How did you find the story of Hannah and Andrew?

This has never happened to me before, but a reporter with the San Antonio Express-News called me out of the blue one day and told me about Hannah’s case. I’ll back up for a second to say that I wrote an article in 2010 about a former death row inmate named Anthony Graves, and that story was partly credited with helping eventually win his freedom, with the help of his attorneys and a special prosecutor.

Because of that, after that story came out — and this continues to this day — I get letters and calls literally on a daily basis, usually from inmates but sometimes from attorneys. This is the first time it came from another reporter. People will come to me and say, “There’s this innocence case, and I really wish that you would look into it.” It has gotten somewhat overwhelming, with letters piling up.

But in this case, this reporter from the San Antonio Express-News, John MacCormack, who is one of the best newspaper reporters in Texas, called me. John and I didn’t know each other, but I’ve been following his work for a long time. He said, “I’ve been writing about this case out of Corpus Christi, and I’ve done as much as I can do with it on a newspaper level. It’s a really important case, and I wish you would look into it.”

John ended up driving to Austin and giving me notes and documents. Again, I’ve never had anything like this happen before. And four days after John called me, a TV cameraman I was talking to for other reasons said, “There’s this case in Corpus you should look into. It’s the case of Hannah Overton.” To have two different media people tell me this was an important case, obviously, I was going to look into it.

About these calls and letters you get: Do you weigh stories now in a different way than you did before the Graves story?

One of the things that’s hard is that part of my job is to be a storyteller. There are many innocence cases or potential innocence cases that I see which are very interesting from a legal perspective but aren’t interesting from a narrative perspective. I can’t write a story about every one of these cases, and so I have to find the ones that are compelling from both a legal standpoint and a narrative standpoint.

One thing that I’ve done in the past month is that I’m partnering, if that’s the right word, with Anthony Graves’ attorney, Nicole Cásarez, who’s an attorney and also a journalism professor at the University of Saint Thomas in Houston. All letters that I get from inmates I forward to her. And she and her students — she runs an innocence clinic — look into the ones that they feel have the most merit, or the ones they can do something with. Our hope is to look at these things together and try to pick out the ones that are the best for us to write about, for her students to investigate, and try to make more of a difference that way.

I write three to four big stories a year, and there are so many of these cases.

It’s interesting that you note the line between what’s an engaging case and one you can tell narratively.

Part of being a long-form journalist is that you are sometimes an investigative reporter, but you are also a storyteller. Is this a narrative — if you’re going to write it at 10, 12, 14,000 words — that is interesting enough to keep the reader going? That’s something I have to consider, which is sometimes hard.

I noticed that each section in “Hannah and Andrew” very clearly captures one thing. You introduce Andrew, you introduce Hannah, you bring them together, you take them apart. She’s charged with his death, she’s convicted of his death, and then family tries to cope. This is just the spine of events, of course.

I have actually never (outlined) it like that.

That’s what I wanted to know. Do you lay things out ahead of time before you write, or do you impose structure on something messier as it evolves?

I picked this up from Skip Hollandsworth, my mentor here at the magazine, who is a wonderful writer. He’s done a lot of crime stories. I have one Word document that I dump everything into — all my notes, interesting quotes, references to documents, everything. It’s a master document that I can do a word search on, and hopefully everything’s at my fingertips. As I start to input information into the document, it starts to take its own organic shape. Information is grouped together spontaneously, and at some point it starts to take a shape. Now, admittedly, that’s not always the right shape to write the story in.

But with Hannah and Andrew, I really struggled with whether to begin with him or her. And I just kept returning to that case file of his, which was really all that I had. I had a couple pictures and maybe 30 pages, most of which didn’t mean much to me. But I just kept leafing through that, trying to understand him, and I thought, “Well, readers are going to be in the same position. He’s our main character, but I’ve never met him.” And our readers will never meet him either. So how do we handle that? My idea was to put him front and center, and go from there.

As far as mapping it out that way, I actually didn’t. So it’s really interesting to hear what you just said. That helps me – I need to diagram my own stories!

The main goal I have in the thick of writing is simply – I have such a short attention span, I have two kids and almost no reading time – so I try to put myself in the reader’s shoes. I try to end each section with something that is going to keep you going, if possible.

But you don’t outline ahead of time? You just use the Skip Hollandsworth Document Evolution Method?

I would call it a loose outline. When I’m writing the beginning of the second section, I don’t yet know what the beginning of the sixth section is. But I do have a general sense of where I’m headed. I always know what my last scene is. For some reason that’s the easiest thing. I always know what my last few paragraphs are, and I’m trying to get there as efficiently as possible.

You have all this information, particularly with something that’s a legal case: the trial, the child protective services material. There’s a lot of stuff you’re not going to tell the reader. One section opens with you explaining “the most unsettling aspect” of the case against Hannah. When you write that, are you thinking of helping readers know where to focus?

That’s so funny that you focused on that. That was the section I had the most difficulty with. It was a three-week-long trial – just reading the transcripts took me so long. There was so much information, and a lot of it was extremely technical medical testimony. I struggled with how to present that to the reader. To do a blow-by-blow account with the trial with its dramatic moments wasn’t going to work in this case.

I probably spent more time on that paragraph that you just mentioned than anything else. Okay, we can’t go through every hour of the three-week-long trial, but what’s the most important thing for readers to take away from what happened at the trial? What lens should they view the trial through?

What really jumped out at me – and there were many lines from the trial I didn’t even get to use – but to say that Hannah was vilified at trial would be an understatement. It was every mother’s nightmare, I guess, to have every aspect of every decision she had made as a mother held up to scrutiny and made to look sinister. That’s what I hoped readers took away from the trial without getting too lost in the details.

I think a lot of people might think of the trial as having real potential for drama. Why not use the trial for drama and fold everything into that? Can you talk about when you would or wouldn’t do that?

This has been true with the Overton case, with the Graves case, and it’s about to be true with another piece I’m working on, in which another person was exonerated with DNA evidence. There is so much you can’t tell in a courtroom. There’s so much context you can provide in a magazine narrative, that for good reason you can’t present in a courtroom, but that still matters. Someone’s character, someone’s history over time, in this case with children, someone’s capacity for dealing with stress and difficult things, like Hannah did with Andrew – there’s so much you can present in a magazine story that you can’t at trial.

To me, when I go back now, having written the story, and read the trial transcript, it’s sort of like reading one fragment of the story. There’s so much that’s left out, there’s so much the jury doesn’t know. It would be too limiting to just tell a story through a trial. To me what’s most interesting is what gets left out of the trial.

Outside of the debates over her contact with Andrew, Hannah is so overwhelmingly a force for good in your story. Everybody who actually knew her said such positive things. Did you worry that would seem unrealistic?

What was challenging – and it’s rare that I’ve run into this to this extent – no one from the DA’s office would talk to me. No one at the police department would talk to me. So I knew heading into this story that whether I wanted it to be or not, that it ran the risk of being one-sided. I would have loved to have had quotes in there from the cop, from the prosecutor. I tried to quote them as much as I could from the record.

To me, what was so fascinating about this case was that people either viewed her as almost saintly or almost demonic. There was no gray with her. People either felt that she was the most wonderful mother ever, or that she was a child abuser and the worst of the worst, that she had murdered a child. That you could look at the same person and sometimes the same set of facts and come to two such different conclusions was so interesting to me.

One of the things I tried to do in the story was to show how all the little disparate details taken together, if you didn’t know the Overtons, looked bad: the bed sheets and the fire pit. There were a couple different things that all put together seemed very strange and seemed like this was a place where abuse could be happening. That duality, that perfect mother vs. evil mother – I’ve never really run into something like that before, and hopefully I presented each side as fully as possible.

You mentioned the people who wouldn’t talk to you, people who normally would. You had some people who backed off their involvement with the case or changed their mind about their role in it. Did this case have an unusual degree of that kind of reversal?

It was a very unusual degree of that. There were people who talked to me off the record who I obviously couldn’t quote in the story. But there were people who had been involved in this case who had made dramatic changes of opinion about this case.

You’re an investigative journalist, and you’re a storyteller. Whatever your intent, with these kind of stories, there’s almost an activist or advocacy effect that trails in their wake. How do you think about your role as a journalist in relation to activism or advocacy?

I think in both the story about Hannah and the story about Anthony Graves, the stories were better the more I pulled back. There was an early version of the Graves story that was an advocate’s draft, and it didn’t work. It was too obvious from the beginning what my thoughts about the case were. I tried, and I think I succeeded, with the Overton case to not make that mistake again, and to lay out the facts so that a reader could come to his or her own conclusion.

I think with the Overton case there are ways in which we can see that there were mistakes made. It’s clear the Overtons waited too long to take Andrew to the hospital, things along those lines. I don’t think they did so maliciously, but I thought it was important to explain to readers that his health had been deteriorating for a while before they took him to the hospital, that it was important not to smooth over the difficult facts of the case. I knew that some people would read this and think that an injustice had happened, and that other people would read this and think, “I wouldn’t have made those same decisions, and of all the cases out there, this isn’t one I’m going to feel sorry about.” So hopefully, it lays things out in a way that people can come to their own conclusions.

When you start to veer into advocacy, you can do your subject a disservice. If you show the warts, if you show the problems, I think that makes the strengths of the story better anyway. The reader knows, hopefully, that you’re being candid and telling them all the facts that you know.

One more thing – with the Graves story and the Overton story, with both of those stories, I had extensive letters, interviews, many, many hours from Anthony’s perspective in the Graves story and from Hannah’s perspective in the Overton story. In both those stories I waited until the last section for the reader to hear from them, and that was very intentional. The reason for that is, of course, if you go through those cases, they see themselves as innocent, and they narrate as such: “I had no idea why the police were there.” That’s not the way to take the reader through the case. You have to present things in a more clinical way before getting to what the subject of the story thinks.

You’re sort of resisting the scenic narrative, the most intimate version, which would have been through their eyes.

Which I could have done in both stories, which I could have done in great detail, but which I resisted because I thought that would be too much and that doesn’t give the reader all the information.

I suspect that a lot of editors giving general advice would say to find the most intimate perch you can, because that’s where you’ll have the most power.

The other things I’ve been spending a lot of time on the last couple of years have been oral histories of important moments in Texas history, like the Whitman shootings in 1966. I did an oral history from the perspective of the victims and people who were on campus that day. That is the exact opposite of what you and I are talking about; it’s nothing but what someone saw from their perspective, and the emotion of that moment, and that’s very gripping, too.

I’ve never really thought this out before, but in a story where someone’s guilt or innocence is in the balance, to me if you told the story from the perspective of the defendant the whole way through, it would be as misleading as telling it from the perspective of the prosecutor the whole way through. You have to somehow have a perfect medium, if you can, though I doubt you can. You have to present things to the reader almost as if they are the jurors, in a sense, but with more information, often, than the jurors received in the actual case.

At about 10am on the same day, a woman stepped into an elevator at 285 Madison Avenue. Halfway in, on the threshold where most people stop to hold the door open, the car shot up and pinned her to the roof. The two passengers were trapped with her body for over an hour.

That night I sat down again with one of the most frightening, banal, effed-up, claustrophobic, and crazy-good pieces of nonfiction I’ve ever read: “Up and Then Down,” Nick Paumgarten’s 2008 history of elevators from The New Yorker. If you’ve never read it, perhaps you’ve heard about the story, another it-will-never-happen-to-me urban legend turned reality: In the fall of 1999, Nicholas White, a production editor at Business Week, enters an elevator at the McGraw-Hill building to go out for an evening smoke and leaves it 41 hours later.

Elevators are the most horrible places imaginable about two percent of their time. For the other ninety-eight percent of the time, elevators have little sex appeal, and so do 8,000-word features on them. It’s a New Yorker staple, these masterworks that reveal the sudden canonical purpose of leaf blowers, or coffee beans, or online dating, or pencil erasers. On a recent episode of “Parks and Recreation,” a character uses a (fake) New Yorker article about the history of ladders to neutralize the sexual tension between coworkers. It works.

Then again, the banality of the thing is often the best challenge there is. Hey journalist, you want a good opening? Start with a man getting into an elevator alone. The elevator stops. Now go:

He occupied himself with thoughts of remaining calm and decided that he’d better not do anything drastic, because, whatever the malfunction, he thought it unwise to jostle the car, and because he wanted to be (as he thought, chuckling to himself) a model trapped employee. He hoped, once someone came to get him, to appear calm and collected. He did not want to be scolded for endangering himself or harming company property. Nor did he want to be caught smoking, should the doors suddenly open, so he didn’t touch his cigarettes. He still had three, plus two Rolaids, which he worried might dehydrate him, so he left them alone. As the emergency bell rang and rang, he began to fear that it might somehow—electricity? friction? heat?—start a fire. Recently, there had been a small fire in the building, rendering the elevators unusable. The Business Week staff had walked down forty-three stories. He also began hearing unlikely oscillations in the ringing: aural hallucinations. Before long, he began to contemplate death.

It’s clear that Paumgarten sat down for an extensive talk with Nicholas White, but there’s hardly a word from him here: it’s all in his head. This is a curious and tricky point of view for a writer. These aren’t the actual thoughts of a person in this situation, there’s no real panic, it’s all ice cold third person, and somehow that’s what chills. “He began to contemplate death.” It’s the kind of spectacular understatement that any good writer would love to pull off.

White’s story is woven through the feature in short episodes, between the “bring sprawling New Yorker stuff” that pads out the canon of elevator lore: the elevator in free-fall, the first elevator demonstration, the elevator’s effect on the skyline, the high-tech elevators in the world’s tallest buildings, the strange mathematics of elevatoring (it’s a science, this up and down).

But it’s the psychological toll on a simple elevator rider that makes this piece so good. And the precision with which that toll is meted out. There’s a detachment to the proceedings, an almost mechanical breakdown in the way Paumgarten gets to our addled hero.

He started to call out “Hello?” He tried cupping his hand to his mouth and yelled out some more. “Help! Is anybody there? I’m stuck in an elevator!” He kept at it a while.

There it is again, that frightening understatement. Could be five minutes, could be five hours.

Not a banality of evil, but perhaps fear—or rather, the possibility of fear? Yes, that’s what it is. “Elevatorphobia is a kind of claustrophobia,” Paumgarten writes, “and as such the fear is as much of experiencing fear—of having a panic attack in an enclosed space—as it is of the thing itself.”

It’s easy to think of writing itself as panic attack in an enclosed space, and the real work of writers is overcoming the fear of that panic attack. Maybe that’s another reason why this is so good: it feels like Paumgarten has complete control over what is basically the mental breakdown of a man in an enclosed space.

For our man on the ground, it only got worse. After White got out of the elevator and found himself at the center of all kinds of attention, he fell apart. He shrunk from the press, he sued the building, he settled for peanuts, and he disappeared to Anguilla for two months, effectively quitting his job at the magazine.

Paumgarten reveals in his closing paragraphs that in the spring of 2008 White still didn’t have steady work, living with almost ten years of grief after 41 hours of loss. He carefully keeps White’s true feelings at the edge of the page, and in the end, we find out we didn’t know White at all, couldn’t possibly understand what he went through. It’s a traumatic realization, how the elevator changes you.

Michelle Legro (@michellelegro) is an editor at Lapham’s Quarterly.

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.

But I’m not here to talk about Talese – rather, I bring up “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” as a point of reference for dissecting “The Biggest Event This Year,” a minor gem by a writer whom I’ve often thought of as an underappreciated anti-Talese: George W.S. Trow.

Trow, a New Yorker writer who died in 2006, is best remembered for “Within the Context of No Context” (published in that magazine in 1980 and later as a book), an idiosyncratic cri de coeur against the hollowing out of the American social landscape wrought by late-20th-century popular culture. Trow was unique among his generation of Media Age critics in that before he inveighed against popular culture, he spent more than a decade reporting on it, often brilliantly. It’s hard to imagine one half of his career existing without the other. Just as Trow’s astringent criticism is tempered by fascination, the peculiar genius of his reporting is a function of his ambivalence toward his subject.

“The Biggest Event This Year,” published in the New Yorker in 1974, is a deceptively straightforward account of the soul singer Sly Stone’s wedding at Madison Square Garden. It begins like this:

On Friday, May 3^rd, in the late afternoon, Sly Stone, the sleek black singer, called the office of Epic Records, his record company, and talked with Stephen Paley, his main man there. During the conversation, Sly announced to Paley that he planned to marry Kathy Silva, a striking young Hawaiian girl, who has been an actress in California, and who is the mother of his eleven-month-old son. Sly said he planned to marry Kathy almost immediately. “I might do it in Hawaii,” he told Paley. “Or I might do it when I come to New York.”

“Why don’t you do it in Madison Square Garden?” Paley asked facetiously. “Before your concert.”

“Yeah,” Sly said. “I could be my own opening act.”

This is a PR stunt of the highest, most decadent order, and a clever vehicle for exploring one of Trow’s great fascinations: the back end of celebrity.

If Talese presents Sinatra as the unknowable center of a small human solar system held together by the gravitational force of his fame,  Trow does the opposite: He presents Sly Stone as an almost inert body, which but for the efforts of his attendants would plummet out of the firmament of popular culture. Trow’s subject is not the force that a star exerts on his retinue, but the Sisyphean effort required to keep the star aloft.

Trow is inverting the conventions of celebrity reporting in more ways than one. All narrative nonfiction relies on a certain sleight of hand, but the business of writing about famous people – actors, musicians, athletes, politicians – relies on it more than most. Writers are expected to spin the most artificial and controlled circumstances into a tissue of simulated intimacy; they are supposed to deliver a fully human portrait of larger-than-life figures despite the best intentions of their subjects’ minders. Trow instead tacks boldly in the opposite direction, embracing the artificiality of the whole enterprise.

As the wedding planning begins, he writes,

Several complicated sets of expectations began to be felt. There was Sly’s expectation that his wedding would be an event—perhaps, indeed, the event of the year. There was the expectation among some people in the fashionable world that it would be a perverse event—perhaps the perverse event of the year. There were commercial expectations of a grand sort—that the wedding and the publicity generated would give Sly’s career new energy and a new direction. And there were commercial expectations of a petty sort—that news of the wedding would help fill the house. From the start, the meaning of what has happened seemed to be tangled—except that two rules seemed to hold true: When fantastic black expectations intersect fantastic white expectations there is fantasy and energy but no real event, and when, in America, commercial expectations enter any equation they determine the result.

Postmodern asides like this abound. At one point Trow describes a PR flack as “a Yale man, dressed in a tan suit and aviator sunglasses, [who] seemed to represent, at different moments, intensity, sincerity, compromise, and exhaustion.” The effect is more Donald Bartheleme than Talese, and the fact that it comes off as daring rather than pretentious is a testament to Trow’s gifts as a writer and a reporter.

He nails all the particulars, from the problem with Sly’s recent music – “people don’t dance to it” – to his lamé-draped mid-’70s milieu. (“You know what I see? For the opening shot?” one of the event planners, discussing lighting design with a stage production artist, asks. “Triangles within triangles. Soaring. Very modern. All in gold. Ten different gold colors.”) The dialogue is snappy – suspiciously so, in keeping with the era’s flexible standards for magazine writing – and Trow is a deft observer of the psychology of fame. Of Sly’s late arrival to a meeting, he writes, “Sly uses small, benign delays in the way that a lion uses small, un-deadly nips—to indicate affection while calling attention to his teeth.” Trow catches Paley opting for local champagne over the real stuff for Sly’s lavish reception at the Waldorf-Astoria, and deciding to serve it only with the wedding cake – which tells you everything you need to know about an artist who, in 1974, was still famous but no longer quite on top of the world.

“The Biggest Event This Year” dutifully touches on Sly’s biography and music, but the main character here is really Paley, Sly’s handler, who is in charge of the dizzying logistics. We see him attempt to arrange – with varying degrees of success – for a flock of white doves, flying models in angel costumes, and the recording of a funky wedding march overseen by legendary producer John Hammond. Sly, in his intermittent appearances, is mostly just a particularly irritating variable in Paley’s calculations, one who skips studio sessions, changes plans on a whim, and demands to be paid more money for whatever he happens to be doing at the moment.

In the end, the titular Biggest Event This Year is something of a McGuffin. Trow spends all of one paragraph on the wedding itself, describing it with a flat society-page affect:

At nine-fifty-one, Kathy Silva came onstage with her father. At nine-fifty-three, Sly came onstage. Eula gave him a hug and sent him out to the front. At nine-fifty-five, Bishop B.R. Stewart, of the Church of God in Christ, in San Francisco, began the ceremony, first demanding quiet. By ten-two, the ceremony was over (Sly and Kathy had exchanged the rings that Mrs. Ryan had bought at Lamston’s), and Sly turned to the crowd, ready to begin his concert.

Trow undercuts the ostensible climax further with an awkward postscript: There is a question about the legal legitimacy of Sly’s wedding, which is quickly resolved. Most writers would have cut this bit after the first draft, but for Trow it serves to reinforce what has by now emerged as the point of the piece. The story has built inexorably toward Sly’s big moment, but in his baroque accounting of the unsexy details involved in putting on the event, Trow has conjured up a sprawling celebrity-industrial complex in which such moments are wholly artificial and the stars at the center of them more or less interchangeable.

This is a truth known to the beleaguered Paley – who, as a skilled mechanic in service of the star-making apparatus, is adept at keeping it running but no more able than anyone else to direct its course – but not to Sly, who believes himself to be the center of the universe. When the lights go up, the singer steps onto the stage at the Garden, surrounded by laser projections and models carrying gilded palm leaves. He is wreathed in a haze of machine-generated fog.

Charles Homans (@chashomans) is features editor of Foreign Policy.

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.

Filkins backs away from pure narrative to employ the language of an investigator – a language familiar to anyone who has ever watched prime-time television:

The previous afternoon, Shahzad had left his apartment, in the placid F-8/4 neighborhood of Islamabad, and driven toward Dunya studios, about five miles away. It was five-thirty; the television interview was scheduled for six. According to a local journalist who talked to a source in one of Pakistan’s cell-phone companies, Shahzad’s phone went dead twelve minutes later.

We are not taken deep inside the last moments of Shahzad’s life; rather, Filkins keeps us at a slight distance. We see the story through Filkins’ eyes and follow along as he assembles his facts. He had known the journalist, a little, and makes clear that he both respected and had misgivings about the dead man’s work.

The restraint of Filkins’ approach creates a boomerang effect, rendering the clinical details as they are gathered that much more distressing: Shahzad’s body, we learn from one source, was found stuck in a grate atop a dam with “his tie and shoes still on.” An autopsy later discloses ruptures of his lungs and liver. Information that something very like a metal rod was used to beat Shahzad is introduced during speculation about whether his executioners intended to kill him or were just engaged in intimidation.

Distinctions like these hardly matter to the reader in the face of the suffering and price paid by Shahzad, but they do matter in a larger sense. And it is this larger arena to which Filkins moves as he builds a case that passes through the long shadow of American ties to Pakistan and the activities of U.S. intelligence agencies abroad.

I have to admit I do the same thing when I open an issue of the New Yorker and find a piece by Katherine Boo. I don’t think she publishes more than a story or two a year. And fewer, lately. But the stories are remarkable. She takes on heavy, complicated themes – social policy and the lives of the poor – and brings a world of vivid characters to life.

Take the “The Marriage Cure,” a New Yorker feature from 2003. A group of academics and policy types had suggested that pervasive singleness in poor neighborhoods, often assumed to be a symptom of poverty, might instead be a root cause. If they were right, a campaign to promote marriage in poor neighborhoods could help improve their lot. One state, Oklahoma, decided to give it a try. Boo went to see how it was working.

Boo could have made the idea the main thing, and profiled a bunch of people. Or she could have picked one person to be the protagonist – a single woman, or a marriage promoter – and zoomed in close. But she did neither of those things. Instead, she wrote about a friendship. The piece begins:

One July morning last year in Oklahoma City, in a public housing project named Sooner Haven, twenty-two-year-old Kim Henderson pulled a pair of low-rider jeans over a high-rising gold lamé thong and declared herself ready for church. Her best friend in the project, Corean Brothers, was already in the parking lot, fanning away her hot flashes behind the wheel of a smoke-belching Dodge Shadow. “Car’s raggedy, but it’ll get us from pillar to post,” Corean said when Kim climbed in…

I love this. Our lives are stories of relationships. We aren’t us without them. But it’s actually pretty rare to see authentic, intimate relationships at the center of a reported magazine piece. It’s tough reporting, for sure. People often guard their meaningful relationships closer then they guard their secrets. They’ll tell you the most private things – painful things, shocking things – and then politely hustle you out when their neighbor shows up, or their kid gets home from school. But Boo writes about Kim and Corean and the people in their lives like she’s known them for ages, and has only now, finally, gotten around to writing about them. And they talk like no one else is listening.

When Corean visits a man in prison who, in both sustaining and vexing ways, has become something more than a friend, Boo observes quietly: “Corean stretched her legs, letting her foot graze the instep of his state-issued sneaker.” Then she returns home, weary, and her son, a high-school senior, removes her sandals and sits with her in their dark apartment, squeezing her swollen feet.

“Corean remembered how, when she was a child, hardship had turned members of her family against each other, and was grateful for her own family’s closeness,” Boo writes. “But she also knew that single mothers could be seduced by it. Husbandless, they treated their [daughters] as confidantes and their [sons] as stand-in partners, and were shattered when those companions left them behind.” At least a half-dozen scenes in the piece are so intimate, they’re startling.

So of course, Boo goes with Kim and Corean to marriage class. And Boo lays out the on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand: In theory, it’s easier to make ends meet and easier to raise kids as a couple, but none of the women in the class had had great experiences with men. Most of them had grown up without fathers, or been left, or been beaten; two of the women had been with violent criminals. In the projects where Kim and Corean live, Boo writes, “relationships with men were often what stopped an ambitious woman from escaping.” So, it’s complicated.

The piece never really lands explicitly on one side or the other. That’s a sign of Boo’s ambition, I think. The marriage class happens pretty early in Boo’s narrative, and she barely returns to it. Instead, she follows Kim and Corean out into their world – a world they face with resilience and grace and good judgment and, still, problems seem to find them, and cascade. “One unacknowledged consolation of struggling in the inner city is the lack of time one has to indulge romantic discontent,” Boo writes.

Ultimately, one of the women’s chances at a good, lasting relationship seem better than her friend’s. But I’m not going to give away the ending. One of the pleasures of Boo’s writing is that you come to care about her characters and how things turn out for them. I’ll just say that in the end the piece is about hope, and fear, and work, and health, and money, and companionship, as much as it is about marriage. In other words, it’s a true love story.

Douglas McGray (@dougmcgray) has written features for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and This American Life. He is also the editor in chief of Pop-Up Magazine, the co-editor of My Life Is True, and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation (which hosted Katherine Boo the year she wrote “The Marriage Cure”).

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

It was a strange place to be reading about cocaine, bombs and Pablo Escobar, but in some ways, it was oddly appropriate to be sitting in such a relic. Readers – especially writers who are first and foremost readers – are the most shameless about nostalgia and its curios. (Why else would a first edition be worth anything to anyone?)

And although my toes curl with embarrassment to admit it, a weird alchemy surrounds that moment when you read something for the first time and realize that you will never think about writing, or reading, in the same way again. I am sure there are poets who can recall with startling detail the first time they laid eyes on a Robert Lowell poem. Or novelists who can tell you exactly which class they were skipping when they read the opening line of “On the Road.”

Our professor was a Mets fan who doubled as a sentimental lefty. If memory serves (mine, not his), he had spent a good portion of his 20s in a van, driving around Mexico and Central America, eventually landing in the academy. He remains the most enthusiastic academic I have ever met. He was enthusiastic about the Cuban Revolution, he was enthusiastic about the Porfiriato, but more than anything, he was enthusiastic about Alma Guillermoprieto.

When he asked us to read the first essay in “The Heart That Bleeds,” his face lit up, and before any of us had the time to get through the first paragraph, he burst out with, “Good lord! Look at how she starts this piece! Window fitters in Bogota! She was asked to write about one of the most violent scenes in modern history, much of which she witnessed firsthand, and she is talking about window fitters!”

Since then, I have read the opening paragraphs to “A Letter from Bogota” maybe a hundred times, marveling at the clarity of the choices made, the muscularity of the sentences and the intelligent detachment with which Guillermoprieto describes the routines of the glaziers of a place where extreme violence has become routine. Her opening sentence:

Among the few people to have benefitted from the current faceoff between the government and the cocaine traffickers are Bogota’s windowpane fitters.

There it is! If there’s a better, “Wait, what the fuck is she talking about?” hook, please let me know.

The man said his name was Carlos Lopez, and added, as he and his partner eased another pane of glass out of their truck, that he expected to be extremely busy that day. Eleven bombs had gone off the previous night, most of them in this neighborhood, which is called Teusaquillo and is one of the pleasantest in Bogota. It dates from the nineteen-thirties, and if the orderly rows of red brick houses with tile roofs don’t quite achieve the English look that was so clearly intended, it is partly the fault of the vegetation – splendid purple-flowered sietecueros trees along the curved streets, and blood-red begonias and blue agapanthus crowded into the narrow front yards.

I’ve never been to Bogota, but if I go, the first place I’ll ask to see is the Teusaquillo. It’s a sign of great writing when you read about a place, and the picture in your head is so clear that your inner cynic wants to see what’s being described, just to double-check.

Because the streets here are not very wide, the detonations shattered an inordinate amount of glass, some of it as much as two blocks away from the target sites. Thus Carlos Lopez’s euphoria as he saw himself surrounded by buildings full of business potential.

A less gifted writer, even if she had chanced upon the genius of starting this piece with glaziers, would have taken a more somber tone. The question “How are these people living like this?” would have resonated throughout the piece. In Guillermoprieto’s hands, the glaziers retain their humanity, their humor and their ambition. They are not sacrificed to clumsy invective about foreign countries and George H.W. Bush and Pablo Escobar and who is at fault.

It takes a hell of a reporter to write about violence with confidence and an appropriate level of humor. If nothing else, Guillermoprieto’s reports from Latin America in The New Yorker are a primer on how to shrug off the early, easy angles (those dripping with significance) and find the guts of a story.

I doubt I’ll ever make a choice as stunning as starting an essay about Pablo Escobar and narco-violence with a window-fitting. The standard is too high. But thievery is part of every writer’s job and the passages you love, especially the openers, have a way of embedding themselves in your head. Whenever I sit down to start writing anything, the question “Where are the glaziers?” is never far from my mind.

Jay Caspian Kang is an editor at Grantland. His first novel, “The Dead Do Not Improve,” will be released in 2012.

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

Using narrative shorthand, Packer jumps from Texas to Russia in the first two sentences of his post. What is going on? Even the quotes he later offers about these two tragedies are off-kilter or unexpected: Nolan Ryan, owner of the Texas Rangers, seems to reject the idea of doing anything in response to the death of a fan at the ballpark. In contrast, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev delivers a surprisingly direct admission that the Volga accident might have been preventable, saying that something needs to be done about Russia’s aging ships.

But Packer has tucked the heart of his post into the third story – that of the Iraqis who have helped the U.S. yet who remain behind as its soldiers leave their country. Linking to a New York Times story on foot-dragging by officials in charge of getting these Iraqis into the U.S., Packer makes clear that people seen as collaborators will be targeted as soon as the soldiers leave.

He gives the problem a face by quoting a man who has gone into hiding after two years of waiting in vain for a visa, noting that before long, America will face the same issue in Afghanistan. Then, in two short sentences, he binds his narrative together:

So here is another preventable tragedy for which culpability is diffuse. But unlike the ones in Texas and Russia, the one in Iraq is ongoing.

The question at hand: What would you do if you knew that someone would die, and you could stop it? And perhaps even a little appeal to patriotism: Could America really be so heartless?

Narrative devices most often compel readers to wonder what happens next. Packer can’t deliver an answer in this story, because it isn’t over yet. But he makes clear that if we continue to do nothing, we have a pretty good idea how it will end.

After 24 years, the story is still valuable simply as a guide to the risks faced by people who live along the Mississippi. But it would be ridiculous to think of McPhee’s articles as nothing more than service journalism. Over the past four decades, McPhee has plunged into a series of obsessions – with plate tectonics, athletes, shad fishing, the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, the entire state of Alaska. At its best, McPhee’s work feels like a journalistic version of an Iron Man competition. He pushes long-form journalism to the extremes, to encompass the world in staggering detail. And “Atchafalaya” is particularly staggering, because its subject is nothing less than the endless, spectacular, and sometimes absurd struggle of modern civilization to control the natural world.

As I reread “Atchafalaya,” I tried to reverse engineer it to figure out why it’s so good. At its core is a journey McPhee took down the Mississippi in a towboat, accompanying some of the members of the Army Corps of Engineers. For most journalists, that would be more than enough material enough for an excellent article. For McPhee, it is only the start. The river, after all, was not just what he could see in 1987. It was also the product of history – the geological history of the region, and then the human history overlaid on it – history that includes politics, warfare and centuries of engineering. McPhee mastered this vast backstory, but he was not yet done. He also became intimately acquainted with the colossal system of levees and weirs that line the Mississippi: a grand construction that is both longer and wider than the Great Wall of China.

I get the sense that McPhee spends every waking hour gathering observations, stories and plain facts that he stores away for articles he may not write for decades to come. In “Atchafalaya” he smoothly slips away from his journey down the Mississippi to recall earlier experiences – flying over the river, running lines with a Cajun crawfisherman.

Once McPhee assembled this mountain range of raw material, he mined it to build a 28,000-word article. McPhee builds articles like few other journalists can. He scrupulously avoids all stock tricks. His paragraphs encompass worlds. He writes from a dictionary full of strange words: revetments, whaleback, distributaries. They’re not obscure words McPhee chose to make the reader feel undereducated, but the precise language required to describe something most people know little about. It takes time to submerge into this language – this is not a story to shave away one iPhone screen at a time.

If there’s any weakness in “Atchafalaya,” it’s McPhee’s portraits of people. We meet engineers and pilots along the river. McPhee records plenty of exquisite details about their backgrounds. And yet I couldn’t recall any of them as individuals later on. They all talked about the great river, but interchangeably. McPhee knows how to write a great profile (I’m thinking of “Levels of the Game,” a book-length account of a U.S. Open tennis match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner). So I can only assume that he has made a strategic choice in “Atchafalaya” to let the people in the story blur into a wall of humanity massed against the river.

Still, this remains a great piece of writing. By that I don’t mean that it’s an exemplar of what all journalism should be. It is McPhee excelling at being McPhee. It’s impossible to steal tricks from a piece like “Atchafalaya,” because you just end up sounding like a bad imitation of someone else. Instead, it sends me flying back to my own work, re-energized to dig as deeply as I can into the subject at hand, and to craft out of it something distinctively my own.

Carl Zimmer’s science writing has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, Time and Scientific American, among other publications. He lectures at Yale University and has 10 books to his name, the latest of which is “A Planet of Viruses.” He is on Twitter at @carlzimmer.

For more from this new collaboration with Longreads, check out the first post in the series, written by Alexis Madrigal. And stay tuned for more inspiration and insight from fabulous writers in the coming weeks.

One could point out many things about craft in the piece. The descriptions of characters are finely observed and sticky. A director “is a man balanced on enthusiasm, as a bird is balanced on air.” Or check out his description of how Brando transforms into Kowalski: “with what chameleon ease Brando acquired the character’s cruel and gaudy colors, how superbly, like a guileful salamander, he slithered into the part, how his own persona evaporated – just as, in this Kyoto hotel room 10 years afterward, my 1947 memory of Brando receded, disappeared into his 1957 self.”

But all that verbiage needed some infrastructure on which to run. Rhythm, narrative or otherwise, is a pleasing regularity in time, and Capote bangs away like a drum major to keep it.

There are two Russian critical terms that are helpful here: fabula and syuzhet. The fabula is the real chronology of a narrative: Brando was born at such and such a time, grew up, and meets up with Capote in 1957. The syuzhet is how the story is told, its internal narrative time. How you convert fabula into syuzhet is storytelling, and Capote is dazzling. He weaves big time (a life) into little time (the hours), always working at two scales. For all its descriptive frippery and meandering actor monologues, the profile is set in reassuring 4/4 time. We never really leave that room in Kyoto even though Capote sweeps across Brando’s entire life.

The first layer of structure is simple, and it’s the one most of us take when we approach long form. Capote starts and ends in the same place. The first graf is knocking on Brando’s door; the last graf is leaving the hotel and walking home. OK, 101. Much of the rest of the work, particularly in the latter half of the story, is done through a remarkably clever rhetorical gadget. Here’s how it works.

About 1,000 words into the 14,000-word profile, Brando’s nominal screenplay co-writer, the pseudonymous Murray, leaves to go to dinner with a promise to call three hours later to do some work.

Murray shook his head; he was intent on obtaining Brando’s promise to meet with him again at ten-thirty. “Give me a ring around then,” Brando said, finally. “We’ll see what’s happening.”

By Chekhovian logic, we know the phone will ring before the story is over; such a call might even end the story, so we’re watching for it. The telephone actually rings four times in the course of the rest of the piece, and each time, we zoom back from wherever we were to the room where Brando is sitting with Capote. The first ring whips us back from the strange James Dean-Marlon Brando relationship. The second ring interrupts Brando’s detailed, inarticulate descriptions of his acting. The third ends an inquisition into whether Brando makes real connections with anyone. And the fourth stops Capote’s masterful description of the actor’s family.

If you plotted the movements with time on the x-axis and distance from Brando on the y-axis, Capote’s perambulations would resemble the elliptical orbit of comets, reaching away from the dinner to various distances, but always returning to late 1957.

That’s how Capote handles big time, always grounding us back into his narrative present and giving his piece the reassuring rhythm that he’s got all Brando’s history firmly under control.

But there’s another aspect to his ploy. Each time the phone rings, some nearly arbitrary amount of time has passed. The first time Murray calls, we know it’s been three hours, though clearly three hours haven’t been described or felt by the reader. In another instance, “an hour seemed to have passed,” in the course of a thousand words. The passage of time roughly tracks with the word length, but not precisely so. And that’s the real trick. By forcing us to pay attention to the real time (the fabula) every so often, Capote is free to play with narrative time (syuzhet) at will, tunneling back to childhood, zooming in on Brando on the stage or on film, stopping, starting, reversing, slow-mo-ing. He’s like a magician distracting us with unnecessary information so that we don’t notice the mechanics of how he pulls the trick off.

Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic and author of “Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.”

For more on this new collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, see our introductory post for the series. And stay tuned for inspiration and insight from other writers in the coming weeks.