We caught Thompson on the road this week in our mutually native Mississippi. He was driving from his home in Oxford to a story in Alabama, but didn’t want to say, at least publicly, what the story was. It was kind of hard to hear each other, and Thompson kept yelling things like “Oh look! The Natchez Trace!” but we managed to cover everything from story conception to deadline music. You may want to think of Thompson’s comments as part master class on narrative journalism and part travelogue.

I had just re-read his great piece on Junior Johnson, the godfather of stock-car racing, and was saying how fun it can be, covering NASCAR, and so we started there.

Paige Williams: Those guys are just not like anybody else.

Wright Thompson: And the way Junior Johnson talks – those are poems. It’s “bored-out” and “stroked” and “cammed” – they’re like the best kind of poems because it doesn’t matter what the words mean, it’s just how they sound.

Those boys are smart, too.

Thompson at Hemingway's house during a reporting trip to Cuba. The line above his head marks Hemingway's height.

Junior Johnson has an innate understanding of physics. I mean if Junior Johnson had been born to your family or my family, Junior Johnson would’ve been, like, a particle physicist. The things he invented!

The best thing about writing about racing isn’t so much the tech stuff or who won or lost, it’s the characters. I remember this thing about Richard Petty rolling a car pretty good – he went over an embankment and out of sight and everybody ran over to find out if he was dead or alive, and he was sitting there in front of the smoking wreckage and all he said was, “Anybody got a Coke?” 

They’re like that! It’s unbelievable! Like Junior Johnson threatening a U.S. marshal – Junior Johnson is not someone you want mad at you, even at 80. Junior Johnson would whip my ass. I wouldn’t fight Junior Johnson – are you kidding me? Like, the story about him cheating in his son’s soapbox derby, hiding the lead in the floorboard of the car –

They figured out how to get by.

I talked to Mike Krzyzewski, the coach at Duke – the thing that’s interesting is that Junior has an eighth-grade education and is really embarrassed about it. The thing he wants more than anything in the world is for his son to go to college, and so they went and toured Duke. And to hear people describe – Junior Johnson’s father had a second-grade education, so to go from a second-grade education to an eighth-grade education to touring Duke? I mean, the look on his face.

What about your family, if you don’t mind my asking? 

My mother’s side of the family were well-to-do Delta planters. My dad’s side of the family was sort of the opposite; they grew up in South Mississippi, very, very small farm. My grandfather was a really smart man who had to go home and run the family farm – I feel like there’s a little Willy Loman there, had to go home and do this job. And so they were middle-class as that era of Mississippi goes, but my dad and his brothers all went to college. There’s a doctor, a lawyer, an advertising executive. So in some ways it’s from the farm to working for a media company, with a generation in between – a pretty standard story. From making things to helping people who make things to working with ideas. Oh, hey, “Welcome to Okolona: the little city that does big things!”

Is that Monroe County?

I do not know the answer to that. My father, who could name every county in Mississippi, would be very upset.

Chickasaw County. I’m Googling.

Oh, look at this! This is the high school football field! It is the Charles Faulkner Field, “home of the Chiefs.” Faulkner died in Okolona, I think, right?

Byhalia.

Oh, that’s right, at the sanitarium, drying his ass out.

And he’d had a heart attack.

It wasn’t drinking that killed Faulkner, it was stopping. It was like: Heroin didn’t kill Jerry Garcia, quitting did.

Faulkner died at the Wright Sanitarium, Wright.

And this is the 50th anniversary of his death. He died 2 1/2 months before Ole Miss integrated.

Oh, he was only 64.

Yeah, well, those were 64 hard-ass years. Did you read William Styron’s obituary about him in Life magazine? It’s incredible. (His niece), Dean Faulkner (Wells), who’s just died, she had this great collection of first editions because every single writer who came to town came by to kiss the ring. She had this Gideon’s Bible inscribed: “Dear Dean, I wrote this book for you. Love, Bill Styron.” You know.

It’s 11:15 in the morning. How long have you been up?

Today? I snoozed until about 6:30.

Morning is your best writing time, right?

I want to be in the chair writing by 6:30, and I want to be done writing for the day by 2. There are always five or six stories going at once so I need to sort of do the daily maintenance on them. I’m just much better right in the morning. And also, I can have a day ruined very easily, which I’m trying to get better about because it’s stupid to be superstitious, but, like, if I oversleep the day is shot for me. I can’t go start at 10. It’s ruined.

When did that start for you?

It was by necessity. At the Kansas City Star I wrote a 3,000-word takeout every week. We would have a meeting on Monday – we would go out to lunch and plan. I would either stay in town or be on an airplane that night or Tuesday; I would report Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, usually come home Thursday or Friday. The story would run on Sunday, so I would wake up Saturday and write live. Every hour counted.

Yeah.

The difference between starting at 6 and starting at 10 was the difference between having a story that worked and having a hot mess. So I just got in the habit. And I just do better if I have a long stretch of day in front of me. To the eternal annoyance, I think, of my editors, I don’t want to conference-call about the presentation of a story before I’ve written the story. I like the long stretch of a day in front of me.

What do you do to get yourself into that writing space?

I drink an absurd amount of coffee. And I have a song mix that I listen to that I’ve listened to basically for 10 years. I mean, I add songs as I find them, but I listen to music.

Wait, wait, wait – you listen to the same song mix that you’ve listened to for the past 10 years?

Yes. That started for a very specific reason, though: I wrote in press boxes, where it’s loud as shit. And so you need something to drown out the noise. So I had a mix that I made that was calm. If I had 17 minutes to write I wanted a little soothing music.

Now you know that I have to ask what’s on that mix.

Hold on. Okay. (Reading from his iPhone.) “Writing Mix: Charlie Daniels Band, ‘Mister D.J.;’ ‘I Don’t Like Mondays,’ Tori Amos; ‘Little Rock,’ Collin Raye; ‘Hallelujah,’ Jeff Buckley; ‘Brothers in Arms,’ Dire Straits; ‘Good Ol’ Boys Like Me,’ Don Williams; ‘New Orleans Ladies,’ (LeRoux); ‘Good Riddance,’ Green Day; ‘This Old Porch,’ Lyle Lovett; ‘Sunrise,’ Norah Jones” – fuck, that’s an odd one – “‘Lonesome Blues,’ Shooter Jennings; ‘Stuck on You,’ Lionel Ritchie; ‘Walking in Memphis,’ Marc Cohn; ‘Photograph,’ Charlie Robison; ‘The Wrestler,’ Bruce Springsteen; ‘Amsterdam,’ Coldplay; ‘Little Motel,’ Modest Mouse; ‘The Freshman,’ The Verve Pipe.”

Well, now I have to make the playlist.

That’s embarrassing! Why couldn’t I have said, you know, Motley Crue, “Home Sweet Home?”

No! It’s great!

I’ve stolen songs. “Amsterdam” is Tom Lake. “Little Motel” is Chris Jones. Somebody’ll mention a song that they write to and I’ll go, “Ooh, I like that,” and I’ll put it on the mix. Sometimes I’ll take things off. I took off Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” because I liked it too much. It was distracting.

(Charlie Daniels is playing out of position on that list for now − clearly he doesn’t like being told what to do − but the others should work.) What else is on your list, from other writers?

I’ll have to do a reconstruction of it.

Do some liner notes.

Exactly. Liner notes. The Green Day song got added because I was writing a story about Tara Peck, a high school soccer star in Kansas City who was killed in a car wreck. Her mom was a nurse. Her mom was in the car, tried to give her CPR. I basically spent several days between Tara’s death and her funeral with her family and her best friend. They put together a playlist for her funeral and her mom sort of went through her closet, the whole thing. I was basically embedded with the family as I wrote this story, and all I remember is the last line: “She would have been so many things.” That was 10 years or so I guess. So they played that song at her funeral – it was her favorite song – so I put it on the mix.

See, it’s all connected. It’s not just a playlist. It’s not just a mix. There’s important stuff at work there. I have “Shadow Boxing” up (in which Thompson tracked down the boxer Jim “Sweet Jimmy” Robinson) and was reading that before we started talking, too.

That’s my favorite story.

Why?

Well, the persistence. I like that it worked. I mean, I chased that story for seven years. That’s an exaggeration because that’s not all I did, but every couple of months for a couple of days I would go look for Jim Robinson. And the thing that broke it open was, I figured out that he was in Miami. I write about this in the story, but I set up a 305 phone number and made up a flyer and put it up all over town, the last place he’d been seen. And I went home. And four days later the phone started ringing. It was just really interesting in terms of what it means to exist. It’s sort of a story about the effacement of memory and the nature of loss. My editor and I worked on that a lot. His name’s Jay Lovinger and he’s unbelievable. He’s a lion. He’s edited Gary Smith and David Halberstam and Hunter Thompson and Richard Ford. He was the managing editor at Life magazine and the No. 2 guy at Inside Sports. I’ve said this a lot but it’s true: He changed my life. The experience of doing “Shadow Boxing,” sort of walking around the block in the Bronx, where he lives, and talking about it – that’s a very, very special story to me.

And there are echoes of it in the Jerry Joseph story. How do you pronounce Joseph’s other name, (Guerdwich Montimere)?

GURD-witch Mont-a-meer.

Okay.

Although I slip up and still call him Jerry. It’s weird.

These stories sort of echo each other. They’re quest stories but they’re also about identity.

Identity comes up a lot in my stories. Because I like to write about place and all place is, is a way to code identity. People love a place as a sort of construct to pass things on. I wrote this thing about Nazareth, Texas, about the girls’ high school basketball team, and I’m sort of obsessed with this idea of reverse manifest destiny. Frank and Deborah Popper are professors – one’s at Princeton and one’s at Rutgers, they’re married, and they do all this incredible research about Buffalo Commons, but essentially – you’ve seen the end of “Dances with Wolves” where they have the quote, something like, “In 1890 the frontier closed.” The thing that’s interesting, the frontier is reopening. I mean there are counties now that were settled in this mad rush West – all these places settled in this mad rush West, and some of them are drying up and blowing away. If the central core of American identity is manifest destiny and if it turns out that we didn’t actually settle the continent in the way that we say we did, what does that mean? This is just a really interesting time for identity in America. The little towns are drying up and blowing away. If you’re from a place like Mississippi, you see it – everyone moves to Memphis, they move to Birmingham, they move to Atlanta, they move to Charlotte. All of the ways in which we learned who we are, they’re changing, and they’re changing very, very rapidly.

Do you look for stories that allow you to explore that, and are you interested in exploring that idea in a longer-form way, like in a book?

Not really. I mean my attention span is such that I’m sort of over it when I’m over it. You know?

Yeah. I do.

Maybe that’s bad but the last thing in the world I want to do is go revisit Jimmy Robinson. I mean that just sounds crushing to me.

It’s like you put all your energy into it for this one amount of time and burn yourself out on it.

Yeah, and then it’s over. And I want to move on to the next thing.

Jerry/Guerdwich: A lot had been written about the guy but no one had done a long-form narrative until Michael Mooney’s GQ piece – what did you want to do with your story that had not been done?

I love Michael’s piece. I thought he did a great job. And he also had a mission and I thought he nailed it. Everything that’s in the story I had, basically, when his came out, but I kept trying to fill the gap. I was really relieved that he didn’t have a couple of (my) people, because that would have killed (my) story. I remember when it came out – I was at dinner, I got a text message that it was out, I drove up to Off Square Books, I bought it, I drove back to Snackbar and I read it in the parking lot. And I immediately thought, “Wow, he nailed this.”

I was also relieved. There were so many different stories to tell and I think all of them are good. I just had to make sure he didn’t tell mine. That was the thing I was worried about. I was always locked into the twin-brother narrative. That was going to be my story no matter what.

The other thing was, I was coordinating with a television producer, so this was a TV piece too – I went to Texas as a print reporter, I went to Texas as a TV reporter, they went to Texas without me, I went without them, and so we were working on the story the whole time with Drew Gallagher, the producer, and then the people who shot it, the Texas Crew.

So it was a logistical challenge because the story existed – right now it exists in three forms. There’s the television story, the dot-com story that we’re talking about, and there’s the magazine story that’s totally different. The hardest part was sort of bringing it to the finish line in all of its manifestations. I’m glad we did. I could be wrong about this but I don’t think there’s anybody in media who’s doing it like this. Honestly, I think this is the first integrated newsroom. It’s not like having a photographer go shoot some video. It’s world-class producers and camera crews – it’s just an interesting thing that’s happening, and it’s cool to be a very small part of it.

The New York Times interactive team is doing some interesting stuff, but taking smaller pieces of big stories –

Yeah, but these are television networks. So it’s a little unfair. We have an enormous news-gathering operation – the walls are gone. Everyone talks to everyone. It’s totally exciting. It’s hard sometimes because you end up being the center of the hub and some of the logistics are difficult, but it’s fascinating if for no other reason than I have found out that a shot of tequila perfectly fits between the wings of an Emmy.

Good to know.

And you can spear the limes on the lightning bolts. It’s perfect.

So anyway, you knew you wanted to lock in on the twins narrative.

I wasn’t interested in “what happened in Texas.” I was interested in why. And then once I figured out the why it all sort of fell together. I thought the most interesting thing was that these two brothers switched lives, and I became obsessed with that. I have no idea whether that was the right call.

Not sure there is a right or wrong. You go with the line that speaks to you. At least it’s yours. It’s unlike anything else that’s out there –

Two people wrote really long magazine stories that didn’t overlap at all, which is a sort of testament to the complexity. The other thing that killed me on this, I wanted it to end with the trial. So we were waiting on the trial. I had a plane ticket for Texas and was all set, and two days before (I was supposed to leave) they pled it out. So the thing I had waited to be my climax was now gone.

You can never bet on a trial, though. They can always plead out.

I’d flirted with that thing, the trial, being the structure. None of this was written and I actually was lost for a while, trying to figure it out. The outline of this was especially difficult.

What did you do?

I had five or six hundred pages of typed notes and a huge stack of letters that (Montimere) and I had written back and forth and then, I don’t know, three, four, five hundred pages of public documents – I just carpet-bombed South Florida with (open-records) requests. The twins were juveniles, so their names were redacted, so you couldn’t search that way. So I basically got every address of where they’d ever lived and then filed (open-records requests) for every police call for every address where they’d ever lived.

I went through all the notes. The thing I always do is, I underline, I tab. I kept trying to go through the notes and write down on note cards everything I’ve underlined, but it just wasn’t working. I was 100 pages in, and I already had 300 note cards. I’m like, this is a disaster. So I went back to the Word doc of the notes and started making separate Word docs for everything that was related to either a certain idea or time period or character – they were all cross-referenced. I ended up with 30 different Word documents. Then I printed them all out and went back through them again and was able to outline. I mean, this was a nightmare.

Touch of the voodoo, maybe.

Voodoo’s one of those things I don’t believe in but that I don’t want to mess with, just in case.

In terms of structure, design played a cool role because your personal narrative plays out on the bits of “taped-up paper.”

Yeah, and thank God for that because in the outline those were called “Reporter’s Notebook.” Which I never liked. But you know how things happen – they’re in the outline and then they’re in the draft and then all of a sudden you’ve filed it and you’re like, “I hate these things.” It sounded cheesy, so I asked (the ESPN designers), I said, “Can you make them an actual notebook?” They’re like, “Yeah of course we can do that.”

The visuals flow nicely, whereas if you’d had a “Reporter’s Notebook” subhed –

It would’ve been needlessly meta.

Yeah. This solution is perfect because the “torn paper” is a visual cue that lets us know we’re back in your narrative. And then you can keep the other subheds, with the twins’ names and dates, which anchor us in chronological time. Easier on the reader.

And if you’ll notice we’ll call him “the twin,” instead of Guerdouin, because we worried about everyone getting confused. (Guerdouin and Guerdwich) had two names that were very strange but also similar. Somewhere an Associated Press editor died a little inside, because we went through every single reference to Guerdouin and changed it to “the twin.”

The change also sets up this eerie echo self, which is what a twin is.

Yeah. And it’s written as if they are one person.

In your opening sentence I like how you cue readers about exactly what kind of story they’re going to be getting with the phrase “weird true-crime story.”

This may be way too literal but I wanted people to know right off the bat that there was a crime and that it’s weird and there are gonna be twists and turns, and that it’s a mystery.

It’s a declaration. You’re establishing expectations: This may be a difficult story to unpack but at its essence it’s this.

You’re referencing a genre that they’re familiar with, so they’re on board from the beginning.

And the kicker of the opener – “In the beginning there was an impostor” – is kind of Biblical. It’s creation, it’s about self-creation. Echoes of identity.

The story was always called, when we had meetings or conference calls about it, “The Impostor.” On the whiteboard in my editor’s office in Connecticut, under my list of stories it was, “The Impostor.” Every time you can be reductive and simple, you should be it.

That’s what’s interesting about it – I don’t think you’re being particularly reductive with that line. What’s great about that seven-word sentence (seven also being a mystical number, by the way) is that there’s so much behind it. It’s a complicated idea.

A lot of things have to be true for someone to be an impostor. And it immediately poses a whole bunch of questions that you don’t have to ask because everyone else is already asking them, from “what is the nature of identity?” to “what the fuck?” I over-ask questions in stories – I go through and cut a lot of them, but I just think the beginning of a story should ask a question that the rest of the story shows the answer to. Sometimes I’m just so evangelistic about that. There are sentences in there that you’d want back after it runs, but in this one, I thought, made people ask questions.

You set up Part 1 with a short section called “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” a string of bumped quotes that functions almost like confessionals. You’ve got different people sort of stepping in front of the camera and saying who they think Guerdwich is. Everybody’s saying something different and it works.

I’d love to lie to you right now and take credit, but that was added just before we filed it, and it was entirely my editor’s idea. That was never the first section.

Really?

Yeah, and it changes the whole story. (Jay Lovinger and I) were on the phone and he said, “Something’s not right.” He called back later and said, “Here’s what you need to do: You need to pull a bunch of contradictory quotes that in effect put all of these different characters, like the blind men and the elephant, in a room arguing with each other. Because that’s what the story is.”

Yep.

He said it and I was like, “Oh my God.” Honestly, I did (the section) in 15 minutes. I knew what those quotes were gonna be. And then he flipped the order. He ended it with voodoo. I had ended it with the quote from the old basketball coach, about the JFK movie.

Why did he want to end with voodoo?

I think it was the punch in the face that he liked. If there’s a sentence he says to me more than any other it’s, “You’re stepping on your ending,” either in a paragraph, a section or a story. He’ll say, “Just stop. Don’t explain it.” And I have this sort of urge – I worked at a newspaper for a long time. I’m a newspaper guy. And so I think, “Well, what if they don’t get it?” He says, “Clarity isn’t God.” That’s not me. I want to hold somebody’s hand and explain it to them.

In newspapers we’re trained to close it out. But in this case, if you’d moved the voodoo line up somewhere within that montage and ended “I don’t think you’ll ever get a why,” the story shuts down, dead-ends. To me the reader could say, “Well, why am I even reading this then?”

Yeah, what’re we even doing? It’s funny, I’ve never even thought about why (Lovinger) said (to end the section that way), because when he says do something I just do it. You know how this works: Writers don’t trust editors up until the moment they earn the trust, and then you trust them implicitly. I’m so thankful for that relationship. It’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.

What was the original Part 1 opening?

“The Blind Men and the Elephant” was just inserted, so –

Oh, so the original start, just after the intro, was, “Two of the few certainties about Guerdwich Montimere are that he has a twin brother and that they are nothing alike.”

Yeah. Exactly.

The elephant sets up all the different possible answers and also creates a sense of chaos.

You’re getting questions. If you look at it, the story answers every one of those questions posed.

There’s a quote under “February 2007” – “The ball stops bouncing.” That’s sort of a transcendent quality of the whole thing: You’re gonna get found out, you’re gonna get old, you’re gonna die. It’s shorthand.

Yeah. What is it, “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.”

Nice.

There has to be a transcendent quality, some subtlety. What’s that Steinbeck quote? Something like, “A story has to be about everything or it’s about nothing.”

You hired an investigator in Haiti for this story. Why?

I’d just been to Haiti and wasn’t really looking to go back. I was gonna go to Haiti depending on what (the investigator) found. I just wanted someone to check first, before I flew to Haiti fishing.

How did that work? Did he send you tapes, or?

He sent me transcribed tapes and documents. He was unbelievable. He went to two different places and found me every family member in Haiti. He’s the one who got me the cellphone number for the dad. I wanted to know if someone could tell me for sure if the mom took Guerdouin to see a voodoo priest in Haiti right around the moment Guerdouin and Guerdwich started changing lives.

The mom is such an interesting character – now that you’ve had time to process all of this, what do you make of her?

There’s something odd that came through, and I still don’t completely understand what went on. From talking to sort of third-party people, she wasn’t really involved, but I don’t want to get in the business of insulting mothers. You know what I mean? Everything’s complicated.

Juxtaposed with Jimmie Wright (the Texas woman who took Montimere in as her own) she’s an especially interesting character. I wondered if you were tempted to make more of Jimmie.

I wrote the entire (earlier) magazine story only about Jimmie Wright. I didn’t leave stuff out of the main story, save it. She’s a fascinating person. She and (her husband) Danny are the only untarnished people in this whole thing.

And there’s interesting complexity and tension even within that relationship: She believes one thing about Jerry/Guerdwich and Danny believes another. That stuff about the lighthouses was great. She’s obsessed with lighthouses and the backstory is incredible. How’d you get it?

I was there and the house was covered in lighthouses and I asked why. I’m just like, “What’s up with all the lighthouses?” I’m a real Woodward and Bernstein. I’ll ask anything.

Not every writer asks, though.

You just cover yourself in the blanket of cute nosiness. You know? The true genius of Chris Jones is that he notices things and he always asks. So you end up with the girl in the flowered dress, or Roger Ebert’s wedding ring.

A lot of people notice details but don’t say anything, or, worse, they assume they know what the details mean. That’s dangerous, assuming that the lighthouses –

Yeah, that she always wanted to live in Nantucket, or something.

You reference a South Florida paper’s timeline of events –

To me there’s nothing more disingenuous than media, the most powerful force of dissemination of information in the world, pretending it doesn’t exist. People interact with the media. And to think that that doesn’t drive these things – this is my little diatribe but it makes me crazy. So you have the thing like with the Cambridge cops and Dr. Gates – you have satellite trucks camping out in each of their yards, yelling questions at them and their families, so somebody says something and then they air these things next to each other as if they’re arguing with each other, and then you have 6,000 television stations calling the mayor of Cambridge to give a press conference, and so he decides to do it all at once, and then the commentariat talk about should he have had a press conference. It’s not even an estate anymore, it’s a weather system. (Media presence is) driving the whole thing and pretending it doesn’t exist.

There’s this passage that functions as a sort of nut graf:

All these questions coalesce into one − crazy or con? − and in that reduction I finally understand that the most important thing Guerdwich Montimere and Jerry Joseph have in common is the reaction they inspire. People see what they want to see, maybe even what they need to see, and the longer they spend thinking about it, the more the focus turns inward. What does a name and a number mean? Do we really ever know anybody?

Up until very shortly before the story ran there was another sentence on the end of that, and it was, “Do we ever really know ourselves?” And I cut it because it just didn’t pass my own smell test. I could feel myself rolling my eyes at myself. Maybe I chickened out – I’m not sure that was the right call or not, but I just thought, this is just psychobabble –

The preceding sentence is enough.

Yeah, to me, that is the whole (story) – everyone was trying to see (Joseph/Montimere) through their own prism. I mean this may sound crazy but sometimes I Google his picture, just to make sure any of this was real. I go back and forth on the crazy or con, still.

A little of both, maybe.

Probably, as is everything.

Did those insights drive the narrative or did they bubble up out of you as you reported?

They were bubbling up out of me. None of that stuff was outlined, those sort of things. It would’ve just been “crazy or con?” in the outline. The reason I was wary about taking that (aforementioned) line out was because that’s what came out in the moment, and I sort of think that you should defer to how you feel in the moment. I had been thinking about all of these things.

There’s a layering of thinking here that gives the story heart.

Covering a bullfight in Mexico.

I try to seek out stories that make me think about things. Sometimes I’m drawn to ideas that are hard to wrestle into shape. Sometimes I kick myself because I’ve avoided a story because I thought the arc was too simple and I go back and read what someone else has done and they’ve just crushed it. And I realize I was wrong and the story wasn’t simple at all.

So if you did miss the meaning, or failed to think about it in the way you wish you’d thought about it, what happened there? Where did the breakdown happen? That’s happened to me too. You look back on some stories and think: I blew it.

It’s when you’re tired.

Yeah.

It’s when you’re tired.

Yes.

I’ve had a real long run – I’ve been on the road a lot. I have a vacation scheduled at the end of this month, and I’ll be a roaring freight train when I come back from vacation. But if you’re just tired, you just miss it. I just missed a great story and I’m so pissed at myself. Sugar Shane Mosley is a boxer who’s been a champion, who’s had doping things going on. I think he’s fortysomething years old and he fought sort of the younger version of himself Saturday night in Las Vegas. I watched that fight and you realize that you’re watching someone at the end or near the end of his career and at the end it looked to me like – he wasn’t even fighting to win, he was fighting just so he could walk out of the ring. There was something inspiring about it. I should’ve seen it. If I’d seen it two days before that, I could’ve been at that fight.

Totally get that. Don’t know what to say to make you feel better about that, so back to the thinking, which is probably 80 percent of writing: In all of your stories, not just this one, there’s something deeper at work than the basic arc of events.

You’re looking for stories about the larger human condition – that’s the prerequisite. It needs to be about something. It needs to be about something to me.

*The conversation has been edited lightly for clarity, length and, occasionally, for words that might displease our mothers. 

Adam Tanner: Gay Talese is an especially good choice for those seeking to study great writing. His 1966 story “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” and other stories, are credited in helping create New Journalism: deeply researched literature of fact enlivened with vivid storytelling. He has published 11 books including the 1969 book “The Kingdom and the Power,” about the history of the New York Times, where he was a reporter from 1956 to 1965. Over his career Talese has written for the Times, Esquire, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and others, and remains an active writer. He has influenced countless writers and journalists, including quite a number in the hall today.

We’ve paired him with a fine younger narrative writer who has a cult following of his own, Chris Jones, writer at large at Esquire and the new back-page columnist for ESPN The Magazine. He has won two National Magazine Awards for his long-form features and he has traveled from Toronto today to join us.

All of this has come together today in partnership with the Harvard Writers at Work lecture series. The lecture series is co-sponsored by the Harvard College Writing Program, the Harvard Review, Harvard Extension School and the Program in General Education, which brings together distinguished writers throughout the year.

Jones: Thank you very much to the Nieman Foundation for Journalism for having us today. How many of you are either writers or aspiring writers? Wow, there we go. Nonfiction? Fiction? Look at those people. They are not to be trusted.

[laughter]

Jones: We were just having coffee in the cafeteria, and Gay [was telling me he] is working on a piece for the New Yorker on Joe Girardi, the [Yankees’] manager. And I thought this might be an interesting way to talk about the process of writing and how you find stories. You spend so much time on a story. How do you know when an idea is good enough – is it good enough for a short piece, is it good enough for a long piece, is it good enough for a book?

Talese: I don’t think you know almost until the piece is published whether it’s publishable. I’ve been working on and off on this piece for six months for David Remnick of the New Yorker about, as you said, the manager of the Yankees, who by name is Joe Girardi. I think I know where I’m going, but what I do not know is how long I’ll be on the road. What I do now is what I did when I was your age or younger: I’m on the road a lot. I believe you have to be there. I don’t use the technology now any more than I did when I was a young reporter. When I went to the Times, beginning not as a reporter but as a copy boy back in 1953, a year after I got out of college at the University of Alabama, I was told by an old-time reporter who probably joined the paper in the 1920s, he said, Stay away from these telephones, stay away from these telephones, there are telephones all over the room. The telephone was the new technology, in this guy’s head. He said, You have to be there.

And I think that’s Step One in nonfiction reporting, whether it’s book length, magazine length, newspaper length, whatever. You have to be there. You have to see the people. Even if you don’t think you’re getting that much, you’re getting a lot more than you realize.

I had an assignment about a year and a half ago to write about an opera singer, and that involved traveling, being there, going to Moscow, going with this singer to Buenos Aries and Barcelona – Marina Poplavskaya is her name. So I had this woman, very active, very young and obviously very talented, and very difficult, and Remnick said, and [New Yorker articles editor] Susan Morrison said, What is it like to be on the road? Well I’m on the road all the time, and here was a writer talking about a singer on the road. What’s good about it is you get scenes.

I always liked being on the road. I always liked being out there. Parenthetically, I do not like the tape recorder and do not use it. The reason is, it brings you indoors. It promotes the idea of question and answer, question and answer, and it makes you sometimes subject to the easy availability of the spoken word verbatim. You tend to fall prey to the charm of that and the ease of that, the little plastic spinning wheels that give you everything but give you nothing really. Because what they give you is the first thing that comes into a person’s head in response to your questions. And the Q&A also takes away, I think, the largeness of the subject; it becomes narrowly defined by the Q&A, the little plastic thing on the desk or the coffee table. It’s convenient for a publisher who wants to cut costs because if you have a Q&A, a lot is achieved in terms of getting an article done in less time.

Jones: You mean writing [a piece] as a straight Q&A.

Talese: Yeah. The publisher is worried about cost, so you can’t go on the road. And what I do and what any person of my generation – [David] Halberstam and Tom Wolfe, all those people out of the ‘60s and ‘50s as I am – we’re on the road a lot. Of course it’s expensive, and you have to find ways to get people to allow you to go on the road. Back to Girardi. I had this idea. I actually had two ideas. One was easy, one is hard. The easy one, Tony Bennett. I was on the road with him. I went to Las Vegas, I went to Denver, and I went to watch him on the road, and then I came back and wrote a scene of him recording from an album with Lady Gaga of all things. That was not hard. And she’s really nice. I’m telling you, the woman you see photographed in these extravagant outfits that she concocts somehow with the help of some bizarre designer, she is really a very simple girl next door as Hefner would put it.

[laughter]

Talese: But Girardi’s difficult. A man who’s in fear of saying something wrong.

Jones: Very stiff.

Talese: Very stiff. Controlled. I started with Girardi – really it started with the old timers’ game at Yankee Stadium in the middle of July. I went mainly to see some of my old heroes, people I remember as ball players who are my age. [Talese is 79.] But Girardi was there as the manager of the team, [a] man of 46, and as I said, very careful, polite to a fault, but not much in the way that you have an insight into who he is. What interested me, he was a ballplayer, wasn’t a great ballplayer but for 13 years had been a ballplayer, with four different teams: Chicago Cubs two times, New York Yankees, the Saint Louis Cardinals and the Colorado Rockies. Before he became a major league ball player, of course, he was a minor league player, and before that he was a college player. He graduated from Northwestern in engineering. Very few ball players are college graduates. It’s unlike football and basketball; college is not the minor league of the sport. In baseball they start usually after high school and maybe have one year of college. I thought, [Girardi] has an interesting experience because he’s educated to a degree, educated as a ball player, minor league to major league, and never was a star, and played with stars. And I love writing about people who were never stars. I mean I’ve written about stars but usually when I write about a star like Joe DiMaggio, it’s when his era [is] over.

People who teach courses in narrative nonfiction, they often will mention DiMaggio or Frank Sinatra – but that was in the era, they had already been famous or [were] now not so famous, or hoped to be famous again. People I like to write about are people who’ve had a history of ups and downs. And Girardi suited me, I thought, in that way.

But the deal is you have to hang around; the art of hanging out, is the way I phrase what I do. So I started hanging around with Joe Girardi the first time at old timers’ day. Then I started going to games. One of the perks of this profession is you get free tickets to the press box. But what’s in the press box? Fifty-five years ago I was in the press box – when I was 24, 23, 22, I was a sportswriter with the New York Times. That was my first job and I remember how we in the press box used to cover the game, and now I see a whole different world of covering the game. In fact now I see sportswriters not even looking at the game – they’re seeing the game on their laptop and their eyes are not on the field. They’re very focused. I remember when I was in the press box in the 1950s, we would not really see the game; we would see more than the game. The most impressive thing, I remember, being in the press box in the 1950s, was all the drinking that was going on in the press box – it was the era of alcoholism in journalism. You don’t see any drinking going on anymore. You don’t see any smoking. Fornication is out. Everything is out.

Jones: It’s definitely frowned on in the press box.

Talese: One game I saw, I followed the team, 12 games on the road, I remember one time I saw in the middle of the game, some relief pitcher came out of the bull pen, and as he came running out the left fielder of the Yankees, who knew him, they sort of waved. They had been teammates a couple of years before, and I thought, This familiarity, this little gesture – those little things you miss on television. The modern day [sportswriters] see the game on the screen in front of them and they push buttons and they have the histories of the players and everything they want, and they get a lot of information very quickly, but they get it from the narrow [confines] of the laptop screen. I’m off the subject already, but I do think one of the problems of journalism today and maybe the problem of the Nieman Fellows here in this room is how we are narrowing our focus and becoming indoors in terms of internalizing our reporting. The detail is what I think we’re missing. See, the idea is to see all you can see and hang around as much as you can with the people that interest you. Well how do you do that? How do you do that when sometimes people are not interested in you seeing what you want to see and what they don’t want to show?

Jones: Girardi is very difficult because he doesn’t reveal anything. He’s covered by hundreds of people every day –

Talese: He is. And he also has a director of publicity with him at all times.

Jones: – and yet you have somehow wrangled – is this a secret? Gay is going to Peoria to sit with Girardi while he visits his father, who has Alzheimer’s. So how are you the guy in that room when there’s 100 guys –

Talese: Well what it is you develop – from the time you enter into an eye-contact relationship you have to first of all make a pretty good impression, meaning, I always thought, the Italian expression bella figura, making a good impression, a good appearance. You have to sell yourself, and how you do that depends on your personality. I approached Girardi’s press agent first of all, and said I had an assignment from the New Yorker to do a profile and [that] Girardi had never been done anywhere, I don’t think, that I thought presented him as he is. What I wanted to do was answer the question How did Joe Girardi become Joe Girardi? Who is Joe Girardi? What is the inside of this man? What is it about him that made him at age 46 the manager of the Yankees? I said, Can I come to a few games? I said, I’d just like to have the privileges that a sportswriter has. I said, I won’t ask any questions of the players; I don’t want to talk to the players . The players aren’t gonna tell you anything anyway. I said at some time I’d like to talk to Joe Girardi when he has the time, but not now. So they gave me a press pass for every game I wanted to go to. After the game Girardi gave to all the reporters who covered the team about 15 minutes explaining what happened in the game, why he changed pitchers, this and that. I just sat through this. I never asked any questions, and after the game was over I went home to the hotel. Did this for about two months.

Finally when the season was over, the Yankees did not win the World Series. I asked if I could talk to him for an hour or so – he lives in a place called Purchase, about an hour or so outside Manhattan – he said, I come to Yankee Stadium once a week, I can talk to you for an hour maybe, on Mondays I usually come in. So I saw him for three Mondays in a row for one hour. I don’t take notes. I just wanted to ask him some questions. The press agent of the Yankees, who was very careful, says, We’re gonna tape it, is that okay with you? I say, Well sure, you can tape it; in fact why don’t you tape it and let me have a copy and anything he doesn’t want to have said or [wants to] say it better, it’s fine. So we had this tape recorder and I’m talking to Girardi for an hour, did that three times. And what I said, I said, I want to start with who are your parents and who are your grandparents. He didn’t know much about his grandparents. I said, Well is there anybody who knows about your grandparents? He says, I have an older brother, eight years older. I say, Okay fine, what’s his name, what’s his phone number? Lives in Chicago. Fine, I’ll look him up.

I start talking to Girardi the second time and third time about his young days in school and about the days before he went to Northwestern on a baseball scholarship. I finally said, You know, I’d like to see these places – you say you were born in Peoria and you went to Northwestern, but I’d like to see Peoria. He said, Well the only time I’m gonna see my father – he has Alzheimer’s and doesn’t know who I am but because he’s the most influential man of my life, I still like to go see him regularly, and I’m gonna do it Thanksgiving. I said, Well I can’t interfere with your Thanksgiving, but if I went out the day after Thanksgiving would you then show me where you born – the house is still there? He says, Yes it’s still there and the school is still there and he said my parents owned a little restaurant at one time and the building’s still there. I said, Great, I’d like to just see these places. He said, Well, come out to Peoria. I wanted to go out the Friday after Thanksgiving, [but] there’s only one flight and it arrives at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. It’ll be dark by then. So I have to go out on Thanksgiving. My wife wasn’t happy about that but she understands. I’ll be in Peoria Friday morning, so when he arrives, Joe Girardi, he’ll show me around.

Now why is it important? I just feel there might be something in his upbringing – particularly I’m anticipating a scene with his father, who cannot communicate with him. I might be able to find in, just being in that town and seeing places that Joe Girardi will describe, I might be able to have a scene of him driving through Peoria, 46-year-old manager of the Yankees, where he was once a sandlot player, grade school player, a man with a very active father, a father who he told me who used to be a bricklayer. I looked at Joe Girardi and said, Look at those massive arms –

Jones: Yeah he’s got giant hands.

Talese: Giant hands! And those arms. He said, I got them because I helped my father build bricks, lay bricks. So there’s a scene of brick building in the background. I love that.

Jones: That scene with the dad. Do you have an image of that, going into it?

Talese: I don’t want to anticipate too much because – sometimes when you anticipate it doesn’t happen. You just have to be there, and if it happens you see it, and if you see it, remember it. You don’t record it. I don’t take notes in front of people but I do carry shirt boards. The shirt board as you know is in the back of a shirt – I cut it up with a scissor and trim it like this, and I do write little notes on these. Never in front of the person. But I’ll go to this hospital or whatever it is, wherever Joe Girardi’s father is registered, and I might later on write something down. I might write just the order of things: I might say we went from high school to grade school and then we went to that restaurant and then we went to this old age home, whatever it is. Then I’ll go back after I’ve left Girardi, or whoever I’m with, there’s a private time when I’m back at my hotel and I’ll review the day and I’ll write it. If I have a typewriter I’ll type it out. I’ve always typed out my notes before I go to bed, every night, whatever I remember that day: the date, where I was, why I was there, what I saw, what I remember.

Granted, the direct quotes I can’t rely on my memory for that. But what I will do, if there’s something interesting I’ll return to the person the next day and say, for example, Joe, yesterday when we were talking about your father and how you remember helping him lay bricks or driving in the truck when he was listening to the Chicago Cubs and that’s how you became such a fan of Ron Santo or whatever – here’s what I heard you say, or I don’t know what you mean by this. Sometimes people enlarge upon what they said and you get a better quote than the one you missed.

I once interviewed a prizefighter, Floyd Patterson, and I asked him, What’s it like to be knocked out? What’s it really like? In comic strips you have stars over the head. He started telling me and I started writing it down. This was for the magazine Esquire. And I went over it again and again and again, and I’m writing it this time in front of him, and I said, Now Floyd, when you’re first knocked out you don’t feel anything but then you look around the room and the ring and you see people under the ropes and through the ropes – finally I had this long, long quote, and in a way it was something that was almost co-authored between us. I was writing and he became a partner. I think that’s something that is very honorable about nonfiction, where to a degree you affiliate with and you partner with the person you’re interviewing. Not that they ever have any view of what you write or editorship privileges, certainly not. However you can and should build a trusting relationship with the person, and to a point where your confidence in your relationship is so trustworthy and so open, you can actually write in front of them.

Jones: The best interviews are the ones where each person forgets who the other is.

Talese: Yeah.

Jones: That you’re no longer the reporter, and I’m no longer Floyd Patterson, we’re just guys talking about –

Talese: That’s true.

Jones: Is that the goal, though?

Talese: That is the goal. And as I said, every night I type up – in the case of Frank Sinatra, for example, I had 33 days on that story, 33 dates. And each day might have two or three typed pages representing the total experiences of that day for me: what I remember, what I felt, what Sinatra was doing, what he wasn’t doing. I was describing as an observer on the scene, somewhat distant but still on the scene. After I’ve amassed all this material I go over it day by day by day and I summarize everything. So I have 33 summaries of 33 sets of notes from 33 days of being on the road. With those summaries I’m also reviewing once more, and once more, and once more what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard. And out of this becomes a kind of connection between the whole 33-day experience, and I see scenes. We all see scenes. When you’re on the road there are things there that are really scenic, if you’re on the road, if you’re outdoors. Well, sometimes when you write them, when you begin to write them, those scenes take on a sharpness, a focus, a particular specificity.

Jones: You mean as a means to illustrate –

Talese: Yeah. Yeah. Even as a young reporter I would think, Why can’t I do what short-story writers do or as novelists do, which is write scenes? I was thinking scenically because the influence I had was from the great short-story writers that I read in college. When I first came to New York as a copy boy I’d never heard of The New Yorker, but when I came to New York I heard of it and I started reading. I’d read John Cheever and John O’Hara and Irwin Shaw – my favorite writer – I started reading F. Scott Fitzgerald stories, Hemingway stories, Carson McCullers stories, and I started thinking, Why can’t I write a magazine piece like a short story, without changing the names? The short story writer gave me scenes, and I thought, Why can’t I do this in a magazine article? It’s the same length, 4,000 words, 5,000 words. So I want to write short stories with real names. That’s what I want to do. So I’m already thinking, What’s the short story of Joe Girardi? Where do you begin? Well I haven’t gotten there yet, but it may well be this trip to Peoria. Maybe I have within my pile of typed notes back home in New York stuff that will be much more interesting when I review it than it was when I was actually there with it.

Jones: So in retrospect –

Talese: You see the whole picture. And what I like to do in this form of writing that we’ll call short stories with real names, I like to move back and forth in time, and if you do enough research you can go from the boyhood to a time when this guy, this Joe Girardi character, first day in the major leagues, which in this case was the Chicago Cubs, and then he was sent down the next year to the minor leagues, and the distinction between the major leagues and the minor leagues. He’s a perfect case of describing, among other things, perseverance. A sense of failure or demotion. Rising again to the major leagues, hoping you can stay there. All the stuff that all ball players but also all people in all lines of work go through. So these messages or these instances of success or demotion are very relevant to the life of anyone, including writers, who sometimes don’t get assignments or, like in the minors, rejection slips.

All my pieces do deal with the history of the upbringing of the person and how that influences the individual that’s the focus of your story. And after I’ve organized it I actually put on my little corkboard, the Styrofoam board that runs across my desk, I pin these little cards that give me a sense of direction. It’s a form of choreography. It’s step by step by step. The opening scene is this. The second scene is this. Third, fourth, fifth, all the way across. So I have that article gradually taking shape visually. It starts with digging up, excavating, then it’s organizing, then it’s doing the choreographic progress from beginning to middle to end. And then the writing, the opening scene, I rework the sentences and try to make it as clear –

Jones: You write in longhand, right?

Talese: Yeah. On yellow line pads, sometimes in pencil, then I go from yellow line pads to a typewriter. I have an old computer –

Jones: It’s like, this big, right?

Talese: Yeah it’s as big as a Volkswagen – the advantage is I can erase very easily. I’ve succumbed to the technology to that point. I don’t have to get my little crummy eraser that falls down into the typewriter and clogs up the roller. This is better.

Jones: A lot of your process seems to be designed to slow you down. The reporting is intensive, the writing it seems like you give yourself time to think, the longhand forces you to slow down. Do you think that’s important to how your stories come out?

Talese: I think it is. I think it’s necessary. Maybe every writer in this room or aspiring writer wishes we had been more productive, wishes we’d been more prolific. I say that and I’ve said that, but I don’t believe that. So you can’t believe what people say; that’s why the tape recorder’s no good.

Jones: I’m starting my career all over again.

[laughter]

Talese: No, it’s just that we work as best we can. I want to do a couple of things. One, I want to do what the old gents who shaped me up for journalism at the New York Times told me you have to do, those old guys said, You’d better get it right. Get it right. Take the time, get it right. That hammered into me and it’s been there. I’m 79 and I hear it as I did when I was 21. Secondly, after you’ve gotten it right, then how [do] you go about communicating it to the reader? That’s where creativity takes its role in nonfiction: storytelling. We didn’t have terms like “narrative nonfiction” back then or “the New Journalism” or whatever Tom Wolfe called it – it isn’t that, but it is getting [it] right and then being a storyteller. And that means you have to have characters.

When I worked on the New York Times in the old days those guys that got it right weren’t necessarily lyrical figures in the world of literature – they were boring. They got it right but they were the paper-of-record people. And if you weren’t a dazzling stylist it didn’t make a bit of difference; in fact they suspected anything that might be called a stylist in those days. I would read the Herald Tribune in my free time and see the freedom they had – it was a sinking newspaper, I think it went out of business in the mid-‘60s, but Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe and those other guys were really having a lot of fun. I wasn’t having a lot of fun at the Times because there was the pressure of the editors and the tradition of the paper to get it right, and anything that was of a style was suspect: You’re piping it, you’re faking it, you’re writing fiction. And I was accused of writing fiction. I never did write fiction, but I was accused by some people on the New York Times: the old-fashioned traditional guys that I respected but didn’t want to emulate in any way because they were so boring. But I wanted to be a reporter and a story writer like some of those great short stories that I used to read.

I go about it now as I did then, so I haven’t changed. You asked me when we had a cup of coffee, How about your physical bearing, does age, you asked something along the lines of, Does age matter? I don’t think I’ve learned anything in terms of technique; it’s as hard now as it was for me then. The only thing that would matter to me because of my age is if I couldn’t travel.

Jones: If you couldn’t be there.

Talese: If I couldn’t be there. Then I’d have to get a job teaching at the Nieman school or someplace. Will you have me?

[laughter]

Jones: The part of the writing process that no one ever seems to talk about is the release of it. At some point you let it go to your editor and then to readers. A lot of writers – don’t take offense to this but you have received criticism sometimes for your work, even work that later became beloved – obviously you work so hard on something. How do you deal with criticism? I’m thinking with the Internet, it’s a bad time for self-esteem. Like, do you sort of say to yourself, Well I wrote “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” so you can suck it? What’s your defense mechanism?

Talese: I didn’t write for The New Yorker until recent years, but I knew the writers a long time ago. One of them was A.J. Liebling. When I was a sportswriter I’d go to prizefights and I’d meet A.J. Liebling of The New Yorker and I’d meet Norman Mailer and George Plimpton – all those persons that I met [were] not at the PEN Club but at the prizefights. And Irwin Shaw, I got to know him, too. They told me they were rejected often by The New Yorker. So Irwin Shaw would be turned down, and the story would wind up in another magazine. So you have to, as a writer, even if you have a certain stature or familiarity with the people who are your editors or bosses, they may turn you down. And I’ve had that. I’ve had that. That’s one thing you have to deal with.

And of course criticism is very hard, but on the other hand particularly we in journalism are so accustomed to being critical and not at all to being criticized. I mean journalists are too thin-skinned.

I don’t have an agent for magazine pieces because there’s no money in it. So I pitch ideas, and since I used to write for Esquire a lot back in the ‘60s and ‘70s – I had an idea about three or four years ago, when the new guy went in, the guy you work for, David Granger, and I called him up and I said I wanted to know if I could do a piece that I’d written in the 1960s. In the 1960s there was this great movie star, Peter O’Toole. I was sent to London and later to Ireland to follow him around – it was a great experience because he was one of the most intelligent persons I’ve ever met in my life. The most fun I’ve ever had was interviewing Peter O’Toole. I think it was published in ’63. Then around 2003 or ’4 or ’5 O’Toole had been in some minor role – any great actor later on does character roles as his or her time as a superstar as over – and I thought I’d like to go back and do another story on Peter O’Toole.

Here’s Gay Talese 50 years later, and I had saved all my notes. I save my notes for everything – I have them on file – so I could easily go back and get my notes. And I pitched the idea to the editor of Esquire. He wasn’t interested. I thought, That shit, he should’ve given me a chance. The point is, you are never so remote from rejection. And what do you do about it? Well I didn’t do anything about it. Because what can you do? It wasn’t a great idea, but it was a pretty good idea because any serious journalist, whether you’re a magazine writer or a book writer, should know the story never ends. You can always revisit your past work – enrich it, extend it. There might be something interesting to say about that subject, that person.

I’ve revisited many subjects, even the books. I once wrote a book about the building of the Verrazano Bridge. It was published in 1964. Took me three years to do it. I was still working for the Times. Did it in my spare time. Then in 2003 someone wanted to reprint the book, some small publishing company – it wasn’t a bestseller, it was a nice little book about this bridge construction. I said, I want to go back and interview some of the people who might still be alive, those hard-hat-wearing people working at high altitudes to build bridges, swinging from the cables, all that stuff. So I go back in 2003 and there are about 25 people still alive, and a few are still working in high-altitude construction. And a few of them told me, said, After we finished that bridge in ’64 we went and built the World Trade Center. I said, Well Jesus how did you feel when the thing went down in about two hours in 2001? And one guy said, I wasn’t surprised; it was a piece of junk we built. The World Trade Center was constructed, one guy told me in so many words, like a birdcage. What they did, they wanted maximum rentable space in those two buildings, and they didn’t care about solid construction. They said, When we built the bridge those terrorists bombs could hit the bridge and bounce off like butterflies. He said, Even the construction of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, those planes wouldn’t have gone crashing through the Empire State Building, they would’ve hit it but they wouldn’t go through it and knock the thing down. So they were saying. This was interesting. So I wrote about this in this new edition.

Every story you write, you can do that. There’s a new development and sometimes a learning experience as well.

Jones: Something instructive about your work is your touch with minor characters. They’re often the best sources in your material – the wisdom of the flunky or the insight that you get from the guy who just hangs around. Sometimes when you’re writing about someone famous in particular I imagine the best stuff is from the people –

Talese: That absolutely is true, absolutely is true. They’re minor in the sense of [not] being newsworthy – you can’t put them on the cover of a magazine, but they can be – I mean I think most of my work is about minor characters. It’s not about Sinatras but all those other people around them.

Jones: Like DiMaggio’s Lefty O’Doul.

Talese: Yeah Lefty O’Doul. And my whole book on the New York Times, there’s not a major character in that whole book. No such thing as a minor character. That’s what I learned from fiction. These fiction writers are really writing about people you never heard of, that’s what the magic –

Jones: Well because they’re invented, right? They have no history.

Talese: So if you get to know your characters well and introduce them with your writing well enough that the reader will identify with them, or at least have a sense of them through your skill as a writer and a reporter, you’ve achieved much of what a fiction writer does. You’re not creating or imagining anything but you’re getting so deep into the personality of the people you’re writing about that they take on the fictional characteristics, meaning they seem like the work of the imagination of the writer. If you’re a fair-minded journalist, [this] should not be part of anything except your efforts as a researcher and your skill with being descriptive without distorting anything.

[Jones opens it up to questions.]

Q: Can you talk about establishing a level of trust with the people you cover? How do you handle the issue when you have material you know the person will not like?

Talese: If I learn things that might well be embarrassing … I discuss it.

Jones: You mean with the subject.

Talese: Yeah. When I spend so much time with people and this develops into a kind of friendship and they allow me to meet their family or go to their home or in this case go to Peoria with Girardi in mind, and if I learn from them that something in my judgment will bring discredit upon them – while I’m never writing with the endorsement of the people; I keep myself separate but I also know I’m not a separate person in the sense that I have a conscience about other people – I will tell them: This is what I heard. I’ll tell them, It might bring a lot of misunderstanding. So the question is, Did I understand you properly? And do you understand that if we use this there might be people who’ll want you to quit your job or will drive you out of office? I find that is a very good practice. Do I lose wonderful stuff? I don’t think I lose that much stuff. Because you know what you can do often? You can find another way of writing the same thing. And sometimes how well it’s written – whatever it is, however delicate, however potentially offensive it might be, if it’s written carefully, gracefully, that makes it clear without being bombastic, you can get away with it.

I’ll give you one example. When I was interviewing some of the New York Times people for the book “The Kingdom and the Power,” I remember I had an interview with an elderly man who used to be the publisher. His name was Arthur Hays Sulzberger. He is the grandfather of the guy that’s publisher now. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who was the publisher when I worked there, had a notorious reputation for being a womanizer. He was married to the boss’ daughter, Iphigene Ochs, who was the daughter of Adolf Ochs, who died in 1935 and left this daughter as the only heir, and she married Arthur Hays Sulzburger, who became the successor to the publisher of the New York Times. And even though he married well and owed his position to that marriage he also had one affair after another, and one was with a famous movie actress, Carole Lombard. Everybody knew it in the office. Well I’m interviewing him about a year before his death. He was in his home. His wife Iphigene wasn’t there, but there was a good-looking nurse that was catering to Mr. Sulzberger. Mr. Sulzberger was in a wheelchair and he had on this very wonderful silk robe, and he’s a handsome guy, looked like Fredric March, if you remember, the stylistic classic matinee idol grown older. And I’m talking to Mr. Sulzberger about the history of the paper and the nurse comes in with a pill. She carries this little tray and she gives him a glass of water and she’s got on a nice starched uniform, with beautiful – nice body, good hair, she’s slender, and young – and as he took the pill he’s looking at her all the way. I thought, That guy doesn’t give up. And I wanted to write that scene. The way I described it was, He had an eye for an ankle. That’s all you have to know. That’s all you need. So underwriting is always a good course to take if you want to do something like that, rather than insult an old letch, which he was.

Q: You mentioned earlier about Esquire in the ‘60s and the ‘70s. I’m curious about what you think of the evolution of Esquire.

Talese: I would like [Chris] to deal with that – I don’t mind talking about it, but I’m an outsider and I wouldn’t know – if you’re sincerely interested in the right answer, this is the better resource than me. What I think happened to magazines – much of society has become just smitten with celebrity, overwhelmingly obsessed with fame and celebrity. At newsstands you see lines of magazines and more than half of them have pictures of people you recognize because they’re all movie stars. So I think it must be very difficult for young people such as those here to write for magazines unless you’re writing about celebrity. I wouldn’t want to really write about these movie stars all the time, although some of them are probably interesting. My one experience was with Peter O’Toole but he was so special in terms of being intelligent, so it was a pleasure, dealing with him. I don’t know. Tell us if there’s any difference.

Jones: No, it’s hard. I wrote a story about Roger Ebert, which I worked really hard on, and we had a very dramatic portrait of Roger – he’d had cancer – I pushed really hard for [the portrait of his face] to be the cover. The hard truth is, if there isn’t a celebrity on the cover no one buys it. And that is just a fact of the business. But you do [celebrity profiles] so that you can do the 8,000-word piece on Roger Ebert. It’s like donuts and broccoli: You put the donuts at the front and the broccoli at the back, and the stuff that you’re really proud of is the stuff that’s at the back of the book. It’s a weird dance. Like Gay’s saying – if you put some of those great covers from the ‘60s, like the black Vietnam war cover or the Andy Warhol –

Talese: Yeah.

Jones: – or Muhammad Ali with arrows, no one’s picking up that magazine. It’s gotta have Lady Gaga on it.

Q: Good short stories with true names involve a lot of investment, and I wonder how you deal with that investment…

Talese: I just become not obsessed with it but very committed to doing all the research at whatever expense of time and travel. And sometimes it’s not worth it. I had an experience where I went to China once to write about a woman who was a soccer player, and I spent six months, and I couldn’t sell it to anybody. I tried sell it to Sports Illustrated because I knew the editor; I knew the owner. I couldn’t sell that story anywhere. I did put it in a book of mine. One thing about books, sometimes you can dump into a book that you couldn’t publish in a magazine. I wrote about that in “A Writer’s Life.”

Sometimes you can’t ever know what is worth what. In one way, years later [an unpublished story] will work out in a different way. I don’t think you’re ever wasting your time when you think you’re wasting your time. In one way I can say I waste a lot of time; it’s part of my occupation; I’m an occupational time waster because so much of what you do doesn’t immediately measure up. There’s a terrible expression: the bottom line. There’s no such thing. First of all you have to have belief that what you’re doing is important. And I thought that when I was a cub reporter. I really thought what I was doing was important. I thought, I am a reporter. And I worked for a very important institution, the New York Times. I’d be interviewing these people and some of them were powerful and famous and rich, and I never felt that what I was doing was inferior to what they were doing – in fact I felt what I was doing was superior because I thought, What I’m doing is trying to get the truth, and I’m talking to a bunch of liars. I mean these people are in professions that tolerate lies much more than journalism does. I’ve said this a dozen times but the pleasure and the honor and respect for the profession of journalism that I always had as a kid and have now even more so is because I was in the only occupation that tried not to lie. If you lie, you get kicked out. And the people who kick you out are your colleagues; it’s not somebody on high. You lie on any newspaper, I don’t care if it’s a great newspaper or a struggling newspaper, you’re probably gonna be thrown out. In the case of the Times when they had the super-liar Jayson Blair five or six years ago, not only does he get thrown out but they [also] threw out the top editors, both of them, and boy if that doesn’t bring pride to a journalist nothing will.

Jones: In journalism school you’re sometimes taught that objectivity is the goal. It’s horsecrap, because when you do the kind of work that Gay does or that I try to do, and you spend weeks or months with someone you’re going to form an opinion. What counts, I think, and I think Gay will agree with me, is not objectivity, it’s truth.

Talese: It’s truth.

Q: I was wondering how you go about determining the structure or organization of a piece, or if you wait till you start writing.

Talese: Sometimes it comes to you right away. For example, I mentioned the opera singer. When I went to Moscow in September of 2010, I think it was, when I went there I was going to see this opera singer so she could show me around her hometown. I had never been to Moscow. The news on the front page of all the newspapers at that particular time was that Moscow and much of Russia was not only experiencing a heat wave but there were [also] a lot of forest fires, and smog all through the city. The day before I was supposed to get on this plane to Moscow from New York the opera singer called and left a message and said, Don’t come, my throat hurts, I’m gonna get out of this town. I didn’t listen; I just went anyway. I wanted to go. When I got there, the plane was landing and I could smell from the altitude, I could smell the smoke. I landed and I had a cab drive me to the hotel, and I made a phone call telling her I’d arrived. She said, I’m sorry you came.

The next day she did come to the hotel and said, I have to get out of here because I’m suffering so much and I collapsed last night – so she started complaining and said she collapsed. And I thought, This is the story. Here it is, the opera singer who is choked by the smog and collapsed. I asked her to describe it and not only describe it, I said, Can I go to your house? So she took me to her mother’s apartment, and I had her go through the whole scene. And she said the night before she’d fallen on the floor and her mother tried to help her and there was no ice because the electricity had gone out in the apartment, and she said she had a chilled bottle of white wine that was still cool. And she said she put this chilled bottle of wine under her neck, and I thought, This is the opening scene, and it was the opening scene.

In the case of the opera singer it’s recreated, but I was at the place where she collapsed, in a bedroom in the central part of Moscow. In the Sinatra case he’s got a cold and is feeling bad and there’s a scene in the pool room where he’s in a confrontation. So getting the idea of how to begin – I’m sure [Chris] could give examples as well, but you’re just there. You have to see it. And you have to think in terms of scenes. It’s just like a film director – when you go to a movie there’s an opening scene and a second scene and a third scene. I once met Francis Coppola when he was doing a film called “Tucker,” about the maker of automobiles. I met Francis Coppola largely through my wife’s familiarity with his wife, Eleanor Coppola, and when I was in California we were guests at Coppola’s house and he was making “Tucker,” and he showed me how he was making this film, with 3-by-5 cards going across his big bulletin boards. And that’s the way I write magazine pieces. But these scenes are something that you have to recognize, as I recognized the pool scene with Sinatra or the collapsed opera singer in Moscow. Those must sometimes be researched – you have to do some work describing the place, describing the situation, asking for a recollection of what was said if you didn’t hear it yourself. I heard it in the case of Sinatra but in the case of Marina Poplavskaya I didn’t hear anything she said. She said she told her mother such and such and her mother said such and such, and she picked up the phone and called her boyfriend. I got it from Maria herself, and I went over it again and again.

Q: On the same note, you don’t outline.

Talese: Is he talking to you?

Jones: He’s talking to me.

Talese: Go ahead.

Jones: Do you want to have a fight?

[laughter]

Talese: No, tell us how you do it. The question is, How do you outline? And you don’t outline. How come?

Jones: In the 70th anniversary of Esquire “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” was named the best story that was in the magazine, ever. Esquire published a little booklet that included the story and also included pictures of your shirt boards with your outline, and if you haven’t seen Gay’s outlines they’re like maps to Narnia – there’s arrows and lists and diagrams. And I remember looking at that and thinking, I’m doing it wrong. Because I don’t outline. I use my memory as my edit. If I remember it then it’s an important scene. And if I remember the details of that scene that’s what counts. I don’t think there’s any one way to do this. I hope there isn’t, because if so one of us is wrong. [But] it can be both ways, [right]?

Talese: It can be.

Jones: It’s whatever process works for you. I just have to ask, when was the first time you wrote on a shirt board?

Talese: When I was a reporter at the New York Times – shirt boards have been around longer than I have, people throw them away – they’re trash in most people’s estimation. When I first started there were no tape recorders and reporters carried rolled up copy paper, and I found the copy papers too floppy. And there were also notepads, but the notepads I didn’t like because they had wire and it would always get caught on the inside of my jacket. So shirt boards were perfect because it slips right out and they’re smaller than a pad, and no little wire to catch. Here [removes shirt boards from breast pocket of suit] I have enough for a magazine piece, at least for one day’s work.

Q: I’m a Nieman fellow, and a number of us in [Williams’ Narrative Writing] class [at the Nieman Foundation] – and I should say I’m a news reporter, so narrative is quite strange to me – we had a big discussion about the very ending of “Frank Sinatra” where you describe Sinatra stopping at a red light and he sees a girl in the sidewalk, and their eyes meet. We wondered how you did that because the whole story is about you looking at him from afar because he didn’t actually agree to be interviewed. So were you in the car with him or were you standing on the sidewalk or did you make it up?

Talese: No, I talked to the woman and she described what she saw. The piece on Joe DiMaggio was the same sort of thing – he looks through a window and sees a blonde outside a fisherman’s wharf. Well I did see that blonde. It was near the restaurant that DiMaggio at that time owned. He’s looking out the window and I saw him and I saw her, and I recreated that. It’s not hard to do.

Q: I was wondering how you decide how much of yourself to put into a story.

Talese: Sometimes I feel you have to put first person because you have to explain – sometimes you’re the only witness to what you’re writing about. The opera singer, I use first person in explaining to the reader how, since I was trying to write about an opera singer on the road and how difficult it is sometimes to get from place to place, going from opera to opera, having to book her own flight and pick up her luggage and get a taxi cab to go here and there, just the general process of being both a performer and a traveler, I felt I had to write about my experience because I was with her, and I was witnessing her growing angry at what was going on around her. She’s not a volatile person but a person who doesn’t suppress her disappointment, if not her anger; she can let you know if things aren’t going well. I had to say what I saw. I remember one time she was so angry at this hotel management that she decided to change hotels, and when the porter wouldn’t take her luggage on a trolley across the street she took the trolley and pushed that damn thing herself across the large boulevard, over the little train tracks. I watched that. I write about that. Other times I think you get in the way. The reader doesn’t want to read about you unless you’re central to the story.

Jones: You also use third person though, right? In DiMaggio you used “the man.”

Talese: That’s right! That’s interesting. DiMaggio threw me out of the restaurant. And I didn’t write “me” because if I had written in first person in the beginning of that article I’d almost be stuck with myself and then I had little [role] to play in that article except in the beginning. What the beginning was about, I had shown up uninvited at the DiMaggio restaurant. I thought I had his okay to talk to him. I wrote to him and I thought he said, Come out. And we had him being offended that I showed up without getting final clearance from him. He wanted me to leave, and I did leave, but I just said “some man from New York” [was asked to leave]. I wanted to be a diminished person. I wanted the eye of the reader, the camera, to be always on him. And I leave, as I’d been told I should. So I left. I go back to the parking lot. I had a rented car. I was going to go back to my hotel and think about what to do, because I’d lost the story. Then I was surprised that a car comes up and stops and the window goes down, and this man that turns out to be Joe DiMaggio, who’d just thrown me out, says, Do you have a car? I said yes. He says, Oh. I would’ve given you a ride. And he drives off. What a stupid comment, Oh yes I have a car; I should’ve said, No I don’t have a car. But that was the end of it. Sometimes the voice that you establish in a piece – and every piece has a voice, every writer has a voice, I have a voice – but sometimes it’s a bit muted and sometimes it’s a little bit bold and – it’s your choice what kind of color you use, what kind of shading you use. What about you?

Jones: I try not to be in stories. I once wrote a story about my dad and tried not to be in it, which is not possible. But I don’t like it as a – Granger sent us an email a couple months ago saying first person was killing narrative and he wanted us not to be in stories anymore. Because it was kind of default – I don’t know if it’s the blogging age or, especially with celebrity stories you think, Well the celebrity’s not interesting so let’s talk about me.

Q: Besides Chris, what other journalists do you get excited reading?

Talese: There’s a wonderful person named Jon Lee Anderson, he writes wonderfully for The New Yorker about foreign affairs.

Q: Are there any mistakes or inaccuracies in your stories that you’d be willing to admit to?

Talese: Let me think. You know, I’ve been lucky. If I made a mistake I caught it in time, or someone caught it for me. When I was working at the New York Times I just lived in fear of making a mistake because there would be a correction. I never had that dubious distinction of being mentioned in the correction column. As I told you, when I first joined the paper those old guys who were my high priests of journalism said, You’ve got to get it right. So what that meant, I was always worried I would get it wrong. I didn’t want to be in a correction column. Sometimes running scared is not a bad thing.

Q: How do you write about someone you just don’t like?

Talese: If you don’t like them or more important if you don’t respect them I don’t write about them. I remember one time I spent a year and a half with a person, Lee Iacocca. He had been fired by Ford and taken on by Chrysler, and was bringing that motor company back from almost bankruptcy – there was a lot of government bailouts back in the 1980s – and I hung out with him from 1981 to 1982. And you know, I just didn’t feel that I wanted after all that time I spent and all the money I spent on travel, I didn’t feel that I could do that job. Because I didn’t feel I could identify with him. I had written about notorious people I respected – I’d hung out with the mafia, killers – and I’d written about all these pornographers in “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” and I respected them on their own terms, and here’s a distinguished man of the business world, the automobile business, and it wasn’t that I disliked him – I admired him – but I felt the story wasn’t something I could get my heart into. And I just dropped out. He went on to write his own book and he made a fortune. Maybe as [Chris] said, maybe I like minor characters better. [Iacocca] was a very compelling and driven and successful person but for some reason there’s something about that character and that situation that I could not identify with.

Jones: If you don’t care about it, you’re not gonna do your best.

Talese: That’s right.

Jones: You have to put so much into it.

Talese: And so you do. It’s so hard.

Jones: You can’t fake heart. It’s either there or it’s not.

Talese: That’s right. That’s right.

Q: You have these extensive files – can you talk about this need that you have to [document] your life and stories?

Talese: The lady refers to how I document the notes from articles and books and all that stuff I saved. I not only save it but I’ve organized it in chronological order from 1945 through 2011, and, if I should live another year, 2012. When I say save, I mean I save everything. I save letters from everybody. I save rejection slips. My wife and I have been married 52 years and I have almost every note she’s every written – it might be Why didn’t you take out the dog earlier? He pooped all over the rug. And I date it, and I know the name of the dog, and I file it. I have a basement, what used to be an old wine cellar, and I have dozens and dozens and dozens of filing cabinets, and it’s all in order, day by day, month by month, year by year, and the years are big signs telling you what year you’re in. About four or five years ago I thought, There is a story. [People often ask],What’s your next book?, and sometimes I know and sometimes I don’t know, and sometimes I start a book like the Chrysler story and I don’t finish it, and now I’m working, and have for the last two or three years, on a book on a 50-year marriage, my own. I was married in 1959. And I have a written record of that. For example when my wife, [Nan], writes a letter of complaint – it might be the dog or something else or You were just awful last night to me and maybe we should stop going out – I not only save that but I answer that letter to myself. I write: This letter was written after we went out to Elaine’s restaurant and one of Nan’s authors was there and Nan will say, How could you have been so disrespectful, and I’ll say, I’m sick and tired of being the husband of this editor. I’m writing to myself but I’m giving background to the letter, and in my mind I’m thinking there’s history in minor characters, and I’m one of them, and my wife’s another one. And I’ve done this all my life. And so now I’m thinking, For half a century these two people have lived in the same building in the middle of Manhattan, and it’s a story. It’s a story of a building, number one, and it’s been the same building from 1959 to 2011, so far. And within this are two people, and these two people have an interaction, have an exchange of letters and exchange of ideas and an exchange of venom, at times, and fury, and yet they remain under the same roof, officially married and technically married and personally married and not always happy about it. This is the story of a marriage.

And it’s not only the story of those two people in that building, wife and husband, but also the people who’ve come in and out of that building, guests who’ve stayed sometimes. For example, much of the time we didn’t have enough money, so much of the time since we had this building that I rented floors in and later became an owner of – in 1972 I bought this building because I had a couple of dollars left over from the bestseller on the New York Times, and I bought the building. But prior to that I rented apartments. One time I rented for two years to William Styron. I had three apartments and I could only afford two, and I sublet to Styron. He’s dead now, you know, but in those days his wife and children lived in Roxbury, Connecticut, but he liked to get away for a couple of days and have a pied-à-terre. My wife worked at Random House, and Styron worked at Random House, and thus we rented the apartment. During that two-year period he was writing “Confessions of Nat Turner,” and at night he would come down and read to us, Nan and myself, and our children were still at the time in the house then. We’d have dinner and sometimes we’d go out. Sometimes [Styron] would give the key to other people. One time he gave the key to the separated wife of Philip Roth, and she had a cat. My dear friend David Halberstam, with whom I had a falling out for 10 years and then we got back to being great friends again, he’s a character. So this building is like a stage, like a theater. Walk-ons, walk-offs, periods, and the Vietnam war, protesting in New York – I remember Halberstam and my wife Nan and myself and our daughter Pamela would be marching on Fifth Avenue in the parade against the war, and I remember Halberstam was still on the Times – he’d yet to win the Pulitzer – I remember he took off his press card when he was in the parade, because he shouldn’t have been. A lot of other people could be in this. So what is it? It’s a chronology, it’s a chronicle, it’s a nonfiction novel, it’s a story. About a building and a marriage.

Jones: I don’t like to judge people, but your file system is strange I think.

[laughter]

Talese: It is strange! But you know what it is? You have a sense of yourself and you have a sense of being someone looking at yourself. And I can’t quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, but I think he said something to the degree that as a writer he had a sense of where he was and a sense of seeing himself from afar, and seeing himself where he was, this kind of prismatic sense of self: you turn and get different lights, different angles. Maybe sometimes it helps, being a foreigner in a way. My father was a foreigner from Italy, and I was always feeling that I was a half of a foreigner because when I was born World War II was going on and Italy was the enemy. I always felt as if I was divided as a person, and that was the perfect attitude to have as a journalist because you had a sense of being something different than what you were, you weren’t sure who you were. And sometimes through the characters you write or the people you interview you’re always looking for, How am I different from that person? Am I different? There’s always that curiosity being indulged because the curiosity is propelled by being an outsider. If you’re an outsider you’re the perfect journalist. You can’t be an insider. You have to really be an outsider, should be an outsider.

*Thanks to The New Yorker’s Nancy Franklin for her clever caption to a photo of Talese’s visit to Harvard.

For more, see our post of Chris Jones’ talk with this year’s Nieman fellows.

Photo of Gay Talese and Chris Jones by Jonathan Seitz.

Williams & Jones (photo: Jonathan Seitz)

Now Esquire’s writer at large (as well as ESPN The Magazine’s new back-page columnist), Jones has written about presidential candidates, astronauts, soldiers, movie stars and game shows, and has won two National Magazine Awards, the highest honor in magazine writing. One ASME award was for “The Things That Carried Him,” about the return of a soldier’s body from Iraq, and the other was for “Home,” which became the basis for his nonfiction book “Out of Orbit: The Incredible True Story of Three Astronauts Who Were Hundreds of Miles Above Earth When They Lost Their Ride Home.”

“When you read one of his stories, you’re putting on the Chris Jones suit of clothes and walking through this world, and you’re seeing and feeling things the way he does,” his Esquire editor, Peter Griffin, told me the other day. [Read our 2009 interview with Griffin here, for Jones’ “The End of Mystery.”] “But it’s frictionless. Part of the reason is, he’s obsessive. He works a story until he gets it right.”

On his second day visiting Harvard, Jones appeared with Gay Talese. But his first day on campus he sat down with this year’s Nieman fellows to share details about his career and thoughts on writing. What follows are some excerpts from my conversation with him and the discussion with fellows that followed.

You’ve worked in both newspapers and magazines. What adjustments did you have to make in order to move from newspapers to magazines, from the daily news beat?

When I started at the paper I was a beat guy, so I did the 600-word sports stories, mostly about baseball and boxing. Then I started working in features. The paper I worked at was a paper called the National Post, which at the time Conrad Black had sunk a bajillion dollars into, and [it] had exactly no ads, so you could write a 3,000-word feature, and you could pitch anything. I remember we sent one reporter to Mongolia to watch a meteor shower, and it was cloudy so she got no story. And that was my impression of newspapers; that was my first job ever, so I was like, This is how it is. I just didn’t know any better. So I was a feature writer. But then when I started at Esquire my very first sit-down with my new editor was – and this is no insult to anyone who works in newspapers – he said, I don’t want to read a single sentence in your stories that I could have read in a newspaper.

What did he mean by that?

I think sometimes in newspapers you sort of fall into that, you write a paragraph you put in a quote, you write a paragraph, you put in a quote –

Formula.

– formula kind of template-y stuff, and you also write thinking they might cut the last four inches off the story. With a magazine you probably don’t put that many quotes in, the story has more of a full-circle feeling to it. At Esquire if you get assigned 5,000 words you’re gonna have 5,000 words of space. There’s no cutting for space. So it wasn’t so much a language change, it was more a structural change, how the piece fits together.

And I think what you also get in magazine stories that you don’t always have time to do in newspapers is, the story might be about something on the surface but a great magazine story is also about something beyond that – an idea; there’s a theme to it. The story about Joey Montgomery was about his body coming back, but really that was a story about war, and he was one guy representing everybody who died there. In newspapers you maybe don’t get the time to craft that kind of narrative.

Newspaper writers sometimes think, “Oh if I could only write for a magazine I’d have all this freedom,” but then you get into magazines and –

It’s a different kind of hard.

Yeah.

Newspapers weren’t a great fit for me because I always wanted to spend more time on a story. I hated writing on deadline. I always lay awake at night worried that I’d made a terrible mistake, that I got the score wrong. The nice thing about working at newspapers is the immediacy of it; if you don’t like a story you’re working on you’re done the next day, and you do something else. The other nice thing about newspapers is, if you write five stories a week and one is really good and three are fine and one is kind of crappy, that’s not a bad average. With Esquire my contract is six stories a year; I can’t have a dud.

Six features a year. What sort of average length are we talking about?

Our minimum would be something like 3,000 words. I’d say average real feature is around six. Celebrity profiles are around three, and those count as features.

The longest you’ve written was the war piece, wasn’t it? Like 12,000 words?

It actually ran at 17,000, and was assigned at six. I delivered 22,000.

Did you let them know they were getting 22,000?

Yeah, it was an awkward conversation with Peter, actually, because – that story’s in sections; there’s like 13 sections. I wrote it in the order that I had the material, I didn’t leave it all till the end. So I wrote the first section, which was the section where they fly Joey back from Dover, they fly to Seymour. I wrote that section and it came out at like 2,000 words, and I thought, That math is not good. So I called Peter and said it might be more like 10. I blew past 10 and said, It’s gonna be more than that. He said, Listen, just write it and we’ll figure it out. To Esquire’s credit they just burned that whole issue.

Like Hersey and Hiroshima in The New Yorker.

We had a Jessica Simpson story, [it] was the other story in that issue.

Well, the world thanks you for burning –

Oh no, it got in. It was the cover.

So you cut 5,000 words. Did you cut it or did they?

We cut it together. One of the great things about working there, my editor Peter, we’ve been together for eight years now; you only write for one editor. Like that’s your relationship and no one else touches the story.

It doesn’t go up to [Editor in Chief David] Granger?

Well he’ll read it, but there’s no changes.

[At some other magazines] everybody gets their fingerprints on it.

And stories inevitably suffer. I think that’s a bad process. Peter and I just have this – we know what each other is looking for. If I bumped from editor to editor I’d have a hard time. You just develop a trust that I think is important to doing the best work you can.

What, then, for people who don’t get the pleasure –

Totally screwed.

[laughter]

Newspaper reporters – sometimes you’re working for different sections –

No, it’s hard. I like being edited. In newspapers I was writing sports stories at 11 o’clock at night, it just went in. I never got edited. And I didn’t like it. I know some people think of editors as evil and they’re messing with your art, but for me Peter is – I mean he’s a fantastic editor. I tell students all the time: You’ll never do your best work until you find that editor who is your perfect match. By a series of flukes I got Peter and we work perfectly together. My stuff would not be nearly as good without Peter.

How long did you spend on that [war] piece?

I spent maybe eight months on that story.

Exclusively?

In the middle I did a Scarlett Johansson feature. I flew from the mortuary at Dover to sit with her at a diner [in California]. It was a surreal juxtaposition.

A lot of what makes that story work so well is the detail. Every passage is so tight, every sentence almost seems to be built with a specific mission in mind. How’d you wind it up so much without ruining it?

Once I realized how long it was going to be, my standard for a sentence was it had to have a fact. And the way I structured it in the end – I thought, It’s so long and the material’s so difficult that people wouldn’t read it in one sitting, so every section starts with a different person. It goes from person to person to person, and the last section is Joey. Then I tried to find little details that would help guide you, because it was backward and I was worried about losing people. So there’s things like the girl in the flowered dress, little cues that I hoped would sort of ground people.

But then Peter, when we took those 5,000 words out, really tightened it – I mean we cut a feature. A simple line edit with a story that length, you can lose a thousand or two words. We lost some whole scenes, which at the time was like – there was one scene that I spent months reporting; it was the funeral they held in Iraq. The soldiers have their own memorial service in Iraq. Soldiers are tough interviews and it was a tough scene, you know? It was hard all the way around. It was probably about 1,500 words, and I spent a long time writing it, and we just cut it.

How do you report your scenes? That’s something we talk about in class – when you’re reconstructing scenes and when you’re at the mercy of people’s memories and at the mercy, in this case, of soldiers who are sort of programmed to talk like athletes, who say a lot without saying anything –

Any interview I do for a narrative story, particularly with people who don’t speak to reporters normally, I usually have a preamble where I talk about the questions I’m going to ask. I tell them, A story like this relies on details, I’m going to ask you what might seem like some really strange questions. If you don’t remember, that’s okay, don’t force yourself to remember things; don’t think anything’s stupid, if I ask a question you don’t like, tell me you don’t like it. Like with Joey’s story people were worried that I was gonna do it dirty on him, that I was going to somehow sully his memory. All you can do there is try to convince them you’re a good person. It’s a lot easier if you actually are a good person. I like to think that I’m a good person. So I told them: You can trust me. And when I said it I meant it: I’m not here to mess with Joey. And if you spend enough time with people they get comfortable. And two very important things with that story: I had the time, and I did every interview in person.

Oh wow.

Which I think makes a huge difference.

So do I.

And every interview was often somewhere very awkward. Like Aunt Vicki, I talked to her over lunch at a Cracker Barrel, and so we’re both sitting in this Cracker Barrel, and I was bawling, she was bawling, and everybody in the room going, What the hell? But it was not sitting in a house. It was almost like a date. We met at the restaurant; it was the first time we met. It was just easier that way.

I think the key to reporting a story like that – and I hope this doesn’t sound arrogant – you gotta see when people are giving you little windows. There’s a scene in that story – the girl in the flowered dress, the National Guard people who carried the casket from the plane to the family. There, I interviewed them in a group; there were six of us sitting around a table. My starting question was How do you keep your game face? That’s what they call it when you don’t show emotion. It was a general question, so they gave a general answer, which was, You don’t look at the family, you look at something else. I said, Do any of you happen to remember what you were looking at that day? The first guy, Schnieders, said, I was looking at the logo on the sheriff’s car. Then these two female soldiers started whispering together, and I said, What are you guys talking about? And that was the girl in the flowered dress, where one of them had said, Look at the girl, look at the dress, pick out a flower on the dress.

For me the girl in the flowered dress is my favorite detail. And this started with How do you keep your emotions? and gradually whittled down to this moment. So you’ve got to be aware of when somebody is giving you an opening. And then you winnow it down.

In narrative you have to be on, all the time, because every moment might matter. It’s almost like being hyper-vigilant. You just can’t be asleep.

Yeah and you have to really listen. You know, when I started that story I was worried that I’d be doing so many interviews that I’d forget stuff. But when you’re doing stuff like that, you don’t forget stuff.

But you’re thinking long term too – it’s almost like you can see the story in the making, and how certain details will serve the narrative.

Yeah. You gradually develop an instinct – this is gonna sound crass as hell, but literally I have a cash-register sound that goes off in my head. Like, cha-ching. It’s annoying. Like, the girl in the flowered dress was cha-ching. I knew that was going in. You know, it’s a spidey sense. When I first sit down to write even a story of that length, I figure if I can remember it, then it’s an important detail.

When you’re talking about details [writers] sort of over – “he was wearing a gray sweater” and there were these pants and – those don’t really matter. At Esquire our goal is always to report the story so well we can sit down at a bar and I can just tell you the story. I did 101 interviews for that story and I could go through that story right now and tell you everyone who’s in it. You just remember. You remember the stuff that counts. So a lot of [writers] are like, I’m worried I’m gonna miss something great; well if you’ve forgotten it, it probably wasn’t great. And that’s how you know the details that are great and the details that aren’t. Then you go back to your notes and tapes and make sure you’re right.

The idea of detail that doesn’t move the action forward, that doesn’t advance any ideas – gratuitous detail –

It’s just clutter. The detail has to have some purpose to it, it has to mean something. Even if it doesn’t mean anything right away, it gradually builds some picture in your head gets you where you’re going.

And nothing’s a throwaway, because you might need it. It might come back in some way.

Yeah. This is a very hard thing to explain but – I’m gonna backtrack. I don’t outline. And I know this is a great debate in narrative. Like, Gay Talese, if you come tomorrow, Gay Talese outlines in ridiculous ways, for me. He will have 17 shirt boards with the story mapped out, and for me the risk of outlining is you miss those little connections that you maybe wouldn’t see if you were sitting there thinking, How am I gonna tell this story? I love when you’re writing and you see this little connection that you wouldn’t have seen [otherwise] – little echoes that count again later when you come back to it. Sometimes I’m asked, How did you know – I didn’t know that. It was only once I started writing that I saw it. Sometimes I see Gay Talese’s outlines and I think I’m doing it wrong, but I think what you might lose then is that sort of spontaneous connection.

And you can’t teach that. You can teach people to be aware always, and to look for opportunities, but it’s like teaching an ear – do you think that’s true? You can teach writing, absolutely, but the music, and those ghostly things that happen in Story –

I don’t think you can take a bad writer and make them great. I think you can make a bad writer passable and a passable writer good and a good writer great, but you can’t make massive jumps. It sounds harsh, but, excluding me from the conversation, there’s kind of an “it,” or whatever, that [good writers] just have. Like music. I’m tone deaf. You can never make me a great pianist. It would never happen. Writing is a similar kind of thing.

Okay.

It’s a terrible thing to say.

No it isn’t.

I mean you guys know: This is a tough business and there are a lot of effing good people at it, and there are lots of good people who can’t work. If you’re not good you’ve got no shot. I mean maybe you want this, you want it so bad, but if you’re not good at it, it’s not gonna happen. And you just have to be honest. It sounds brutal as it’s coming out of my mouth.

No it doesn’t.

But I don’t believe in false hope. Or there’s a sweet spot for different [types of writing] – you gotta find that spot. If you want to be a journalist, which is such a huge field, you’ve got to find your sweet spot.

Let’s talk about the origin of stories. You see Story in places where other people don’t see it.

[In magazine writing] you gotta find those stories that don’t change, and yet that no one else has written about. You’re always on the lookout for the stuff that fell through the cracks. If you’re pitching magazines, you can’t pitch a story that’s happened and that everyone’s writing about, or that’s happening in two months. For me, I get most of my ideas from newspapers, where the reporter I used to be – some poor dude only had three hours and 400 words to tell a story and you can see –

The bigger story.

The bigger story. So “Home” was a 400-word story about [the astronauts’] return. The soldier story was a 600-word piece on CNN.com. The Price Is Right was my own obsession. Roger Ebert was, like, his blog, which was just out there. No one had asked Roger Ebert to do a story – it was just sitting there. Those are the things you gotta find when you’re doing magazine stuff.

Yeah.

The great magazine stories you’re like, How the hell did no one else write this story?

That hardly ever happens though.

That hardly ever happens. I’ve been at Esquire for nine years and probably have done five or six stories that I think were good, just because it’s so hard to find that perfect mix of idea, material, your writing was good, everything worked.

It takes a massive amount of organization to keep track of the material for stories like “The Things That Carried Him” because you’re dealing with different characters, different points of view, different time periods, different countries. How do you organize everything and at what point do you write?

Because that story was so big, I wrote it in chunks, and that’s why it almost reads like a collection of little stories. With a regular story I often don’t write it front to back. Usually I know my ending, and often I’ll write my ending first. That’s from school. I had a professor telling me, How do you know how to get there if you don’t know where you’re going? That stuck with me for some reason. I also think endings are the most important part of the story. From my newspaper days I got scarred because all my endings got cut off. But with magazines, for me, it’s your finishing note; it’s how you’re leaving company with people. Ideally your story has built to this sort of crescendo and it’s like, here’s your moment. So I usually know what my ending is, and then I’ll start writing wherever I feel like writing.

But the sheer reporting. What are your tools? I didn’t realize you don’t record anything.

I record sit-down interviews. And in the soldier story I recorded – [at Esquire] it’s the only time they let you use the interns, to transcribe your tapes, but I never do it because I don’t want them to hear me stumbling and bumbling through my crap. The humiliation factor is just like – I don’t want anyone listening to this. It’s like what I do in the bathroom, you know?

Great.

So what I work toward in the reporting – I mean I sort of have two rules. For me writing is pretty hard, so my attitude has always been – my great fear is sitting down to write a 5,000-word story with 3,000 words of material. Like that’s my death. I’m not a very flowery writer. There are a lot of writers who could get away with that but I have no imagination. I think everyone would see this is where he ran out of shit and now he’s lying. I report as hard as I do so I can avoid that oh-crap feeling where you sit down and go I don’t have it. The other thing I sort of work for – Esquire’s fact checkers are beautiful, beautiful people; they are insane. My favorite fact checker story: I was writing about a fight, and I had a little joke, Shaquille O’Neal tripped over some lighting cables. The [fact checker] spent days trying to make sure they were lighting cables and not sound cables. And I was like, Dude, we can just call them cables. And he was like, Well, shit.

[laughter]

Fact checkers also make you feel like the least funny person on earth. Because you have to explain jokes. I had this basketball player who had like 17 different devices on his waistband so I was like: The Motorola fax/pager/copier on his waist – and the fact-checker was like, Well I called Motorola, and they don’t have a fax/copier/pager that goes on the waist – and I’m like Shit, dude, that’s not a real thing.

[laughter]

I love fact checkers; they allow me to sleep at night. But fact checking is torturous, and on a 17,000-word story it is hell. So that story in particular I kept ridiculous notes. I kept every phone number, every name, so they could verify everything easily – you just have to do it –

Well not all writers do it, though. You’re probably beloved for that –

I always warn them when I’m coming: Sorry guys, I’ve got another one coming down the pipe.

Annotating is your friend.

Again, going back to my newspaper days I’d have killed for that. I like that part of the process. So as long as I can get through those two things I’ve done my job and then I can write.

Dina Kraft: I have a question about structure on “The Things That Carried Him.” Were you working with a spokesperson for the Army? Did you think, This is a good possible [story subject] for me, I’ll jump over to Indiana?

Well I saw the story on CNN and that was Joey. Really it was about life at the forward operating base and it included a vignette on carrying the body back, and it turned out to be Joey. I spent probably a couple of weeks – this sounds ghoulish – but looking at other possibilities. And I kept going back to Joey. I liked that he was from a small town in Indiana; I just thought it was better than New York or L.A. And I felt sort of a weird connection – we had similar sort of adolescences. I felt like I kind of understood him. The very first thing I did was call his mom. No matter who we did, I wanted the family’s permission. So I called his mom, and it was terrible. I thought I was calling her at home. I thought, I’ll call her in the middle of the day, I’ll leave a message on her home machine and she’ll call me back if she wants. But the number I’d been given was her work, and she answered.

This is something that’s really hard to explain but, what do you say? So I was like, Hi I’m Chris, I write for Esquire magazine and I really want to write a story about how a soldier is returned from Iraq and I’d really like that soldier to be Joey. And she just started bawling. I felt so bad that I’d ruined her day, but we ended up talking for probably an hour and a half. At the end she said, You can do it, but I want to be [interviewed] last; if this story falls apart anywhere along the way I don’t want to have gone through it for nothing.

At that time there were a lot of stories about how hard it was – you couldn’t take a photo of a flag-draped casket. I thought, This is gonna be really hard. So I called the mortuary in Dover and they said, You need Pentagon approval. I said, Well who is the Pentagon? They gave me a name. I called him up and did the same schpiel. He said okay. I was like, Okay what? He said, You’ve got Pentagon approval. I said, You sure? And that was it. And I never once had a roadblock. Everything just fell into place. It was one of those spooky – I have countless examples of moments where I was like, That’s nuts. When I went to Dover – they pray over every planeload. Chaplain Sparks had done 700 planes and he said, I do a different prayer for every plane. And I said, You have no idea what you’d have said [at Joey’s]? And then he went back to his desk – and this was months later – and sitting on top of his pile was the prayer he said on Joey’s plane. He had the manifest and on the back was the prayer. He came back and looked like he’d been hit by a board. And there was countless moments of stuff like that.

The last thing I did was go to Scottsburg. The other nice thing about doing it that way was, I could tell [Joey’s family] what I knew.

Did they ask?

They asked. And one of the lessons about that story for me was, I was really worried about Gail reading it. She’d lost two husbands, her son, just this litany of tragedy, and I didn’t really want to add to it. And when I wrote the scene in the mortuary the first time I wrote it Peter called and said, You’re hedging, you’re holding back; every other part of the story is so detailed and here you’re kind of skimming it. I was like, Yeah it was really gory and I didn’t know how much detail to go into. He said, You’ve gotta go all the way with it. I was like, Okay.

Gail didn’t know Joey had lost his legs. I called her before the story came out and said, Gail, you might not want to read this, there’s stuff in there you might not want to know. She was like, Give me an example. I said, Joey didn’t have any legs. That was sort of the big – and she was okay. You know? And it’s true about writing about yourself: If you write about yourself you’ve gotta be 100 percent honest; people know if you’re holding back. And with this, Peter picked it out right away: You’re not telling me everything you know. And if you’re gonna write a story like that, you’ve got to go 100 percent.

Carlotta Gall: That’s interesting because that’s the one passage I would have cut if I was your editor.

It’s definitely the most technical. And it’s the least detailed. There you can’t say to the mortician, Do you remember that particular – there’s four morticians who’ve done thousands of bodies. It’s definitely the weakest section, it always was. You just couldn’t get the girl in the flowered dress in the mortuary. It just didn’t exist.

Claudia Mendez Arriaza: What makes Peter a great editor?

I’ll call Peter a lot when I’m reporting, and I’ll tell him I had a cash register moment, or if I’m having a problem. We’ll sort of talk it out. I think a great editor is almost part therapist in some ways. You know, writers spend a lot of time by themselves, and I’m on the road by myself a lot, so he’s just a good guy for me to talk to me about stories. I think my favorite thing that Peter does is his cuts, his actual removal of things. Like Paige was talking about with “The Things That Carried Him,” the tightness of it, that there’s no sentiment in it, that’s because of Peter. The very first section of that story, now it ends with something like, “They spend a lot of time like that.” I talk about Chaz walking out, holding hands, and they’re not talking, they spend a lot of time like that. I had, “They spend a lot of time like that, talking only with their hands.” And just that little cut makes that story better. So he’s like that 10 percent restraint, like a reining in. If I go too far with the sentimentality or the emotion he pulls it back. It’s very nice when people talk about the restraint in my stories, but that’s Peter, that’s not me. Because it’s really hard to know where the line is for the emotional.

Rema Nagarajan: Is there a time when you don’t agree with him and then what happens?

Yeah, you know that old cliché about you read your story and find your favorite line, and that’s the line you should cut? It’s kind of true. Peter has a way of [lots of sound effects here meant to represent Peter cutting, and also the sound Jones likens to being waxed].

You get waxed often then?

Yeah, all the time. It’s better not to be super-hairy.

[laughter]

It goes back to the trust thing. If Peter does it I’m like, well Peter is my swami, and he is totally correct. But yeah, he’s part therapist, part cheerleader and a hard-core ass-kicking editor.

You don’t call in wringing your hands.

I don’t often call him with a problem. I usually call Peter when I’m excited. I usually call Peter when I have that moment where I’m like, Oh this is actually gonna work, especially when it’s a story that I’ve pitched hard and I’m nervous about. The Price Is Right story, I called him after the Drew Carey interview, which was one of the great interviews of my life. We’re backstage and he just went off, like F F F F F. There was this publicist who’d been a pain in my ass – CBS was worse than the Pentagon. She was sitting there and she wouldn’t leave, and she said, You cannot ask about Terry rolling The Price Is Right. So I’m sitting there with Drew, and he kind of brought it up. He says, There’s this guy – I’m like, Yeah, Terry. And I hear behind me like a thunk, and I turn around and her head’s on the table. As soon as I was in the parking lot I called Peter and said, I got it I got it I got it. I don’t call him saying, It’s not working.

He also told me you sometimes call and say, I’m gonna go another way but I can’t tell you what it is. He trusts you to just go do it.

See I’m a writer because I can’t really talk. Like I can’t explain – so something will come up but I can’t –

Articulate it.

So it’s like, Let me try it in words. It’s like instead of me trying to explain this let me just write it. If you don’t like it, fine. Like the Price Is Right we went into it not knowing the twist about Ted, the guy in the audience who was yelling out the numbers. Instead of telling all that to Peter, I just said, Listen there’s a thing, there’s this guy Ted, I’m just gonna write it and you’ll see. That’s how we dealt with that.

No surprises.

I feel like if I’ve sold it as something I’ve gotta – it sounds like I’m bragging about the length of “The Things That Carried Him,” but I felt bad. Usually I’m within 100 words of my assigned length. I try very hard to hit that. People get offside about this, but journalism is a business. You’re expecting people to buy a product. You’re being paid for your work. Your editor is a customer; your readers are customers. So I feel this responsibility – I don’t think of it as I’m conducting my orchestra, and I’m doing my art and blah blah. For me it’s a contract. You’re paying me to do a job. I’m gonna deliver on time, I’m gonna deliver at the length you’re asking for, I’m not gonna be a pain in your ass, if you don’t like something I’ll fix it. I try to be –

Professional.

Is that the word?

I don’t know.

I try to do the job. So the soldier story was a weird – I just can’t see how you’d do it in 6,000 words.

Tyler Bridges: You said earlier that you don’t see yourself as a lyrical writer, and I’m certainly not a lyrical writer either, and if I do something that’s okay, it’s because of the reporting. But you take reporting to an extra level and I’m wondering if you have to constantly remind yourself what the person’s wearing, what the weather’s like – whether you have little tricks or it’s so natural now that you are able to get all these details –

I think it’s gotten more natural. One thing I still do is ask the people, Can I call you back? Like, If I go home and start writing and I need a little spackle can we talk about it? Because sometimes you don’t know until you’re writing it that you need this little bit that gets you from this paragraph to this paragraph. I think it’s okay not to get it all on the first run.

Bridges: Do you have little tricks to make sure you’re attendant to everything that’s going on or is it just natural to do that?

I don’t really know how to talk about this stuff without sounding like a jerk.

Just say it.

Well, I’m mildly autistic. It was a hindrance as a child, but as a reporter it’s kind of helpful because I find myself noticing things. And I think I have a good memory. So things will just sort of jump out sometimes, things I’m maybe not supposed to be looking at.

Bridges: I have trouble describing what someone looks like.

That is hard. That was one of my early lessons, that you always have to include a paragraph of description of the person because you can’t pretend that people know what people look like. In the Scarlett Johansson story I have a paragraph describing her face and it’s easily the most overwritten thing I’ve ever written. Because I mean how the hell do you describe a face? I mean you start with the forehead – I don’t know, big? Nose? It’s nose-like. So you kind of come up with all this language, and that’s when it gets fussy for me. Probably every other writer at Esquire is a much better writer than I am. Tom Junod could write 3,000 words about Scarlet Johansson’s face, but I can’t, so I try to get by with other stuff.

John Diedrich: I covered the military, great job on this piece. I’m curious about when you survey what’s been done on a subject area, and when you detect –

Jim Sheeler.

Diedrich: Jim Sheeler. He was covering it from a different angle. But how far will you read something – do you read everything that’s out there?

No I don’t read everything. I read Sheeler’s piece, and it’s a great piece. I mean it won a Pulitzer, right? It’s the definitive piece about the messengers. For me, it’s not good for me to read other stuff, not so much because I worry I’m gonna steal something but because I’m pretty naturally insecure. Like reading Sheeler’s piece was like, Shit, but it was good because it was a boot in my butt. I was like, Well, if that’s the bar. But no, I won’t sit there and survey the landscape because I don’t know what good could come from it.

Diedrich: So would you stay away from that aspect?

I didn’t purposely stay away from it. It was just different from the start. I mean I included the moment of notification. What was strange in this case is after reading Sheeler’s story I thought, Oh this is what this scene is gonna be like, but it wasn’t like that, because she found out from her sister. So that’s the one part of the process I thought I knew, and it was totally different. I mean if you’re doing certain stories you have to read to get the knowledge. If you’re doing a geology story you have to read about geology.

Samiha Shafy: I would like to hear the story about how you talked your way into Esquire with a box of donuts. The second is, you said you’re writing six stories a year, which doesn’t sound like a big number but considering the effort you put into each story how do you make sure you pick the right stories, and is it like two months per story or four months for one or?

Yeah, it can be six weeks – a celebrity story you might spend three weeks on and another story you might spend six months on. I’ll answer your second question first. So the hardest part of the job is the idea. You can take the best writer in the world and give them a crap idea and they’ll come out with a crap story, and you can take an awesome idea and give it to a not very good writer and they’ll probably come out with a pretty good story. Again this is part of the editorial process – pitching and pitching and pitching. So many stories I really like I had to pitch for a long time. Ebert I pitched for eight or 10 months. The space story I pitched for close to a year. The Price Is Right, I had to make that bet. [[The editors weren’t interested in the Price Is Right story at first. Convinced it was a good story, Jones bet Granger: He’d pay his own expenses and eat them if it turned out to be a non-story, but if Esquire ran the piece the editors had to pay him double his expenses. Which they did./pw]]

I think one of the tests at Esquire is if you can’t let it go, that’s when they’ll finally say yes. Like Ebert happened – I was supposed to write about Taylor Swift. At Esquire – I’m 37, I’m the young guy, so I get Taylor Swift. I’m still 37 trying to write about some 17-year-old girl, so I’m gonna be the pervert in the corner of the room. Luckily she canceled at the last minute. I was like, How about Roger? And that’s when I finally got to do it.

The donut story: So this is because I’m an idiot. I’m not very socially aware. When I was still at the National Post I really wanted to work for Esquire –

Having never written for a magazine before.

Having never written for a magazine. I got my job at the National Post having never written a published story before, so for me this was how it works. Actually I’m gonna tell my National Post story. So when I got my paper job there was a magazine in Canada called Saturday Night. I got my degree in urban planning. I thought it was gonna be like Lego. It’s not. It’s super-bureaucratic and terrible. So I had this headmaster who was a journalist and who set me up with a job interview with this guy named Ken White, who was the editor in chief of Saturday Night, which is like I guess our New Yorker. So I went for a job with Ken White and he kept saying newspaper, and I kept correcting him, saying, This is a magazine. It was like the worst job interview ever. Afterward I called my parents and said, I don’t know what that was but I’m not gonna be a writer.

And then they offered me a job at the paper. The paper was brand new. They stuck anyone with no experience, like me, in this bureau in Toronto, and if you were good enough you got pulled up. I started getting phone calls from the news editor and the sports editor, and in my head I’m like, They’re fighting over me. Meanwhile up at the paper Ken White was going, One of you has to take him. Years later I found this out. Finally I went to Sports because I wouldn’t count against their hiring quota. And I literally sat there for three months doing nothing, just sitting at my table, like ballast.

But the magazine – I walked into the Esquire building –

Wait, you flew to New York?

I was already there anyway, doing a Mets/Blue Jays series. And I walked in the building because I assumed that David Granger, the editor in chief, would want to meet with me. I was like, Clearly he’ll say yes. So the security guard was sitting there at the desk. I said, I’m here to see David Granger. He said, Do you have an appointment? I said, Nope. He said, Well, no. I was like, Can I make an appointment? He said, No, no, I don’t think you can.

So I was leaving and there was a janitor sweeping the lobby and he said, Do you want a job at Esquire? I said, Not as a janitor.

[laughter]

He said, No, no, no, there’s an editor, Andy Ward, young guy, really good guy, loves sports, you need to talk to Andy. So I went back to the security guard and said, Can I call Andy Ward? So I called up Andy, and he answers and I say, Hey I’m Chris, I write for a newspaper, I really want to work for you one day, I wonder if we could meet. He was like, Oh, when are you coming to town? I said, I’m in your lobby, the janitor said to call you.

[laughter]

And Andy said, Well, I’ve got this meeting to go to but come back at two.

And Andy’s the nicest dude on earth.

The janitor was totally right – he knew the guy I needed to talk to. So I got two boxes of donuts. I got one for the janitor, [and] was like, Thank you. I took a box of donuts to Andy, and some clips. [[I later asked Andy about this, and what kind of donuts Jones brought. Andy said Krispy Kreme, because Jones wanted to make a point that Krispy Kremes are better than Dunkin’ Donuts. Which, sorry Boston, they are./pw]] And again going back to the socially awkward thing I’m sitting there with Andy, we’re talking, he’s very nice, and I said, Can you read some of my stuff? He said, Yeah, I’ll read it. And I said, Can you read it now? He was like, While you’re sitting here? I was like, Yeah, I just kind of want to know is this even possible. So he’s reading and he’s like, Yeah, we wouldn’t use so many one-sentence paragraphs but it’s not bad. I said, Okay, great.

So, I kind of forgot about it. I quit my job at the paper, was traveling around. I ran out of money in Arizona, I was in Flagstaff. Got an email from Andy saying, We’ve got a job, 10 guys are gonna write a story, best story gets it. And this is the job I want more than anything. And I was flat broke. I mean I was busted. I had left the paper in a hissy fit, which was a terrible mistake  – and I wanted that job so bad, so I wrote my story –

What was the story?

I wrote about Barry Zito, the baseball player –

You could choose any story?

I had to pitch 10 stories – this was specifically to be the sports columnist. That’s how I started at Esquire. And it was only years later that I found out the competition was bullshit. It had never happened. I spent years trying to find out – because the business isn’t that big – who are these other nine people? I was asking around, Are you one of the people? So whenever students ask how to get a job in journalism: Well, you act like an idiot, you go places you’re not supposed to go, you bring donuts, you run out of money and get super lucky.

Jonathan Blakley: With Roger Ebert – I love that story – one of the reasons I really loved it is, I’m a little older than you but I think we both grew up watching him. Suddenly you’re there. Was that one day with him?

No, parts of four days. And Roger was also awesome in the sense that, when I first emailed about doing the story he said, You know, I can’t talk, so we should probably do this by email, and I said, Well it would be better if we actually met. Roger actually started his career as a feature writer, including stuff for Esquire, so once he got past the idea of me coming, which did take some convincing –

Gosh – sorry to interrupt but that surprises me that he wouldn’t get that you needed to be in the room –

He hadn’t really been out at that point. He didn’t want people seeing his face.

Still –

Yeah. Once he got on board he was like, Oh he’s gonna need scenes – we’ll go out for dinner. All I said was, I want to go to the movies with you. Everything else was him. He knew what I needed. It’s funny – we talked afterward, and he had written the story. He was like, I’m surprised you didn’t put this in.

[laughter]

And there was a great moment that I didn’t put in, because in order for it to work I had to be in there, and I didn’t want to be in the story.

What was it?

They were cleaning the house before I got there and Chaz, his wife, had their wedding album out and Roger was like, Why the hell do you have the wedding pictures out? And she put it away. And after I’d been there maybe 15 minutes he was like, Chaz, bring out the wedding pictures! Anyway, he was like, I would’ve led with that, and …

[laughter]

I tell you the hot-sweat moment – he was mad about the picture. He was like, I’m kind of surprised you did the full face, like a whole page –

Bridges: Oh, but it’s such an amazing photo, though.

But all he sees is the damage, right? And it was a full page in the magazine. And he said, I’m surprised you spent so much time on my sickness.

Really?

And I was like, Oh shit. I said, Listen, if we don’t have the photo people are gonna spend the whole story wondering what you look like and they’re not gonna read the story. So you get that right out of the way. And with your sickness, nobody knows about this stuff. It’s important to establish why you can’t talk.

Bridges: Do you read stuff to Roger Ebert or whoever?

Oh no, no. This is always a tricky situation. I wanted Roger to love the story. I really like Roger. For me that was – I’ll never be able to relate what it was like to be sitting there pulling Post-It notes off his fingers. Like, I went there – I’d had this waffly kind of bad-head period where I was depressed or whatever, and I left there and thought, What the hell. I’m gonna leave here and I’m gonna have a root beer, and that moment on its own – it was a transformative experience, doing that story. I wanted him to like it, but you have to play this game where, I hope he likes it but I can’t be writing it for him.

And the fact checking – oh God I had this awful moment where I described the hole in his face. Originally I had it as the size of a small fist. And the fact checker called him and said, Roger do you have a hole the size of a small fist? And he immediately emailed me going, What are you talking about, this hole? I said, You have this hole, it’s there. I made it a plum, I think, in the end. But he was upset, and that kind of stuff bothered me. The reaction to the story was so positive he got on board.

Diedrich: The headline for “The Things That Carried Him” is clearly a nod to “The Things They Carried” – how aware are you when you’re writing that you’re in this legacy of people who’ve written about soldiers?

The title is a funny – I always put a headline on my stories because I find it helps me –

Focus.

If I find myself drifting I can go back to the headline. If it’s hard to write a headline for your story your story is probably unfocused. My headline was “The 3,431st.” I thought it sounded vaguely military, I thought it got across the idea of one of these thousands. Then Peter put that headline on it and I was like, Argh. Like “The Things They Carried” is one of the great pieces of war literature of all time, and when he put that headline on it I thought it sounded like hubris. But again, it was that 75th anniversary year, the original “The Things They Carried,” the short story, was in Esquire. I still never quite loved the headline. I really like headlines like “The Body.” There’s a story in the current issue that’s just called “Hood.” I like headlines like that. Very rarely is the headline that I put on my story the headline. Like this one, Roger Ebert, was [ultimately] called “The Essential Man,” or something. I like having a headline as my compass point.

For more from Chris Jones, check out his conversation with narrative legend Gay Talese.

“I knew Roger was writing about the story,” Jones told us via email, confessing his hands had trembled when he clicked on the link to see what Ebert had written about his piece. “I mean, he’s a critic, right? And I really enjoyed spending time with him, and I hope he enjoyed spending time with me. I didn’t want him to feel regret for having let me in.

“So, when I read what he posted, I felt like 1,000 pounds had been lifted off my shoulders. I could have received a million letters from other people saying they liked the story, but if Roger Ebert had hated it, I would have felt bad about that, literally for the rest of my life.”

Jones’ moving profile of the film critic drew praise from Ebert, and also garnered a mention by Jim Romenesko and a post from the Cronkite School’s Tim McGuire, who portrayed the article as a call to the journalistic ramparts. And it’s true that the Ebert article is beautifully written, and that Jones is a national continental treasure (it turns out that the Canadians get credit for him, along with Sidney Crosby and Celine Dion).

But the thing that struck me about the story is how its online existence has transformed it. If it had come out as a print piece only, the profile of Ebert would have been read and praised, then perhaps used in some classes or maybe eventually, it would have found its way into a collection of Jones work. But what has emerged instead is a larger, living thing—a dialog of stories, if you will, between Ebert and Jones, and Ebert and Esquire.

The online version referenced Ebert’s journal on the Chicago Sun-Times site and described the movie expert expounding there on the “existence of an afterlife, the beauty of a full bookshelf, his liberalism and atheism and alcoholism, the health-care debate, Darwin, memories of departed friends and fights won and lost.”

So we have an Esquire piece that points to nearly two years of entries in Ebert’s online journal, followed by Ebert using his online journal to comment on the Esquire piece. But the story doesn’t stop there. Ebert talks about his work with Esquire decades ago and mentions “the best interview I ever wrote” for the magazine. And that interview, “Saturday at Lee —-ing Marvin’s,” is now posted on Esquire’s site as well, linking back to Ebert’s response and the original profile. Jones explains how the Marvin interview came up:

“In the course of my research for the story, Tim Heffernan at Esquire photocopied a bunch of Roger’s stories for me out of the paper archives. One of those stories was the Lee Marvin story. I brought them to Roger to show him—there was also one on Groucho Marx, and one of Hugh Hefner’s daughter—and he lit up and said that the Lee Marvin story was the best story he ever wrote.

“I mentioned them in the article and told my editor, Peter Griffin—you talked to him about the helicopter piece—what Roger thought of the Lee Marvin story. A little while ago—maybe two weeks ago—Peter asked if I thought Roger would mind if the story was posted. Roger was fine with it, and someone at Esquire typed it into the system. Voila. A piece that’s nearly 40 years old is suddenly given new life and a new audience.”

These posts and stories work particularly well together because of the talent possessed by both writers. But their connection also illustrates how a standalone story can evolve into a larger narrative by picking up prologues and codas as it finds echoes and responses in the world.