(This conversation has been lightly edited for length.)

I’m going to ask you about some of the things you cover in the book, seeing as most of our readers won’t have read it yet. So even —

But they will read it soon.

Of course they will – this will be such a compelling conversation. But I was interested in how you tie together a lot of different approaches to narrative, offering a kind of umbrella approach to what story is and how it works in nonfiction. Coming at it from a different angle: Do you find yourself finding one or two main ways that stories tend not to work?

Well, I think that you hit on it when you talked about the umbrella. I think that a lot of folks who work in various forms of narrative don’t realize all the structures available to them, and they often try to force square pegs into round holes. So a writer and an editor may have material that would be great for an explanatory narrative, and they try to turn it into a full-blown story narrative, with a narrative arc and a climax and a denouement, and all the elements that go into that. They turn a potential silk purse into a sow’s ear – they have great material but the wrong structure. So I think an awareness of all the different forms in which you can tell true stories using narrative techniques is important to succeeding with a broad variety of materials.

Not everyone will have thought about the differences in some of these categories. Could you talk about, say, story narrative versus explanatory narrative?

Explanatory narrative is the classic New Yorker form – the McPhee, Susan Orlean, David Grann story – where you have a narrative line, a sequence of actions with frequent digressions, where you talk in more abstract terms, more report-like terms, about the context. So McPhee writes about a trucker crossing the country, let’s say. Sometimes you’re in the cab with the trucker, driving, and often you are off exploring various dimensions of trucking and hazmat materials or fuel consumption or the country’s freight system or whatever.

So that’s an explanatory narrative. It’s the form that Rich Read used when I worked with him on “The French Fry Connection” that won the Pulitzer in ’91, I think it was.

A classic story narrative has the narrative arc that you find in a novel. An initial section is devoted to exposition, in which you introduce a protagonist. The protagonist engages a complication. You move through a section called rising action, in which the protagonist grapples with the complication. Eventually you reach a point of insight, in which the protagonist sees the world in the new way that finally allows resolution of the complication that sets up the climax, and then leads to a final wrapping-up-of-loose-ends section called falling action or denouement.

You don’t always have all those elements in a nonfiction narrative, but sometimes you hit a home run, as Tom Hallman did with his 2001 Pulitzer, the one I worked with him on, called “The Boy behind the Mask,” which had every single one of those elements in it, as complete as any novel could be.

There are very short narratives that just take the form of a single scene; we call those vignettes or tone poems. There are profiles that contain both narrative and report elements. There are personal essays that usually start with a first-person narrative, a sequence of actions that describe a personal experience, then go through a turn and reach some kind of conclusion.

There are long-form issue essays – Atlantic magazine-style pieces in which there’s a first-person exploration of some large theme. And then there are all kinds of bastard forms that include elements of one or more of these various structures.

But finding the right structure is key, I think. If a good writer finds the structure that works with his or her material, then right out of the gate, you can write an awfully compelling narrative.

I mentioned Rich Read. “The French Fry Connection” was his very first narrative ever, and he won a Pulitzer for it. And David Stabler made the finals for his very first narrative. … That was a piece I didn’t deal with in the book, which was called “Lost in the Music,” about a cello prodigy who kind of imploded during his senior year of high school, as a lot of prodigies do. A really fascinating story.

It seems like there are challenges to balancing when to go scenic and when to do summary, and kind of ending up in a mushy middle ground.

Let’s step back a minute. I like to distinguish between reports and stories. Reports tend to be abstract, and their principal purpose is to convey information. Stories tend to be very specific, and their purpose is to convey experience. So you have informational writing and experiential writing.

Most journalists most of the time write reports, and that’s a perfectly valid function of journalism – probably its most important function in the long run. When they attempt to tell a story, sometimes those old habits die hard, and they have a difficult time getting down the ladder of abstraction and entering the world of scenic narrative, where you’re describing specific events and specific scenic elements that unfold in, at least to the reader, what appears to be real time.

And most standard journalistic dailies are written at sort of the middle rungs of the ladder of abstraction. Writers who’ve been doing that all of their adults lives have a difficult time breaking loose sometimes and starting to move down to the highly specific scenic narrative, and then in the case of explanatory narrative, occasionally digressing and moving way up the ladder of abstraction to talk about the larger context and the meaning of what’s happening.

Do you have suggestions for any of our readers who are trying to make that leap?

Yes. Just step out the door and stand on a street corner, and take some very specific notes about the actual things that are happening before your eyes, and write up a very specific scene, the kind of thing that never appears in the standard journalistic report. Because that’s a basic skill that you need to tell great, true stories.

Are there things that shouldn’t be done as a narrative? You talk at some length about that in the book.

Oh, yes. Lots of things. (Laughs.)

But are there groups of things you see regularly tried as narratives that just don’t work?

One of my reviewers, as we went through the review process at University of Chicago press, was Cynthia Gorney, a great narrative writer. She teaches at Cal Berkeley now. Folks who deal with students always tell me this, but Cynthia made a very solid point that students want to run off and do narratives on things that are inappropriate for the narrative approach. For journalists, most of the topics they tackle are inappropriate for a narrative approach. It’s the information that’s important, not the story itself.

If people are hanging on the edge of their seats to hear the latest development in a running story, you don’t want to start with a long expository narrative arc windup. You’ll drive them to some other information source. Most of what you see in the daily paper should be written as a report.

Then what do you think are the parameters around news narratives?

On news narratives that are dailies, you don’t want something that’s a huge breaking story. We had our best success with interesting rescue stories, police enforcement stories, things like that – where the story is of greater interest than the actual news content. So we often had things that might have run as fairly minor news briefs or zoners that turned into great stories that made Page One. But the audience wasn’t out there aware that news was coming and hanging on the edge of their seats to hear what the latest-breaking developments were in those cases.

You don’t want your election results as a narrative.

Exactly.

There’s a lot to cover. One of the things you talk about is character development and the necessity of a sympathetic protagonist. A lot of the best narratives have sympathetic but often deeply flawed protagonists. Do you have suggestions on how to keep it real while maintaining the reader’s sympathy for the protagonist?

Well, just because the protagonist is flawed doesn’t have to mean he’s unsympathetic. I heard a really interesting segment on the “News Hour” last night with Russell Banks, the novelist, who’s just written a book …  This is a book about, apparently, sex criminals who can’t find a place to live, based on true life, who have holed up under an expressway in Miami.

The protagonist is a young man who is a convicted sex criminal, although the circumstances of the crime were something along the lines of sex with an underage girl who wasn’t that much different in age than he was. Obviously, he’s deeply flawed, and he’s in this terrible situation, but Banks made the point that he has to be a sympathetic character in order for the narrative to carry the reader through the story. That’s something we tend to forget. Journalists tend to focus on victims and perpetrators, neither one of which make terribly good protagonists in a true story.

Following on that, the concept of round and flat characters is something else you address. I’m sure we’ve all read stories with too many flat characters, where nobody emerges in the round. Have you seen many stories that suffered from too many round characters?

I just read one. It was written by an acquaintance, and I’m not going to mention the name, but there were probably six or seven very fully developed characters, and the narrative flipped back and forth from one to the other, and it was just impossible for me to keep them straight and to follow the story.

Do you think at that point it becomes an issue of point of view or stance, or is it just an over-proliferation of developed characters?

Both point of view and stance are shifting so rapidly and into so many different positions that the reader gets lost. At best you can have maybe three or four fully-developed characters. And if there’s a single protagonist, or maybe a couple of protagonists who can be developed even further, so much the better.

For those who have started to develop their voices and their ability to turn a nice phrase, you argue the importance of structure. What are the structural mistakes you see most often?

Well, that gets back to just choosing the wrong structure. A lot of would-be narrative nonfiction writers come into this with their focus on the story narrative with the complete narrative arc and try to force material into that form that just doesn’t work. I know that Tom Hallman had that experience early in his career. I’ve seen it with lots of other writers. It’s just a question of being aware of all the structures that are available to you and choosing the right one, or choosing none if it turns out that the material is best handled in some form other than narrative.

Not to upset the applecart, but in fiction, some of the most important strides have been made by people who pushed back against the conventions of story in their time. Obviously a lack of understanding of story mechanics is probably a more pressing problem, but do you think there’s room for mavericks to push the envelope on narrative journalism?

Oh, absolutely. I hope they do, and I’m looking forward to seeing some great new forms emerge. That said, you learn the established mechanisms – the ones that we know work – first. Picasso was an accomplished landscape and portrait artist before he branched off into cubism.

So often, young writers bridle at the notion that there are established forms that work, and that they have an obligation to learn those first. But a blues musician has to learn 12-bar blues before attempting something else.

That’s most of what I wanted to ask you about today. Is there anything else about the art of storytelling that you’d like to say?

One point to make is that there is a theory of story, and there are certain basic structures of story that apply in so many different fields and contexts that it just behooves all kinds of folks to apply themselves a little bit and to learn some of these forms. We’ve had an explosion of nonfiction storytelling over the past 20, 30 years. And now you see creative artists of all kinds doing terrific narrative in film and broadcast, as well as traditional locations like magazines and newspapers.

And certainly in the book world, this has become one of the dominant forms. I think it’s a major, major development in world literature. In a way, because this is a largely American development in literature, it’s analogous to the development of jazz. So what jazz was to world music, I think nonfiction narrative is to world literature, at least in English.

Tom Hallman

Sam’s story took two trips to Boston. Each day it ran on Page 1 and had two full pages in the A section, across four days. In addition to the logistical things about cost, you couldn’t get that kind of space now. But good narrative doesn’t have to take months to do.

I’m all for other media when it works, but the online component would have ruined that story. The power of the story doesn’t come from talking to the doctors or having a graphic to show where the surgeons went in and how many procedures they did. Nobody cares about that—they care about the boy having a journey.

If we want to compete with other people in other media, if we just try to do it faster, it’s a losing battle. The way we can define ourselves is by telling stories.

I’m working on a story about a 1951 DeSoto. No TV station will have it, no radio station will have it. And I guarantee you I’ll hear from readers. They’re not saying they want puff pieces, but they’re saying, “Show me a story that reflects some humanity.” Most pieces are just an assembly of facts and graphs and photographs. What we need are stories.

As editors, we have to look around our newsrooms and say who is best equipped to find, write and edit these stories. I’m a lousy investigative reporter. I’m a terrible columnist. As editors, you have to ask yourself, “Who in my newsroom could do this?”

For reporters, there has to be a change of attitude. Narrative was seen as being all about writing and having plenty of time to do stuff. Narrative reporters were seen as prima donnas. So for younger writers, they’re going to have to tell stories, to find stories that are going to be shorter. I did a series of stories last year that would have been written differently five years ago, and that was a struggle.

The truth is that we turned out stories that were not worth 40, 60 or 90 inches, where the openings were about impressing other writers more than reaching the readers. But you cannot tell a scenic story in 15 inches. It’s going to require a different kind of narrative: The presence of a writer’s voice but without the heavy first person references. My feeling is unless you’ve witnessed a murder, you don’t need to be in the story. It will take a more disciplined approach to the story, the realization that some things are going to have to go by the wayside. You’re going to have to use quotes, whether you want to or not, to condense the story.

At every newspaper, storytelling can be the tonic to help us get through these times. For the writers, it means they connect with the readers. For the newspapers, it helps brand a paper in the community. People say, “I started to read it, and I knew it was your story.” It helps if newspapers can say, “Once a week or once a month, we’re going to have a real story.”

You still hear, “Let’s do the tick-tock,” but those are almost clichés. Fifteen years ago, they were groundbreaking. Now what I think readers are looking for is more meaning. Those are the stories that we have to discover by getting out of the newsroom. Editors need to encourage the reporters to be out. If you’re in the newsroom, it should only be because you’re writing. They need to also set the bar higher on stories. Anybody that’s ever freelanced for magazines knows you have to be clear and make an argument for why they should run it. If we could answer the questions up front that freelancers have to answer for magazines, we’d cut a lot of the stories that are being written now that have no point.

It’s hard, because if you fail at narrative, you fall further than you do with any other kind of story in the paper. People will read it and say, “What a waste of space.” That sets off this schism between writers and reporters. If we continue to have “these are the writers, and they get time” and then “these are the reporters, and they work the night shift,” we’re going to have problems. We can’t have that divisiveness. It’s going to require a lot more from the editor at the front end.

Ninety percent of what’s in the newspaper is not story. It’s factual. Storytelling can be one of the saviors of our business. I did a thing a couple weeks ago about some World War II vets who were having a meeting. I was really taken by the power of the video that ran with it. It might have been two minutes. I clicked on it and watched it, and I was so impressed. It did things my story couldn’t do.

So I’m a big believer that stories are a way to find a way out of the woods. But I do worry about the next generation because they are not schooled in the craft of reporting. They’re more interested in writing than they are in reporting. And many of them feel entitled, saying, “I want to be a writer. I don’t want to spend two years covering cops.” So I think we have that as an issue, too.

The upper-level editors say we want more narrative, but they don’t give mid-level editors resources or backup. They need to step back and say, “What’s our mission?” If storytelling is part of that mission, then we can make it happen. If it’s done right, then there’s nothing more powerful.

With all due respect to Jon Franklin, every story doesn’t have to have conflict, a complication, three steps and a resolution. Earlier I tried to write stories like that, and sometimes they don’t work.

We had a local barber riding a motorcycle who lost a leg. I went down and talked to the guy.  They did this medical technique on him. He had all these cards. When I was talking about his leg, he was matter-of-fact. He had a bunch of cards along his window. I asked him if I could read the cards, and then he got emotional. As a barber, you talk. But he didn’t know if people liked him.

And the story turned on that. It became a story that was less than 25 inches.  The opening posed a complication. Not the lost leg—it was, “Do people like me?” I wrote it in a day, and it ran around Thanksgiving, and I got many, many responses from it.

My editor had the good sense to follow up on the story, but she had tried to get everyone to take it, and ran into resistance from people who didn’t want to do it. It was not a big, month-long project. There are quotes, and narrative elements. It’s not a pure narrative, but it had narrative elements. Editors have to raise the bar for narrative, and reporters have to lower the bar—or at least their expectations—for narrative.

You have to start by knowing the structure, then knowing the pieces that you can use, the pieces that are appropriate to the story. No newspaper, no editor can make this happen. It must come from the writer. The barber story is a perfect example. If a reporter tells me, “My editor won’t let me do it,” I really wonder if they’re trying. You can’t help but listen to the story calling you, and you do the damn story.

In these days, a reporter must be optimistic. You can find mentors who are not at your papers. I’ve had young people write me and say “What do you think?” Find people whose work you admire and ask them how they do it.

If you listen to music, it just sounds beautiful. But you learn about it, and you understand it doesn’t float out of nowhere. There’s a craft to it. So many readers get seduced by the art of writing, but everything that follows is craft.

Ten years ago, this DeSoto story would have been a different story, and in a lot of ways a better story. But we are filling a need in the marketplace. If readers want this, why not give it to them? So much of traditional journalism is filled with bad news, crime, the worst of humanity, we should be able to balance that out with the best of humanity, but that has to be a story.

There’s no formula. People that profess to talk about how to do narrative journalism are sometimes wrong. There are some rules, but sometimes the rules are meant to be broken. Everything must serve the story.

If I put on a Stevie Ray Vaughan tune, “The Sky Is Crying,” you don’t need to know what it is. It’s just part of the way we are as humans. We live by story. The people that want to make a lot of rules are too caught up in the intellectual aspect of it.

So what are the rules for writing stories?

Rule 1: Must be interesting.

Rule 2: See rule 1.

That’s it. I don’t mean to be unhelpful.

There are still places that have good narrative storytelling, but the golden age of narrative has shifted to magazines. Magazine writers are the best ones going. Take a look. You pick up Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ. You start reading one of their stories, and you don’t know where the story’s going. Those people the real storytellers, and they are not writing by rules. Read C.J. Chivers, who writes from Russia for Esquire.

One of the negative things coming out of the golden age of narrative journalism is the whole writing coach, seminar, Nieman conference thing. We still have a little bit of that hanging on now. I don’t like writing exercises. I’m stubborn. If someone says, “Okay, we’re going to practice writing a scene,” well, I don’t want to write unless I have a story.  There are patterns that work, then it’s just a question of which tools you need. Does foreshadowing make it more interesting or bog it down?

I get how stories work, but I don’t want to ever make a story feel like it’s a paint-by-numbers thing. One of the best storytellers I’ve ever known is in jail right now.

As far as attribution, there are some things that are so intrinsically true, you can’t get hung up where they come from. “Life turns confusing when a boy turns 12.” Only a narrator can say that. It’s just true—don’t go ask a 12 year-old boy, because he won’t tell you. But ask any grown man, and he might. There are certain things in life that are just absolutely true. Having the authority in there can get in the way and clutter up the story.

Narrative journalism grows out of good reporting, not great writing. The best stories come from somebody out in the room when something happens. And that comes from reporting. If I were going to create the perfect career for a young person, I would not say, “You are going to be on the features team.” That’s terrible. Give me the person who has covered cops and had a cop to tell him to go to hell, and then goes and talks to the PIO and gets that cop to come back and to talk to him. Give me that person every day for a month, and I can show him how to write.

I’ve been on both extremes. I had one major project I was working on for a long time, and it was not healthy in a sense. Because the act of writing is something you keep practicing. Writing frequently makes you hone the skill of getting it done.

Sometimes stories that worked out really well, I’d come in that morning, and I’d have to get the damn thing done that day. If I’d had two weeks to do it, I’d have just putzed around and tried to make it beautiful instead of telling the story.

Shawn Levy

At last weekend’s American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors conference, speaker Shawn Levy spoke about “getting the story” and the connections between writing books and journalism. The film critic at The Oregonian, Levy has written five books, including King of Comedy, about comedian Jerry Lewis, and his most recent biography—Paul Newman: A Life. In addition to his work at The Oregonian, he blogs about film and professional soccer, and tweets compulsively, suffering from what he calls “monkey brain.”

Newspaper work is the foundation of my writing. There are enough commonalities between the two types of writing that my books would have been drastically different if I were not answering to the daily newspaper. One of the things I learned was how to dig for a story. Learning from people breaking public service news about what they do, what their methods are, and looking around at the research tools on the homepage at the newspapers. Looking how to search tax records in Connecticut, military records, census responses from [Paul Newman’s] family. You can only find these things out through what’s normally found as shoe-leather reporting. You just happen to be doing it about things that happened 85 years ago.

There are Web sites dedicated to special collections at research libraries. Among the things I found was a single-spaced 90 page Q&A with Newman from 1959. I knew from the first page no one had ever written about this document. I don’t see how you could write nonfiction without using the tools of journalism.

Another thing essential to a project like the Newman book is the cross-referencing—finding the organizational connections between things. It’s the foundation of storytelling—that you always know what happened next. Here’s what he was doing at this point as an actor. What was he doing as a race car driver? As an actor? As an entrepreneur? As a dad? I want to emphasize that it’s the organization of the raw materials.

The other thing—it doesn’t sound important—but when I think of writing a book, I think of a publisher in New York cutting a check, saying “Where’s that manuscript?” That’s no different than my editor wanting copy on deadline.

How do you find what you need? Look high, look low, and look sideways.

Look high—the special collections library at Columbia University was very useful. The New York Public Library at Lincoln Center has a massive library of clipping files. You can ask them about someone, and they will bring you out boxes filled with clippings, from papers going back to the Thirties and Forties—that’s as far back as I’ve ever looked. You can track someone’s life as they’ve appeared in the print media.

I found one of Newman’s first interviews from 1954, with Sidney Skolsky, a hollywood columnist, in which he mentions that he’s especially proud of his salad dressings. So when he started marketing those dressings later, I knew that wasn’t new.

Kenyon College had his handwritten application to college.

Look low—I found old Hollywood magazines that talked about Newman and rumors of an affair. Most of the stories would bring it up and then dismiss it. But one story seemed different and had specifics, with a woman saying, “Yes I did have an affair with him.” [Goes on to detail finding and interviewing the woman, who led him to someone who could corroborate her story.]

Look sideways—get a sense of what the person was thinking at the time. What else was going on? At the time of his father’s death, Newman had wanted to be an actor. He was working as a field hand in Illinois. He had to go work at the family sporting goods store. He had to give up acting.

A biography is a chronology of life. I’ve done two books with multiple biographies, with several lives going at the same time, but in a biography of single person it’s just one damn thing after another that happened to this person. It’s a clothesline—a straight line going from beginning to end. And it’s not very interesting—a list of dates and deeds.

But you can hang things on the clothesline that make it interesting. When I landed on the subject of Jerry Lewis as the subject of my first book, no one had written a book on him in more than 20 years. There was a hole that I could fill. But it had to be a person interesting enough to write about and research. With Jerry Lewis, I could see five or six things to hang on that clothesline right off the bat: the work with the Muscular Dystrophy telethon, his back injury, an addiction to Percodan that cost him his marriage, the stuff with Martin, the Borscht Belt.

So there are two models: a clothesline and a list. But in the clothesline model, you can just hang stuff, and hang stuff and hang stuff.

If you break it down into pieces, it makes it possible to write. Work a little bit every day and then you’re done with that piece. I would tell myself, “Today, I’m going to write the beginning and the end of the making of The Sting.” There really, really is a strong connection between journalism and books. I think of writing as an activity like running or playing golf—the more you do it, the more easily it comes to you.

“I was working the weekend shift and was assigned to cover a college graduation. The school sent out a press release touting the story as one about a professor who was retiring and receiving honors. I called the P.R. department looking for something better. I asked if there were any unusual students graduating. They told me there was an older student, Juan Morales. I called him and in one minute knew there was a story. I told him I would meet him at his house and go to graduation. The entire story, from reporting to writing, took about two hours.”

With its good reporting (not just interview, but observation), its concrete, telling detail and its engaging story and backstory, the piece does its subject justice—despite the quick turnaround.

As for winning the trust of the nurses, Hallman told WriterL he took his time. He spent many hours on the ward, becoming a part of the place, in an effort to get the nurses to speak openly.

The piece itself is remarkable. It contains some of the most intimate, emotional material we’ve read in a newspaper narrative. (The intimacy is all the more striking given its setting amid beeping medical machines and sterile equipment.)

We believe the piece might have been even stronger had Hallman more deeply and closely followed one character, rather than several characters, for the length of the series. We found one of the piece’s most powerful moments to be a scene in which a veteran nurse warms a baby who has died before bringing it to its mother so she could say goodbye. The description of what this nurse has learned to do to help parents grieve is affecting. In the end we found ourselves more interested in the veteran nurse than in the novice whom Hallman follows more closely. We wanted the depth such a veteran could offer, to learn from her, rather than follow several characters a bit more superficially. We would have then, perhaps, gotten a more complete and satisfying narrative arc.

As it it, the arc is more thematic than narrative. The narrative occurs in the unfolding of action, rather than in a real arc of building action and resolution. We say this simply as an observation. We recognize that the topic was a complicated one and did not lend itself to clear, classic narrative progression. This is a powerful piece.