Britney turns and faces the camera. There is a loopy, crooked grin on her face, and her eyes, when they skip across the lens of the camera, have a feral glint to them. That expression, in combination with her buzzed skull, gives off the distinct impression of someone unhinged, someone teetering on the verge of an unknown abyss. It’s unsettling how satisfied she seems.

After that scene, in the days and weeks to come, any time Britney Spears’ name came up in conversation, whether you were a fan from the start of her meteoric fame or just someone who tuned in toward the end to watch with amusement as she married a dopey backup dancer nicknamed “meat pole,” flashed her bare derrière to the paparazzi and toddled in and out of public bathrooms barefoot, the same question arose again and again: What in the hell happened to Britney Spears? And what did it mean?

Today, in an era of Kardashians and Winehouses and “Toddlers and Tiaras,” this is the norm. But back then, it wasn’t. Britney turned her private life inside out. She put every terrible piece of it on display for us to dissect.

And in “The Tragedy of Britney Spears,” Vanessa Grigoriadis tries to understand what her demise, set against a backdrop of an unhappy country, knee-deep in an overseas war and an uncertain future, all meant.

The challenge of any journalist tasked with writing a celebrity profile is to tell readers something they don’t already know, and I’m not talking about revealing the little-known fact that your subject is actually a devout vegetarian who wanted to figure out a way to test pharmaceuticals without harming animals when she grew up, but got discovered in a shopping mall in Wyoming and things took off from there, and boy, wowee, isn’t life a strange and bizarro ride. No. I’m talking about getting an accurate portrayal of what celebrities’ worlds are like and satisfying our insatiable appetite to know what it is truly like to be famous, what life is like when all of your wildest dreams come true.

The opening graph paints a grim picture of that reality.

Grigoriadis writes,

Only a few kids are in the store, a young girl with her brother and two blondes checking out fake-gold charm bracelets. Britney rifles the racks as the Cure’s “Pictures of You” blasts into the airless pink boutique, grabbing a pink lace dress, a few tight black numbers and a frilly red crop top, the kind of shirt that Britney used to wear all the time at seventeen but isn’t really appropriate for anyone over that age. Then she ducks into the dressing room with Ghalib. He emerges with her black Am Ex.

The card won’t go through, but they keep trying it.

“Please,” begs Ghalib, “get this done quickly.”

One of the girls runs to Britney’s dressing room, explaining the situation through a pink gauze curtain.

A wail emerges from the cubby — guttural, vile, the kind of base animalistic shriek only heard at a family member’s deathbed. “Fuck these bitches,” screams Britney, each word ringing out between sobs. “These idiots can’t do anything right!”

Grigoriadis did not seem to get extensive access to Britney for the piece, which she deftly discloses to the reader by weaving in descriptions of the shrewd attempts of Britney’s handlers to elicit $2 million in exchange for the interview. In doing so, she gives the reader a sense of the exploitative nature of everyone, absolutely everyone, in Britney’s life. And yet, even without candid access, she is able to paint a portrait of Britney’s life through thorough and numerous interviews and accounts of the exes, friends, lawyers, handlers and the people who orbit around her, and piece together how Britney fell so spectacularly from her perch as a pop princess into an inky pool of isolation, paranoia and madness.

Grigoriadis is not in love with her subject; she is not seduced by Britney’s celebrity. She is blunt and unforgiving: 700 words in, she shockingly describes Britney as an “inbred swamp thing.”

She goes on to say,

She is someone who, when she has had her one- and two-year-old sons taken completely out of her care, with zero visitation rights, appeared at Los Angeles’ Superior Court to convince the judge to give her kids back, but then decided not to go inside, and she’s someone who did this twice. She’s the perfect celebrity for America in decline: Like President Bush, she just doesn’t give a fuck, but at least we won’t have to clean up after her mess for the rest of our lives.

The brilliance of this piece, what makes it so good, is the way Grigoriadis turns Britney’s breakdown into an examination of popular culture and in doing so, delivers an unflattering glimpse into the undercarriage of the entertainment industry, the price of fame and the way that celebrity can warp your perception of reality, so much so that even as it is ruining your life, you still crave more and more attention, you are still giving a performance, the only way you know how.

While it may be true that Britney suffers from the adult onset of a genetic mental disease (or a disease created by fame, yet to be named); or that she is a “habitual, frequent and continuous” drug user, as the judge declared; or that she is a cipher with boundless depths, make no mistake — she is enjoying the chaos she is creating. The look on her face when she’s goofing around with paparazzi — one of whom, don’t forget, she is dating — is often one of pure excitement.

And then in this paragraph, she neatly ties together the theme of celebrity culture with our disposal notion of entertainment and entertainers, so much so that even the fascination that compels us to read this article, to know what really caused her meltdown, is all part of a big putrid cycle:

If Britney was really who we believed her to be — a puppet, a grinning blonde without a cool thought in her head, a teasing coquette clueless to her own sexual power — none of this would have happened. She is not book-smart, granted. But she is intelligent enough to understand what the world wanted of her: that she was created as a virgin to be deflowered before us, for our amusement and titillation. She is not ashamed of her new persona — she wants us to know what we did to her.

Britney’s transformation from a carefully manicured sexpot into something more grotesque, something undesirable, calls into question the kind of culture and news infrastructure that we are building:

There is one group of people who love Britney unconditionally, and whose love she accepts: Every day in L.A., at least a hundred paparazzi, reporters and celebrity-magazine editors dash after her, this braless chick padding around town on hilariously mundane errands — the gas station, the pet store, Starbucks, Rite Aid. The multibillion-dollar new-media economy rests on her slumped shoulders, with paparazzi agencies estimating that she has comprised up to twenty percent of their coverage for the past year. It’ not only bottom feeders running after Britney — a recent memo leaked from the Associated Press, which plans to add twenty-two entertainment reporters to its staff, announces that everything that happens to Britney is news (they have already begun preparing her obit).

The piece conveys that no matter what happens next to Britney, this was the performance we all tuned in for, and would always remember her for.

Toward the end of the piece, Grigoriadis writes:

We want her to survive and thrive, to evolve into someone who can make us proud again. Or maybe, we just don’t want the show to end.

It is a stunningly articulate conclusion. Grigoriadis makes it clear that if this spectacle is about Britney, it is also about us.

I can remember waiting for this piece to come out online, then checking local magazine shops in San Francisco to buy a hard copy (retro, right?) and reading it again. This story made me want to be a journalist and uncover the things that give us pause, all of the triumphs and casualties that reflect who we are as a culture, and put them on display, no matter how discomfiting they may be.

Jenna Wortham (@jennydeluxe) is a technology reporter at The New York Times. In her spare time she makes zines and stalks former “America’s Next Top Model” contestants in Brooklyn.

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

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.

“I turned in a vibe,” he says now.

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

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

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

Why’s this so good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do it,” Henry said to Hank.

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

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

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

The fourth paragraph:

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

And then the fifth:

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the morning went so wrong.

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

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

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

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

Pressler’s story follows a former stripper who marries a New York financier, only to find him charged with embezzlement three years later. We spoke by phone with Pressler earlier this month about the piece. In these excerpts from our conversation, she discusses fate handing her an ending and the fascination of “these creatures that roam around the city.”

Your look at Diane Passage feels a little like the underbelly of a knight in shining armor story. Did you cast it that way in your head? How were you thinking of it as you were writing it?

I thought that she was a much more interesting character, in that she was this archetype of a kind of New York person that exists, like Holly Golightly. There have been a million examples, and they’re kind of around all the time. There’s this whole class of people where this is kind of what they do, and it’s fascinating to me. I thought she was more of an interesting character than he was. His fraud was also interesting, but he was doing it because of his own delusions of grandeur, and also because of her. That was interesting to me.

You’re sitting there with Diane and the group of businessmen at the beginning of the story, and it was almost painful to read.

It was painful to be there.

How did you choose the tone for the opening scene?

I had seen her a bunch of times, but that was definitely different. We went out a few different times, talking with each other, but that was really her in her – not her natural environment – but her doing the thing. It was like her job, her work.

How much time did you spend with her to get this story? That was the only time you were out when she was doing her thing?

It was always that we’d go out and checks would get comped mysteriously. But I spent a lot of hours with her, probably more than is evident in the story. I went to her house for a few hours one day. We went to (the strip club) Scores. The original idea was that it was going to be a very short thing, like “Let’s go to Scores with a former dancer.” Then I was like, “Actually, this is a bigger, more fun piece about this type of person.”

How did you pitch the longer story you wanted to do?

I don’t know if I used the words Holly Golighlty, or if that didn’t come up until later. There’s also this great book called “Millennium Girl” written in the ’90s about this type of person I feel has existed throughout the years. This is kind of the post-recession version of that. How did I pitch it? I don’t know. I think that I probably said that she was a type. It’s such a classic New York magazine story that it’s almost a parody.

What makes it such a great fit for the magazine?

I think the founder said the magazine is about “the parade of ambition.” So it’s a sexy story about ambition. It borders on tabloid, but it’s smart in some ways, too. That’s the quintessential New York magazine story – where you’re thinking about these creatures that roam around the city and identifying them.

You take this group of people that seem pretty loathsome at first, and you humanize them a little. As awful as the whole culture is, at the end, there’s the sense that maybe Starr and Passage really did fall in love, maybe there’s something a little touching about the way it all played out. How did you think about structuring the story?

That’s a really good question. I don’t know if I was going for loathsome at the front and then empathy at the end. During the course of the reporting, I was like, “This is a love story. It’s about these two hustlers and how they found each other.” But then they were splitting up, and that wasn’t really working out.

You know, the guys in the beginning were loathsome, though I’m sure if I had spent several hours with each of them, I would have found something in them to like. They’re people, they’re not caricatures, so they do have human qualities.

Diane in particular was really interesting to me, because she had a lot of feelings. She’s not a bad person, and she didn’t not like Ken Starr or even not love Ken Starr.

People don’t think – they think these women get together with these rich men, and they’re acting the whole time. That’s not true. You start to like whoever you’re around. You have to tolerate somebody, and then you grow to like them. I think that relationship and how it develops is interesting. In some ways, she says, it’s a more honest relationship than a lot of other relationships.

That’s not exactly true, but in some ways it is more honest. She had a lot of feelings. She had this whole life that she had imagined, that she had lived, for four years. She was a stripper who had a kid, and then was like, “Oh, whew, this is over, and I don’t have to struggle anymore,” and then got thrown right back into it. So I had empathy for her, and she was really angry about that, though she was very pleasant about it the whole time. That kind of stinks. No matter what you think of what she does or what she did, it’s a difficult situation for her to be in.

I think you make that point when she moves into the apartment near the end. When did you know that would be your closing scene?

I really thought it was going to stay a love story, so it evolved as it happened. It was kind of a moving target.

Your sense of what the story was about evolved as the story happened?

Yes. She moved into the apartment as the story was closing. It had a more ambiguous ending before. But she happened to move, and it was like, now she’s right back where she started in Times Square, which is such an iconic New York type of place. So I kind of lucked out with that. It would probably have ended in the same way, but the fact that she actually moved out of this mansion she had been in, that was useful for the story.

So for you this piece is about these New York characters and their lives. Is there anything else that you think this piece is about?

It’s obviously about New York and people who come here and have these ambitions and dreams and desires, and find themselves doing these crazy things you really wouldn’t do anywhere else. This kind of thing does exist in other big cities, but doing these outsize things with these boldface kind of names feels unique. So it’s about that and the nature of both kinds of relationships.

This is not in the piece so much, because I didn’t want to get in trouble, but I think there is this almost feminist – not feminist, but almost female power quality to the Diane Passage character, where it’s like she’s really using her femininity to boss guys around. And then it works, and they become like putty, and she’s kind of contemptuous of that. I think that’s kind of interesting, especially when these guys are jerks, like the guys in the beginning. It’s kind of cool – cool is not the right word. There’s something admirable and completely mercenary and ballsy about it, I guess. I think it’s a little about that, too.

Were there any issues with access? Did these businessmen know who you were and what you were up to?

They did, I guess. They did know who I was. I don’t know if they really knew what I was doing. I think that they don’t see themselves as characters. So they were asking, “What’s the story about?” I was like, “It’s about Diane and her life.” And they said, “Well, it’s not like there’s really a story there.” At the time, I thought maybe they were right. But I don’t think they really got what it was supposed to be. I don’t know what they thought of it. They did ask me not to use their names at all, which is why I changed them.

Diane Passage was pretty open with access, though?

She was very forthcoming. I’m not sure of her motivations, except that I think she might want to sell a book or something along those lines. She was pretty open with me, which was great. I was in touch with her pretty much constantly. I don’t think she was surprised by anything that was in the story.

Did the story change a lot between your first draft and your final version?

Actually, no – and usually I feel like it changes a lot. Structurally, it stayed pretty much the same. It was hard to get concrete information out of Diane a lot of the time. I think maybe she was a little bit nervous, and she has various legal issues, so she was not specific on a lot of things. I would have to keep calling her back and asking, “Could you be more specific?” She’s not entirely reliable, and I would have to check things with other people and stuff like that. So the details of it changed, but generally it stayed the same, because the arc of the story was so obvious.

That’s what makes “Veteran Kills 12 in Mad Rampage on Camden Street,” Meyer Berger’s 1949 story of a mass shooting, so remarkable. The swarm was one guy: Berger.

The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism has kept Berger’s Pulitzer Prize-winning story posted on its web site, along with a short – perhaps too short – explanation. Berger, according to the Columbia note, was assigned to the shooting story just before 11 a.m. on Sept. 6, 1949. He caught the first train to Camden and covered the story himself, and appears to have interviewed at least 20 people that day. He filed about 4,000 words. The last of his copy reached The Times by 9:20 p.m., an hour before deadline – an editor’s dream.

The story is painstakingly thorough. It is also riveting. Just about every paragraph shines with some surprising detail: the two hours the gunman held up under questioning without revealing that he’d been shot; the blood stain on his seat that gave him away; the crossed pistols and bayonets decorating the peeling walls of his home; the mother’s murmured remark about how strange her son’s eyes looked.

Editors today might quibble that the lead is a little long – in the 35-word range. But the structure is straightforward and easy to read. Into that first paragraph, Berger packs a ton of specifics: the character, age and background of the shooter; the contrast between his battles overseas and his shooting rampage “in his home block in East Camden”; the make of the gun; the number of dead. The second graph is even better, contrasting Howard Unruh’s devotion to reading scripture with his well-honed firearm skills; his lack of a history of mental illness with the likelihood that he’d “secretly nursed a persecution complex for two years or more.”

Another fault editors might question today is the lack of attribution in the lead, and especially the psychiatric conclusion in the second graph. Both could be addressed with the addition of more attribution, though you’d probably diminish the story’s flow.

At times, Berger’s account is almost cinematic:

A few minutes later River Road echoed and re-echoed to pistol fire. Howard Unruh was on the rampage. His mother, who had left the Pinners’ little white house only a few seconds before, turned back. She hurried through the door.

She cried, “Oh, Howard, oh, Howard, they’re to blame for this.” She rushed past Mrs. Pinner, a kindly gray-haired woman of 70. She said, “I’ve got to use the phone; may I use the phone?”

But before she had crossed the living room to reach for it she fell on the faded carpet in a dead faint. The Pinners lifted her onto a couch in the next room. Mrs. Pinner applied aromatic spirits to revive her.

The shooting itself unfolds as if a camera were trailing Howard Unruh:

All this was only a matter of seconds and still only a few persons had begun to understand what was afoot. Down the street at 3210 River Road is Clark Hoover’s little country barber shop. In the center was a white-painted carousel-type horse for children customers. Orris Smith, a blonde boy only 6 years old, was in it, with a bib around his neck, submitting to a shearing. His mother, Mrs. Catherine Smith, 42, sat on a chair against the wall and watched.

She looked up. Clark Hoover turned from his work, to see the six-footer, gaunt and tense, but silent, standing in the driveway with of the Luger. Unruh’s brown tropical worsted suit was barred with morning shadow. The sun lay bright in his crew-cut brown hair. He wore no hat. Mrs. Smith could not understand what was about to happen.

Unruh walked to “Brux”– that is Mrs. Smith’s nickname for her little boy – and put the Luger to the child’s chest. The shot echoed and reverberated in the little 12 by 12 shop. The little boy’s head pitched toward the wound, his hair, half-cut, stained with red. Unruh said never a word. He put the Luger close to the shaking barber’s hand. Before the horrified mother, Unruh leaned over and fired another shot into Hoover.

Any editor would be proud to print a story like this weeks or months after the event. I keep wondering what it was like to read this copy on the desk that night, knowing that the news had occurred only hours earlier, and that the newspaper had sent just one reporter to cover it all.

Mark Johnson is a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting as part of a five-person team telling the story of Nicholas Volker, a boy with a rare genetic defect.

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

Photo of Mark Johnson by Mike De Sisti.

Jacqui Banaszynski
Knight Chair professor, Missouri School of Journalism

On “gold coins” and making words work:

As I read Amy Harmon’s richly packed piece, I was put in the mind of Pulitzer Prize winning author Tracy Kidder. Harmon’s work has a similar deceptive simplicity – straightforward, non-gussied prose that is actually the scaffolding that holds up deep, deep reporting. She has learned so much in the course of that reporting that she doesn’t have to strain her narrative; she doesn’t overexplain, overattribute, overdefine or overdress. She has earned the right to compress tons of tricky emotional and scientific and economic information into direct statements that demand trust by virtue of their authority.

But Kidder’s work is usually book length. Harmon is tackling as much at magazine length – what would essentially be a single chapter of that book. So she really has to use that compression and voice of authority to maximum effect, and then make crucial choices about the scenes she chooses to center her story and draw the reader forward. As much as she leaves me wanting to know more (the ultimate compliment to a writer), she also succeeds in drawing me ever forward.

The key to that success in a moment.  First a short digression:

I said this could be a book.  If you study Harmon’s piece, you’ll find multiple story (or chapter) possibilities embedded there. She could easily peel out separate and fascinating pieces connected to the core issue of autism: science, treatment, cost, education, the toll on families, erratic social support and more. Many reporters miss the opportunity to find many, many stories in a single issue. If you get in the habit of looking at the various content chunks of a complex story, you open the door to many other stories, each with its own center. That’s a valuable skill for a staff reporter trying to own a beat or for a freelancer trying to find a new angle to pitch.

Now back to our regular programming.

Of all the things we could study here, I want to focus on “gold coins.” The Poynter Institute’s Roy Peter Clark includes it as one of his 50 essential “Writing Tools.” It’s a way to keep placing little gems along a reader’s path to keep them moving forward. Think of it as a literary scavenger hunt: You give the reader a clue worth pursuing and send them on the hunt; then just when they might be getting tired or frustrated, you drop in another juicy clue. Or maybe it’s like cairns on a long wilderness hike. Or a Hershey’s Kiss every 30 minutes on the treadmill. You don’t do that to be a tease, but to pace the journey. The sparkling moments – the gold coins of character, action, dialog, surprise, emotion – light the way ahead, reward readers when they get there and encourage them to keep going with a promise: another coin lies ahead.

In Harmon’s dense-packed piece (lots and lots of information pressed into strongly structured sentences and paragraphs), she regularly offers such gems. Mostly commonly they come in the voice of Justin’s signature dialog (not quotes: dialog). But other things sparkle along the way: the father’s very human frustration; a peek into Justin’s sketchbook; moments that show the equally relentless drive of Justin’s mother and his teacher; the specific techniques used to calm Justin down, and that wonderful little touch of Justin taking the young lady’s hand.

In part this is about structure. Harmon chapters a complex piece by scene and topic, then weaves in moments in each chapter (usually at the end) to put a bow on that subject and entice me to go on to the next part.

But it’s also about spooling out the good stuff with patience and purpose. Instead of going for overarching gothic drama, Harmon offers small moments and scenes throughout her piece, helping me stay with her (and Justin) through a difficult ride.

(For another great read on the challenges of the autism spectrum, check out “A Brother’s Story.”  Cristof Traudes was a senior at the Missouri School of Journalism when he told his brother’s story. Full disclosure: I was his editor.  But the work is all his, and his family’s.)

Chris Hunt
Assistant managing editor, Sports Illustrated

On imagery the complements the story:

I can’t think of another article that benefits so much from its multimedia elements. Often these extras give you more but don’t take you deeper. The ones in this story do both. The piece is so engrossing and affecting that I wanted to learn as much as I could about Justin, his condition and Kate’s work.

The videos and additional photos and articles more than satisfied my curiosity. It was fascinating to see and hear Justin – his voice, his affect, his interactions with others – and to study the photo gallery of his art. I was also struck by the affection and tension between his devoted, exhausted parents. Amy Harmon’s beautiful narrative was complete in its own right, but the multimedia elements made it even richer.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

On unearthing and revealing character through indirect means:

How often do we feel stymied when we’re writing a story and our central character can’t reflect on or articulate his or her experience in any great depth? Amy Harmon shows us how to overcome that challenge as she profiles Justin Canha, the high school student with autism. Harmon reveals Justin’s personality by using:

Drawings. Harmon takes advantage of Justin’s passion for drawing cartoons – his creativity and feelings emerge from his comic strips. When a teacher takes away his markers, Justin draws himself “crying on a long, winding road home.” We even get a sense of his wicked sense of humor when Harmon details another one of his strips:

And with new computer software, he developed his own cartoon animations and a comic strip called “Jickey and Fanky” about a fox and a wolf that sometimes took on a decidedly personal twist. In “Jickey Goes to Behavior Therapy,” for instance, Dr. Fanky P. Wolf gets his eyes gouged out by his patient, Jickey, whom he is prodding to make eye contact.

Cartoon characters. Justin is an expert on Disney cartoon characters. Harmon notices that he is fascinated with Pinocchio. She points to the story of Pinocchio as a fitting parallel to Justin’s journey – and his desire to belong with the other kids.

“Pinocchio,” he informed anyone who asked, “is about a wooden puppet who was brought to life by a blue fairy and goes through mischief and mayhem so he can be approved to be a real boy.”

If he recognized himself in Pinocchio’s classic quest for acceptance, Justin did not say it in so many words.

Dreams. Justin reveals his dreams twice in Harmon’s story, and they offer the reader a glimpse into his fears and anxieties. When his father returns from a fishing trip, Justin draws one of his nightmares: “his own body on a plate, a fish above him with knife and fork, ready to dig in.” In another instance:

[He] woke his mother in the night, crying. He had had a nightmare, about “parents’ death and my death,” he told her.

It was, his mother thought, the first time he had registered what it would mean to truly be on his own.

Dialogue. Harmon uses dialogue to show how Justin interacts with others. For example, in one scene, we see how insistent Justin is about handing people Christmas cards. But then we see him soften as he realizes that not everyone celebrates Christmas.

“I’m not allowed to say ‘Merry Christmas,’ Marilyn,” Justin said abruptly to one of the librarians, thrusting a card at her. “So, happy holidays.”

He turned to walk away as she started to thank him.

“Justin,” Ms. Stanton-Paule said with unusual sharpness, “I think Marilyn was speaking.”

He stopped.

“I appreciate that you said ‘happy holidays,’ Justin,” the librarian said calmly, “because I celebrate Hanukkah.”

“Oh,” he said, as though it had never occurred to him. “Happy Hanukkah then.”

Then, in an exchange between Justin and his mother, we gain insight into his impatience to be on his own, away from his family.

“Mom, when is the last day of Dr. Selbst?” Justin asked on the weekly trips to the cognitive behavior therapist.

“Well, Justin, what’s the goal?” his mother asked. “Why do we go to Dr. Selbst?”

“Independence,” Justin sighed, turning on classical music on his iPod and settling in for the ride.

Observation. Harmon knows that an interview with Justin will only get her so far. So she spends a lot of time watching what Justin does. She undoubtedly has several notebooks full of observations. She distills the information into paragraphs like this one:

But more prosaic lessons arose at every turn: when he should present money at the pizza place (not until after he ordered), how close to stand to the person using the weight machine he wanted at the gym (not so close), what to say when he saw a co-worker drinking a Coke (probably not “Coca-Cola is bad for your bones”).

Poster. Harmon uses the poster that Justin presents at a conference to crystallize his hopes for his future, as well as his doubts about finding a partner.

On the lower steps of the poster, he had written “learn how to take the bus.” At the top, he had drawn himself at a drafting table, in a jacket and tie, with a red-brick apartment building. “Famous animator-illustrator” he had written, and, on the step marked 2014, “move to the apartment.”

In large blue letters, he had also written the word “Single.” “Marriage,” he said, drawing out his words in his exaggerated style, “is too comp-li-cat-ed.”

By portraying Justin in a multidimensional way, Harmon shows us how challenging it will be for him to transition into adult life, and that makes us want to learn more about programs that might help him do so. By the end of the story, it’s hard not to care about Justin and wonder what the future holds for him.

For more from Amy Harmon on this piece, read the Storyboard Q-and-A with her. For full bios of the Roundtable editors, see our introductory post.

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

Amid the rushing current – in print, online and on TV – certain pieces of food media have staying power. I often find them in Gastronomica, a publication that has held its own while its categories (paper as a medium and food as a topic) have evolved. Gastronomica manages to straddle the border between consumer magazine and scholarly journal. Many of the contributors are academics, and the articles often emerge from obscure research finds. But the best among them leave you with the lasting flavor of a textured, human story.

The Gastronomica article that has remained most vividly in my mind was written by a professor of cultural anthropology, Sandra Cate, at San Jose State University. “ ‘Breaking Bread with a Spread’ in a San Francisco County Jail”* was published in the journal’s Summer 2008 issue, and I hadn’t reread it since. What I recalled about the piece was how the author had described a cultural phenomenon among male inmates in a prison, but despite the complex social implications of her topic and her status as an outsider, she kept the focus tightly on the subjects, delivering a cleanly crafted account that lets the reader uncover the meta narrative.

Cate’s piece digs into a culinary phenomenon born inside the jail known as “spread” (both a noun and a verb), which was originally documented in photos and interviews by San Francisco photojournalist Robert Gumpert. Spread is a meal the inmates make for themselves outside of institutional mealtimes, assembling packaged foods pocketed from their canteen trays or ordered through the prison’s commissary program (a weekly delivery of personal items). Ingredients like Top Ramen, Cheetos, hot chocolate powder, peanut butter and jelly packets, pork rinds, and instant oatmeal are combined and cooked using one of two available heat sources – a microwave or boiling water. The resulting concoctions become a nighttime meal designed for sharing.

Writing from the outside about marginalized populations is a charged and challenging pursuit, and it strikes me as especially so in this case, as Cate sets out to describe how the creativity and community-building power of cooking manifest in the stark and relatively grim context of a jail. How to avoid romanticizing, exoticizing or patronizing a group of men whose extraordinary lack of comfort has led them to develop a full cookbook’s worth of comfort foods?

Toward the beginning of the article, she lets the inmates themselves set the stage by splicing together quotes from four sources in an almost Zagat-style patchwork:

Inmate Brennan Owens describes “spreading” as “putting something together to eat, too much of nothing, couple of Top Ramens, couple of bags of chips, couple of beef sticks. I pretty much crush everything together, throw it in one bag, a few cups of hot water, and blam. I got my Top Ramen special.” But other inmates assign spread a loftier status. Vanteak Alexander calls spread “the best thing going in the county—the things we buy off the canteen to satisfy the belly.” Trent “Mohammed” Prader claims that “not only is [spread] filling, but it’s like this is the premier meal of the day. It’s a top-of-the-line meal, like a filet mignon.” Patrick McConnell agrees, describing spread as “a delicacy. It’s like steak and lobster to the people.”

There’s nothing terribly unique about allowing a subject to do some of the heavy lifting by running a quote, but the way the author chops up and reassembles the various descriptions of spread also functions as a verbal reflection of the thing itself. She maintains her role as a scholar, using the subjects’ voices and a few spare personal impressions to create a much stickier and more dynamic cultural illustration than your average anthropological report.

I was particularly struck by how well Cate uses technical and completely objective details of spread preparation to convey some of its most significant functions in the life of the inmates. She zeroes in on two men who have figured out how to reverse-engineer their processed food rations in order to glean cooking oil.

Hackett … does an Asian ‘stir fry’ in the microwave by heating peanut oil he has extracted from his lunchtime peanut butter and then adding cooked ramen noodles, leftover vegetables, meat, and hot sauce.

After sixteen years in and out of jail, one Chinese inmate … has perfected his own Asian-style spread-making technique. … To make a sauce he heats mayonnaise to break the emulsion, and then mixes the oil with the soup base from the noodle package.

The ingenuity of these prison food hackers makes a great anecdote in and of itself, but more importantly, it demonstrates the significance of spread beyond its utility as a late-night snack. This is cooking. And it matters enough to these guys that the process feel like cooking, that they’ve found a way to provide themselves with the primary ingredient for making a hot meal from scratch: oil.

But Cate is never so explicit as to spell it out for the reader. And that is probably why, three years later, my memory of the story is more visual than analytical (aided, of course, by Gumpert’s photos): the familiar texture of ramen noodles, the unnatural color of Red Hot Cheetos, and the orange hue that is common to squeezy cheese and standard-issue prison uniforms.

It’s a great example of modern food writing. If you’re looking for an investigation of community in an institutionalized setting, a study of humans’ adaptability and self-reliance in dire circumstances, or an exposé on the relationship between government-contracted food distributors and prison administrators, Cate delivers all that using food as her vehicle. And if you just want a few ideas for turning a junk food medley into a feast, you could read the same eight pages as a series of highly inventive recipes. Nutritional content not included.

*To access this article, visit this JSTOR page and click the “PDF” link beneath the article title.

Sarah Rich (@sarahrich) is a writer, editor and new media entrepreneur. She is a co-founder of Longshot Magazine and the Foodprint Project, a former senior editor at Dwell, and co-author of “Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century.” Later this month, Rich will hit the road with Alexis Madrigal to explore Southern tech startups from Richmond to New Orleans.

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

We’re talking today because of your New York Times essay on your plans to end your life before ALS completely takes away your ability to do so. When did you know you wanted to tell this story?

It takes a little backstory. I was born with certain genes. My parents were writers. They were both very bright. I ended up as a newspaper writer like them but I was also alcoholic and gay. I’m sure there were other drunks in my friends and family, and other homosexuals. But at the time I was growing up – I was born in ’44 – I didn’t know what to do about being drunk. I didn’t understand that homosexuality was an identity. So I did the usual things to myself. I married and I drank.

The St. Petersburg Times began to let me play with writing from my own perspective. Then I went to the New York Times, which taught me to write tight. And then to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to become an editor, because I was tired of running around. And when that attempt to build a great paper crashed, I was so burned out I ran out of gas, because I was married and drinking and had a boyfriend on the side – which my wife knew, but it was exhausting.

I was lucky. I had one friend I knew who had a shrink, one friend of all my friends who I knew was in therapy. I called her shrink. She began to persuade me that I was a drunk and gay, two concepts I didn’t understand – and two pieces of fate, genetic fate, I think.

When I resigned from the Journal-Constitution as an editor as a matter of principle, I had no job to go to, and they were wondering why I had quit. I went off to treatment in Minneapolis.

And when I came out, I began to look around me. I separated from my wife, and for two years I did nothing but go to AA meetings, see my shrink, talk to my divorce lawyer, see my last boyfriend, and spend more and more and more time with [my daughter] Whitney.

During that period of self-realization, during that period of getting real for the first time in a personal way, I began to see myself differently, and I began to write more personally in a couple of ways. When the ’92 presidential campaign got underway, I had reported on presidential campaign coverage for the New York Times ever since ’68, so I had some experience. But I wasn’t writing about it. For the first time, in ’92 I was just looking and watching. And I saw this as someone who was for the first time understood himself to be alcoholic and gay. That makes a difference.

I had covered the religious right for the New York Times. I was the first to do that. I’ve written a lot about the South and civil rights. So I looked at the Republican convention, and I looked at the Democratic convention and Bill Clinton. The Republicans were using gays as their bogeymen. The Berlin Wall had fallen, Communism was no longer the bogeyman, so they were using homosexuals for that purpose. Clinton, on the other hand, for the first time as a presumptive nominee for a major party, was reaching out to gays and saying, “I understand you. Come to me.”

And I thought between those two polar opposites, there might for the first time form a national gay vote which could affect the election. So I called up the op-ed editor at the Times and suggested they write a piece about that. He said, “Why don’t you do it?”

I did, but in writing about it – to make it understandable to other people, I wrote it as someone who newly saw himself as gay, somebody to whom that change could matter, so people reading could understand the feelings of someone who, for the first time, was being embraced by the American political system.

It became a coming-out piece. I didn’t really intend for it to be that, but it became that, and, I think, the first time anyone had come out on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Maybe the last time – I’m not sure.

But it did me a lot of good. It solved the problem of “how do you tell people?” I had already told a lot of people, but once you’re in the paper of record, that’s pretty much it. You don’t have to worry about the subject anymore.

As life went on, I began to see other issues which were, I thought, universal to some extent. I began suggesting and writing about them on the op-ed page for the Times. And when I was an editorial writer for the Times under Howell Raines in ’98, ’99 and 2000, I wrote editorial columns occasionally from my life also.

So I ended up writing about being gay, being an alcoholic, and being legally responsible for old ladies who wanted to die and couldn’t. So I wrote about my cousin Florence and my aunts Bessie and Carolyn, for whom I was responsible. And then I wrote as a son about my mother, when she was dying.

I wrote about looking for love as a gay man in the age of AIDS for GQ. I wrote about divorcing and discovering my daughter, whom I know is the great joy of my life, in the process of divorce. I wrote for Lear’s. I’m a lucky bastard.

This is a long answer, but I think it will address your question. I’ve gotten in the habit of experiencing my life as both the person living it and the writer observing it. I’ve gotten in the habit of taking notes on my life experiences. I’ve been doing it since the days I wrote a column in the 1970s. That’s a long time now.

So when I got this diagnosis, I knew that one of the things I wanted to do at some point was to write about it for the Times. I’m lucky, I happen to have this relationship with them, and I’ve come to regard it as the way to pass on whatever understanding I think I’ve gained from my current narrative predicament.

And also it clears my mind and it frames it for me. I’m blessed with the New York Times having printed them all, and I’ve probably written more about my personal life, or from it, on the op-ed/editorial page than anyone else. I not sure I want them to think of it that way, but it just kind of worked out.

So when I got the diagnosis, the next day, I began to think like a reporter and observer and a nonfiction writer. I wrote to the director of the master’s in writing program at Johns Hopkins. I was teaching there that semester. I think I was a visiting writer or something, and I suggested a new course to him on living and dying in America, taught by a dying writer. I figured if he wanted something new and interesting, he might like that.

Oh, my.

And it happened that he had a new dean who had just said, “You know, we need some new voices in courses.” [Laughs.]

It was complicated. What I was trying to do was to create a narrative out of this experience. Because I’ve spent so much time in AA meetings – I’ve been to thousands in the last 22 years and in so many hundreds of hours of therapy – I’m pretty clear on how I feel and think about things.

So this diagnosis has been an event for which life has prepared me, one which is not, as odd as it may seem, unwelcome. I don’t think I’m fatalistic, if you take that term to mean glum – I’m not – but I don’t quibble with fate. It’s not up to us. What’s up to us is how we accept it, how we embrace it, and whether we let it make us weak or strong, and whether we can see the humor in it, because there’s humor in everything. So long as we get that, we can find a way to enjoy it, and it makes the experience ours, which is also a way of making it more tolerable.

That’s a long answer to your first question.

You mentioned that you are two people: the person living the life and the writer observing it. Do you have suggestions for people on how to let the writer get control of the story when the time comes?

About 1,000 hours of therapy is a good start. I think the hardest thing for a typical reporter – an old-fashioned, I guess at this point, newspaper reporter like me – is to shift out of the third-person perspective. Writing un-self-consciously about oneself is not an easy trick. To the extent that I can do it, it’s because I’ve been working toward it in the pieces I’ve been writing for the last 30 years. That’s a long time.

The thing is to keep your sense of humor. I mean, be modest, be funny, at least in the way you see it from the inside. If you can’t illuminate your own understanding, you’ll come across as too dark for the reader. Don’t take yourself seriously. Take the subject seriously, but treat yourself as material which is inherently amusing, dramatic, entertaining and instructive. See yourself as a really entertaining writer would. If you can do that, can begin to see yourself as a really entertaining writer might, you might be able to become that entertaining writer.

We had to wait a bit to have this talk because you’ve gotten so busy. You mentioned a visit from an ex-boyfriend and a book contract. Are you writing the book now? What will it be called?

My choice is “Lemonade: The Good Short Life and Cheerful Exit of (by) Dudley Clendinen.”

The title says everything. It sounds egocentric – I don’t mean it that way. I think it helps readers if titles and words are very specific to a person, to keep it so that other people can relate to it.

I wrote a series of letters when I was first diagnosed. I’m not old by modern measures. I just turned 67. I’ve always been pretty active, fairly strong and all of that. So I didn’t expect this. Nobody does. I started writing letters basically saying, “Don’t worry about me, because I’m fine. It’s a big lemon, but I’m making lemonade.”

I wanted to find some way to reassure my friends and my family. If you can let people know you’re comfortable, that you can deal with something, they can deal with it. If you can’t deal with it, how the hell can you expect them to? It’s really important not to be selfish about this stuff.

Some people might say it’s the moment where it’s most reasonable to be selfish.

Then you’ll die alone. I won’t be alone. Who wants to be a lonely and miserable, selfish son-of-a-bitch and then die? I think it’s the moment when it’s most important for a person to be as graceful and empathetic and entertaining as possible.

Because A) it’s easier if you enjoy it, and B) it’s easier on other people if you enjoy it. And why do you want them to remember you as someone incapable of being the equal of this disease? There’s no point in that.

Do you have anything else you’d like to say about the writing life?

Well, first, this will be my third book, assuming I can finish it – and that’s not a given. But I’ve turned in the first chunk of it – a week ago Friday – and they like it a lot. I like it, too. If I can finish it, this will be the third book in a row to quote from an essay or essays on the op-ed pages of the Times. I guess my point is that if you free yourself to realize that sometimes your best material is you – not you, but what’s in your life, then you may find the satisfaction of finding ways to write about those things that find audiences and then remuneration. As a result I get paid to die. How good is that? [Laughs.]

You have found a grace in this that I find hard to imagine.

That’s what people keep saying. What surprises me, actually, is that people find that so unusual. I think the fact that they do find it unusual speaks to a really large need in this culture, which is that one of the things we really don’t do well at all as a culture is deal with approaching death.

We don’t deal well with individuals once we spy death coming at us or when it’s coming for the people we love. We don’t seem to know how to talk about it. We don’t seem to know how to feel about it in ways that are unselfish and truly thoughtful, or therapeutic and helpful.

It’s not so hard if you get the trick of it. And it’s really important. We waste a gargantuan amount of emotion and money in self-defeating, dead-end discussions on the subject of dying and how to die. We are so behind our own technology that it’s tragic, and we don’t seem to be doing anything about it. I think we’re stuck. It’s changing, but not that fast. And in public, in the political sphere of public policy and debate, of course, the subject is where the understanding and the rhetoric are the most behind the state of knowledge.

What do you hope this piece, and your book, will do?

The impact, or influence might be the better word, of pieces like this is hard to measure. I do know that I’m astonished at the response to this piece. It’s far – light years – in excess of any response I’ve ever had to anything. I was way north of 600 or more letters and notes and emails before I quit counting. They’re still coming in.

I’ve heard from several publishers. I got the biggest book contract of my life. I’m continuing to do the interviews and the conversations on Maryland public radio, and people listen. It’s amazing. The biggest joy is the reactions I’ve had. I’ve heard from friends who teach at Johns Hopkins and at Harvard Medical School that the piece has helped change the discussion about death and patient rights within the medical community in a way which they said would continue. It’s a little hard for me to imagine, but then again, maybe not. Something about it seemed to grab people’s attention. I don’t pretend to understand exactly why, but it seemed to be a piece that people noticed around the world.

[The original conversation with Clendinen took place by phone, but he added a final note by email.]

In reforming my life so thoroughly, starting in December, 1988, when I went away to Minnesota over Christmas, for treatment in what was then the only alcohol and drug rehab designed just for gay men and women, with a gay professional staff, in the world, I became thoroughly -  though I hope not boringly – honest.

I’m the man with no secrets. With the wrong attitude, that can be a dangerous condition. But having a divorce jury trial, with a 12-member jury, helped a lot. Testifying and being cross-examined under oath about all my issues and transgressions, in front of a jury in Atlanta, was both very humbling and very liberating. I think that was 1990, and ever since, I say the same things in public that I do in private.

Writing now is conversational. I’m not on a soapbox. I do try to be entertaining about it, but I basically say what I am comfortable saying, in a voice that I hope is comfortable for the listener or reader to hear.

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

Using juxtaposition to manage tone:

Dudley Clendinen’s essay is about his impending death. Yet the piece is neither depressing nor horrific to read. It is a delight. One of Clendinen’s secrets is the graceful way in which he delivers his message. He is gentle in tone, and he is a master at juxtaposition – pairing something dire with something surprising to temper the grimness and break the tension. Sometimes, even in the midst of such grimness, he makes us laugh.

The lede is a good example.

“We need to go buy you a pistol, don’t we?” he asked quietly. He meant to shoot myself with.

“Yes, Sweet Thing,” I said, with a smile. “We do.”

I loved him for that.

The smile, the “sweet thing,” the love – all are unexpected. They tell us that he’s going to have a very different take on all of this than we expect. And it offers us a little breath of relief.

Or look at this paragraph, in which he does it twice:

At the moment, for 66, I look pretty good. I’ve lost 20 pounds. My face is thinner. I even get some “Hey, there, Big Boy,” looks, which I like. I think of it as my cosmetic phase. But it’s hard to smile, and chew. I’m short of breath. I choke a lot. I sound like a wheezy, lisping drunk. For a recovering alcoholic, it’s really annoying.

He shows you the ravages of his disease – he’s wasting away, losing weight, can barely eat, can barely breathe. And yet two short sentences – “I think of it as my cosmetic phase” and “For a recovering alcoholic, it’s really annoying” – are funny and filled with character. They make it impossible for you to feel sorry for him, though you do feel great empathy.

In the body of the piece, he stays serious. He recounts the early days of his illness – how he coped, or how he watched relatives linger far beyond their time. It’s tough reading, but he has already charmed us, and so we keep going. And then he gives us another little gift, two surprising sentences placed right up against terribly bleak ones. After listing the many ways he could commit suicide (which makes it clear that he has thought this through), he writes of helium that it “would give me a really funny voice at the end.”

And, in the next graf, he assures us: He no longer has to be careful about what he eats or having enough money. And as we realize the enormity of what he is saying, he reassures us: “I am having a wonderful time.”

Paige Williams
Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

On short sentences:

I first suggested to Andrea that I write about Clendinen’s simple sentences, but as I looked again and again at the material I realized what I meant was short sentences. The power of this piece rests upon the poetry of Clendinen’s sentence-level brevity.

The result easily could have felt choppy or self-indulgent. Some writers prune their sentences in an effort to mimic Hemingway (“For sale: baby shoes, never used.”), with the sole result of showing all the puppet strings. The stripped-down approach often grates – we see the underdeveloped writer, focused more on Self than Story, sweating all over the page in an attempt to impress and manipulate. Which is why it’s so remarkable that every one of Clendinen’s sentences is full of the personal yet devoid of writerly ego. The collective rhythm and unpretentious sentence structures suggest he sees no point in adornment, no time for fat. The subject matter and line-by-line delivery remind me of Beckett (“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”).

In his book on sentence craft, “How to Write A Sentence,” Stanley Fish asks writers (and readers) to first consider form. “The form is more important than the content, and if you master the form and understand what it’s doing and what can be done with it, then you can produce content endlessly,” he recently said on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.”

Clendinen’s piece beautifully represents that idea. If you data-crunch this story in terms of sentence structure you find, by my rough count, that 116 of the 124 sentences contain fewer than 20 words. The four-word sentence appears most frequently (18 times), followed by the seven-word sentence (13), the five- or 12-word sentence (nine each), and the eight-word sentence (eight). The longest sentence contains 51 words; the shortest, one (“Why?”).

All 28 of his paragraphs obey the Writing 101 rule to vary one’s sentence lengths whenever possible. In paragraph one: 4 words in the first sentence followed by 9, 8, 10, 4, 12, 21, 7. In paragraph 17: 12, 6, 36. Paragraph 12: 9, 28 (“I began to slur and mumble in May 2010. When the neurologist gave me the diagnosis that November, he shook my hand with a cracked smile and released me to the chill, empty gray parking lot below.”).

Overall, the predominance of short sentences serves the story because:

The good short sentence is a coiled rattlesnake. It does not mess around.

The pacing reflects the subject matter. Together the sentences behave almost like a fusillade, imparting urgency.

The reader doesn’t get lost. Committing to a long sentence can be like entering a maze – we run the risk of forgetting where we are. Unless you’re the next Dickens or Faulkner, step away, por favor, from the steroidal word count.

I wondered whether Clendinen speaks the way he writes, so I listened to some of the wonderful interviews he mentioned, from the “Maryland Morning” program on Baltimore’s main NPR station. Listen to this: “The first thing I notice every morning is the voice,” Clendinen said on March 7, referring to his illness’ effect on his enunciation. “Some mornings it’s better. Some mornings it’s sloppier and slurpier, and I think this morning it’s a little sloppy.” [And that changes day to day?] “It does. Two hours from now it may be better. Tomorrow it may be better. Having a progressive total disease is a little bit like playing chess with a computer: You know the computer’s always thinking, it’s always advancing, it’s gonna make some move – it may be a little one, it may tease you and be good to you one day and then trick you the next, but it’s always moving.”

Clarity and power begin in the mind. Even when Clendinen speaks, one never feels him straining to write (and certainly not to pose) but rather to reveal. The man is dying of ALS and he wants us to know what that’s like. His shrine to this impulse is a simple one but, like a good pine coffin, strong.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

On attention to universal theme:

In his essay, Dudley Clendinen goes beyond the traditional nut graf, hitting upon a universal theme.

Facing death can be a freeing experience.

I think it’s important to say that. We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die. We act as if facing death weren’t one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is. This is not dull. But we have to be able to see doctors and machines, medical and insurance systems, family and friends and religions as informative – not governing – in order to be free.

And that’s the point. This is not about one particular disease or even about Death. It’s about Life, when you know there’s not much left. That is the weird blessing of Lou. There is no escape, and nothing much to do. It’s liberating.

While a traditional nut graf tells the reader what the news in the story is, the universal theme graf (or grafs) tells the reader the broader meaning of the story – or at least hints at it. The graf gives the reader what I call a glimpse of wisdom.

You’re not necessarily going to need a universal theme graf for a straightforward news story; the report’s main purpose is to convey information. But a universal theme graf can strengthen the setup of a narrative, essay or feature story – it signals that your piece is going to be about a larger idea, one that will hopefully resonate with readers.

Chip Scanlan, a longtime mentor of mine, provided a road map for crafting a theme graf in his classic 2003 Poynter column, “Selling the Power of Focus.”

Inspired by journalist David Von Drehle, Chip described a set of five questions that can help writers determine the focus – and theme – of their stories: Why does the story matter? What’s the point? Why is the story being told? What does the story say about life, the world and the times we live in? What’s the story really about – in one word?

Chip argued that readers, overwhelmed by information, are hungry for meaning.

He quoted Jack Fuller, the former Chicago Tribune editor and publisher who wrote in News Values: “People come to a newspaper craving a unifying human presence – the narrator in a piece of fiction, the guide who knows the way, or the colleague whose view one values. Readers don’t just want random snatches of information flying at them from out of the ether. They want information that hangs together, makes sense, has some degree of order to it. They want knowledge rather than facts, perhaps even a little wisdom.”

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

On the power of the personal essay:

Many reporters would rather eat nails than write about themselves. It’s ironic, really, because we’re happy to intrude on other people’s lives and ask personal questions and hope for dramatic insight. But exposing yourself – figuratively – can be terrifying.

In this case, Dudley Clendinen is up against something even more frightening – ALS – so maybe it’s not so hard to open up. I’d argue that more writers should give it a try. Readers need to be reminded that we are, despite what they may think, human.

Of course, a gifted storyteller can relate any experience better than most. But consider the biggest advantage of the personal essay – you’ve already done a lot of the reporting. After all, it’s your life, your experiences, your take.

In this case, Clendinen got to choose from everything – his past, what he’s facing now, what he’s been thinking about, what people have done for him, what he’s done for others, conversations he’s had, how he looks, what he’s learned about the disease, what choices he’s made, what regrets he has, what he’s happy about. You’d be lucky to have that much material on any story.

Then you have to have the courage to share. Remember, we ask people to do this all the time. To lay bare their worst moments. We try to pull out of them what it’s like to learn that you’re going to die. How do you make peace with that? What are you scared of?

Do we get honest and/or complete answers? I suspect that it rarely happens, because most folks will only go so far with total strangers.

But Clendinen took us right up to the crossroad we’re all going to reach someday. He wrote with personality and humor, so it wasn’t a downer, despite the topic. And writing about himself allowed Clendinen to make a convincing argument for why we should think more about death than we do. Because it was his story, the message also carried more weight: “Lingering would be a colossal waste of love and money.”

For more on Dudley Clendinen, read the Storyboard Q-and-A with him. For full bios of the Roundtable editors, see our introductory post.

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

“Karen Wagner’s Life” by John Sprong for Texas Monthly (via @longreads).

The initial flash of sound was deafening, unreal. The officers still in Axson’s office didn’t know what had happened. Some thought there might have been an explosion at the helipad. Others were certain it was part of the attack. Karen, who was sitting at her desk, never got to wonder.

“For 9/11 Families, Healing Comes With New Starts and Tributes Paid” by Glenn Collins, Anthony DePalma, Robin Finn, Jan Hoffman, N. R. Kleinfield, Maria Newman and Janny Scott for The New York Times.

Alissa Torres has now lived without him three times longer than she was his wife, and sometimes, she admits, it’s kind of shocking to realize he actually existed. “I think of him every day,” Ms. Torres said, “but sometimes he seems like something I might have made up.”

“‘The lake left me. It’s gone.’” by Dan Egan of the Journal Sentinel.

I think this is probably going to be the last time I see Milwaukee from the water, 77-year-old Alvin Anderson says.

Yeah, his son, Dan, replies glumly.

Then Milwaukee’s last working commercial fishing tug – the Alicia Rae – glides through the north gap of the Milwaukee Harbor breakwater.

And it is gone.

“What Is Killing the Bats?” by Michelle Nijhuis for Smithsonian Magazine.

“On my worst days, I feel like we’re working our tails off just to document an extinction,” says Reeder. “But somehow in really teasing apart all of this, in really understanding how they die and why, we may find something really important, something we didn’t predict, something that might help.”

“Gold Coins: The Mystery of the Double Eagle” by Susan Berfield for Bloomberg Businessweek (via @thebrowser).

The investigation has spanned three continents and involved some of the most famous coin collectors in the world, a confidential informant, a playboy king, and a sting operation at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan. It has inspired two novels, two nonfiction books, and a television documentary. And much of it has centered around a coin dealer, dead since 1990, whose shop is still open in South Philadelphia, run by his 82-year-old daughter.