Immersion journalism was the theme of this year’s Mayborn. Attendees heard accounts of journalists being pushed, falling or jumping into stories, courting the unexpected consequences that make immersion narratives riveting – and sometimes problematic. We’ll be writing up several of the sessions in the coming days and weeks, but here are a few highlights:

Gene Weingarten presented the audience with real-world ethical case studies, using moments from two stories in his own career. In one he said he was offered (and took, and smoked) a source’s hash pipe, which he knew constituted a firing offense. In the other, he extracted evidence of corruption and bribery from a delusional patient in the hospital, a man who believed Weingarten was a doctor even after he had explained that he was a reporter.

Joshua Foer entered a memory competition for a story he was working on – and unexpectedly won the contest. “I had been approaching it thinking I was writing about this bizarre subculture of weirdos,” he said. “And now I was their king.”

Mandalit del Barco played an NPR piece that rose out of her carrying letters and gifts between Haitian and Los Angeles County schoolchildren after the 2010 earthquake. Using storytelling soundscapes, she showed how audio paired with a story script can carry listeners into another world. “If you close your eyes now, what can you hear?”

Ted Conover talked about traveling an unpredictable path from observer to participant: riding the rails with hobos, crossing the border with coyotes, and getting slugged by an inmate during an undercover stint as a prison guard. “This doesn’t require an advanced degree,” he said, “just the willingness to do something crazy.”

We think the subtitle for this year’s conference should have been “When Things Get Messy.” Stay tuned for in-depth posts on these presentations and more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I want to talk about craft. I want to talk a little bit about how I do what I do, and maybe give you some pointers, stuff I wish people had told me when I was just starting out.

There are essentially three venues we can work in: newspapers, magazines and books. I’ve done all three. I’ve done all three very well, and I’ve done all three very poorly. I can supply examples of each. I’ve written five books, one of which was number one on the New York Times bestseller list and two of which were read by about 17 people, most of whom were my relatives. I have been interviewed on Larry King, I have been interviewed on The Today Show, and I have sat in bookstores in Denver and had the guy say, “You need to quit signing now. I don’t think we can sell any more of those.” So, I have had the best and the worst.

Narrative journalism is the best way to get noticed in journalism; it’s the best way to get ahead. They’re the most memorable stories, bar none. I’m talking about a story, as we used to say at the Journal, that’s beginning-middle-end. It’s not an analysis of the Federal Reserve or anything else. It typically starts with a real-time lede, an anecdotal lede. It breaks out into a part that at the Journal we used to call the “nut graf”; at Time magazine I think they always called it the “billboard,” which is essentially a quick one or two paragraphs saying “this is what the story is,” a section where you say “this is why the story matters.” And then you get out of the way and get into the story and tell it as fast as possible.

I’ve been writing the same story for 25 years. They pay me to write the same story. Well, I don’t do the same story; I do the same structure. That’s the structure I’ve always gone with, and it works beautifully for me. I am stunned that more people in our profession don’t write narrative stuff. If you’re a daily reporter at your local newspaper, this is the way you get noticed. If you want to get something in a magazine, this is the way to get noticed: telling stories, whatever story matters to you.

Be picky

One of the real problems, of course, with writing narrative is that it takes a long time. I’m contracted to write for Vanity Fair, three pieces a year. That typically takes a total of six or seven months; each story will take six to eight weeks… the rest of the time is stuff that I will spend three weeks on then say, “This is not up to par.”

I think – in fact, I know – that I’m a lot pickier than some of my peers. I find a problem that too many people who attempt narrative journalism do is to think that applying the narrative form to material that’s subpar, that somehow elevates it. Well, it doesn’t. You’ve got to have the goods. I’m renowned, in fact, notorious probably, at Vanity Fair for throwing stories out after a month: “Sorry, not going to do that one.” “Why? Why? Why? It was a perfectly good story.” “No, it wasn’t good enough.”

Because here’s what a lot of us know but never talk about. The only advertisement for your services, the only thing anybody really knows about you, is what you publish. If it’s not as good as you can possibly do, don’t publish it, because you can do more damage to your career with a shitty story than you’ll do good with a good one.

I just went nine months without an article. It used to really bug me. It bugs me less now, when I know that after nine months, I hit the fence, I hit a solid triple. I don’t think twice about the stories I pass up. It frustrates my editor, but I guess my lesson there is be pickier, if you can afford to be.

Cold notes = old fish

When I start, I do my articles a little bit differently than George [Getschow, my former boss] did. In fact, one of the lessons that I took early on was something I thought he was doing wrong, and I came up with a way I wanted to do it. You’re doing a narrative story. Let’s say you spend six weeks gathering your material. It’s good enough; you’re going to publish it, right? George would always sit down at the end of the reporting and start to write. And I saw him; he’d freeze for at least the first few days. He would sit back in a writing room and freeze. I started doing that, and I would freeze. Why? Because you’re dealing with cold notes, and you’re dealing with, “Oh, shit. I gotta write this.”

I came up with a way that gets around this. It doesn’t seem to work for everybody, but it works really well for me. I find that the best writing is if you write when the material is fresh. It’s like fish; it’s like food: fresh ingredients. I try to write my stuff as fast after gathering it as possible. I get off the phone; I’ve just interviewed George for 30 minutes. I’m writing that up when I get off – no later than the next morning, because I want the sense and nuance and inflection. If I wait six months – I don’t know about y’all’s notes; mine tend to suck. I remember really well for two hours, maybe even two days. Two months later, I’m looking at my notes – and I know people who type up their notes, but I still don’t remember it as well.

So at the beginning of the first day, when I get the assignment, I start two files on my desktop. Let’s say the story is slugged Mayborn. I start Mayborn.reporting and Mayborn.writing. Everything I gather, obviously, goes in Mayborn.reporting, but unlike a lot of people I don’t wait to the end to start filling up Mayborn.writing. I start immediately. I write up every single thing I get in Mayborn.writing because I’ve found that I block, badly, badly, badly. And so, what I do is, let’s say I get a nice interview with George. I’ve got eight grafs, I write it up. It makes me feel good to be able to look and see that I’ve already got stuff written. Everybody knows that the worst part of any narrative project is the early stuff, when you don’t really have the confidence that you’re going to get enough to do it, and you panic, “I’ll never be able to do it.” We all have this. And I feel so [much] better about myself, when I can say, “Look. I have eight paragraphs.”

Every morning, the first thing I do when I go up to my office – I am so not a morning person – I go out, I light up the day’s first cigar, and I go up into my dot-writing file, whatever it is, and I just play with words, play with words with the goal of chopping as much as I can every morning, just cut, cut, cut-cut-cut, until I get down to the best stuff. Obviously, what makes some of us really good and some of us okay is knowing what to put or to keep in that writing file. Too many of us don’t know maybe what the best quote is, what your best anecdote is. There’s no tinkering for that; that’s something you learn from experience.

Cut and steal

Here’s my advice—steal, steal, steal. I’m telling you, George and I worked in a four-person bureau, and after nearly firing me about three times, he brought in a guy named Tom Petzinger. Tom was really, really good as a wordsmith. Tom was the master of The Wall Street Journal paragraph: topic sentence, example, example, quote. Not necessarily always applicable for a narrative story, but it worked very well for the Journal. And I just copied Tom. I copied everything he did. There’s nothing illegal or wrong with it; that’s what you should do. I copied Tom until I was relatively sure that George wouldn’t fire me – I’m not joking – and then I stole as much as I could from Hemingway, because I didn’t know any of these great writer guys. But Hemingway had these beautiful short sentences, so I copied Hemingway. That’s how I kept my job at the Journal.

Back to how I do it: the beauty of doing it with two files as you go along, for me, is that the moment I finish the reporting, I’m done with the story. Because I write every morning, just writing and playing with the stuff I’ve put in there, cutting as much as I can. And I’m absolutely ruthless. You can’t fall in love with anything you write, because shorter is always better. I know this is Journalism School 101, but some of us forget it. Your words are not nearly as great as you think they are. Fewer is always better. Every time I give Vanity Fair a story, and I write an average of eight to ten thousand words, and they say, “You’re going to have to lose a thousand words,” I say, “Fine. Go for it. It will be better.” And it always is.

This is just the way that I came up with to unblock myself. I never write a story from top to bottom. I find the easiest way to block is to say, “Gosh. What’s the first word of this story? What’s the second word? What’s the third word?”

The way I do it is I assemble the story like they’re blocks. Typically, I’ll have a little narrative section; somebody told me a story, maybe that’s six grafs. And eventually I figure out that goes with those four grafs. At some point, I’ll think, “Oh, that’s the best thing I’ve got; let’s make that the lede. That’s a really good quote.” I put it together like DNA, like papier-mâché. It just grows and grows and grows, and at some point, it fills the file, it gets up to about where I think it ought to be. Then I read it aloud, and then I let my wife read it, and if she thinks it’s as good as the last thing I did, then I know I’m done.

Every-other-paragraph but people

We’re writing long-form, right? I’m talking about anything over 2,000 from Bloomberg, anything over 5,000 words from a magazine, or any book. The biggest challenge – and I think sometimes we fall so in love with our words and we forget this – is that people are busy, and they are dying to put down your article. They are dying to put it down. If you’re introducing a new character, they don’t really want a new character; they want to find out what happened to the other character. They don’t want to turn the page; they’re dying to go do something else. So I put enormous energy into devising ways to trick them into staying with me.

There’s two ways I swear by, and I’ve done them in every single thing I’ve ever written. One way is a little cosmic, the other is very real.

I’m nuts for transitions. The transition is, essentially, that you’re going to lose them at the end of a graf, right? You don’t know where the end of a page is, so there’s not much you can do there. But the end of a paragraph is where you’re going to lose people. So I’m nuts for good active words at the beginning of a paragraph.

What’s the greatest single transition word? And is weak, because it’s just like, “I’ve got something else to say.” Nobody cares. But! But is the best one. Do you know why but is the best word? But says, “You don’t know everything yet. I’m going to correct something you think. You can’t walk away.”

The problem with but is, obviously, that it’s overused. So you don’t want to be one of those every-other-paragraph but people, because you’re crippled. I read those people. I’m like, “He’s overdoing the but.” And I read and, and I just think, “Weak, weak, weak. You can come up with something better than that.” And with? With is for real losers; don’t even go near with. If you’re really not into but, and you need something at the beginning, however is acceptable. I like however.

[The] absolute best transition word ever, and you can only use it about once every two or three stories, because people will ping you on it. I stole this from the other person in our bureau in 1983. He started an article with the single best transition word I’ve ever seen – a word you cannot walk away from: suddenly. Who’s ever going to walk away from a graf that starts “suddenly”? Suddenly something happened – I’ve got to know that.

I’m very big on transitions, but if your story blows, it doesn’t matter how many but’s and however’s you’ve got. It still gonna blow.

Mystery kills

My stories average 8,000 words. I’m a failure if I don’t get them to read the last sentence; that’s how I feel. I’ve failed. There’s only one way I know to get people to the end of the story – and this is a little cosmic, but I’ll try to make it concrete for you. You have to have some mystery. There has to be a holdback, something you’ve hinted at within at least the first 10 grafs, if not the first five. If you’re writing about a murder, it’s a murder mystery, well, that’s fine, it’s easy.

You can’t get all pretentious about this. I read stuff in all the great magazines, and I’ll see a writer try to do this, and they overdo it. It as to be hinted at, alluded to — you can’t just be saying, “There’s a great mystery; if you read to the end, you’ll find out.” The biggest thing is there has to be a story with an ending people want to get to. It’s that simple. If you don’t have that, you’re going to lose them somehow.

[For more, check out the rest of our Mayborn coverage, including posts on talks by Mary Karr, Gary Smith and Mark Bowden.]

To become a longform writer and to kind of immerse yourself in different worlds, it’s almost like a double-railed track. Not only do you grow as a writer, but that other rail of the track is huge. Part of it is something you’re developing – some sense of self, getting a little more at ease in your own flesh and bones. So much of what happens in the interactions between you as the writer and the subject hinges on their trust in you, their confidence in you. And so much of that hinges on how comfortable you are. Any uneasiness you bring is going to cost you dearly.

I’ve sensed that and felt it and seen it as the years go by. The more at ease I became, the more the trust grew in that interaction, the more goods, the more treasure came back. It’s almost like you need to be very aware of both sides of that railroad track. If one is lagging behind the other, you’re going to really shortchange yourself in everything you get as a writer. That’s not the reason to do it — there are a zillion other better reasons to go on that trip. But that’s one of the biggest benefits of it.

As you’re walking as an outsider into these worlds all the time, how comfortable are you in doing that? If they feel your uneasiness, how easy are they going to feel about handing you their most intimate stuff to write about?

There’s almost an equivalence to that interaction, so the more they sense that you’re really there just to understand rather than judge is huge in how much they’re going to start giving … When you’re more relaxed, you listen, and you’re ready to flow with what’s being said and to hear something that’s sparking off three or four other questions in your mind. It’s because your mind is more relaxed; it’s not tense and tight and worried about getting that next question on your checklist.

When it goes from an interview to a conversation, that’s when things really start to happen in that interaction … but it’s not there at the beginning, I can guarantee you. When I was 25 years old doing this, I was nervous as a cat and worried and sometimes in awe of the person I was interviewing. It’s all just time, putting in time, and also really, you wanting to grow as a person and to throw yourself into circumstances that aren’t always the most comfortable right off.

…

Smith’s ability to get inside his subjects’ lives and ways of seeing the world is legendary, and so I found myself curious if he’d ever encountered a subject with whom he felt unable to connect, and if so, how he had handled writing the story. I caught up with him the night before his talk and put the question to him. He mentioned that Tiger Woods had spent a good part of their interview time watching Sports Center, but seemed unable to recall anyone for whom he just hadn’t felt empathy. Here’s what he had to say about it:

If I can’t get there, I shouldn’t even start writing. There should be some feeling for the human condition, in a way, and so if I can’t get there at all, then it’s like trespassing to write. If I’m going to write about pretty intimate stuff, I shouldn’t go there unless I can treat it with that kind of feeling.

I’ve started into stories and done a lot of research and then pulled out. But once I meet the person, I’m pretty dogged about just thinking “I’m going to find some connection and find my way into this person’s world and understand it and try to grasp it and render it.” Even if there’s a lot of banging my head against the wall, I’ll just keep coming back at it and at it. That’s what I’ve found. Maybe it’s not smart, but that’s what I’ve done.

It’s funny, because that whole idea of crossing that abyss to the other, there’s something under it that’s compelling to me, I would have to guess. Why else would I be doing this so much, so long, and so feverishly for so many years?

[For more on Smith at the Mayborn, read The Dallas Morning News' coverage of his talk and the profile of him from the Mayborn Conference magazine. You can also check out a Storyboard interview with him from fall 2009. For thoughts from other speakers at this year's conference, see the rest of our Mayborn posts.]

When I started working as a reporter for the Baltimore News American, I wasn’t particularly interested in being a newspaperman or a reporter. I had majored in English at Loyola College in Baltimore, and I wanted to write great stories, I wanted to write great books. I had been particularly inspired by some of the books that the so-called “new journalists” were turning out in the 1970s.

And so I knew what it was that I wanted to do — and I tell this to my students today, that I was pretty much in the same boat that they are now, in that I knew what I wanted to do, but I just did not have a clue how to get to that point. But it seemed to me that getting paid to write stories was closer to that goal than running a cash register at the supermarket. So I took a cut in pay, and I became a newspaper reporter.

My first job was covering Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Every morning I would drive from my home in Baltimore down to Annapolis, which was the capital of Anne Arundel County and where my office was. And halfway down was the county police headquarters. I got in the habit of breaking up my drive down to Annapolis by stopping in to police headquarters. And it was a really podunk operation.  They had this unfortunate guy, Captain Lindsey, who had been given the very unenviable job of dealing with the press, which pretty much consisted of me and a number of other amateur reporters. And he got to like me. Every morning he’d have a cup of coffee waiting for me, and he had a stack of police reports from the night before.

And let me tell you something: a police department is a terrific reporting organization, because all they do is cruise around and look for trouble, and when something untoward happens, they have to write a little report. So many a morning, I would read through the stack of reports and I would come across a story that I would then spend the rest of the day following, and I often had stories that other reporters didn’t.

Well, Captain Lindsey admired my initiative, and so one morning he asked me if I would like to accompany a crack swat team from the county police who were going to be hitting all of, as he put it, “the major drug dealers in Anne Arundel County” one night some weeks hence. So I said, “Sure, sign me up. I’ll go.” So I showed up. I was 22 years old. I showed up in the parking lot of the police headquarters at about three in the morning, and here were all these Anne Arundel County detectives in civilian clothes drinking beer. They had cases of beer, wandering off to the bushes to urinate, having a good old time. And I thought, “I wonder if this is the way police always do drug raids?” But, you know, I was new to this, so I took notes.

So then we left, and we pulled up in front of the housing project outside of Annapolis. And I thought, “This is odd. Why would the major drug dealers in Anne Arundel County be living in the projects? Don’t they make any money dealing drugs?” That night, I watched as they banged on doors and they dragged people out in their pajamas and their underwear, and they rounded everybody up, and made a big commotion. The following morning, like seven o’clock in the morning, they had this very dramatic press conference in Annapolis, where they had invited all of the reporters from the newspapers in Washington and Baltimore and Annapolis, and TV and radio—it was a big deal. And laid out on tables in front so they could all get pictures were all the drugs they had seized from the housing projects the night before. Now, as I said, I was 22 years old. I was probably the youngest reporter in the room. This was around 1975. So I can say without a doubt that I had more experience with the recreational drug culture than any of the other reporters in the room, and what I was looking at was a paltry collection of drugs.

The Anne Arundel County police in the press conference announced that these drugs were worth $800,000 in street value, and they’d rounded up all these major drug dealers, which was of course ridiculous. Nevertheless, every news agency in Baltimore and Annapolis and Washington was going to report the story that way. The lede on their stories was “Anne Arundel County police last night raided all the major drug dealers in Anne Arundel County and rounded up an estimated $800,000 in drugs.” Seized them.

So how was I going to write that story? I knew that that wasn’t true, and yet, to write the story the way the newspaper wanted me to write stories, and be truthful, would have meant writing “Anne Arundel County police perpetrated an enormous fraud on the public last night. They rounded up a bunch of unfortunates from the housing projects and took their petty drug stashes and then claimed it was worth about $800.000.”

I maybe would do that today, but I actually lacked the gumption when I was 22 to write the story in that way. It was a bit of a dilemma for me, and so what I did was I simply wrote the story. I wrote what happened, beginning with the party in the parking lot, with the beer and the urinating, and then going on to my description of the unfortunates being roused from their apartments. And then we come to the press conference, and I describe the drugs that were on the table accurately and estimate what they’re worth, and then I quote the Anne Arundel County spokesman claiming that this is $800,000 worth of drugs.

The story was an enormous hit. My editors loved it, the readers loved it. It was a narrative. It was my way out of a thorny problem. Captain Lindsey was very unhappy with me, but he couldn’t be angry with me, because he knew that everything in the story was true. He had invited me along, and he got what he asked for, which was an accurate account of what happened.

I was never invited back, but that incident, that story, clarified a few things for me. It made me realize that conventional journalism, conventional reporting, requires value judgments. You have to decide, really before you sit down to write your story, what’s the essence of this story? What’s the most important fact that I have to offer? What’s the second most important thing? There was a real rigid format to writing these stories.

Writing a narrative, on the other hand, simply telling a story, to me, I realized, was more true. It was not only more fun to read and more fun to write, it moved out of the abstract world of newspaper journalism and into the real world, where there was a setting, there were people, and there were characters and action and dialog, and the story unfolded in a very comprehensible way. It also is a way of storytelling that respects the reader, who we can assume is intelligent enough to make up his or her mind about the significance of what it is that you’re telling them. It also left room – a well-told, true story—for differing interpretations of the story that was being told, just like life.

…

I generally begin working on a story in total ignorance, which I think is the ideal starting point for me, because only if you are truly ignorant can you ask the truly ignorant question. But I have only the foggiest idea of what the story is when I get started on it. And in fact, every story that I write, when I’m doing my reporting, I always come upon some information that completely destroys my concept for the story.

I think I know what the story is, and then I interview one more person, or I come across a document, or I see a video, or something, some piece of information that tells me, you know what, I’m wrong, I don’t get this. The initial response that I have when that happens is “Oh god, I’m screwed now. I’ve just wasted my time. I don’t get this all. The story’s gone all to hell.” But on a few moments of reflection or sometimes waking up the next morning, inevitably, the realization is, “Wait a minute. No, this story just got better.” Because my understanding of it has deepened. I have a much broader and different take on what happened than I had before. So, to me that’s the process.

And I can tell you it happened to me a number of times in writing “Black Hawk Down.” In those early meetings at Fort Benning, those original eight interviews, the Rangers all told me these fantastic stories, but what I didn’t know at the time was that the raid that is the center of the story of “Black Hawk Down” was a Delta Force raid, a special ops raid — a unit that the Army would not even acknowledge existed. It was totally a black ops unit, and so the Rangers whose job it was to set up a perimeter around the block where the Delta guys were doing their work were not allowed to mention the name of Delta Force. So they would try and tell me their stories, and they kept getting stuck. They would go out in the hall, and there would be a representative there from public affairs, and they’d huddle and confer. The soldier would come back in and say, “And then a soldier from another unit would did thus and so.” And I would say, “What other unit?” “I’m not at liberty to discuss that, sir,” he’d say.

So I left Fort Benning at the end of that that first day knowing that I had a great story, but knowing there was something essential about it that I wasn’t going to be able to get at, that I didn’t know. Well, the one question, and Kristen Hinman this morning in her talk said she always does this, and it’s something I’ve always done – when I interview people for a story, the last question I always ask is “Who else should I talk to?” And of course each of these Rangers that day had lists of their buddies who had fought with them, and many of them had, in the years since this battle, left the Army. You would be amazed at how much more a guy will tell you with a beer in his hand in his basement in Cleveland, than a Ranger sitting next to a public affairs officer at Fort Benning. So I eventually got to learn a lot more about Black Hawk Down.

Now, just as I don’t know what a story is going to be when I start out working on it, I have no idea how to write it, either. In fact, I try to preserve that state of mind. There’s this teaching in Zen called “beginner mind,” which says if you want to be original and creative, then you have to approach each new project as though you were an amateur, as though you had never done this before. And obviously, it’s not completely possible — or Zen would be easy, but I try to approach a story without knowing how I’m going to — often I honestly don’t know how I’m going to report it; I certainly don’t know how I’m going to write it. But I have a trick that I learned as a daily newspaper reporter. And that is, you carry your reporter’s notebook around with you, and you scribble notes when you interview people. Because I was writing for a daily newspaper, I was never certain in reporting a story when I had reached the end of the amount of information that I was going to get, or when an editor was going to call me and say, “You know that story you’re planning to send me, you were planning to write it tomorrow? Well, I need it now, I need it this afternoon.”

So I had begun the habit of taking that notebook and flipping it upside down, right from the beginning of the story and jotting a little outline of what the story would look like if I were writing it right now, on the basis of maybe just one interview and a little back story. And then I’d get another interview, and my knowledge of the story would be shot all to hell, and I’d have to redesign it, but I kept outlines always, so that when I had to write, I wasn’t having to start from scratch. And the wonderful advantage of doing that was that as I grew older, and I began working on stories that were far more complex, that would take me weeks and months and years to report and write, that habit of keeping that outline constantly alive and constantly changing enabled me to focus my story far more intelligently than if I hadn’t done that.

I knew in time what were the pieces of this story that I really needed to find out more about and focus my energies on, but even more importantly, what were the pieces of the story that I wasn’t going to be writing about. I didn’t have to waste any time gathering more information about this. So it focuses your efforts.

In composing a story as complicated as “Black Hawk Down” or “Guests of the Ayatollah,” each project gives you immense storytelling challenges that grow organically out of that particular story. In the case of “Black Hawk Down,” two of the major compositional problems I faced were that telling the story of a battle has so many characters, hundreds of soldiers, Somalis who were fighting. How do you possibly make the reader care about those soldiers? I wanted the story to be powerful, so that if Sergeant Eversman gets shot on page 60, the reader knows who Sergeant Eversman is, and he cares a little bit about what happens to the guy. He isn’t just a name on the page.

So the initial draft of “Black Hawk Down” had a 60-page-long first chapter, all of which concerned events that took place in the weeks and months before October 3rd, which is the day of this battle. And it gave me an opportunity to introduce the mission, tell the backstory of why they were there, describe the characters — who they were, where they came from, why they were where they were. All of which makes perfect sense, right? Except that when I showed the manuscript to my editors at the Inquirer, they both said, “You know this story really takes off when the helicopters lift off to go on the mission. You should just get rid of that whole first chapter.” Because they were interested in the action, that’s what really compelled them in reading it.

Of course, they were wrong about the most important thing. You needed the backstory; you needed the character information in order to care about the story.

So what I eventually did is I did what they wanted me to do for the serial in the newspaper, but when I went back to write the book, I took that first chapter, and I cut it into like a hundred pieces, and I found ways of shoehorning that back story into the action of the battle. To me today, when I look at that book, I can see all of the scenes where I made a cut and I inserted two paragraphs or two pages of background information. And to me it’s very noticeable, but no one has ever said to me that they noticed that in the story.

It was a good illustration both of what you can get away with in telling a narrative, that a reader is willing to be taken on a detour from time to time. You don’t need to maintain a constant breakneck pace. Also, it enabled me to pace the story, so that if there was a particularly intense period of action, I could step away from it for a page or two. I think it was really helpful in giving the reader an opportunity to digest all of this very traumatic storytelling.

The other big problem with “Black Hawk Down” was that the battle was enormously complicated, and things were happening virtually simultaneously at a number of major areas during the fight. So I had to go back and essentially rearrange the time in the book, not changing the reality, but changing the narrative flow. I decided to take all of the account of what happened on the convoy of armored vehicles, and that was all going to belong in one chapter, even though in its pure time frame, the beginning of that story of the wandering convoy happened before the second helicopter was shot down. In the book it comes after the second helicopter was shot down. I make this clear to the reader.

But stepping away from a straightforward chronology and using the tools that you have as a writer of narrative to make the story more coherent, to make it more digestible, was for me a real breakthrough as a writer. I began to see how a good writer can manipulate the techniques on the page without changing the truth of the story, to make the story more understandable to the reader.

[For more from the conference, take a look at our other Mayborn posts. For additional coverage of Mark Bowden's talk, see Joy Tipping's writeup at The Dallas Morning News. You can also check out DMN books editor Michael Merschel's summary of the Sunday sessions and his post on the casual community of great writers at the conference.]

I actually pray about what to write, so if you think my success is unlikely, maybe you ought to pray. No, I’m kidding. Pray to me about what to write, and for the right amount of money, I’ll tell you.

I do actually pray … I pray, “Let me write one true sentence,” which is what Hemingway used to say. It’s the application of your ass to the chair and then you just try to write one true sentence. What is a true sentence? We’re talking about what lies between what is actual lived experience.

The experience on the page is not for you, the writer. This is a mistake people make about memoirs – that if you have had a bad enough ass-whipping, you should make a lot of money. Now, I think we should all make a lot of money, but that’s a topic for another evening.

But in therapy, say, you pay them. In memoir, hopefully, they pay you. That suggests that you are supposed to give them something: an experience – that distilled experience. You’re supposed to create a world where things that perhaps sound strange on Jerry Springer actually begin to sound feasible or possible.

You read the “Black Hawk Down” book, for instance. You suddenly almost believe that you understand what happened in Somalia. There’s an immediacy to that kind of writing, and to any good writing, I think.

It’s sort of suggested that memoirists have extremely venal motives. I don’t write my memoirs for charity; I really do write to generate income. I’m not Oprah, would that I were. But some people suspect us. I think of the William Gass line: “To have written a memoir is already to have made yourself a monster.” Clearly a guy whose novels didn’t sell.

And Gass makes a good point. We’ve all read these memoirs — we’ve got the James Frey example, right? He assumes that we’re going to betray confidences, we’re out to settle scores, we’re going to display our wounds in the marketplace, we’re going to try to evoke pity.

I was always horrified when I would hear myself described before I was being interviewed as this Dickensian orphan. People often say when they meet me, “You look better than I thought you should look.” Calvin Trillin, the first time I met him, said the same thing to me, “You look a lot better than I thought.”

I said, “You know, Mr. Trillin, due respect and all, nice to meet you. How bad am I — what am I supposed to look like?” He said, “Mmm. Some bedraggled slattern.” I was so tickled that I didn’t look that way.

If you want to settle a score in a memoir, you live in the state of Texas. You can buy a firearm at the Target. I mean, really, there are better ways to settle a score…

One of the ways I try to examine my own motives is to be fairly ruthless with myself when I ask about “one true sentence.” This recent book that I wrote, available for a mere pittance, took me seven years to write. It was supposed to take me three.

They gave me a lot of money for it – not enough. They become extremely interested when they’ve given you a lot of money in receiving the actual book later. In this, I find they are bad sports. But they kept asking me – you know, I remember my agent on the phone saying “I don’t get it. The stuff happened. You know what happened. It’s like five years later. You know, they’re being very patient.”

I broke, literally broke, the delete key on my keyboard in my office. My keyboard is still broken. I threw away 2,000 finished pages … not in one pile; I don’t smoke pot or anything. But it was 130 pages here, 300 pages there, 120 pages here. I think that they didn’t fully understand that it wasn’t [that] events were changing. You don’t have to change the events. Knowing the truth is not about manufacturing events. It’s choosing what to write about, one, and then examining your motives.

Specifically, I didn’t want to write about my son’s father, my ex-husband. So my first go at this book, I was about 200 hundred pages in, and I would write up to that point, and then sort of try to pole vault: “Nine years later,” and just kind of, “comma,” to try get around this thing. And the temptation then, when I first wrote about it, was to make him in a way more saintly, and me more bedraggled and slatternly. And again, this isn’t a James Frey thing where I said we were in prison and we weren’t. It’s not a Jayson Blair thing where you say you talk to people who don’t exist. It’s about motive.

I think one reason the people I’ve written about often remain very friendly – I have one here tonight – and they don’t seem to want to sue me or they’re not mad at me, is that I really try very hard not to attribute motives to other people that I cannot guarantee, unless somebody has told me, “This is my motive.” I really try often not even to speculate. So what was hardest for me in writing about my husband wasn’t the terrible moments between us, which all of you know who have had terrible moments with anybody. You usually remember the most horrible thing they said, and in some ways it’s always unfair, because it’s always out of context. It’s usually that they were richly provoked.

I could have started the memoir, “It all started when he hit me back.” But I think when people read the book, and I’m thinking of running over my husband when he moves in the garbage cans, I don’t think people assume that’s an accurate assessment of who he is. I think it’s pretty clear who the asshole is.

My friend Geoffrey Wolff – Toby Wolff’s older brother, who wrote a memoir when I was first in graduate school that I read called “The Duke of Deception,” about their con-man father, Papa Wolff – he was writing a biography of Melville at one point. And I mentioned to him in passing, “Wasn’t Melville this real asshole?” And he’s like, “No, whatever gave you that idea?”

And I remember some apocryphal story about Melville. “It was Christmas, and his daughter wanted these oranges, and he has this big bushel of oranges that he’s locked in his study, and the daughter is crying, and they have no food.” And he said, “Well, he had scurvy.” Suddenly, that one piece of information changes entirely your take on the story. It’s not as if I was saying something about Melville that was untrue. So the least of my problems as a memoirist, as a writer, is getting my facts right. I try not to write anything not true.

One of the historians I most admire, the biographers I most admire, is Robert Caro, and one of the changes in reading biography or history is that at the beginning of many histories or biographies they have these kinds of position statements. So Robert Caro starts out to write this biography of Lyndon Johnson, this guy who’s been able to push through the first civil rights act that they’ve gotten since the Civil War, and he decides that Johnson is actually one of the most despicable people he’s ever read about, heard about, thought about, in his life. There’s this beautifully written chapter very early in the book that explains what his investment in the material is, what his limitations are.

In some ways, I think that that idea of the truth being eroded started in the 19th century when people started reading the Bible as a novel not as wisdom or truth but as a novel featuring God as a kind of minor character. Jesus and the prophets had all the good roles. And early on, when the novel was being invented, this genre that’s seen as highfaluting now used to be seen as trashy the way memoir is now seen. We’re seen as those weirdo people, who are, I don’t know, writing the Lord’s Prayer on a grain of rice. There’s something wrong with you if you’ve written a memoir.

At first novels were seen as skeevy because they were just made up. The idea was that they weren’t sermons or epistles, they didn’t have moral underpinnings, they didn’t have the discipline that an epic poem required. Also in the 19th century, there began to be a blur between genres. Poets like Baudelaire were writing prose poetry, and later James Joyce was writing a very poetic kind of prose, and that’s led to the mockumentary and edutainment.

So in some ways I think – yes, I think with Richard Nixon – there’s a politician who may have lied … we began to get the idea that maybe these guys weren’t always dealing straight. So that when Robert McNamara later was manufacturing body counts, we began to mistrust government records about what was happening in the Vietnam War.

When Michael Herr writes his book “Dispatches,” which is arguably one of the great memoirs ever written, it’s not that we assume his memory – by the way, if you’ve never read “Dispatches,” you’d at least seen “Full Metal Jacket.” He wrote that, and he wrote the voiceover for “Apocalypse Now.” So when you hear in “Apocalypse Now” that weird kind of Rolling Stones music in the background with the voice of Charlie Sheen being really nutty, that’s essentially the voice of “Dispatches,” which is, in this country, the voice of the Vietnam War. It made a noise. He’s created an idiom that represents that war in this country and probably in other parts of the world.

So, it’s not that we don’t think that Herr has a corrupt memory or a corrupt imagination. But he writes a line like “We had this gook, and we were going to skin him” as something he allegedly overheard, and then he later says, “What can I say about these people? I stood as close to them as I could, because they were my guns. We covered each other. It was an exchange of services. But I also stood as far away as I could without leaving the planet.”

So the complexity of his relationship with those events, his own emotional complexity, his difficulty, has become part of the narrative. Now, obviously that’s not always necessary for a great journalist or a great historian. I think for a memoirist, it’s probably always necessary.

[For more on Karr, check out Mayborn Conference director George Getschow’s talk with her or Chris Vognar’s interview over at The Dallas Morning News. For more on last weekend's Mayborn Conference, see our post of narrative writing tips from Tom Huang's workshop at the conference, and take a peek at Larry McMurtry's 32,000-volume private library.]

FINDING THE STORY

• Every story has its surface-level meaning. Let’s say the surface story for “Titanic” is that a huge ocean liner goes down. But what is the theme of the movie? What is the real meaning of the story? Theme, at least in my view, is the underlying meaning of the story.
• Stories can have several thematic strings, and especially powerful ones are layered in that way. As a writer, I think you want to figure out what is the most important one, the one that you want to spend the most time on.
• When doing narrative, you have to sharpen your focus and figure out what your story is really about. Think about one set piece, performance, play or wedding – something that takes place within a set amount of time. There are also natural journeys like a road trip, or internal journeys, like addiction or abuse.
• If you’re the narrator, we need to see you and to understand who you are.
• When you’re trying to get readers to care, to get readers in on that, they have to see some of what you have seen. Try to figure out what it is that the reader really needs to know.
• If you decide to write about deeply personal things, you have to go all the way. If there’s painful stuff you’re holding back, it won’t work. If you’re not ready to go there, that’s fine; maybe let the story sit for a while.

NUTS AND BOLTS

• You want to engage the reader immediately – start in the middle of things.
• As you add to the number of characters in your story, the more complicated it becomes, because the reader has to keep track of more people.
• Once your language is powerful, your next step is to take it and pare it down, read it aloud and see when the sentences go on. When you find that, you either break up the sentence or get rid of adjectives and adverbs.
• Be simple and clear; don’t let the beauty take over – which is not to say you shouldn’t have any beautiful writing. You want some beautiful sentences, but you don’t want to overdo it.
• The more you focus your narrative on scenes, the stronger your narrative will become.
• Really good narrative writers talk about limiting the number of flashbacks. Tom French diagrams flashbacks with loops and tries not to have more than one or two.
• Metaphors are really hard to carry out. My advice would be to use them very sparingly. You can use so many layers of metaphors that you get confused. A story can be compelling without any overt metaphors.
• One really useful thing to do after you write your first draft is to see what happens after you remove the first paragraph or two. Often times it’s the second paragraph that’s the real beginning.
• Watch out for trying to explain too much.
• You don’t have to put a bow at the end or always have a totally clean resolution. Is there a way for you to evoke an idea without necessarily saying it or explaining it? Is there an image or scene that can convey a feeling or idea to close the piece?

Tom Huang is the Sunday and Enterprise Editor at The Dallas Morning News and currently president of The American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors. He was also co-editor of “Best Newspaper Writing 2008-2009.”

McMurtry lives in the town where he was born. But he has added his own brand to the place by opening a collection of bookstores on or near the main drag and filling them with hundreds of thousands of books.

His devotion to creating and preserving stories has made him the patron saint of not only Archer City but also the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, which took place last weekend in Grapevine, Texas. And so it happened that on the opening day of the conference, a group of attendees made the annual pilgrimage to Archer City for a visit to McMurtry’s bookstores and private collection.

McMurtry's private library (click to enlarge)

A converted carriage house filled with 32,000 books, McMurtry’s private library contains a treasure trove of Americana. More surprising is the unparalleled collection of H.G. Wells’ writing and the substantial amount of works of visual storytelling, from books of still photography to underground and adult comics.

(click to enlarge)

One visitor found a volume containing the only short story McMurtry ever published. (He is reported to have burned more than 50 others.) Another guest noted the Joyce Carol Oates section, which seemed to include her complete works.

The author’s health kept him from meeting guests, but the collection itself was worth the trip. McMurtry’s library is “the most important possession that he has in all the world,” says Mayborn Conference director George Getschow.

This week on Storyboard, we’ll be recapping the Mayborn happenings in detail, from Archer City road trips to storytelling tips. Posts will include the wit and wisdom of literary superstars Mary Karr, Mark Bowden and Gary Smith, along with many other writers you know (and a few you don’t). We’ll also be linking up with other sites’ coverage, to give you as complete a picture as possible of the weekend.

So keep checking back all week for ideas on memoir, magazine writing and books, as well as anecdotes from some of the best writers around.

The Society of Professional Journalists is hosting one-day workshops with Tom Hallman, who will address not just long-form narrative but also how to “apply narrative techniques to your daily reporting.” (For a sample of his thinking on story, check out our Storyboard post by Hallman.) He’ll be at the University of Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., on April 3 and at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, Calif., on May 8.

Boston will host two events in close succession. “The Power of Narrative: Timeless Art in an Urgent Age,” will take place April 23 – 24 at the Boston University Photonics Center and will include veteran storytellers Gay Talese, Adam Hochschild, Buzz Bissinger and Isabel Wilkerson, among many others. As of this morning, online registration was not yet in place, but a list of presenters and conference fees is available.

Grub Street will host “The Muse and the Marketplace 2010” conference May 1-2 at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel. Listed sessions embrace a mixed group of writing styles and genres but will offer writers Jennifer 8. Lee, Michael Downing, and Pablo Medina, as well as a discussion of the current nonfiction market.

Lastly, this summer, you can head south for the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference taking place July 23 – 25 in Grapevine, Texas. Conference keynoters include memoirist Mary Karr, sports writer Gary Smith and journalist Mark Bowden. See this year’s conference schedule, and read our wrapup of last year’s sessions. Registration will open later this month.

All of the above, excepting the Boston University event, list participatory sessions and opportunities to get feedback on your work as part of their schedules. So if you’re interested in classic storytelling, have a look.