“I turned in a vibe,” he says now.

America opens at 9, which is to say 9-ish, which has become our saddest hour.

9:02, for example. Or 8:45, or 9:04.

Or 9:11, six minutes after the second jet hit the second tower, and the mind started connecting dots in a panic. At some point we may have stopped to consider the date, 9/11, which reads as 9-1-1, which is keypad-speak for: Oh God no, help, please. Perhaps the day could simply be called Nine One One.

Why’s this so good?

Start on Sept. 11. Hank, a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, had been at the Post for about two years, and his editor was Henry Allen, who in 2000 had won a Pulitzer for criticism.

They by then had started to develop an almost telepathically good working relationship. One day a few months before Sept. 11, Henry came back from lunch, walked over to Hank’s desk and said, “Plastic patio chairs,” and Hank looked up and said, “Absolutely.” A week and a half later, he had written 1,915 words about the world’s most ubiquitous piece of quasi-furniture, their place assured in the pantheon of the all-time most Stuever-esque Stuever stories.

So on that blue-sky Tuesday, in a buzzing, mobilizing Post newsroom, Hank said to Henry something about how they always know when to get us, don’t they? Right around when we’re getting to work. Right around 9. Hank, they decided, would get up early the next morning to report.

It’s worth pausing here for a second to consider what we mean when we use that word. Reporting is not walking around with a tape recorder or a notebook and a ballpoint pen. It is not transcribing. It is not talking to as many people as possible. It is not collecting quotes. Reporting is all that, or can be, but it’s also observing and thinking and recognizing themes and ultimately earning the ability to say what there is to say. Reporting is work. Hank, an outsider by nature, is a keen observer and possesses the kind of original mind that sees meaningful differences between the convenience store chains Wawa and Sheetz and turns those perceptions into nearly 2,500 words of culturally relevant synthesis.

Early on the morning of Sept. 12, he worked downtown D.C., around 17th and K Streets. He reported “the overheard,” as he puts it, but he also dutifully filled his notebook with names and ages and quotes, “just in case” he ended up having to resort to a more traditional scene or mood piece. He didn’t, thank goodness – note that in the story there is no Johnny Johnson, 22, of Bethesda.

“I’m going to do the 9 o’clock idea,” Hank said to Henry when he got back to the office.

“Do it,” Henry said to Hank.

Here then is the part of the process where no one who does this job does quite the same thing. Some writers rarely outline, instead relying on something like rhythm and magic. Others are maniacal organizers, armed with three-ring binders and color-coded tabs. Reporters working on bigger stories have been known to take over entire offices, doing storyboards with posters taped to walls. There is no one, right way, but Hank often finds himself in the camp that relies on magic. He cites Joan Didion – she has said she doesn’t know what she thinks until she writes it down – and he believes what Henry believes – the good stuff comes from the anxious energy that comes from a great idea and a blinking cursor – and so he sits, and he trusts.

Locate the right tenor and tone. Universal, but not Op-Eddy; a lot, but not too much. This, Hank reminded himself sitting in front of the screen, does not have to be the final word on everything and all it means. “Don’t light the candles. Don’t summon the Gods. Don’t do any of that.” Like Henry says in essence, then and now, less throat-clearing, more throat-grabbing. And so go.

“I remember,” Hank says, “just hitting a groove and playing with type.”

The fourth paragraph:

Apart from the middle of the night, or the predawn, which are both fraught with simple darkness and somnolent vulnerability, 9 o’clock has taken on a peculiar quality all its own: terror before the day even really gets started, before the second cup of coffee, just before the staff meeting you’d as soon not go to, just when you think you’re five minutes ahead by being five minutes behind.

And then the fifth:

The people who would kill ordinary Americans in order to make a point have zeroed in on the humdrum of our early-mid to mid-mornings, with the idea that we’re all up and at our desks doing … doing what, exactly? In somebody’s interpretation we are busily playing our notes for an intricate orchestra of Western evil, of conspiracy, of a capitalist McDomination.

The world-class wordplay that started with keypad-speak for: Oh God no continues with intricate orchestra and capitalist McDomination. Fun is perhaps the wrong word, considering the content, but Hank is making music. There are many different ways to keep the reader reading, which is a mandate of the craft, but on the list certainly are little, interspersed pulses of awesomeness. Roy Peter Clark calls them gold coins. One here, one there, and they’re enough to train the reader to expect the next. To want it. NPR’s breakfast drone of militant rebels in jungles of countries with new names? That’s a gold coin. And later, down toward the bottom, the innocent working lives in tragic triplicate? That’s another.

This is a piece that has a sort of spotty natural propulsion. The primary engine is the strength and sequence of the ideas. In places, though, Hank crafts forward movement, equating sights, smells and sounds with times of the morning. We can hear the truck backing up. We can hear the brakes on the bus. We can all but hear the tick of the clock implicitly tied to the scream of the planes. This tactic does a couple things: 1. Movement can be as simple as Monday to Tuesday, light to dark, and here it’s 8:45 to 8:52 to five of nine and so forth. The reader is not stopping in between those points. 2. It quietly knits together the mundane with the dread of the day.

That’s important. Because all of this is flash and brilliance and not much more if it’s not attached to an idea that undergirds the structure of the piece as a whole. It turns out broad daylight was so much scarier. Hank had earned the right to say that. A new era of unshakeable unease.

It starts with five paragraphs that are beautiful. It ends with three that are pitch-perfect.

The 9 a.m.-ness of it all came raining down: all 243 pages of the committee report on the interface transfer, all those shreds of capitalistic minutiae, all those desk ferns and coffee mugs and Hang in there it’s almost Friday posters, the blue copy, the pink copy, the yellow copy, the innocent working lives in tragic triplicate.

How the morning went so wrong.

But, oh, a day later: It’s a little bit before 9 o’clock and everyone who could went back to work. The trucks were beeping, the line formed at Starbucks, and the eye contact we made with each other said what we didn’t have to.

Henry, when he talks about this story, talks about the great 18th-century English poet Alexander Pope: What oft was thought but ne’er so well express’d. “You read this piece,” he says, “and you say, ‘That’s right, that’s right, that’s right.’”

Michael Kruse is a staff writer at the St. Petersburg Times and a contributing writer for Grantland. He won ASNE’s 2011 award for distinguished nondeadline writing.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So you realized that was an important moment right then?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s a new part of your process then?

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

What made you want to do a book about Christmas – something longer than the long-form stories you’ve done in the past?

I actually pitched this as a newspaper story a long time ago, when I was at the Albuquerque Tribune. I kept a private list of stories I should work on in addition to all the stories that I was assigned to do. I had written a line on my story list: “follow a family through Christmas,” because I had been the metro general assignment reporter who had to do different stories about Christmas every year.

It’s very hard to tell the truth about Christmas. People don’t mind being in online forums where they kvetch about their families and Christmas stresses, but that very rarely makes into newspaper stories about Christmas. Newspaper stories about Christmas need what I call “soft focus,” so they’ll be happier. Even back then, I thought it would be much better to follow a family and stay with them long enough to see the joy and the unavoidable misery that comes with Christmastime.

To deny the misery is to commit the same sort of malfeasance as saying, “The war is going OK,” “The economy is OK” or “Your houses will always be worth more than you paid for them.” There are a certain set of denial mechanisms. Christmas is one of them, journalistically, and it’s very hard to report. It’s hard to be a tough reporter and come back with a story and get an editor to say, “OK, great! Nobody’s happy at this toy distribution.” We just resist it.

I had thought, “Wouldn’t it would be interesting to tell the true story of Christmas in America?” But I never got around to it – I thought it would be too long to be in a newspaper. But then ultimately I thought maybe it was the book that I wanted to write, mostly because it intersected with everything: the suburbs, strip malls, box stores, families – families being good to one another, families not being good to one another – popular culture, music, television, crap, credit cards, debt, sweetness, grandmas, mawmaws, meemaws and neeners. It had all those things about it that I’ve always liked writing about.

You dive right into these things that we, as readers, suspect you loathe a little bit – obsessive decorating, buying expensive presents – and you explore why they’re important to the people who do them. But then you drop back to just one or two lines that change the pages that came before. A woman behind the mall makes herself throw up. A baby dies. It’s almost like you’re trying to see what’s wonderful in what you’re looking at, but you can’t help seeing these other things.

I can’t help it.

Can you talk about that a little?

I honestly didn’t know if I was going in to write a book against Christmas or for it, but I did know that I wanted a book – actually I want this from all pieces of nonfiction I read: if there’s not a clear point of view pro or con, I just want to feel that I’m in the hands of someone who is really conflicted and trying to think this through out loud or on the page. I really did want this to be about a man who grew up with perfectly nice Christmases who somehow found himself – not careening away from mainstream culture at all – but just having a series of heartbreaks about how we live now and what we’ve become, and yet work this material with heart. I really do like these people. I really did enjoy living in Frisco, Texas.

That comes across. You’re not just wanting to draw us in – it feels like you want to find something out yourself. There’s that moment with the make-a-wish guy, Frank, on the radio –

Christmas Wish.

Yes. He fulfills their wishes. People submit these requests, and the station makes them happen. There’s an actual moment when you break out of your own storytelling, and you come up with all the questions that you as a journalist want to ask, because you don’t really buy what you’re hearing.

I don’t, and Christmas is larded with all of these hard-luck cases, and they show up on the radio and in the newspapers. It really does seem like people take off their reading glasses – again, it’s soft focus. They don’t ask questions of it, and when I ask, they say, “Why do you have to ruin it?” Really, my question about all that is why does it only happen this time of year? Why do the people who spend the rest of the year ticked off about welfare and taxes and literally being kind to others – at least fiscally – why does all that come off at Christmastime? Because of faith, because of religion, because of concepts I don’t really accept as good answers. I accept them as dear answers and important to a lot of people, but I don’t accept them as factual answers about why we do what we do at Christmas.

And I attempted to ask all those questions of Frank at Christmas Wish, and I was rerouted to the corporate office with a message that said, “We don’t think we can participate.”

In order for our Christmas to be good, we need to hear stories about houses that caught on fire, car wrecks that happened on Dec. 23, cancer diagnoses – the appetite for tragedy is very strong for tragedy at Christmastime, for things that were going on all along. There’s a very good book, Stephen Nissenbaum’s “The Battle for Christmas.” He writes from newspaper accounts in the 1880s, the 1890s, about how people used to buy tickets for Madison Square Garden to watch street urchins get fed at Christmas. The price of your ticket helped pay for the meal. People needed to observe the poor being fed at Christmastime.

It was performance art?

Yes. Something about that makes me deeply uncomfortable. And I would hope it would make others uncomfortable, too. But you know, we do a lot of the same thing – Angel Lists and Christmas Wish – it’s the same sort of imaginative idealizing of the poor that I think is just part of the experience.

I want to move back to your work at the Post for a moment, because these days, you’re writing some creative, voice-centered television reviews there.

I actually am willing to say after doing reviews for a year now that it’s much more of a challenge to me to make it work within the length and time allowed, and the subject matter, which is not terribly important, not important at all, or only kind of important. It’s a very difficult kind of writing.

There’s this middle part that I struggle with: what is the show? what is it about? what is it about to us? does this belong to any other conversation we might be having about ourselves right now, about life, grieving, laughter, disease, manners? Every TV show is about something in life anyway. In that regard, it totally feels like an extension of feature writing.

I really do interview these shows. I write down questions and quotes as I watch. Can I find out the answer to this or that, without launching an investigative story? It’s a very difficult way of watching TV. If you’re doing it right, you’re like, “Oh, God, it’s two hours long.” That’s going to be like a two-hour interview.

Stuever's Patented Outlining Method (click for details from his blog)

In addition to books and reviews, you’ve also done feature writing.

And spot news!

And spot news. When you sit down to write a story, do you have one way you start?

On the one hand, it feels like continuing a conversation we’ve been having, you and I – the reader and the writer. Really, early on, it kind of dawned on me that there was one massive epic story of people living in America, and that each piece was part of it. It just felt like the sensibility was first and foremost, as far as how to write a story, so I looked for whatever voice I would want to read it in. I followed that voice, that entity – not me and not the reader, but something inside that wanted to tell the story, that I usually trusted.

And so I feel like the reviews I’m doing now are part of that conversation. Now, I’m sort of interviewing a TV show, and I’m taking notes on it, and then I’m coming back and telling you what it felt like, which is sort of how I was doing stories about people’s weddings, stories about funeral homes, stories about one guitar shared by five different owners over time. It’s all the same voice to me.

I just wait for a good place to start – I listen for it. Boy, that’s not a very good explanation.

Do you start writing before you’re done reporting, or do you separate the two?

I’m one of those believers who says that if the writing is not happening at the usual clip, generally the problem is in the notes. You have not found the right person, you have not found enough of the right thing, you haven’t checked everything off the list. You’re trying to write too soon. For me, if there’s real serious stoppage in the writing, it usually is because of something that’s not in the notebook yet.

You comment a lot on stories at Gangrey.

I don’t know why I do that.

Whether it’s your own stories or other people’s stories, what do you see come up as the most common issues in stories you read? Actual ability to craft language? Structural issues?

I think there is a seriousness that gets in the way of a lot of stories that I read at Gangrey, here in the Post and everywhere. There just seems to be this – not overwriting – it’s almost like someone is telling you a great story on the way to church, and then we get to church and they shut up, or they kind of whisper it to you instead. Or it becomes an incantation. I feel like a lot of stories are written from that high point, not from the pulpit, but from the feeling that people are in sacred space and they’re too afraid of violating the space.

A lot of narrative stories have that hush of seriousness about them. That feels like capital “W” writing to me. They are honoring all the narrative or feature stories about serious or weighty or disturbing subject matter that came before, so therefore there’s going to be that mood. It’s too dramatic or liturgical.

Do you know about “they came”? Look out if the first two words of the story are “they came.” Usually you see it in vigils or people waiting for news about miners or plane crash victims. “They came” bearing objects. Who are they? We don’t know, because the writer has taken on that priestly seriousness. He’s just elevated his delivery in such a way that it’s getting in the way of what he wants to say. That, to me, is the first indication that I don’t want to read on.

What do you think the cost of that approach is, other than annoying Hank Stuever?

Isn’t that price enough?

What does it do to the story?

I think it just becomes too much reaching for art instead of being art. That’s the fine line in everything, that’s the fine line in cinema, that’s the fine line in making greeting cards, that’s the fine line in songs.

What’s the worst piece you ever wrote?

I will say that some of my worst stories have been about things that are very important to the gay community. Because I am gay, and a lot of times, the stories fall to the gay person. It’s the only time that journalistic red flags go up for me as far as representing. More than any other subject, I feel the need to explain. I keep telling, not showing.

What are the biggest challenges you have in writing your own stories?

My challenges have always been separating the good from the bad from the ugly as far as the material. I think in the decade or so that I wrote features for the Washington Post, I learned to get everything up higher, finally, which I still think is important. I wasn’t in this business very long before someone described the concept of throat-clearing to me. I was turning in stories with a lot of stuff up top. At some point, you learn that people don’t want to watch you build the set. They want to see the play.

What journalists have been the most instructive or interesting for you?

I would say Joan Didion, hands down. I know that she aggravates a lot of writers who don’t want to do that kind of thing at all. There are two things about her that I keep going back and rereading. One is the precise, meaningful detail that makes a sentence razor-sharp and completely right. And then the other thing is the sentences themselves. She over time really learned how to parallel park an 18-wheeler truck. Some of what she can do with a comma in a very long sentence is worth studying just for the craft.

I did an internship at The Washington Post in the summer of 1989, and there were some people going full guns at that time who I have paid attention to ever since: Henry Allen, who I think was and is really good at American character and meaning in the popular culture. I admired it early on and aped it. Martha Sherrill, who’s always worth looking up. She’s written four books. I think Paul Hendrickson is really good, but he was in the seminary, so he’s somebody who does the priestly voice, the prayerful, meditative opener, really well, and it’s worth going back to Paul Hendrickson’s stuff, and his books, because he does right what people do wrong. Well, sometimes he did it a little wrong, too, but he was willing to push it out there, that feeling of “bow your heads.”

In the ’90s, I really liked Susan Orlean. I really thought that she had just the right balance of the quirk and the heartbreaking. And presently, I go to Gangrey, just to keep abreast – anytime Ben (Montgomery) and Michael Kruse write, and it gets posted there, I like to read it.

Here at the paper now, I think Dan Zak is really starting to – well, he had a voice, he has always had a voice – but some of his features are turning into lovely pieces of work. And Monica Hesse. They’re the two people who are carrying the torch for the Style section now.

Any thoughts on the future of narrative?

I really hope that somehow, what we collectively think of as the hard bearing down on a story and sticking with it, and then writing it in a fantastic way so that people take time to read it – I hope that all survives the current mania. I hope people don’t lose heart in doing it. It’s so easy to talk yourself out of beauty right now in favor of speed. But that’s what you stand for; that’s what this whole project is about.

The monkey story seems like a very traditional assignment that any metro desk might have to cover, but you tackled it in a different way.

A couple months ago, there was a story by Emily Nipps, one of our reporters here. And Vernon Yates, this character of a trapper from Seminole, had a quote maybe ¾ of the way down the story. I’m not looking at it, so I’m going from memory—something like, “The monkey’s not necessarily having a good time out there, you know. For him, what this is like is if you were dropped onto a desert island with no other humans.”

I read that quote and thought, “That’s kind of interesting. I wonder if that’s true? Because I would look at the story totally differently if that were true.” And it made some sense—monkeys are like us.

So that’s what started my interest in the monkey. I would bring it up from time to time in our meetings for the enterprise team. “I want to profile the monkey. I want to take it real seriously.” And people would laugh. And I would sort of laugh. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it, but it was something along these lines: “Is the monkey lonely?” How can I get at that? Because obviously, I’m not going to be able to talk to the monkey.

At one point, you talk to a loneliness expert, which was great.

I got to the point where I was feeling good about the monkey, and I needed to know about what loneliness does to people and to primates. I actually tweeted and said I needed a loneliness expert. Pretty quickly I got a tweet back from one of our news researchers here, Shirl Kennedy, saying she had the person. He was this guy John [Cacioppo], from the University of Chicago—he’d written a book called Loneliness. So I scooted over to the local Barnes & Noble and bought their one and only copy and read that. Then I felt like I was ready to have a conversation with him.

The subject line of my email to him was “A story about a monkey.” I’m sure the nation’s leading loneliness expert has never gotten an email with that subject line. But he got back to me immediately and he was totally on board with the idea. There were some things in his book and in our conversation not just about primates but about Rhesus macaques—the effects of social isolation on that particular kind of monkey.

It’s easier to make the case that the monkey is isolated than to make the case that the monkey is lonely. The monkey is not going to go down to the bar and have a drink because he’s lonely. But the monkey is isolated, and the chances are good that he hasn’t seen another monkey of his kind since he’s been on the loose. So he’s definitely isolated, and that definitely has physiological effects on him—the same way it would have effects on us if we were dropped on a desert island or put in solitary confinement.

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

I’d say for two weeks, the monkey was my primary focus as far as reporting is concerned. I went up to a conference in New York then, too, but it was a couple weeks of reporting and reading and talking to people.

One afternoon, I took a few hours and drove the route of the monkey—where he’s been this calendar year. I started from the first address he was spotted at and drove from address to address, just to get a sense. Obviously, I’m driving on roads and the monkey isn’t, but I can kind of envision where he might have gone. That was really helpful. Looking at yards where he was spotted, patterns started to develop. The monkey likes the same kinds of yards, the monkey likes the same kinds of trees. That’s a little speculative, but at least it’s kind of an earned speculation.

The actual act of writing typically isn’t a huge commitment of time relative to the total time spent on a story, at least for me. At some point when I thought I was ready to go, I headed over to a coffee shop with Bill Duryea, my editor, and said, “Here’s what I’ve got, and here’s what I’m thinking.”

We almost never don’t do that. We talk about the story to work out kinks in structure before I ever put anything to the page. It probably took me a day and a half to pull it together. And then Bill, as he always does, came back at it with some wise suggestions and made it better than it was when I sent it to him. I basically wrote it on a Tuesday, and then Wednesday we went over it, and by Thursday it was sitting in the can ready to go.

You’ve done narrative in a lot of forms, not just for the Times, but also your book and feature stories for Charlotte magazine. Does a narrative approach come by habit now, or is there a mindset you have to work to get yourself into?

It’s kind of interesting to me that you wanted to talk about this story, because there are certainly parts of narrative in this story, but I don’t think it’s a “pure narrative”—whatever that is. There’s some essay in there, there’s some science in there.

But I think, to answer your question, anywhere there’s movement, there’s possibility for narrative. I knew I had that to work with—there’s nothing but movement: the monkey is moving from point A to point B to point C. So there were possibilities.

I guess at this point, it’s how I think about stories. I always want to have narrative components in a story, because that means a story is moving. And if a story’s not moving, a reader is probably stopping.

Maybe I’m less wedded to the idea of narrative for the sake of narrative than some people are, but I think it’s the most natural, most obvious way to tell most stories. I’ve done what lots and lots of people have done—read the people who do this the best, go to conferences to hear the people who do this the best, pick the brains of the people who do this the best, and hopefully over time, some of that rubs off.

Your story has some clearly narrative elements but could have run in any of a number of papers around the country. It seemed like a good model for journalists interested in doing this kind of writing but working for papers that may not encourage it.

I don’t know the end inch count on this. It’s long-ish for some places, but it’s not overly long. It’s certainly not long for us.

There’s an idea behind this story, and that’s something that is really stressed here in St. Pete. And I feel like I’m really lucky to work in a place where that is encouraged, where the editors I get to work with are always pushing it. Mike Wilson always says, “What’s the big idea?” I guess the big idea here—if it’s not too presumptuous to call it that—is the tradeoffs we all make between wanting to be free and wanting to be part of a greater whole, whether that’s valuable space in a community or a healthy, loving relationship.

You brought up my Charlotte magazine work. There was a story that I did in it last year called “After the Crash.” That story is totally an idea story, to a point that is unique for any story I’ve ever done. I didn’t talk to anybody, not a person—I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s a 5,000-word idea story that was reported by reading for months, on and off: NASCAR coverage, NASCAR books, magazine stories about NASCAR, stories about the housing crisis and economic collapse, and American studies. And then going to Daytona for the weekend and just walking around with a notebook, just walking and walking and literally resisting the urge to talk to people. Some people liked it, some people didn’t.

Why did you decide to take that approach?

Because what am I going to ask people? What am I going to ask the man on the street? “Can we have a conversation about the ways in which NASCAR at this current moment is similar to the housing bubble?” How do we even start that conversation? I just had to recalibrate my idea of what reporting is, or was, for that story.

This is something that I’ve been having some internal conversations about recently: the idea of thinking as reporting, which sounds ridiculous when I hear it come out of my mouth. Because of course you think when you report. Sometimes I think the more people I talk to, the better reporting I’m doing. Well, maybe. And for some stories, the more conversations you have, the more you’re learning.

But to really stop and consider the whys and the whats: I felt like I was getting the whats over the weekend and over the course of reading for that story. What I had to do was to start to tying together the ties of the whys. That was something I had to do on my own, in my head, and I had to organize it in a way that worked for that story.

What is your process for tying together the whys?

I brought up the NASCAR story because it is the most extreme example. I think the monkey story is definitely an example, too—it’s just they’re two different stories, two different approaches. In both cases, it was, as it always is, important to learn as much as I can about those different pieces of the story, those dots. For the NASCAR story, those dots are—I’m painting with a broad brush here—NASCAR, the economy, the highs and lows of American real estate. For the monkey story, those dots are rhesus macaques as a species, this rhesus macaque and loneliness.

So whatever it takes to learn as much as you can about those dots, that’s what you do. For the NASCAR story, it wasn’t talking to people, it was reading, reading, reading, and then really observing that weekend, walking in Daytona with a notebook.

For this piece it was also plenty of reading, but it was also visiting the yards where the monkey’s been spotted, talking to experts. Once you have all that, you can start putting some meat on those connections. You have a sense of where those connections might happen, but you can’t support those connections without that learning.

That’s maybe one difference in how I approach stories now versus how I approached stories five or six years ago—now I’m reporting stories as little self-taught, self-put-together seminars. I’m making a syllabus as I go along. And once I feel like I’ve learned the material on that self-inflicted syllabus, I can then make those connections and tie those ties of the whys in the most illuminating, most concise ways.

“What” is everywhere—more than it’s ever been. It’s still our role, but one of our additional roles, perhaps more than before, is making sense of the whys, or the reasons.

What journalists are most inspiring or most interesting to you these days?

I really like reading Michael Lewis, because I feel like he combines some of those things: narrative movement, big ideas, characters, and does it in an enormously readable way. I’m unbelievably lucky to share an area of the newsroom with people like Ben [Montgomery] and Lane [DeGregory] and John Barry. Somebody that I read a lot of and admire who used to work here is Tom Lake, who’s now at Atlanta magazine.

There are so many people, and you start throwing names around, and you don’t want to leave anybody out…

Like the Oscars. You don’t want to forget to thank somebody…

There are so many different kinds of work. I love Gary Smith’s long stuff in Sports Illustrated, and I love Tommy Tomlinson’s short stuff in The Charlotte Observer. They’re almost two different forms, but they end up doing the same thing—they make you think and they make you feel. Charlie Pierce is one of those journalists—I don’t care if he’s writing in Esquire, for The Boston Globe, or on his blog. I don’t care what he’s writing about. I read everything he writes.

There are others, like Elizabeth Gilbert—pre-Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert. Not that I didn’t enjoy and read that, and her last book, Committed, too. I’ll read everything she writes. But some of her work from 10, 12 years ago—magazine work—I just pick that up from time to time and reread it. The people who hide—maybe that’s the wrong word—big ideas and big stuff in unbelievably readable stories, that’s what we’re all trying to do.——

[For more, check out our commentary on Kruse’s monkey story.]

An Indian narrative journalism magazine called The Caravan launched this month. Or perhaps re-launched might be the better term, as publisher Delhi Press traces the magazine’s roots to a journal with the same name founded in 1940 by Vishva Nath. The Caravan bills itself as an Indian Granta or Harper’s, and for the cover of its January issue, offers a straightforward but informative story on how the Indian-American community goes about lobbying Washington. Inside is a meditation on Lyari in Karachi written by Fatima Bhutto that made us want more: “The British worked Karachi to the ground, but never to its death.”

What do you do when you’re an MBA who’s having hard luck finding a job? If you’re Don Gould, and you have three kids you’d like to teach about the importance of a work ethic, you start as a bag boy at Publix. But it’s not so simple. From Michael Kruse of the St. Petersburg Times.

If you had won the world chess championship at the age of 22, you would probably have coasted on it for the rest of your life. But you are not Garry Kasparov. Kasparov went on to dominate the world of chess for two decades, and then took up a career in politics as a burr under the saddle of Vladimir Putin. But that is still not enough to keep Kasparov busy, and so here he writes a book review—well, we think it’s a book review, but it’s more about Kasparov going up against ever-better computers as technology has improved and why the focus on supercomputers may be missing the point. Not an intimate narrative voice, but with an opening line about playing chess against 32 computers at once, who can resist? In The New York Review of Books.

After our focus last week on multimedia projects using poetry in journalism, we were thrilled to hear that gifted author Sherman Alexie had dashed off some nonfiction sports poetry in a matter of hours for ESPN, in an effort to get Allen Iverson not to play in February’s NBA All-Star Game in Dallas. (Thanks to Laura Nathan-Garner for spotting this one.) Alexie has long taken an interest in basketball and protested the Seattle SuperSonics’ departure for Oklahoma City mightily, so we will consider this a sort of poetry op-ed. At any rate, we at Storyboard are in favor of Alexie’s newsroom-style spirit and his ability to deliver on a self-imposed deadline. The poem? Not so much. (But you can see the winter issue of Contrary to take a look at some of his more serious work.)

Happy reading!

So what’s it like? Workshop coach Neil Swidey (whose day job is with The Boston Globe Magazine) describes looking at submitted stories in a supportive but intensive setting:

“There were late nights spent talking about war stories and the stories people had brought with them, conversations continuing through breakfast. It was great to have a focus, something concrete that [participants] were working on. We were actually talking about not just ideas but how to make their stories better.”

Swidey is returning for a second year at the workshop. The roster of other coaches for this year includes Lee Hill Kavanaugh of The Kansas City Star, along with Ben Montgomery and Michael Kruse of the St. Petersburg Times, among others.

Who was Mike Levine? He served as a reporter, columnist, then executive editor at the The Times Herald-Record in Middletown, N.Y. Levine died in 2007 at age 54. For a more detailed history, you can read Gregory Favre’s tribute post on Poynter.org or visit the webpage maintained in his memory by The Times-Herald Record.

The workshop is open to working journalists who have between 3 and 12 years of experience (though there is some flexibility in the guidelines). Asked if attendance were limited to print journalists, spokesperson Barbara Gref sent a note saying, “We are open to any kind of media. We’re of the mind that the story should be told in whatever media does it best.”

Gref and all the workshop coaches volunteer their time, in the interest of promoting quality journalism and remembering Levine. According to Swidey, “Those of us who lived and worked with Mike Levine know that he was a guy who helped spot the flight of young writers so that they could reach greater heights. This workshop is for people who think they can fly and want some help getting airborne.”

For more information on the experience, check out Michael Kruse’s blog from last year’s sessions and Ben Montgomery’s December call for entries on Gangrey.com. The deadline for applications is February 7, and the workshop site says limited funding is available for travel scholarships. Apply here.

The Lake homestead in Ludowici

The Auburn Chautauqua—named for the educational movement that brought cultural and entertainment programs to rural America—drew a dozen or so reporters and editors from a half-dozen states to Auburn, a rambling old house filled with family photos and mementoes. The house sits on 170 acres at the head of a teardrop driveway, nearly hidden from the highway by the greenery that grows so well in the sandy soil of that part of Georgia.

Thomas e-mailed us links to a fascinating range of work submitted by participants, who ranged from writers still developing narrative voices to veterans with decades of storytelling experience. And in what may be a first in the history of narrative conferences, his e-mail warned us not to wander off into the swamp at the back of the property without a pistol, on account of the feral pigs.

My husband and I arrived that Friday morning hoping to catch a glimpse of the pigs and eager to talk about something other than the fresh buyout offers we carried in our backpack. The others trickled in for breakfast, having had a most excellent time singing into the wee hours of the morning.

We spent the next two days discussing reporting and storytelling, and devouring Brunswick stew, homemade biscuits, and other feasts prepared by Thomas’ family. We retired to the back yard each evening to play guitar and sing.

In the following e-mail Q&A, Thomas writes about how the Auburn Chautauqua came to be—just in case you’re inspired to launch your own narrative conference. (If you do, Storyboard readers, please let us know about it.)

Why did you decide to hold your own narrative writing conference?

This was something that Michael Kruse, Ben Montgomery, and I had been talking about for years, pretty much ever since we started trying to out-write each other at the St. Petersburg Times around 2006. We had gone to other conferences together, and we found that we had our best times outside the formal conference sessions. Like when a bunch of us all sat around a long table in a bar and took turns reading our favorite passages from Richard Preston or Hunter Thompson or whoever. Later, the three of us took a road trip to Alabama—almost a pilgrimage—to meet Rick Bragg, and the talks we had in the car were some of the best I can remember having with regard to what makes a good nonfiction story.

Then, we all got the chance to attend a conference in North Carolina called Word. This was put on by the narrative team at The Virginian-Pilot—Lon Wagner, Diane Tennant, and company—and held in a rented beach house in the Outer Banks. They had the idea of asking each participant to submit a story in advance, getting everyone else to read about it, and then talking in turn about each one. Sort of a roundtable, only without the table, and with a boat-sized cooler of beverages. What we found is that each story sent us on any number of useful tangents and got us talking about craft-related issues that mattered to all of us. I left there feeling energized, and I thought maybe we could try something similar.

Part of what made the weekend so interesting was the atmosphere of your family’s homeplace in Ludowici, Georgia. Talk about the conversation with your family when you said you wanted to have more than a dozen people over for the weekend?

Well, my mom, Elizabeth, is a writer herself, so she was sympathetic to the cause. And that old house in Ludowici has hosted any number of extended family gatherings much larger than this one. So I figured it was possible. But of course the preparation was a phenomenal amount of work, most of which I didn’t do. My mom and dad (Robert) and brother William and sister Liddy put in an unbelievable number of hours getting that old house ready. Months of preparation. I’m incredibly fortunate to have a family like that.

What kinds of reactions did you get when you invited people to attend?

To begin with, I kept the invitations as low-key as possible. Here, essentially, is what I wrote to potential guests:

“Basically it’s going to be about a dozen writers from newspapers and magazines having various roundtable discussions about the craft. The program won’t be very formal. It’s actually going to be at my old family homestead, a 19th-century farmhouse in what my mother likes to call ‘a comfortable state of disrepair.’ Anyway, we’ll sit around, talking about various storytelling techniques and that sort of thing, and we’ll eat some food that my mom cooks, and my dad will probably get out his guitar, and we’ll have a drink or two, and it should be a pretty good time. Accommodations will be a little rustic. There will be beds for some, but some others may end up crashing in what we call the Screen House, a nifty open-air structure that lets in the breeze and keeps out the mosquitoes.”

And this approach seemed to work. The whole thing felt sort of underground–the opposite of being overhyped. Anyone who couldn’t come seemed to really wish they could, and the others found a way to get there.

My main regret is that I couldn’t invite more people. I limited it to writers who are actively working on narrative journalism right now. Even then, there were quite a few I wish we’d had space for. But we had only so many beds, and the discussions would have gotten unwieldy with more than about twelve people. As it was, some of us had trouble getting a word in edgewise.

Participants took the conversation about stories seriously. They asked good questions and if they disagreed, they did it in ways that furthered the discussion. That can be tough to pull off. Why do you think it worked so well?

It probably helped that many of us were friends already and that most or all of us felt connected by the common goal of telling true stories as well as possible in a world where the craft is becoming more and more difficult to practice and still make a living. I think we all wanted the same thing: to be just a little bit better at doing the job we love, and to help others do the same.

What were you hoping to get out of the weekend? What did you learn, and what surprised you about what happened?

Mostly, I wanted everyone to have a good time. And based on the comments I got, that seemed to happen. There was an amazing collective energy all around the land that weekend. By day we talked about the craft, and by night we played guitars and sang. I wish I had the musical talent that some of our guests had. But I was happy just listening.

I guess I was surprised by how much this weekend meant to people by the time it was over. We all need some recharging every now and then, and our guests seemed to get that here. I know I did.

Any advice for others who might try something similar? 

Begin planning several months or a year in advance. Start with the location. If you can have it on private property in the country, you’ll save a lot of money. Even then, the costs will add up. Consider charging a nominal fee just to cover expenses. Think hard about your mixture of guests–it may help to have some established writers along with some of those who are a little bit newer to the field. That way you’re not wall-to-wall egos. Make sure to buy enough beverages. And hire my sister to cook for you.

For more than four years, Gangrey.com has rounded up the best print narratives on a daily basis. Founder Ben Montgomery, who is also a reporter with Florida’s St. Petersburg Times, talks here about his personal motivation for starting his site and what he thinks narrative journalism can do.

Why did you start Gangrey?

I used to keep a big, growing clip file of stuff that I liked to read. I found myself at times on deadline trying to quickly switch from reporting to writing, and searching for new stories that would get me there. Sometimes I’d dabble around the Pulitzer site, but after a while I found I’d read everything on there. I’d get on Nexis and search for early ’90s material from Rick Bragg.

I thought, “If I’m doing this, there must be other people who are doing the same thing.” So I thought that maybe it would be a service for other people if I started collecting new stuff every day in one place in a simple, streamlined blog. If it didn’t help anybody else, I thought it would be a resource for me—it would be my digital clip file. And I found pretty quickly that there were a number of other people who wanted to go there, too.

Waveney Ann Moore and Ben Montgomery with documents for the Marianna project

Has it changed since the beginning?

The idea is the same: a daily inventory of good journalism. But it’s also become more of an online community, a place where we can criticize each other’s work and make each other better—argue about things and learn from new pieces of journalism.

It’s also become a place to showcase new writers. That’s sort of rare. I got an email from Wes Ferguson the other day, asking if I’d take a look at what he’s done. He’s at this little paper in Texas, and it turns out he’s a fantastic writer.

So maybe in a small way, I can also introduce people to new writers’ work.

What makes a good Gangrey story?

Maybe a little bit of what Tom Shroder was talking about. I don’t want to be bored. It might be as simple as that. There’s no set of things that I’m looking for. Does it have something that’s surprising? Is it entertaining? Will it keep my attention? Is there some device being used that I’ve never seen before?

Do you get any payment for Gangrey, or is it a labor of love?

No [he laughs], no payment. I added a little amazon.com bookstore to the site, hoping maybe referrals to people buying the books would generate some income. I have yet to receive a dime. I sold some t-shirts a while back, thinking the same thing. I sold out my stock, but I’m not even sure I made any profit.

How do you find the stories you highlight?

I’ve got a decent network of people that has developed. They’re just serious readers and know what to look for or what makes a good story. They supply a pretty good stream of new stories. Beyond that I have a pretty insatiable reading appetite. I’m reading all the time. Even while I’m working, I find stories I’ll go back to read later. I’ve also invited some people to post.

Who else is involved? I’ve seen Tom Lake post, I think.

Yes, Tom, and also Michael Kruse, who works at the St. Petersburg Times, though he hasn’t posted for a while.

Your tagline is “prolonging the slow death of newspapers.”Do you think print narratives have a future?

Absolutely.  I kind of like the pessimism in that tagline, because that’s who I am. But I think we’ll be doing print narratives forever. They did them on the cave walls, right? They’re not going anywhere.

In your Marianna story about abuse in a boys’ home, you had some interesting multimedia components that really added to the whole project. How do you feel about the shift toward multimedia narratives?

I love it, and I love that video we did. That didn’t require a lot from me. Much of it came from the photographer Edmund Fountain shooting over my shoulder while I did interviews. I couldn’t have pulled that off if it had required more effort from me. We wouldn’t have achieved the same level of—I don’t want to say excellence—the same level of story for either of those things, if both of them had required my attention.

If journalists are required to write the story and compose the multimedia elements going into it, both parts tend to suffer. It was my job from the beginning to do my thing for the story, while Edmund worried about the multimedia.

When it came time to create it, we had a meeting. We outlined the story on the giant pieces of paper. And then we met with Edmund and storyboarded the video, asking ourselves, “How can we make it different?” I think it complements the story. I think the story is the more important element there, but I’m totally in favor of good multimedia.

I see you’ve followed up that Marianna story with more installments. The project itself was a beautiful complete narrative. What do you hope to accomplish with more stories?

This ongoing thing wasn’t the idea at first, but we kind of decided we’d call it part two when it became clear that it would be part two. I’ve written probably eight stories total on this, about 17,000 words. When we’re writing about the stuff that happened in the 1950s and ’60s, the constant question we got was, “What’s this place like today?” Or, people would say, “It’s a good thing it’s closed.” And we’d say, “No, it’s not closed.” And they’d come back with, “Well, what’s it like?” It’s a natural question. So we delivered part two. And there are going to be a couple more that we’ll work on.

I view this whole year-long project—all 10 stories, or whatever it ends up being—as one big narrative. I have written some news leads for a couple of the pieces, but I think they all have a consistent tone and point of view. And hopefully, if someone ever considers the body of work, it will be clear that this thing happened, and then this part came here. I hope there’s a consistency in the voice.

What do you see as the role of narrative journalism—to tell good stories, to cause some kind of change, or something else altogether?

I got an email from a guy who used to be an editor at the Times a while back—Martin Dyckman. He wrote and said, “I’m glad to see the Times is still crusading.” It feels good to know you’re crusading on the side of social justice.

Had we approached this with the idea of writing a bunch of inverted pyramid stories off of this news event, there’s no way we could have kept readers’ attention. The evidence is in the letters to the editor, and the phone calls, and the comments. We wouldn’t have achieved this response if we hadn’t told the stories. Also, I think you confuse people if you don’t give them a chronological account of the evolution of this place.

What should good narrative journalism do?

At its best, it grabs you by the shirt collar and brings you from your kitchen table in St. Petersburg to a cell at the Florida School for Boys, so that you can witness an atrocity. And then hopefully when it returns you to your table in St. Petersburg and you read the last line, you put the paper down and say, “Damn, I’m glad I went on that journey with this reporter.”