a gymnasium parking lot that has been turned into a FEMA camp, past a television production tent with three screens and producers sitting in monogrammed chairs. They pass two dozen crew members, a long metal jib with a camera attached to its end, and gather near us, the living, in this phantasmagoric heat. The zombies have been moaning on camera, slouching and leering, baring their teeth. Contact lenses imbue a miserable hunger into their eyes. They wear tattered clothing, dried with fake blood and damp with sweat.

How the story was born: I wanted to write about The Walking Dead. Specifically, from the point of view of a zombie extra. I wanted to be in the show, and write from that perspective, the perspective of an actual zombie, what it was like in my own imagination and what it was like actually being a show zombie, working. The story would ultimately be about my fascination and love of zombies, and also … the show, and its popularity.

Biggest reporting challenge: Getting an okay from AMC to be a zombie extra and then having them inexplicably pull the plug late in the game, with no big explanation. I was so angry. And frustrated. Writing the story from the perspective of being a zombie was my vision of grandeur. I got barely any access after being told we’d get a lot. The access I did get? Through a friend of a friend, whose brother worked on set. I mean, I wasn’t supposed to be there. The access amounted to a few hours in and around the set. And an interview with IronE Singleton, one of the characters, at a graveyard. The PR person was sitting next to us on the lip of a tombstone.

Solution: Where do I begin? I had to write a magazine story about the show; I still wanted it to be about my love of zombies. I had to start over with a different idea, a bigger idea, than just, “This is going to be about the show, and my love of zombies.” With little access, I wasn’t sure exactly how to do this. I began searching around. I already knew Atlanta was a great horror town, with a great horror scene. But a little Googling showed it to be zombie central. After about a solid day of reading around online, I typed out this phrase in a Word document: “Atlanta really is the zombie capital of world.” That ended up being kind of the point of the story. Suck it, world! I started it.

And — it blew up. For example: A few weeks after the story came out, I was pleased to see that the New York Times reads Atlanta magazine: They wrote a story off my story, using the phrase I’d freaking coined! I mean, it’s their lede. Of course, I went and bought several copies of the paper. Now, this phrase has become an accepted part of the Atlanta lexicon; It’s on Atlanta’s Wikipedia page. Other cities are pissed about it, apparently.

Biggest writing challenge: This was fun to write. The only challenge was deciding to use first person or not, since I wasn’t a zombie extra. Did we really need it?

Solution: I ended up using the first person, because I felt, yes, we needed it. The genesis of this story was always the fact that I loved zombies. Ask Steve and he’ll probably say it’s because the magazine wanted a story about the show. I used first person only so I could write the second section. The story still had to be personal; it’s a personal story, I think, or at least it comes from a personal place. It’s not just about the show to me.

Nice line, editor’s pick: “The geeks lurched into the city last summer, taking over seven square blocks Downtown.”

Nice line, writer’s pick: “Contact lenses imbue a miserable hunger into their eyes.”

Why he likes it: I spent a decent amount of time trying to describe them, even in one sentence, in a new way. To add something to all the zombie “literature” (hey, there’s a lot!). I think that’s actually how zombies look: not just miserable, not just brain-dead but hungry. There’s something deeper, like they have to eat brains but maybe they don’t want to. Hence, that line.

Storyboard: Breaking format for a minute, we’d argue that the line reads better this way: “Contact lenses imbue their eyes with a miserable hunger.” Let’s fight about it.

Heckert: The first one reads better because it ends with “eyes” and not “hunger.” Also, the “with” slows the sentence down.

Storyboard: “Hunger” is a more evocative end word. It creates feeling. “Eyes” doesn’t. And what’re you talking about, slowing the sentence down? Choice No. 2 has a lovelier rhythm. Loveliness being what you want, of course, in a zombie story. Read it out loud. Do you read your stuff out loud? Are you a hair-pulling edit? Did Steve grow gray, with you in his stable?

Heckert: I read aloud in my head. The way I write is: I write one sentence. Read it. Then write another. Read both of them. Write another. Read the three of them. Write another. And so on, until I have one section. Then I read the entire section before starting the second. Then over and over again. We wouldn’t even be talking about this had I not written that sentence in the first place. Which is the way it sparkled in my head. It’s hard to create something that no one has said about a certain thing before, be it the ocean or zombies. I still like mine.

Storyboard (sighing deeply): Yeah, but you have to be able to let go of the process and the victory. It’s the local-level equivalent of killing your darlings. You did write something unique but it’s no less unique if you then take it one step further by smoothing out the cadence.

Heckert: Here’s something: (In “The Town that Blew Away”), “Vaughn, Georgia” became my “cellar door.” I found the two words to be almost entrancing when placed together. Hence, I wrote them down immediately and knew I would build everything after those two words.

 ***

“The Town that Blew Away”

What it’s about: A tornado that destroyed the town of Vaughn, Georgia.

What it’s really about: One of the most important things that defines us: a sense of place, and what is lost when that place disappears.

A taste:

And it was also weird what the tornado did. For instance, it picked up John English’s lone picture of his father and placed it all the way across the road, without a scratch on the glass. It took the tomato plants but left the beans. It took most of the house but only blew over his grill and bent a side of the pool. It took away the play set but left the air-conditioner. It took some big, comfy chairs and two Bradford pear trees right out of the ground, but didn’t take the porch fixture or the butterfly plant in the bowl. Next door to the Englishes, in an old house everyone thought used to be a hotel, a man named Kenneth Youngblood lost his porch, some windows, part of the roof on the back, but that was all.

How the story was born: While working on zombies, I was south of Atlanta, near a town called Senoia. I was riding on a back road, in the woods, with one of The Walking Dead crew. He took a wrong turn, or I would’ve never written this story. After he took the wrong turn, and we drove past the place he was looking for, we came upon a scorched opening in the woods. The forest had been obliterated and there was a small area of immense devastation. In the middle of the waste — concrete, dirt, cinderblock, flattened and broken trees — one person was rebuilding a house. I don’t see tornado destruction very often, so this really … amazed me. Then the woods began again, thick trees, and we continued on. “That was Vaughn,” the crewmember said. “A big tornado came through here. Completely destroyed that town.” I’ve read plenty of tornado stories before, but I’d never written one. Just briefly passing by Vaughn, and seeing it was no longer there — I told myself to come back and find out what happened. And if anyone was staying, and why. And I wanted to know more about the place. So, I went back. I really wanted to explore that idea, about a place being totally wiped off the map. You know, for instance, Joplin was really bad; but not all of it was destroyed. Most of it still remained. Vaughn was completely erased.

Biggest reporting challenge: Getting the residents to talk to me, and feel at ease when I visited every day for two weeks in a row.

Solution: First, I had to find Vaughn and get back there. It’s not even on the map anymore. It’s technically a part of Griffin. Several tornadoes (a near-historic number) hit the state on the same night. But there was, literally, nothing in the news about Vaughn. This is one of those instances where my story was going to be the only story. I felt a sense of responsibility to kind of, I don’t know, write the town back into existence, while also providing its epitaph. I saw a photo on the Georgia Red Cross web site showing a church that had been leveled by one of the tornadoes, and the caption in the photo said something like “Vaughn United Methodist Church.” The picture was the only thing I found on the Internet. I called the Red Cross. A few calls led me to the pastor of that Vaughn church. I asked her to take me into the ruins of the town. She put me in contact with another woman, named Brenda Wolf. She knew everyone in town. I met her at a McDonald’s one morning and she took me to ground zero. We met the pastor there. One of the men — the mayor, John English — was standing outside in the ruins. Brenda introduced me. I spent two days visiting with Mr. and Mrs. English; they introduced me to the sheriff, and so on. I told them I would come back every day until I had talked to everyone — 20 people or so — who had lived there. One of the residents was in jail, and I talked to him. Coming back every day, I think that let them know I was really serious about this. I would come back in the morning and stay all day. Several people were always out smoking cigarettes under a tent. People who were rebuilding their homes, just sitting out there in the wasteland. They began to expect me, and then grew comfortable with my presence.

Biggest writing challenge: I am a firm believer that the beginning is by far the most important part of a story. An ending of a particular story may be a letdown, but that’s nothing compared to not wanting to read the story in the first place because the beginning is boring.

Solution: I spent a lot of time trying to decide how to begin this one and also how to end it. When I came back from my first visit to Vaughn, I typed “Vaughn, Georgia” into my Word document. Those two words were my “cellar door.” They were beautiful together. I typed them, and then at some point I finished, “was a good place to live.” That sounded really nice. And true, of course, according to its former residents. It wasn’t a great place, or the best place in the world; just a good place to spend a life. The rest of the beginning is somewhat about repetition, and rhythm: “It was a place … it was a place … it was a place …” and so on. Those sentences seemed to really snap off my keyboard. I thought those lines sounded great in my own head. I used metaphors in this story, and foreshadowing, two qualities of fiction that are always important in my work, whenever I can use them: The pigeon coop, and the tree next to the trailer, before it fell and saved the family, factor in at the beginning and also big-time at the end. Simple foreshadowing. The pigeons and the metaphor of them are a bit of a different matter. Half the people there looked at the tornado as a sign of God, the fact that they were spared. The others saw it just as a tornado, as a bad stroke of luck, as just something that happened. Half called the pigeons “doves” and vice versa; some saw them as beautiful, as a symbol, and others saw them as just pigeons. You can call it both ways, but that was very beautiful and haunting to me.

Nice line, editor’s pick: “The pine branches had begun to pop and dance.”

Nice line, writer’s pick: “Tired vehicles slouched in the yards, yes.”

Why he likes it: The cars and trucks in Vaughn, how the place used to look in pictures that I saw before the tornado, they were just parked in the grass, some of them broken down and junky. This made me think of old dogs slouching or drooping on porches or in yards, just sitting there as the days passed, as they do in these little Southern towns. So, I liked the way that sounded.

***

“The Bird Flies Again”

What it’s about: Atlanta’s first underground paper, which Mike Wallace, on 60 Minutes, once called “the Wall Street Journal of the underground press.”

What it’s really about: A moment in time.

A taste:

An aging hippie limps into Aurora Coffee and takes a seat beneath the concert flyers that cover the wall. He drops a plastic grocery bag onto the sticky countertop, lifts out a pile of old newspapers folded in half. The hippie has sunken cheeks and a gray beard, a thick mustache and a full head of short, graying hair. He’s wearing tennis shoes and a T-shirt with a cartoon bird on the front, its wing curled into a fist. His papers—well, they’ve yellowed over the years, and the ink has faded, the pages turned brittle. He bends one of the copies carefully at the spine.

How the story was born: During a break in the Decatur Book Festival last year, after hearing one of the featured authors read for an hour or so, I went into the Decatur Courthouse with my wife and mom to beat the heat. Right inside the door, in one of the exhibit rooms, was a big retrospective on The Bird. The walls were covered with old photos, slogans, articles, covers of the paper, shiny, laminated artwork, a timeline spanning the walls. I felt like an imbecile — I’d lived in Atlanta for eight years and never, ever heard about it. I knew nothing about it. Standing in that exhibit reminded me of being a young boy, hanging out with my mom in the darkroom of the old newspaper at Scott City High School in Missouri, smelling the ink and looking at the photos soaking in their bins. I wasn’t alive in the ’60s or in eight years of the ’70s but I had this huge buzz in my head, right then: If I had been, working for The Bird is something I would’ve wanted to do. I told Steve that I wanted to write about this paper immediately. He indulged my curiosity. I knew this was going to be a short story, but I felt a personal need to write it. It was all about me.

Biggest reporting challenge: Trying to ask smart questions to the self-described hippies in the story. I would describe all of them as intellectuals, and former reporters and writers, obviously. And they were slightly … imposing, I suppose.

Solution: I did a shitload of research about The Bird and about those decades in Atlanta. This was one of the only stories I’ve written in a while where I wrote many questions down before I interviewed each person. I didn’t just go in there and try and start up a conversation and see where it led.

Biggest writing challenge: Trying to figure out how to write the story in 1,700 words, and make it have a life. I really wanted to make it about the feeling the paper conjured inside me when I discovered it there in the courthouse.

Solution: I had only a few days to write it, so I chose a very straightforward approach. I don’t often like to write things this … straightforward. Looking back, I wish I’d taken a riskier approach. I do remember writing the story and being cognizant of the fact that I’d used the word “The” to begin nearly every story I’d written in the calendar year. I don’t know why, but this was something I was now desperate to avoid. So, after much deliberation, I decided to begin this story with “An.” I had this internal monologue: “Only a hack would use the word ‘the’ so many times in a row to begin a story.” I know that sounds dumb. But that’s the way I often think, and not just about first words.

Nice line, editor’s pick: “Now they are an old married couple, both in their sixties, who often pedal around town on their recumbent trikes.”

Nice line, writer’s pick: “He bends one of the copies carefully at the spine.”

Why he likes it: This was one of the only human moments in the story. The guy was really protective of his keepsake copies. They really meant a lot to him. That character — none of the characters really turn out to be three-dimensional, that’s just not the kind of story it is. This is just a small insight into this character with whom I talked for about six hours.

***

“The Beards Are a Joke”

What it’s about: Four hirsute comics known as the Beards of Comedy do a West Coast tour, ready “to be serious about being funny.”

What it’s really about: Resilience, determination, hope.

A taste:

The journey wore on them. The road wore on them, as it curved into the mountainside. For five days, the Beards of Comedy had stared at the gray of the highway, and the cold and the dark had worn on them, too. They’d eaten potato chips and CornNuts, Big Macs and Subway footlongs, candy bars and cookies that left crumbs in their facial hair. They’d whizzed in the stalls of a hundred rest stops, devoured two loaves of white-bread sandwiches made with honey and Walmart peanut butter. They used luggage as pillows, bags of dirty clothes as armrests, discarded their refuse into the seat pouches and door slots and onto the carpeted floor of their rented Tahoe.

How the story was born: My wife, Amanda Heckert (editor of Indianapolis Monthly), and I went to see some stand-up at the Laughing Skull Comedy Club in Midtown Atlanta. Afterward, I said: “I’d like to write about these people.” So I spent a month in Atlanta going to shows nearly every night; big clubs, small clubs, black clubs, white clubs (like everything else in the city — like Ryan Cameron said — there’s a Black Atlanta and a White Atlanta); and I was going to write about the different comedy scenes there, the different people. But there was no natural storyline. I just had dozens of interviews with different comics, talking about themselves. Talk about depressing! Steve Fennessy, my editor on all but one of these stories, was like: “Okay, what are you going to do with this material?” I had no idea. One of my last interviews in this series of interviews with ATL comics was with Dave Stone, the guy with the Elizabethan beard. He mentioned their first big road trip. My ears perked up, and I asked if I could go.

But the deeper impulse was this: This is the very first thing I’d written after working five years on contract, as a contributing writer on the masthead, at ESPN The Magazine. I mean, this is the first story I wrote in light of turning down quite a bit of money to stay at the magazine in November 2010. They had offered me a three-year deal, which is huge stability in this industry, at a national sports magazine. People at the magazine were always very good to me, and I really liked all my editors. My decision to leave was about the creative process as a whole. I wanted to avoid having five or six people edit each story before it was in print. In my experience, that just doesn’t really work. So, my gut told me it was time to leave. I’d written a story a year earlier, “Lost in the Waves,” and the success of that story, that I could write it and get it published, was an affirmation of the type of work I wanted to do.

So I’m 31, not sure AT ALL I’ve made the right decision, wife at home supporting the hell out of me, financially and emotionally. And I’m on this road trip with the Beards and one morning I wake up in Portales, Ariz., in some shitbag hotel, to Taco Bell wrappers and lettuce and cheese on the bed, to the smell of a chicken pot pie — one of these guys is ironing his only pair of jeans, and, as he says in one of his bits, that’s really what jeans smell like after you iron them every day for a couple weeks, and don’t wash them. They smell like a chicken pot pie. There were empty Coors Light bottles and Little Caesars boxes on the floor. Going in the bathrooms, stepping out and gasping for air, and lighting a match and yelling, “Jesus!” This was just the life on the road. The Beards were all in their early 30s, too. They were technically barely making it, but they had a real hunger for what they were doing. They talked about comedy like I talk to my buddies about writing, wanting to be great at it. They were very serious about it at this point in their lives, and they were good. It was this, or it was nothing. So, honestly? This was a story about me. About failures, hopes, artistic aspirations, wanting to be great at something, not sure about the future. The story coincided with this big decision in my life, and I was frightened, and hopeful, and curious about my own abilities and, using a line I used with one of the Beards, with bigger dreams that I couldn’t ignore.

Biggest reporting challenge: I had as much access as anyone could ever want for a story. The biggest challenge was trying to fit in with them; to not be some weird fifth wheel; to seem like I wasn’t “there.” Try and get them completely comfortable with my presence.

Solution: I grew a beard! Also, I didn’t ask any questions the first few days. I just tried to laugh with them and occasionally, subtly, join the dialogue. At one point, to make them laugh, or to ease the fact that I was there, or something, we met some nice older ladies at the first show they played, at a small university, and I introduced myself as “Mitch.” The Beards knew this wasn’t my name. I said it real loud, because MITCH is a manly name. This cracked them up.

Biggest writing challenge: Finding a beginning. The road and the shows blurred together. Everything blurred together. I came home from the trip. I had dozens of hours of tape (I would often just turn the recorder on in the SUV while they were talking). I had taken hundreds of pictures with my iPhone. I just had a ton of “stuff,” everywhere I turned.

Solution: I put all that stuff in a drawer, and just stopped transcribing. I realized I could just remember everything, pretty much, except for exact lines of dialogue. I sat down and started typing, at a very vivid remembrance, several days into the trip, having seen the scenery, having smelled the smells, having been with the Beards, having been worn down by the nights and the mornings. That was a place in the story that kind of summed things up for me, a place where I could put the reader into the middle of the story and then take them back to the beginning.

Nice line, editor’s pick: “TJ was behind the wheel, just north of the Hoover Dam, and the evening sun looked like a single coin flipped into an empty sky.”

Nice line, writer’s pick: “There were a lot of tourists, a lot of young people, a lot of weirdos, a lot of leather pants and short skirts, football jerseys, an insufferable number of sunglasses, a lot of mumbling and disoriented dudes, a lot of women walking two- and three-by-side, holding oversized, plastic beer bottles, aimless wanderers floating beneath all that flickering neon, begging for something interesting to gobble them up.”

Why he likes it: Well, first, that’s one of those passages that I just wrote really quickly, and liked. One of my favorite parts about writing nonfiction is doing stuff like that, the “exposition.” I mean to say, one of my favorite things is to not “get out of the way.” I had the jones to write something about Vegas that no one has ever written before. “Begging for something interesting to gobble them up…” — that’s just what people are doing.

*Spread designs courtesy of Atlanta magazine

We named the piece our latest Notable Narrative because it’s such a fine example of the marriage of deep reporting and literary quality. Grann spoke to us a few days ago by phone from his office at the New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 2003.

You say someone suggested this story idea to you in passing at a book signing in Ohio. When did this happen and what happened next?

This was a few years ago. I think I heard about the story maybe in 2010. I looked into it some and then had other projects I was working on. I just kind of filed this away. I also then began to send out FOIA’s to all the government institutions. William Morgan, who had fought in the Cuban revolution and got caught up in all that, had become a focus of interest of the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service, so I began that process and those documents began coming in over a span of six months to a year. And then I really turned to the story seriously about a year ago.

You’ve jumped into something that I wanted to ask you about, which is the FOIA process for this particular project. The Army dossier and the other declassified documents – they dribbled in over that time span, so you had the luxury of time.

Yes. I was working on another story when I did a lot of those requests, so when the documents came in I just kind of put them away; in fact, I didn’t even really read through them. I just let them stack up, and when I felt like I’d gotten everything and when I’d finished my other project I sat down and went through them, and at that point I said, “You know what, this is a wonderful story and there’s just so much great material in here.” It was really at that point when I said I wanted to go ahead with it. At that point I began to track down people who knew William and also to try to persuade William’s widow to cooperate since it’s a love story as much as anything else. It’s about a man who both fell in love with a cause and kind of found himself, and a man who had this great, passionate romance during the revolution and fell in love with a Cuban woman. She was still alive. She’s a wonderful lady, incredibly spirited woman; she’s in her 70s now and still as spirited as ever but it took a little while for her to feel comfortable, to want to cooperate. When she did, I knew I had a great story.

It must have taken a tremendous amount of self-discipline not to immediately dig into those records.

Yeah, to some extent, but when I’m working on something I’m so focused on the thing I’m working on, it’s actually not so hard. In a weird way by not having looked through them I didn’t know how great the material was, and that probably made it easier.

What were you working on at the time?

I did a story about Guatemala, “A Murder Foretold,” about a lawyer who was found assassinated on the side of the street and who had released a video alleging that the president and the first lady had assassinated him or were behind his death. That turned out to be a bizarre conspiracy, a byzantine story. I was pretty absorbed in that at the time. And often when I know that there’s going to be a time lag in terms of collecting documents I get that process started and let them come in while I’m working on something else.

The Americano, a biography of William Morgan, by Aran Shetterly, came out in 2007. How does your piece differ from the material in that book?

The Americano is a terrific book and Aran Shetterly is a wonderful researcher. As I said to him, I really see these works as complementary. In many ways Aran gives a broader historical portrait. When you’re doing a magazine piece you don’t do as much context. Aran did a wonderful job placing Morgan in historical context and giving an understanding of the forces behind the Cuban revolution. I focused much more on Morgan and Olga. Inevitably in doing research you come across different things, and one of the advantages I had was that Olga participated in the story. I was able to get a deeper understanding through her of the love story.

And she had never talked to anyone before?

She talked to a terrific reporter named Michael Sallah who was then at the Toledo Blade. But she had generally been hesitant. And she really helped me dig deeper into the story. There were other wonderful discoveries. One was, for example, this oral history by Leo Cherne, who was close to the CIA. I don’t think details of Cherne’s encounter with Morgan had ever been made public before. Inevitably when you report you uncover different things, and I also think that you end up just telling stories differently (from other writers) because of the perspective you bring, or the kind of interest you bring to it. I was intrigued by the love story and the murky paranoia and the CIA stuff and the Cherne recruitment.

You had a couple of amazing source documents here, including the oral history. How did you come across that?

Cherne’s name had popped up in the CIA records, and so I began to research him. He had done an authorized biography and I noticed in the endnotes – I always look at endnotes to see what kind of archives existed – and saw that at one point he’d done some sort of oral history. I was able to find the oral history, and it turned out it there was this amazing section on William Morgan.

How did you find the oral history?

I called the person who did the biography and he was very nice and he pointed me in a different direction where he thought I might be able to find it. And he even sent me pieces of it as well.

Finding that kind of source material would send most reporters over the moon and back. How does it affect you?

Grann

I find the thrills of reporting kind of vary. There are thrills of reporting where you interview people and you have that thrill of witnessing something or meeting someone. Meeting Olga was just such a thrill, and hearing her story and hearing her passion, and seeing that this woman still felt incredible love for this man from decades ago. As a reporter, you just have a visceral response. And then there is the different kind of thrill you experience when you’re doing historical research and you come across key documents.  When you’re trying to reconstruct history it’s a real challenge. One of the things I want to try to do with history is to make it feel as vivid as if you were there. That process is often hard because people aren’t alive or you weren’t a witness yourself, so the hunt for those kinds of materials can be kind of exasperating and exhausting. Then suddenly you stumble across something like Cherne’s oral history, which was so detailed and so wonderful. It not only provides you facts but also helps you bring to life what happened.

Example?

Many things. One is you’re getting someone else’s insights into Morgan. You’re getting another point of view on the character you’re writing about, so that’s enormously important. How did he view this man? How did he interact with him? You’re getting enormous insights into this question of was Morgan a CIA operative or not. Was he ever recruited? You’re getting light cast on this question that hovers over this story. And then the other thing you get in that particular oral history was: Cherne narrates their interaction as a scene, so he paints the scene and helps the reader, or the listener, picture it. So those details were helpful because they allow you to construct a narrative.

So much of what’s wonderful are those details, from the $250 white suit to the fact that Morgan was “rarely without a cigarette.” Also the details on his body that “offered clues to a violent past?” Are those the kinds of details that came from the oral history or from a range of sources?

I have thousands of pages and I spent a year researching the story, and often when you paint the scene you have multiple (perspectives). For example, in the battle scenes I would have multiple sources from the people who were there and I would crosscheck people’s memories. You have to really drill down on these and make sure you’re getting conformation on people’s memories since it took place a while ago. For the battle scene fortunately there are multiple people who are alive who were there, including the head of the unit. Every source you mine, you look for details. So for example you mention the scars on his body. I got all his prison records, and in his Army intelligence dossier, when they were recruiting him, they had many physical details – all the tattoos, all the markings on his body. One of the things I found which I don’t think had been found before, or I had not seen it, was this statement that Morgan’s mother had given to the Red Cross in which she narrates all about her son’s youth. Again, that gave me another point of view on the character and amazing insights into this chapter of his life, his very rebellious, wild youth, from the vantage point of his mother. It went on for many, many pages. So each section, you find documents or sources that help illuminate a different element of him. While I was researching the biography section, I found out that the woman he had met on the train and briefly married was still alive. She’s 87 and blind, and she was lovely and still remembered Morgan vividly. They met on a train, got married in Reno, spent two nights there in Nevada and pretty much never saw each other again.

Insane. Just when you think his story can’t get any stranger it does. You remind us of that on Page 61 – we’re deep into this story when you give us, “As Hoover confronted the gaps in his knowledge he became more and more obsessed with Morgan. A former fire-eater at the circus!” There’s that little echo of how crazy his story is.

It’s an unbelievable story in the sense that here was a guy who was a ne’er-do-well, dishonorably discharged from the Army, a mafia hanger-on, and he had reinvented himself in this deeply classic American sense and, incredibly, not just reinvented himself and found a sense of purpose but kind of catapulted himself into this historical stage and then further catapulted himself to become a figure seeming to tilt or affect the balance of world power.

Is the oral history different from “the unpublished account of a close friend” that you cited?

Yes, those are two different documents. Two totally different documents.

Can you say more about “the unpublished account of a close friend” and how you found that?

The nice thing about this was, these men – they were mostly men, the people who were in Morgan’s rebel unit – they were all very close, and a good number of them are still alive. Usually when you find one they lead you to the other, and this was the case, where I basically bounced from one to the other and was able to both mine their memories orally and then also to collect any written documents or letters and whatnot, anything they might have.

Was the unpublished account in English?

No, it was in Spanish.

From Grann's reporting files: a declassified memo about William Morgan to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover

That was just one of the many different kinds of sources you used for this piece. You’ve got the FOIA documents, the oral history, the personal account, radio, television, including a five-hour Castro broadcast.

You know, I have here old video that I don’t think anyone’s seen. I was able to actually find old B-roll video of Morgan when he came down from the mountain, even an interview with him and Olga. So I have several of these old jittery black and white clips that I was able to find in archives. The good thing about the Cuban revolution: It was a big deal and it wasn’t so long ago, so the technology was better. When you skip back to earlier periods in history, like the 1920s, things just get a lot more difficult in terms of preservation. So both the magnitude of this event and the fact that it was at a time when government agencies, police records, news media – all were using technology and mediums that were better preserved. If you search long enough you find wonderful things. At some point I would like to put some of it up on the New Yorker website.

Do you do all of your own research?

Yeah, for the most part. When I did my book The Lost City of Z I had a very smart researcher, Susan Lee, help me at times, but generally I’m on my own.

How did you decide to use a mostly chronological structure for this story?

To some extent this was the most obvious way to tell the story. There were two elements. One was, I knew this was a big history story, and I knew it was about something that most people had not heard of. And I knew this wasn’t front-page headlines in our papers today, so I needed to kind of bring the reader in. I know there’s a different kind of burden on a story like that, where you’re asking someone to read a 21,000-word story on somebody you haven’t heard of before and it’s about a part of history that may or may not interest you. So beginning with the execution scene I knew was a way to say: Okay, how can I hook the reader enough that they’ll come with me on a very long journey? I began with the execution because it had inherent drama – you don’t yet know whether he’s going to be executed. The story is then allowed to unfold more or less chronologically while trying to show and preserve the sense of mystery that existed around Morgan for the people who saw him at the time. Here’s this man who shows up in the mountains and nobody knows why he’s there, who he is. It was important to let the story unfold not just chronologically but also in the way people were seeing it at the time, with their confusion, sometimes with their blinders, sometimes with their mistakes; to let history unfold the way history really unfolds, which is not omnisciently, not always with the benefit of hindsight. I thought that was the truest way to tell the story.

You worked on this piece for a year. The writing itself – are we talking about a few months? A few weeks? Or were you writing all along?

I would work on things in sections. Sometimes once I knew what the section was – so if I was focusing on his biography section or a battle scene I’d create an outline and at that point I’d try to draw all the information from all the documents and start to fill in the outline. The outlines are often 200 or 300 pages for a story like this. Because I’ll include all the quotes from newspapers or details from documents and try to have that information organized more or less toward the sections that I’m writing. That way I don’t need to go looking through stacks of FOIA documents to find a detail − it’s all there in my outline. So I would usually work on a section and a section would take me a few weeks to write. Once I start to write a section I’d realize where there were holes. Often while I was writing sections I was doing multiple phone calls, kind of re-reporting to get more details. So if I was writing a battle scene and see in my notes that the rebels hid themselves but then realize, “Oh wait, I don’t know where they hid,” I would start to call people and say, “Were you hiding behind trees? Were you hiding behind rocks?” And I’d get that detail to flesh out the scene.

That reminds me of the detail about the rebels crouching behind the stones, “feeling the warmth of the earth against their bodies, holding their rifles steady against their cheeks.”

The nice thing was, on these battle scenes I interviewed at least five people who were actual direct participants, including (Eloy Gutiérre) Menoyo, who oversaw it, and including the wonderful source Roger Redondo, who was a rebel and who in a weird way was the unit’s historian. Once I’ve written up the scene I actually read it back to the people and make sure that everything’s accurate. Sometimes it’s nice because not only do they correct you but they often add something. For example, I was going over the facts with Olga for the sections she’d helped me with and when we were going over the scene of her and Morgan getting married she mentioned that they didn’t have rings and so he “took a leaf and put it around my finger.” I said, “Wow, that’s just such a wonderful detail.” So that detail emerged through going back over the scene. Often I will go back over a scene with someone to the point where they’re probably exasperated with me, but that’s how I get the accumulation of detail.

So interesting. A lot of reporters are sort of programmed not to share anything about what we’re doing with the people we’re writing about.

I always say, “I won’t change something because you suddenly wish you hadn’t said that – because you did.” But I’ll go over things with people because I want to make sure I got everything right.

So how much Hemingway did you read while you were writing this?

I re-read For Whom the Bell Tolls. Obviously that became – once I heard that Morgan was this Hemingwayesque character and that (the New York Times reporter) Herbert Matthews was writing to Hemingway, I had to read it.

How did re-reading it inform your story?

I knew that this was something that was in their imagination. I knew Morgan in some ways saw himself as a Hemingwayesque character, and Matthews also was writing to Hemingway at the time. And I knew people were drawn to the Cuban revolution because it had the whiff of the Spanish civil war; that was very prevalent in people’s minds. I feel like if that’s what they were reading or thinking, I want to read it and think about it.

It gave you a quote but also, maybe, a sensibility. Or no?

I think with each story you want to find a voice for that story and I suppose that maybe helped to some degree. I think these processes, though, are often not so conscious. I’ll try to read as much as I can about a subject or about a milieu or about a sensibility and just kind of let – I don’t always consciously think about it, like, “How am I gonna use this?” or, “Why would this be helpful?” Just unconsciously I think it impacts the way you tell a story.

Tell us about Olga.

Olga is wonderful. I met her in Florida and chatted with her. She’s this incredibly spirited woman who has been through stuff I can barely imagine, and she also has very vivid and precise memories. I guess that makes sense because it was such a transformative part of her life. She would help me drill down on things. Like I said, she had described for me the wedding scene initially but she hadn’t mentioned the leaf. So when I was checking the wedding scene with her, she then recalled about the leaf. And I said, “Wow, this is almost like a Garcia Marquez image.” We have kind of remained close since the story came out. I probably told her some things about her former husband that she might not have known all about. She knew he had different wives, I don’t know if she knew all the details. You know, this was a story that involved a lot of pain. There are few people who suffered the way Olga suffered. This was a woman who lost her husband, was separated from her children, spent a decade in jail; what she went through in jail I only touch on. She’s unbowed and a fierce spirit.

Did you speak in English or Spanish?

Both.

Through a translator?

I speak Spanish. When I first interviewed her I brought a translator with me just to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Then when I would go over things with her I’d often go over them with somebody who spoke Spanish, just to make sure. My Spanish is pretty good so we could definitely communicate, and her English is good.

Have you ever been to Cuba? You didn’t go for this piece, right?

No, I’ve never been to Cuba. I tried many times, but they would not give me a visa. They did not want to talk about William Morgan.

(laughter)

I tried for about a year to get a visa, or six months, and they would not give me the visa. I would’ve liked to interview Fidel. Or Raul. I put in those requests but they were denied.

You spend such an extraordinary amount of time on each piece. What do you look for in a story, to make sure it’s the right way to spend your time?

The stories I write are extremely different, but often they begin with something that’s just tantalizing. So an American who fought in the Cuban revolution who became a hero and was executed by Castro, that, to me, is tantalizing. Then usually I spend a period of time looking into a story, to see if it really is as interesting as it may seem on the surface. I usually spend a real intensive pre-reporting period, where I’m just trying to figure out if it’s a story worth telling and researching for a long span of time, whether it be three months or a year or, in the case of a book, three years. So I’m getting a sense of (a) is the character really interesting; (b) if it’s a historical story are the people alive and are the documents available that would actually let you tell the story? There are probably a million wonderful stories that sometimes you just can’t tell because the materials don’t exist to know precisely what happened or to get the details. I mean you could write a paragraph but not a story. So part of the process was knowing that materials existed – finding the Cherne oral history, Olga deciding to cooperate. All of these things give you confidence that you can tell the story.  In that pre-reporting stage, you either get more excited or you lose your excitement, and when you get more excited, when you feel like the questions are increasing exponentially and the things to discover are widening out before you, that’s when you know you’re onto something. If those things aren’t happening, then I’m usually pretty ruthless about ditching it. I just don’t want to be six months into something and go, “What am I doing? Why did I do this?”

Whom do you read? Who inspires you, either in the nonfiction or fiction world?

It’s such a wide swath of things. I read a lot of fiction, a lot of detective novels and things like that, which probably have some impact on the way I tell stories. There are people who influenced me in that I began to realize you could tell nonfiction stories in different ways. I think they’re familiar names but they’re familiar for a reason. Gay Talese’s stories – his piece on DiMaggio and his piece called “The Loser” – and Slouching Towards Bethlehem (by Joan Didion), they’re just arresting. And then there are the contemporary writers I love – I don’t think Michael Lewis has ever written a dull sentence in his life. I don’t know how he does it. He finds ways into stories that I find amazing. Like his way into The Big Short – he took this enormously complicated, massive event that was going on, that the whole world was covering and he found a fresh way in. And there are people – some of them have been my editors and have become mentors to me, like David Remnick and the way he writes a profile. I read his collection of profiles The Devil Problem even before I came to the New Yorker. I suppose I was drawn to work for someone like that because I deeply admire his work. Mike Kelly, who passed away covering the Iraq war, was a mentor to me when I was young, as he was to many other reporters, and he’s had a lasting impact. Sometimes when I write stories I often wish I could show him, and get his thoughts.

On a lighter note, you’re tweeting now. Why?

You know, I don’t know why.

(laughter)

The thing about me, I love new technologies once I use them, but I’m a technophobe. So I start things late. I was so late to email. I’m very late to things but then I love them. I’m not quite sure how I’ll use Twitter, but I like the sharing of articles and the community of recommending things. I like that people draw me to stories that I might miss. But you have only so much time. It’s less of an issue of: Do I like something or not like something? Because the truth is, usually I like it. I’m a slow writer and reporter, and I have a family, and those two things take up so much of my time. So part of it is just trying to figure out how to work in other (activities) without giving up the one thing that is most important to you.

*Grann photo, story spread and FBI memo courtesy of the New Yorker

A good ending absolutely, positively, must do three things at a minimum. It must tell the reader the story is over. Must do that. It also needs to nail the central point of the story to the reader’s mind. You have to be leaving him with the thought you want him to be taking away from the story. And it should resonate, it really should. You should hear it echoing in your head when you put the paper down, when you turn the page. It shouldn’t just end and have a central point. It should stay with you and make you think a little bit.

The very best endings do something in addition to that. They surprise you a little. There’s a kind of twist to them that’s unexpected. And yet when you think about it for a second, you realize it’s exactly right.

We’ve curated three of our favorite craft essays for your weekend reading pleasure, starting with a piece that defines the genre. As narrative journalism spreads worldwide, sometimes it’s good to go back to the basics.

Narrative 101, by Rebecca Allen
In “News Feature v. Narrative: What’s the Difference?” Rebecca Allen, now the Orange County Register’s deputy editor of features and business, cuts a clear pattern for anyone confused by anecdote and scene, by quote and dialogue:

A narrative is a story that has a beginning, middle and end. It engages the reader’s mind and heart. It shows actors moving across its stage, revealing their characters through their actions and their speech. At its heart, a narrative contains a mystery or a question − something that compels the reader to keep reading and find out what happens. Newspaper narratives are also entirely true and factual in every detail.

Long or short? Short!, by Jack Hart
In “The Art of the Short Story,” Jack Hart, author, most recently, of Storycraft, suggests building (or rebuilding) audience by assigning the great writers to more bursts of short-form storytelling, the way Hemingway used to do it in Kansas City and Toronto:

Sunday story that runs 3,000 words helps. But short daily stories that brighten the weekday paper may be even more important. Short stories reach more people. And they reach them more often. Besides, good storytellers can maintain a much more consistent presence in the paper if they write short – and often. Does a writer have more impact with something that appears once every three months or once every three days?

Seven building blocks of narrative, by Michael Pollan
 In “Natural Narratives,” best-selling author Michael Pollan offers principles for writing about science and nature, but the tips apply across genres:

You can also construct a narrative out of arguments, ideas. One of the more challenging pieces I’ve written was “An Animal’s Place,” about animal rights, published in The New York Times Magazine in 2002. The piece is an essay of ideas, but it’s also a narrative about an argument. It’s a play with Peter Singer, the animal rights philosopher, and me as characters. The first line of the piece is, “The first time I opened Peter Singer’s ‘Animal Liberation,’ I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium-rare.”

Here’s the whole drama of that piece: Do I finish the steak or not?

It started off cool enough, and some of the kids were spinning fine ones, and quick. But pretty soon we were shouting at each other – “Shorter!” – and we were going shorter, and shorter, and shorter, until the rule had become: Tell a story in a couple of sentences.

Hemingway’s baby-shoes short.

I’m not sure I’ve been part of a better couple of hours of riffing. Being concise made us rethink how to tell a story, from entry point to structure to complication to end. There’s some truth to what good writers have always said: Being succinct is harder than going long.

That’s the first reason I like Brady Dennis’ story, “After the sky fell,” part of a series with photojournalist Chris Zuppa here at the St. Petersburg Times that earned Brady an Ernie Pyle Award.

It’s 296 words in 13 sentences, and it touches me every time I read it. While a lot of folks are cheering for long-form journalism (1. a worthy celebration a long time coming, and 2. have you seen how many people follow @longreads and @longformorg on Twitter?!), it’s a reminder that the value of a narrative isn’t related to inch count. Every writer wants to take his clothes off and dance naked in the Fields of the Lord, but sometimes a direct skip from A to B is best. Y’all remember Breslin? Jimmy Cannon? Pete Hamill?

There’s nothing showy or complicated in Brady’s language. There are no words with four syllables or more. Just 10 words have three, which means 97 percent of the words have two or fewer syllables. The story is tight as a fist. You can read it in 45 seconds.

And the structure is so simple. Both the set-up and the question that drives the story are right there in the cinematic sentences of the first paragraph:

The few drivers on this dark, lonely stretch of the Suncoast Parkway in Pasco County pull up to the toll booth, hand their dollars to Lloyd Blair and then speed away. None of them knows why the old man sits here, night after night, working the graveyard shift.

Lloyd Blair is alone in a tollbooth? Why? Brady does not dawdle. “Well, here’s why:” he writes – and we’re transported back in time.

What follows are nine sentences, each starting with “Because,” each building off the last to shape a story of love and loss years in the making, with reported details that take your breath and make you root for Lloyd Blair. The rhythm that structure creates – and the implied passage of time between each sentence – makes it almost like watching the scenes on a slide projector.

Here’s the party in Queens where they met.

Chuh-click-click.

Here’s them at work in Manhattan.

Chuh-click-click.

Here’s her growing ill.

Chuh-click-click.

And in the end – the last slide – we have our answer and the climax to this short story. We see him greeting drivers on a dark and lonely stretch of highway and we feel the strange contradiction between the pain he has lived, the predicament he’s in, and the cheerful greeting he gives strangers, especially when it’s cast against the only other quote in the story.

The last line is a surprising punch. Not sentimental. Not maudlin. No tears race down his cheeks, thank heavens.

Which leads me to another reason I like this simple tale. There’s a Hebrew phrase, Tikkun olam, which means “repairing the world.” One of my mentors used to say that’s what good journalism does.

It reminds us that our problems might not be as bad as the other guy’s. It reminds us to have the guts to empathize. It reminds us to go on living.

This story, in 296 words, helps repair the world.

Ben Montgomery (@gangrey) is an enterprise reporter for the St. Petersburg Times and the co-founder of Gangrey.com. He was also a Pulitzer finalist in 2010 for the project “For Their Own Good,” which detailed a century of abuse at the Florida School for Boys.

To read more about “After the sky fell,” check out Brady Dennis’ account of how he got the story.

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

Unfortunately, it has never been adequately answered. Commentators have tended to gravitate to oversimplifications: one side asserting that every word in a book sold in the non-fiction section of the store must be fact-checked and airtight, the other that “memoir” implies memory, which implies a not-the-truth-but-my-truth subjectivity bordering on carte blanche.

A better, more nuanced answer would recognize the complexity of the issue. Here’s a try: Inaccuracy is a problem in a memoir based on the extent to which it gets details as well as larger truths demonstrably wrong, depicts identifiable people in a negative light, fails to recognize the limits of memory, is poorly written, is self-serving, or otherwise wears its agenda on its sleeve. The more of these things it does and the more egregiously it does them, the bigger the problem is.

A rating system for memoirs

We decided to devise a way to apply these standards to the truthy aspects of memoir. Here’s the (half-facetious, but also half-serious) scoring system we came up with:

The charts below, analyzing some recent and not-so-recent memoirs, attempt to quantify the process; selected annotations have been added. Obviously, the charts themselves have a strong element of subjectivity, both in some of their metrics (especially E) and in the interpretation of the final scores. For us, a memoir “passes” if it scores 65 or more (the “Yagoda Line”). For others the threshold may be 40, or 80. In fact, such a notion of personal judgment is part of the point.

Clear-cut cases exist only on the extremes, the completely discredited “Love and Consequences” (that’s the one in which an upper-middle-class white author fabricated a childhood in the L.A. ’hood) on one end, Rousseau’s “Confessions” on the other. In the large middle, an informed reader has to make the call.

Interested in making a pre-emptive strike for truthy writing? Memoirists can use our convenient printable one-page PDF worksheet to evaluate their own work alongside some of the most famous and infamous examples in history.

Ben Yagoda is an English professor at the University of Delaware and author of “Memoir: A History.” He blogs at britishisms.wordpress.com. Dan DeLorenzo is a journalist, cartographer, infographics artist, photographer, painter and ping-pong enthusiast living and working on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.