By April 2002, the end of Brown’s rookie season with the Washington Wizards, dozens of reporters had dutifully written profiles about the teenager from rural Georgia. The first wave of stories focused on his size (6 feet 11 inches, 235 pounds) and speed and aggressiveness on the basketball court.

As he struggled over the course of the season (he averaged just 4.5 points per game that year), the tone of the coverage changed. Journalists increasingly asked skeptical questions about his age, his confidence level, his will to win. The kid had been dissected endlessly. What more was there to say? Why would someone assign an 8,000-word profile of Kwame Brown to run the week after the end of the regular season?

Well, because someone was Tom Shroder, then editor of The Washington Post Magazine. Shroder had the foresight to realize that a story from Post sport columnist Sally Jenkins about Brown’s first year in the NBA would transcend all the well-worn tropes about the most-scrutinized man in sports and become “Growing Pains,” one of the most revealing sports profiles ever written. Jenkins and Shroder understood that every other story about Brown had focused on what he had done (which, after all, any casual follower of professional basketball already knew), while she would write about who he was. Striving to explain how the Wizards overestimated Brown so badly, she writes,

What they couldn’t see was the inside of him.

What she doesn’t have to say is that at that point, she was the only one who had.

One paragraph in, a die-hard Wizards fan may have learned more about Brown than he did from dozens of profiles combined.

Kwame Brown knows more than he should about some things, such as certain aspects of human nature, and less than he should about others, such as nutrition, how to treat a good suit, and when to throw the lob pass. What Brown knows and what he doesn’t is a consequence of his age, newly 20, and where he’s from, the saw grass lowlands of Georgia, where crook-armed silhouettes of shrimp boats move against the horizon and misshapen oaks draped with gothic-gray moss line the melting tar streets, so sticky-hot that the children, Brown until recently one of them, hitch up their pants and hop from patch of grass to patch of grass.

Each of the three details about the gaps in Brown’s knowledge hint at an anecdote that will come to define him among engaged fans and legions of sportswriters. He ate Popeye’s chicken for every meal and brought a bottle of store-bought French dressing every time he went to a sit-down restaurant. He wadded up his fancy new suits and threw them in the corner because he didn’t know how to take them to the dry cleaners. He couldn’t follow simple instructions on the basketball court and made embarrassing mistakes that cost his team points and wins.

Tellingly, the basketball example comes last of the three, more than halfway through the story. Kwame Brown’s problems with the lob pass aren’t significant because the Wizards didn’t make the playoffs in 2002, but because they contribute to an indictment of an NBA system that put the weight of a team on a 19-year-old “baby-man” who was scared to sleep alone.

The Kwame Brown story is a sad one – from his abusive father to his troubled siblings to his fear of the world even after making so many millions he could afford any life he dreamed of – and many of Jenkins’ lyrical turns of phrase evoke the heartbreak of being so lost in the world.

Where Brown is from, religion can be a fairly desperate matter, a begging for some explanation and improbable rescue from the unpayable bills and empty refrigerators and the illnesses that come from living in stagnation and deprivation – in the case of Joyce Brown, the gnarling arthritis, or the kidney disease that left her with just one, or the degenerative disc in her back from cleaning under all those beds at the local Holiday Inn.

But Jenkins also acknowledges that it’s hard to feel too sorry for a man who was being paid millions to watch NBA games from the bench, who goofed off and slacked off and mouthed off. And so she doesn’t go easy on Brown, including cutting, funny lines among the more somber ones. Her eye for detail allows her to subtly critique every character in the story without ever veering into takedown. After quoting Joyce Brown asserting that God Himself made her son the No. 1 pick, Jenkins offers an elegant, understated rebuttal.

The Wizards, on the other hand, wanted to see less of God’s work, and more work from Kwame Brown himself.

Superlative narrative journalism is often compared to fiction, but these moments of fast-paced back-and-forth in “Growing Pains” – between Brown and the people around him and between author and subject – is more reminiscent of theater, even in the long stretches of the piece that have no dialogue. You can’t help but turn the (digital) page, whether you’ve followed Brown’s entire career or don’t know a thing about basketball.

But compelling narrative is not enough to make a piece, of course, especially when it’s about a topic as niche as a bench-warmer for a mediocre basketball team. What makes Jenkins’ article so good – what makes it one of those pieces I turn to for inspiration when I’m trying to string words together in the magic combination that will make people care about a topic they otherwise wouldn’t – is that there is no break between narrative and “issue-speak.” It would have been easy for Jenkins to settle for a conventional structure: anecdote –> quote –> framing question –> analysis, rinse and repeat. Instead, she mixes it all together into a rich stew no lover of words could resist. Only a master can make her nut graphs as riveting as her comic anecdotes.

Brown’s naivete poses the question once again: Is it wise for the NBA to make a foray into surrogate parenting of kids fresh from high school? What’s to be done with a Kwame Brown? What is the nature of the league’s responsibility to such a tender rookie? No one is quite sure.

Those three questions foreshadow the real-world consequences of Brown’s failure to thrive as an NBA center or even a functioning adult. They would reverberate for years after the piece went to press, and Jenkins’ article surely contributed to NBA Commissioner David Stern’s 2005 decision to seek a minimum age for players entering the draft.

Hard-hitting journalism doesn’t always mean exposing corruption or abuse of power. Elegant narrative does not always stop at story-as-art. Sometimes, a simple profile lays bare a radically new vision of a person you thought you knew, distilling the subject’s essence so cleanly it carries the weight of a major scoop. Sometimes, 8,000 words reveals an entire world you’d somehow missed, even though it had been sitting there the whole time, right before your eyes.

Megan Greenwell (@megreenwell) is managing editor at GOOD Magazine, where she writes a weekly column about sports and society.

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.

“I turned in a vibe,” he says now.

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

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

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

Why’s this so good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do it,” Henry said to Hank.

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

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

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

The fourth paragraph:

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

And then the fifth:

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the morning went so wrong.

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

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

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

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

At the time, Chris Zuppa and I already had published about 10 pieces in the “300 Words” series. A few had turned out half decent, but almost all of them had been the product of happenstance. We’d started with a story about the security guard in our own office building, of all places. From there, we often just roamed the streets, looking for other overlooked scenes that might make for a nice picture and an interesting tale. We attended the lonely burial of an indigent man in a potter’s field. We found a pair of teenagers waiting in the Greyhound station, experiencing the wonders of first love and the open road. We found a young man on a tractor in Pahokee, cultivating the sugar fields but longing for city life.

Each story was fun and fascinating in its own way. But something felt lacking to me. Nothing wrong with spontaneity, but I felt like we were relying a bit too much on serendipity and needed a better game plan.

Chris and I spent spent an hour one day writing down situations we wanted to witness or types of people we wanted to encounter. Then we set out to make that happen in a way that still left plenty of room for serendipity.

We wanted to know what it was like for a comedian to bomb, so we hung out at a comedy club until one did, and then followed him to the parking lot. We wanted to document a birth, and although it took months to find a couple and a hospital willing to trust us, it became one of my prouder moments to write about something so common and yet so intimate. We wanted to see a prison visit, and after convincing the Hillsborough County jail to let us in, we bounced from room to room until we saw a little girl. We wanted to explore a prom night, so I trolled the parking lot of Lakewood High School until I bumped into Josh King.

On that pad with the other ideas, I had scribbled down “toll booth operator.” That also took more work than I’d anticipated, because it turns out that the authorities frown on reporters parking their cars on the shoulder and dashing across three lanes of traffic to talk to toll collectors. During my time covering Pasco County, I had gotten to know Joanne Hurley, a spokeswoman for the Suncoast Parkway. I’m not sure she ever grasped why Chris and I wanted to come hang out with toll collectors, but eventually she agreed to meet us at a toll plaza just north of the county line for a couple hours one evening.

I remember that two toll collectors were on duty that night. I talked to the woman first, and she seemed bored and tired with the job. That weariness and the prospect of a long night ahead in her tiny booth could have made for a decent story, I thought.

Then I met Lloyd, who by comparison seemed both upbeat and serene. It struck me how he maintained such an outlook in a job that seemed pretty tedious and more than a little isolating, given the endless, brief encounters with drivers who see your toll booth as just another obstacle between them and home.

I introduced myself to Lloyd and asked him the first questions that came to mind: How did you wind up here? What did you do before this? What about before that? Soon enough, he was talking about Millie, his wife who had died of cancer. I’m sure I asked some other questions, but mostly I just listened. The story of their life together came pouring out of him – the way they met at a party in queens, their life on Staten Island and their years commuting into Manhattan, their dream of a Florida retirement, his slow realization that she would not live to share it with him. He paused only to make change for a handful of drivers passing through. At some point I asked him what Millie looked like. That’s when he whipped out her picture from his shirt pocket and said he always carried it with him. We probably talked for half an hour, 45 minutes at most. I wished him well and left him there with Chris in his solitary booth.

Because “300 Words” was sort of a side project, I didn’t go back to my notes for a week or so. One afternoon, I was supposed to speak to a small class of journalism students at USF-St. Pete about writing with brevity. I thought it would be cool if I took a rough, unpublished story to read as a way of talking through the reporting and writing process and letting them critique it and offer suggestions. I only had about an hour, so I grabbed my notes from the evening with Lloyd and started typing. I went back to my original question to him, figuring it would be the first thing anyone might wonder about a toll collector: Why are you here? And then I just tried to answer it: “Well, here’s why…” I tried to let the story unfold on paper the way it had poured out of Lloyd. It took all of 15 minutes to write (unlike my usual process of agonizing and rewriting half a dozen times). It ran in the paper virtually unchanged. And, of course, Chris took a very moving photo that said everything in a single frame.

That’s basically it. The story certainly struck a chord. To this day, I’m not quite sure why, except perhaps that all of us have been touched by love and loss, or at least can imagine ourselves in Lloyd’s shoes. The evening with Lloyd, as with almost every time we set out to do a piece for that series, underscored for me that unexpected tales come from the most unlikely (and sometimes most obvious) places, that as Don Murray said (and Tom French has reminded me), “we swim in an ocean of stories.” Sometimes it’s worthwhile to just toss the net into the water and see what rises to the surface.

It’s embarrassing that my explanation for a story has run much longer than the story itself, so I’ll shut up now. Just a brief postscript: A few years back, I was down in Florida visiting friends and drove up the Suncoast Parkway to visit a former editor in Pasco. I stopped at the toll booth, grabbed a dollar from my wallet and went to pay. There was Lloyd, smiling. “Have a great day!” he said. He didn’t recognize me in the slightest. “You too, Lloyd,” I said, and kept on driving.

Thanks to Ben Montgomery for asking Dennis to comment on the background for this story.  For more on “After the sky fell.” read Montgomery’s take on how and why the story works.

We ended up running a post on the story as part of our “Why’s this so good?” series. But I also wanted to share these excerpts from the conversation, in which Weingarten talks about the writing/editing process, being a reluctant character in his own stories, and how he built his profile of the Great Zucchini.

Give me a little background on the story.

I had spent a week in New York at the U.N., because [my editors] had asked me to do a story about how the U.N. was funny.

How the U.N. was funny?

I was going to do a piece on the hilarity of the United Nations, and after a week I had nothing. I got a phone call from David Von Drehle, who was a writer at the Post. He said, “OK, there’s this guy we’ve hired.” David has four kids, ranging at that time from 6 to 1. He said, “We’ve hired him to do birthday parties successively for three of our four kids. With each party, he seemed to have deteriorated a bit in terms of his personal habits, how he looked, how he dressed, and I’m thinking that there’s a drug problem here.”

As he was talking to me, I was leaving the U.N. and going to La Guardia to return to Washington to do this story. I had decided, “Fuck the U.N. This sounds interesting.’’ It was somehow the nexus of childhood and humor and darkness. I didn’t know if it was about drugs or what, but it seemed perfect.

Do you still know that piece well enough for me to ask you some really specific questions about it?

I’m sorry, but I do.

Of course you start it at a party – it’s about a performer. But when did you find the woman who asks why you want to write about this guy? Did you go to 15 parties before she handed you this line, or was this early on?

That was not the first party I went to. Look – I don’t believe in God. I don’t think there’s a god. I’m an atheist, but I do believe there’s a god of journalism. I believe this because – I’m an old man. I’m 59 years old. I’ve been doing this for many years. And it seems to me that every time I’ve done an extra thing, every time I’ve made the extra call, gone on the extra assignment after I thought everything was done, and I didn’t really need to do it, but I say, “Oh, what the fuck,” and do it anyway – every time it results in the best thing in the story.

And that happened here. There was a final day, and I had done all my reporting. And Zucchini called and said, “I’m going out for one more Saturday. You want to come?” I didn’t need to do it, but that Saturday wound up being the opening party and the kicker party.

The special needs kids’ party was the same day?

Yes. Both of them the same day. And there are a few other unusual things about this story.

In general, my rule is that you don’t make yourself a part of the story unless you have to. The default is to keep yourself out of the story if you can. Midway through this story, I realized I had to be part of it, because virtually all the important moments of this story happened during my confronting him – the Gene-and-Zucchini moments. Not all, but many of them. The single most important moment in the story happened as a dialogue between us.

So I realized that to take myself out of the story, to pretend I wasn’t there, No. 1, would have been a lie, and No. 2, would have been really awkward. I would have somehow had to write around the fact that the person asking the question was me. So, Tom Shroder, my editor, and I decided that I have to be in this story. And we looked at each other and realized at that point, “This can never win a Pulitzer Prize, because we’re breaking the most basic rule. However good this story winds up, it’s not going to win the Pulitzer because I have to be a character in it.”

Now why do I have to be a character? What is this story ultimately about? It’s ultimately about the fact that life is terrifying, and humor is the way we tame that terror. That’s what the story is about on its highest level. Given that fact, what is the key moment in the story? It’s the point at which I sit across the table from the Great Zucchini and confront him with the thing he saw as a 12-year-old boy.

What his mother has told you.

Yes. He doesn’t want to talk about it. He’s in denial about it. “What happened?” “I don’t remember what happened.” “Yes, you do remember what happened.” “Well, there were shots. Maybe it was the Superbowl.” “No, it wasn’t the Superbowl.” “I don’t remember the boy.” “Yes, you do, you remember every child.”

“They’re all the same.”

Exactly. He has to get rid of me. So what does he do?

He makes a joke.

He makes a joke. That was the moment when I felt this could be a great story. How do you tell that moment without it being a conversation between the two of us? You can’t! So that was the point we realized, OK, I have to be a character. At whatever cost, I have to be a character.

By the way, the conversation about the Pulitzer was sort of a joke.

It may have been then, but you’ve won two since you wrote “The Peekaboo Paradox.”

I should just say this for the record: Winning the Pulitzer Prize is a crapshoot. It is not a validation of the story. If you think otherwise, you’re fooling yourself.

Does this story feel different in some way from other stories you’ve written?

I felt when it was done that it was the best thing I’d written, and I still feel that way. It’s not that I did it so great. It’s that everything worked out perfectly. He didn’t have to have that in his background.

And it still would have been a good story.

But things worked out. He might not have deflected my questions with a joke. Things worked out beautifully.

I wrote to you the weekend that story came out in 2006 – a critical email praising the story but asking how you decided it was OK to drive him to Atlantic City.

He was going anyway. He would have gone with other friends. We thought about this, and I talked to my editor about this. I remember your email now, because you were talking about it as an addiction.

Yes.

You asked how was it different than buying a drunk a drink. If I were writing a story about an alcoholic, and he said, “Let’s go to the bar,” and he goes to the bar every night, I’m not going to feel like I’m being an evil person by joining him in what’s killing him. The only difference here is that I physically drove him to Atlantic City.

Which was why I wrote you.

At the time, it was true that he didn’t know I knew that he couldn’t drive. But a friend would have taken him, or he would have gotten there some other way. I didn’t feel bad about that decision then, and I don’t today.

One of the things I find interesting is that so many of the things that the Great Zucchini does in the course of the story are things that bring you to mind. He is very much like you.

He has a central dysfunction that is not entirely dissimilar from my own dysfunctions.

The way he deals with his terrors and anxieties, which are both the same as and different than yours: the flirting with addiction, the –

The humor.

The humor. For you, it’s making poop jokes, for him it’s using a dirty diaper as a prop.

I hadn’t thought of it quite that way.

Taking a deliberately juvenile approach as a way to manage –

You could argue that the only thing distinguishing him from me is that I married an adult who in some ways saved my life. Not from addiction, but from this central dysfunction. I am married to a woman who is the adult in my life, who makes sure that our rent is paid.

But he’s alone. He doesn’t have that. Would I be homeless without my wife? No, but I would live much more marginally, more the way he does.

Are you writing about yourself in writing about him?

I think that the fact that at our core we’re kind of similar helped inform my understanding of him. I don’t really feel in writing this story that I was writing about myself. That is more true in the story about the dead babies. There I felt I was writing about myself.

As you were writing it or revising it, how did you think about the movement from the ridiculous to the very serious – to go from the guy wiping a dirty diaper on his face to pondering the terror of death?

I pretend I’m directing a movie. This is the best way I can explain this. You can’t bore the reader. And the same way a good director knows to intersperse scenes of action with scenes of reflection, if you look at my stories, they tend to have a rolling topography.

You’ll see that in this story, too. There will be a scene filled with presence and action, and then we’ll come off and think a little bit about what this means. That I do deliberately.

Do you write a lot and then cut it down?

I’m an editor. I edit as I go. I don’t write longer than the story winds up being. Sometimes Tom will cut something out, but rarely. Most of my life, I’ve been an editor. So I compulsively edit myself. The most galling part of that is that as I’m writing, every time I go back into the story, every new day, I start from the beginning, and I word edit from the beginning.

It will be the ninth day of writing. I will have written 118 inches for a story that’s going to be 180 inches, and I can’t boot up the computer and go to inch 118 and start writing. I start with the first word of the story. It’s horrifying.

So do you end up happier with your ledes than your kickers?

That’s a funny question, but yes, it’s true. The tops of my story become so much better because they’ve been gone through so many times.

The first great writer I edited was Madeleine Blais at The Miami Herald – a former Nieman. She would write the kicker of the story first. I don’t have that kind of discipline. She would literally write the last paragraph and then build the whole story to deliver on that. I’m not that good.

[For more on Gene Weingarten and “The Peekaboo Paradox,” read our “Why's this so good?” post about the story. For more on Weingarten and ethics, read our transcript of his talk at the Mayborn Conference about two moments in his career when he struggled with journalistic ethics.]

“A children’s performer? Really?” you might wonder as you start the piece, but Weingarten is already there, waiting for you:

“You’re writing a story about him?” Vicki Cox asked, amused. I confirmed that I was.

“But … why?” she asked.

A few feet away, the Great Zucchini was pretending to be afraid of his own hand.

“I mean,” Vicki said, “what’s the hook?”

Now, the Great Zucchini was eating toilet paper.

“I mean, are you that desperate?” she asked.

Weingarten uses the skepticism to launch his tale: “if you want to know why that is – the hook, Vicki, the hook – it’s going to take some time.”

That setup is no accident. Writers have compared storytelling to a striptease, which points to the power of the dramatic reveal. But narrative also winds its way through comedy and magic acts. And Weingarten literally pulls rabbit after rabbit out of his, um, hat, summoning devastating answers to why The Great Zucchini can’t drive, has no furniture, and maintains a childlike obsession with children. The power of “The Peekaboo Paradox” lies in the way that form follows content – how the story itself becomes a performance in which Weingarten breaks and then restores the spell of the Great Zucchini.

The peekaboo of the title comes from the beginner’s hide-and-seek done with babies, and Weingarten describes its mechanics explicitly: a loved one disappears, a loved one reappears, and all is right with the world. As we get older, Weingarten argues, we learn to enjoy slightly more sophisticated versions of the gag, though at some level we’re still wanting reassurance, still hoping that peekaboo might be an apt metaphor for the biggest question of our lives.

But Gene Weingarten is not a believer. He is an atheist. And he can’t bring himself to buy the promise that it will all turn out all right – for him, for those kids at the Great Zucchini’s parties, or for the world. And like one performer calling out another, Weingarten begins to realize what lies behind the public face presented by his subject.

If you know even a little about Weingarten, you might be able to guess why he has the Great Zucchini’s number. The guy whose act is filled with cheap novelty items meets the guy whose Twitter avatar is a rubber pile of poop. The middle-aged reporter who promises to get a helpful reader laid encounters the bachelor who looks for romance at a strip club. The writer who, in his 20s, only remembered to pay his bill each month when the power company cut him off comes face to face with the performer whose electricity gets turned off for nonpayment in the middle of the story.

Deep in the piece, we learn that the Great Zucchini has other issues that Weingarten understands just as well. And he tips us to the weight of the coming darkness with the best line in the story:

We are rolling bones.

Later, an assist from the performer’s mother allows Weingarten to corner the Great Zucchini with the real nature of the world those children face. And if history is any guide, it will not all be all right.

Outside of writing circles, Weingarten’s fame doesn’t come from his literary chops. Ask a haphazard assortment of residents of greater Washington, D.C. (where Weingarten lives) to name one thing about him, and the most common answer you will get is along the lines of “The funny guy?”

Yes, the funny guy. But look close, and you come to realize that the Great Zucchini acting like an imbecile, inventing a banana phone and rubbing a fouled diaper on his face, parallels the juvenile material that Weingarten has chosen to tackle in his column at the peak of his career: indulging in borscht-belt goosing, mocking people with silly names, and making prank phone calls.

(Presented with this comparison between himself and the Great Zucchini, Weingarten says, “You could argue that the only thing distinguishing him from me is that I married an adult who in some ways saved my life.”)

Here, Weingarten does his act by showing the Great Zucchini doing his. And while readers learn exactly what the Great Zucchini is up to, they may not notice that Weingarten is pulling off the same trick.

“The Peekaboo Paradox” doesn’t work just because the Great Zucchini has a terrifying secret. It works because Weingarten recognizes him, conjures his demons, and then returns him to the height of his powers at a stellar performance for a group of kids with special needs. It works because magic and storytelling – all performances, in fact – come down to the same thing: behind the children’s games, behind the Great Zucchini’s act, faced with our mortality, the show we put on and the stories we tell may be the only things we’ve got. And even when we know that everything will not be all right, the most magical among us, flawed and sorry as they are, get us to suspend disbelief and buy the illusion.

Andrea Pitzer (@andreapitzer) is the editor of Nieman Storyboard. She is also working on a book about Vladimir Nabokov and his century.

Looking for further reading? We’ve posted Andrea’s full Q-and-A with Gene Weingarten about “The Peekaboo Paradox.”

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.

Did you pitch this story, or did National Geographic approach you about it?

I’ve been at the Geographic a little over five years. I do one piece a year for them. In my experience, one of the things that makes the magazine interesting is that the stories are more typically pitched by photographers, because figuring out what will make a good photographic narrative is trickier than figuring out what will make a good print narrative, due to issues of access and things like that.

So I’ve tossed ideas at them, but everything I have done for them to date has initially been cleared by the editors and the photographers, and then they have come to me and said, “We’d like you to do this.” And when they do that, typically what happens is that they will come to me with a humongously vague project idea, like this one: “Child marriage – go!”

This story was the passion of the photographer, Stephanie Sinclair, whose images are so amazing. She had been collecting images of child brides for almost a decade, I think, because she had become caught up in the issue in the course of an earlier assignment, which I believe was on violence against Afghan woman. I’m now forgetting what the original assignment was, but she had encountered young girls married off to older men and had documented this matter in a number of different countries over the years and finally had persuaded the Geographic to go for it.

My text editor, Barbara Paulsen, had been very strong on this story from the beginning, but the Geographic had worried that is was so depressing and difficult to document that they had apparently taken some persuading. And then finally we got the assignment in late 2008. Geographic has the longest lead time of any place I’ve ever heard of.

How did you walk that ethnographer’s line: remaining nonjudgmental enough to try to understand differences between child bride customs in different parts of the world, yet willing to describe one tradition involving men “who rape first and claim their victims as wives afterward”? How do you find that vantage point between the two communities?

That’s a fabulously well-put question, because we had, in retrospect, an amusing exchange on this issue that was unlike any I’ve had in previous assignments. I come from a background as a reporter of loving to take on things that are complicated because they’re complicated. My biggest work has been in abortion reporting, and the thing I’ve always done is take it on as a complex prism issue and trying to write with equal interest and accuracy and passion from the perspective of people on all sides.

So my working model for lots of kinds of reporting is, “Life is complicated. Things are really complicated.” Our job is to explain that in a way that at least in theory people will understand. That’s part of the reason I’m kind of the anti-investigative reporter. My deal is not to go “this bad thing, this bad thing,” but rather to say “this complicated thing, this complicated thing.” They know that about me, and they like that about me, and that’s what I’ve tried to do in my previous pieces at the Geographic.

So my editor, Barbara, calls me and says, “We want you to do a piece on child marriage.” The first thing out of my mouth is, “This is not complicated, this is really simple. These people should all be shot.” And she started laughing, and said, “No, I think you’re going to get out there and find that it’s actually kind of complicated.” I said, “No! It’s not complicated.” Later, of course, we both laughed about this, because it took me about 15 minutes of climbing into the subject matter to realize how extraordinarily complicated it is.

How did you handle that complexity as a storyteller?

Just as you put your finger on it, my challenge was trying to find this balance between making clear how complicated it is, while maintaining a sense of justified outrage. Outrage is not an emotion that I almost ever get into in the kind of reporting that I do. I don’t find it useful for my general life mission of trying to write about complicated things. This, on the other hand is pretty frigging outrageous, right?

I have quite a bit of experience reporting overseas. I’ve been a foreign bureau chief in South America, I’ve done a fair amount of reporting in other countries and other languages, but I am also lucky enough that I have typically been able to do my overseas reporting in a language in which I’m fluent, which is Spanish. It’s not that I necessarily have cultural roots in all the places I’ve been in, but part of my family is Mexican, so I feel some kind of familiarity in a lot of cultures I’m working in.

This, I knew, would be completely different for me. I was a total outsider. I wanted to try as best I could to remain completely conscious of that all the way through, while at the same time trying to learn as much as I could as fast as I could. That’s a very tricky balance to try to negotiate for any foreign correspondent. And it’s not just for foreign correspondents – it’s for anybody working outside their own cultural and linguistic comfort zones. There are certainly parts of the United States where I would have had the same issues.

I’m in my late 50s, and one of the things I’ve learned about being a reporter over the years is that the older I get, the more conscious I am of my own ignorance and my own beginner status at any kind of new subject matter that I walk into. When I was young, like a lot of reporters, I was all full of myself and thinking, “I can learn anything really fast, because that’s what reporters do.”

We all know that, we’re all really familiar with it, either as editors and writers. It’s where most of the screw-ups come from. The arrogance is really good in some ways, but it’s really problematic in others. I think if you’re lucky enough to grow up as a reporter and gain some a little bit of experience and wisdom, one of the main things you learn is what a beginner you are, over and over again, and how much other people understand things a lot better than you, and how your job is to get them to explain it to you.

This was a kind of super-exaggeration of that phenomenon. I literally did not speak the language. I’m not accustomed to working with an interpreter. I got really good interpreters – I was lucky in that way. When you work with an interpreter, the interpreter’s job is a lot more than language. You know you’re not getting nuances of what people are saying. You’re only scratching the surface, and all that just somehow has to be incorporated into your understanding of what you’re getting, and then what you write as you write it, so that you can try to be as transparent as possible for the people who are reading you.

You mentioned in an email that you felt like you hadn’t gotten as much narrative in this story as you normally like to. Can you talk about the challenges of weaving narrative into a story with such a large scope?

Anybody who’s been a writer or an editor can see reading that story what the challenges are. You’ve been given this worldwide phenomenon. When you’re sitting there tearing your hair out in clumps, what you’re doing is thinking, “OK, I have to explain Islam. Oh, no – I don’t have to do that, but I feel like I have to. And the entire history of India. And when they banned child marriage. And the fact that Gandhi had a child bride, except that he later grew up to be against child marriage.” You’re going nuts with fact, and the feeling that there’s all this encyclopedic stuff that you have to try to learn to do this.

In this case, it felt more daunting to me than ever, because each young woman or girl’s story was so astonishing to me to learn, and my job was to get multiple stories, not a single one. And my job was also to explain nuance and complication and counter the very impulse that I’d had at the beginning of the assignment, which was to say that there is nothing complicated about this: “These people should all be shot.” Trying to do all of those things in one not-very-long chunk – initially 6,000 words and then under 5,000 – was really difficult.

In order to understand what’s going on in Yemen now, you have to tell the Nujood Ali story, a story which has already been told at some length, but that National Geographic readers probably won’t be familiar with. You want to start with something that will pull them in and be real. You’re trying in each case not to make it simple, to make clear that much of what seems so antiquated, so repressive and so dreadful comes from a sense of loyalty to tradition and also parental love and protection. And also, to my mind, an irrational and destructive obsession with purity and virginity for women. So trying to separate all of that out and string it together in a narrative that makes sense and is not just confusing to the reader is a hellacious challenge.

The opening graf introduces readers to an unbelievably young bride on her wedding night, while the closing graf brings in another young bride who died after her wedding night. In between you give us two stories of hope. Is that the way you thought of framing it?  How did you come to that structure?

Initially, we talked about structuring the story around people who are working in the communities to try to prevent this practice, partly because we thought that would be less incredibly depressing, and partly because it would give us easier access, frankly.

I doubt very much I would have gotten to that opening wedding in the story if it hadn’t been for Stephanie’s obsessive need to photograph an Indian wedding involving an extremely young girl. She knew that those take place, and we also knew that they were extremely difficult to get to, because they’re very secretive and always take place at night. As we said in the piece, they’re usually sneaked into what are portrayed as weddings of slightly older girls.

We had already been to the wedding of an older girl, who was like 12 or 13. And Stephanie was absolutely determined that she was going to get to an infant or a little girl wedding. I had said, “This is not going to happen. We are not going to be able to do it.” And she said, “It is going to happen. It is going to happen.” And just by tenaciousness and sticking around and asking over and over again and getting to a waiter who knew someone who knew someone out in this village, eventually we got there. She was right. We got to it, and it happened.

As a writer, sometimes you walk into a situation, and you’re like, “Oh, this is the lede.” I know something is the lede when I realize it’s the most powerful way that I can pull people into my subject matter. Had we not gotten to that wedding, the lede probably would have been something comparable, but it would have been something less shocking to an outside reader, because it would have been a 12-year-old. That’s still not something you want to be looking at, but it’s not quite as “AAGH!” as a 5-year-old.

You knew right away that would be the lede, then?

That was pretty clear. I knew before then that it would be something like that, but it didn’t happen until quite late. I didn’t know about the Yemeni girl who died until later either. I didn’t want to end it fully on a note of hope, because that felt false to me. But I also didn’t want to end it fully on a note of this is sooo horrible and these girls are being smashed into oblivion around the world. I did want to convey the idea that it’s a huge problem, that it’s not going away, but there are very considerable and sometimes effective measures underway to try to deal with it. That’s the ultimate message that I wanted to leave people with.

In order to do that, you enter the story. When did you know that you would make use of the first person?

Whether you use first person or not is partly a function of what the typical practice of your outlet is. The typical practice at National Geographic and my other main outlet, the New York Times Magazine, are what I refer to as the “narrative I.” You are not really an individual in this story, with characteristics and a personality. You almost serve a grammatical function. You place the reader: “How and where was this said?” “He told me.” It’s a very New Yorker-y kind of function, too. Most magazines are comfortable with that or welcome it, or in some cases prefer it.

I have heard through a mutual friend, although I don’t know her well, that Katherine Boo, the great poverty writer for the New Yorker, gets into a little bit of a head-butt sometimes with her editors because she likes to completely write herself out of the stories, and they want her more in. This is secondhand, but we do share a mutual very good friend.

She wrote that fantastic magazine piece for which she won the National Magazine Award about seven years ago – “The Marriage Cure” – a piece that made every writer I know want to hang up their tools and go do something else for a living because it was so gorgeous. She does not appear anywhere in that piece, despite the fact that she’s clearly more or less living with these people for many weeks on end. I gather that was Kate just insisting that she did not want to be in the piece.

For my purposes, I find it more transparent and more comfortable to the reader, especially when you’re doing something like hanging out at an illegal wedding, to be in the story a little. To me the reader is going “Where are you? What are you doing? How can I trust you?” In addition, my feeling was that with a subject matter like child marriage, the reader wants to ask, “Wait a minute. Why aren’t you punching everybody out and taking her away?”

It’s a little bit like the giant ethical controversy over the L.A. Times story – I forget whether it was child neglect or drug use, but there was a big ethical to-do in journalism with the reporters having been present without intervening in any sense. I think there are times when you have to explain yourself in that way. And I think it’s useful here to explain your Western orientation. There are ways in which you have to get over that if you’re going to understand what’s going on in these cultures and how trying to intervene in any way can just be seen as imperialist oppression.

When it comes to first person, usually my routine goes like this: I’m doing a “narrative I,” and I put a little bit too much of myself in there. And I end up paring myself away, or sometimes my editor does, unless I’m writing a personal essay. But it’s always very tricky, trying to figure out to what extent you’re going to try to be a breathing human in your story.

Tell me a little about the timeline for the reporting and the writing of this story.

I had been in Rainsville doing a couple daily stories and ran into this one in the course of reporting those. I met Corey Plunkett at a FEMA outpost and he mentioned the paystub situation. From that point it was three days of reporting, two days of writing.

You open with sentences that begin “on the first day” and “on the second day.” It feels like you’re reworking the Biblical story of creation – repeating order growing out of chaos. What were you trying to do with that lede?

I was trying to accomplish a few things at once. One was practical. This was in some ways two stories – the Rainsville side and the Hixson side – that were more or less parallel time-wise, and I thought the ‘on the first day’ phrase, and repeating it, would help orient the reader better than saying Wednesday or Thursday. The other thing has to do with thinking about the story as a whole, I mean what it felt like being in Rainsville, what people said about their experience, and of course the story of Corey and Charlie. Besides just being sad, there was a surreal quality to the aftermath – everything being rearranged and unfamiliar, and all these people trying in their own ways to reorient themselves, or as you say, create some order. That’s what people were trying to do, fundamentally.

Then there was this story of Corey and Charlie, which had an almost fable quality to it. So the phrase in the lede surfaced out of dwelling on all that. It seemed to convey an appropriate feeling to the story, which was almost archetypal, which is maybe why you’re saying Biblical. But I didn’t start off with that idea; I started out thinking about what people said, what it felt like, what happened, and the lede grew out of that.

One other point. With most ledes, I tend to focus not on the first or second sentence per se, but on where the opening needs to end up story-wise. In this case, the opening needed to end with Corey getting the first email. From that I worked backwards, orienting the first few sentences towards that moment, like steps in a process.

The story feels very spare – even the quotes are short. Did you start long and cut a lot out to get there, or did you just write it that stripped from the beginning?

I wrote it stripped. It seemed right, plus I fear overwriting. The degree to which a story is emotional is proportional to how much I tend to pull back, almost like I don’t want to invade the subject’s space or the reader’s. The danger of course is pulling back too far and draining a story of feeling by obscuring things or not giving enough information. So, while nothing was cut, the first editor, David Finkel, suggested adding a couple of key sentences to make certain important points sharper. Like in the second graph, he suggested adding one more ‘someone else’s’ as well as the last sentence in that graph to make the point clear. He knew exactly which parts needed a bit more elaboration or attention, and I think these additions made the story much sharper.

Barbara Vobejda, who was the second editor and moved the story, made a couple surgical changes – like changing particularity to peculiarity in reference to the tornados’ destruction, which was perfect. But overall, things were added rather than cut.

Structure seems key to this piece. At what point did you figure out the structure?

I figured out the opening, as mentioned, and then I knew the midway point the story should drive to this vulnerable feeling Corey described when he realized his things were out there everywhere for anyone to see, and then wondering about Charlie. To me, that was the hinge of the story. Once I had those two things decided – the opening and the mid point – the structure fell into place.

You knew hundreds of reporters had written or were writing about the same story. Did that influence your approach?

Not really. At the outset, we decided to avoid Tuscaloosa, because everyone was there. I also did not have the responsibility of wrapping in daily developments, so it was possible to just focus on trying to tell this particular story, the story I had, in the place where I was, as well as I could. It was great that the newspaper allowed that.

Is there anything else you want to say about this piece? Anything we wouldn’t know from reading it?

I went back and forth on putting the thing in about Charlie’s medication. But he was very open about his struggles, which was in fact what made him appealing, I thought.

Also, about the ending. A lot of times I just let a story stop, rather than really writing an ending or thinking about it the way you think of a beginning. It’s probably the fear of overwriting again, or not wanting to be definitive, in terms of meaning. In any case, I knew the story ended with Corey surrounded by other peoples’ belongings. That was the odd fact of what happened – this exchange that had taken place. It was touching, of course, but also somehow strange. So in the first version of the end, I had described the scene and just let it stop there. But David thought we should elaborate a bit, and asked me again what exactly happened. I told him about the “Oh, Corey” which was so purely beautiful in the actual moment. I had left it out, though, because I thought there was a danger it might not read right on paper, a notion that he found mystifying. So we put that in. Most importantly, he thought it was not enough to just have the description sitting there, and suggested the very last line, which was truly ingenious. It was satisfying because it spoke to the whole story, but without being too defining or confining.

We’ve switched things up a little this installment, freeing editors from a pesky word count and asking them to pick out one device or idea that they wanted to focus on rather than looking at the whole story. They didn’t see each other’s comments as they wrote, and haven’t yet read the reporter’s reflections on how the piece came together. Tomorrow we’ll post our interview with McCrummen [update: the interview is now up], but here we offer our editors’ thoughts. (For bios on the members of the Roundtable, see our January post.)

Kelley Benham
Enterprise editor, St. Petersburg Times

On writing about emotion:

Ah, here in the bag of downers that marks the recent tornado coverage, we find this heartwarming, uplifting story to renew our faith in humanity.

And here are some words that never appear in the story: Heartwarming. Uplifting. Faith in humanity.

This is the kind of story that makes your heart swell, makes you dash off a check to the Red Cross and hide your sniffles. But emotion is difficult to conjure. You can’t force it, bludgeon it, demand it. All you can do it put the right elements in the right order, then hope the reader feels something.

Here, the writer builds emotion without stumbling into sentimentality by assembling a clean, focused narrative driven by action, in which every line is rooted in reported detail. ­

She uses action to establish the focus swiftly and cleanly. We are with Corey Plunkett and his wife surveying the devastation when we get the first key observation: “Everything was someone else’s.” Sense of place is established through action as well, by following the flight of paper on the wind.

When the emotion in the story is turned up, the writing is turned down. Corey Plunkett’s crying in the fifth paragraph is tucked into the middle of a sentence, in the position of least importance. Imagine by comparison bad television coverage we’ve all seen before, where the camera zooms in and lingers on the tears, like some kind of prize. Or the (sub)standard newspaper feature story, where tears glitter on cheeks, often like diamonds.

The language throughout is simple and specific. There are no fancy words, few adverbs, no clichés. Sentences mostly branch to the right. It can be tempting to pump in extra syllables, as if doing so would signal the reader that “This Is Important.” Better to pull back. My editor, Mike Wilson, says, “Two cheers for understatement.”

My favorite line, for its simplicity and restraint: “He put it on the shelf next to his antidepressants. He waited.”

Characters are established through detail, not generalizations. You can’t care about someone unless you know them, and the writer makes the introductions but allows the reader to own the conclusions. We see the wood paneling, the blanket covering the rips in the couch. We learn everyone’s income, without being told that anyone is poor. No one is labeled selfless or a hero.

The writer patiently allows the story to unfold. We learn about the characters as they learn about each other. We see the Alabama couple “conjuring” the couple in Tennessee. We learn only very late in the story that Charlie Thompson’s wife is in a wheelchair after a stroke, that his daughter has Down syndrome. Like the tears in the top of the story, these details are placed quietly in the paragraphs.

The quotes are as disciplined as the rest of the piece. The writer does not allow vague, lazy thought into the story just because it’s inside a quote mark. Best quote in the story: “Oh, Corey.”

Chris Hunt
Assistant managing editor, Sports Illustrated

On the pacing of details:

I was moved by this piece and especially impressed by the way the author advanced the story through the careful distribution of small, telling details. We learn things about the Plunketts and the Thompsons gradually, and it’s much more effective than being told all at once.

Little by little the details, reported matter-of-factly, often introduced indirectly – Corey is bearded and 25; he has a factory job; he’s frustrated because he can’t brush his teeth; he writes poems and regrets in a spiral notebook; he makes $360 gross a week – add up to a vivid portrait.

The same happens with Charlie and Melissa and Heather Thompson. A shelf on Charlie’s desk contains his antidepressants; the daughter sitting on the green couch has Down syndrome. Rather than be told at the start that Charlie struggles with depression and Melissa is physically disabled and Heather mentally disabled, we’re led to these facts by the wheelchair and the shelf and the couch, and the facts have no less impact for having been backed into.

The author trusts the reader, and the reader is rewarded with images that linger because they were allowed to do their job without intrusive rhetoric.

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

On narrative unity:

I want to focus on the dramatic unity of Stephanie’s piece. Notice how the story begins: (first paragraph) On the first day . … (second paragraph) On the second day…

Biblical, and not just Biblical, but Old Testament-kick ass-and-distribute-plagues Biblical. In other stories, this could be a stretch, but considering the wrath of God destruction she’s writing about, it’s nearly perfect. They don’t call the most powerful tornadoes “the Finger of God” for nothing.

On the second day, in fact, comes the key paragraph for consideration:

On the second day, they sorted through the fragments in the bright sun: ripped photos of strangers, a piece of someone else’s mattress, someone else’s medicine. When the wind blew, shards of fiberglass from someone else’s house stung their faces. Everything was someone else’s; their stuff was mostly gone.

Notice the very understated “under the bright sun” detail – Let there be light, anyone? We’ve gone from “shredded debris under a blackened sky” (aka “formless void”) to the bright sun, and a world fully populated with stuff. But there’s one phrase relating to all that stuff that is repeated four times: “someone else’s.”

This is no mistake, or redundancy; this scattering of “someone else’s” stuff triggers the action of the story. And as a stranger forms a not very rational but hugely human connection with the random “someone else” whose pay stub is blown to his doorstep, you can feel it all building to a place of great significance.

The voyage is nicely restrained. You see the collection of care packages – not of store-bought items, but personal items – stuff. The care packages arrive with more of an emotional impact than a practical one. You can see the connections being made as the lives upended by the catastrophe shift slightly and begin to settle in the new reality.

And then you get to the fabulous and well-earned unity that brings it all together and guarantees this story will mean something to many people.

The point is this: That a storm, an act of God, scatters someone else’s stuff literally to the winds; but that an almost equally powerful force, human empathy, collects someone else’s stuff and sends it back in the other direction, the direction of hope and resilience. Note the restraint, but also note the precision with which the point is driven home:

He pulled out Heather Thompson’s dolls, and Melissa Thompson’s blouse and Charlie Thompson’s shirts. He pulled out new toys for his daughters. He pulled out razors, and a brand-new Crimson Tide cap, which the Thompsons knew Corey would like because they had found photographs of him on the Internet wearing one.

“I needed a hat,” Corey said to himself, not realizing.

He emptied the boxes until the only thing left was the plain white envelope, “Corey” written on it in cursive. He opened it.

There was no note inside. No pay stub. Instead, there were $20 bills, which he fanned out and counted, $160 in all. He was quiet.

“Oh, Corey,” his dad said.

Corey Plunkett stared at all the belongings of strangers that were now his own.

Great use of dialogue in that last passage – so pared down but, because of context, so incredibly powerful and evocative of a whole world view.

Paige Williams
Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

On Voice:

I was thrilled to see a Stephanie McCrummen story come to the Roundtable. When McCrummen covered Africa, her important and extremely difficult pieces were studies in precision reporting and detail, but what has always struck me about her writing is the powerfully restrained voice.

We already know that dramatic events – hurricanes, homicide, war – tempt us to overdramatize the storytelling. While there are obvious exceptions (Michael Herr’s rollicking, slightly panicked voice in Dispatches, for instance), placid delivery can work an elegant, authoritative spell. McCrummen’s almost fairytale-like voice (the use of words such as “cottage;” the structural mileposts of “On the first day…”) is at once calm and confident, and without pretension. The pairing of the straightforward delivery and mileposts work together to move us through the story without seeing the writer at work or feeling manipulated. In other words, power comes from strong, accessible language and carefully chosen juxtapositions: “alien” and “wasteland” suggest the scope of the change that has come to the Plunkett family; the wedding veil and tree limbs suggest promise and life, upended; the deft black-sky stroke doesn’t just function as description, it suggests finality and sets up an avenue for narrative arc. If the sky is black now, will things get better? What we really want from a good narrative is to find out what happens next, and McCrummen preps us with almost lulling subtlety, not with a hammer to the temple.

By sticking to a less-is-more tone – “Everything was someone else’s; their stuff was mostly gone” – she shows allegiance to the story and its inhabitants, and respect for the reader. She’s not trying to move us; she built her story and then let it do its job.

Smart-bomb detail functions as an element of her voice. McCrummen wouldn’t have been able to build such a strong story without wide-awake reporting. She’s the kind of writer who knows when to avoid laying down a speed bump of distracting detail or device, when not to include a detail just to prove she has it in her notebook. Better yet, her smart-bombs make quick, seamless points about big concepts. By writing that Plunkett sat at his parents’ trailer (not their “kitchen table” or “home”) she cues us to lifestyle/economics – i.e., class. Nothing elaborate here, just a dollop of information without resorting to exposition. Another example: “… the pale-green paper from Corey Plunkett’s factory job…” – a kitchen-sink writer might’ve unnecessarily overlaid this with “where he works as a die caster,” etc. McCrummen is able to write with assurance and authority because of how she observes story and how she renders it: the pay stub didn’t fly above “billboards and pastures” but rather above “blank billboards and cow pastures and rising ridges.” That passage works gorgeously for its alliteration and specificity – ridges by nature rise, but here the cadence numbs us to the redundancy. Writing that Plunkett opens not just a knife but rather a hunting knife echoes the theme of survival.

Calculated restraint: Sometimes when writers choose to restrain themselves you get the feeling they’re trying to channel Hemingway or be someone they’re not. McCrummen is McCrummen. So by the time I get to the single-sentence graf “Alone in the quiet, the tattooed, bearded 25-year-old cried, and then began typing” I’m with her.

As a device, the single-sentence graf has its place but tends to be overused, especially in newspapers. The device often shows the writer banging a gong, as if to say right here I want you to cry – GONG! right here I want you to gasp – GONG! We’ve all been guilty of it, but maybe we should kick away this particular crutch a little more often. The abovementioned McCrummen graf isn’t a gong graf and here’s why: Instead of simply imparting information or trying to deliver a bolus of emotion, the sentence pivots the action forward. And the short passage of single-sentence grafs that soon follows – “First he thought: ‘My God, this has come all the way from Alabama’” and “Then, slightly sickening: ‘Gosh, I wonder if this person is okay’” – works because McCrummen is using the device as structure, in order to show thought progression and advance the narrative.

Integrity: Maybe above all I appreciated that McCrummen embraced the fact that no one could have traced the pay stub’s journey, not really. By writing that the pay stub “was probably sucked into the half-mile funnel” and “somehow floated north” and “probably over Interstate 59” and “must have crossed the Tennessee River,” etc., she gracefully shows true journalistic chops and builds reader trust.

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

On focus:

Journalists too often fail to seize opportunities like this one. We cover the BIG story from 3,000 feet, and it leaves readers feeling understandably detached. Whether the subject is a storm or war or recession, we need to take our lens and focus as tight as possible.

Say to one scrap of paper.

I applaud Stephanie McCrummen – and her editor – for seeing the story. For understanding that this random connection between two families had the potential to illustrate the devastation more than a sweep of the countryside.

It all starts there. The reporter has to make a choice about what the “story” is and then report for that story. That’s instead of unloading a notebook full of facts and observations and interviews with people who say it sounded like a freight train coming through. What you get with that approach is a story that’s a mile wide and an inch deep.

What we want is a story that’s an inch wide and a mile deep. That’s how you reveal that helplessness is having no toothbrush and losing the journals where you scrawled your secrets. And how you discover what drives someone to care less about himself than a stranger whose name appears on a pay stub. The more focused the story, the deeper the reporter can go, the better the chance that it will deliver an emotional wallop.

So far, this has been the most memorable of all the tornado stories I’ve seen this year. There are many reasons why (other editors will highlight some of those), but first and foremost, this writer had the courage to commit.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

On the importance of being there:

I tell reporters who are just starting out that – as good as they might be at working the phones and scouring the Internet for information – there’s nothing that replaces “being there.” Stephanie McCrummen demonstrates the benefits of traveling to both Rainsville and Hixson, and witnessing several scenes there.

Getting story ideas. I’d be interested to find out how McCrummen learned about the Plunketts and Thompsons. I’m willing to bet she heard about their e-mails when she got to Rainsville. More often than not, reporters get these story ideas by being out in the field, talking to a lot of people, and keeping their eyes and ears open for what intrigues them.

Gaining trust. McCrummen gained the trust of both families by visiting them and spending time with them. They were willing to show her things and tell her things that would be difficult to do with just a phone conversation. We learn that Charles Thompson has anti-depressants on his desk, that his wife has written him a love poem, that his family has a ripped leather couch, that his daughter has Down syndrome.

We learn more about his family’s financial situation:

When a guest comes, Thompson, who mistrusts the government and half-joked about the tornadoes being generated by a secret military project in Alaska, offers his desk chair. He used to work in a photo studio, but since his wife’s stroke, he stays home. They live on two disability checks totaling about $1,800 a month.

Evoking emotions. By being in Rainsville, McCrummen observed people’s emotions and the events surrounding them. She then evoked those feelings by putting the reader within the scene without explicitly labeling anything. Take, for example, the tonal shift between the church scene and the Plunketts in their field:

At Brown’s Chapel Baptist church, a preacher stood under a broad, broken oak and offered that God had not caused the tornadoes but was there to help people through the aftermath, and they all sang “Near the Cross.”

In the green field, Corey Plunkett and his wife continued to pick through debris, trying to make sense of things, starting with the idea of nothingness.

Developing plot. McCrummen develops her plot through short scenes and dialogue, all of which are hard to reconstruct simply through interviews. It’s hard to imagine that she could have crafted the ending of her story without being there:

He emptied the boxes until the only thing left was the plain white envelope, “Corey” written on it in cursive. He opened it.

There was no note inside. No pay stub. Instead, there were $20 bills, which he fanned out and counted, $160 in all. He was quiet.

“Oh, Corey,” his dad said.

——

Read our interview with Stephanie McCrummen – find out why she wanted bare-bones language and how her editor helped her nail the ending. And in two weeks, we’ll post our second Editors’ Roundtable for June.

Anne Heller, formerly a fiction editor at Esquire and Redbook, talked about her first book, “Ayn Rand and the World She Made.” Heller described becoming intrigued by Rand after reading one of her books on vacation as an adult, even though she never became a fan. Here she describes how her own curiosity propelled and winnowed her research:

“I began my biography of Ayn Rand with a number of questions that drove me and drove the narrative. The research in my case was driven by the questions that I had about her as a writer and a human being and a political figure. One of those questions was that I learned that she was born in  Tsarist Russia in 1905 in the last decade of the Tsars, that she’d lived through the Russian Revolution at age 12, and that she was 21 when she came to the United States, having idealized the United States first from afar, from a vast afar.

“She had no way of knowing anything about these places except what she read and what she saw in the few movies she had seen in St. Petersburg, where she lived. She was Jewish in the most anti-Semitic place on the European continent at that time, and never mentioned being Jewish. Most of her readers don’t know that she was Russian. Those who had heard her or seen her in her lifetime did know that. She spoke with a very heavy Russian accent. But her name, which she changed from Alissa Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand, had not only no nationality that could be identified but no gender. So then people didn’t know that she was a woman.

“I wanted to know what being a Russian, being Jewish in Tsarist Russia, being a woman who left that place that was so difficult to leave to come to the United States all by herself with the intention of becoming a writer in a language she didn’t yet know – what drove her and what influence these life experiences had on the Ayn Rand that we know: the pro-Capitalist, anti-altruistic, free market, self-styled philosophical Ayn Rand. So I set out to find out, and the research that I did was, for the most part, in the service of these questions that I had.

“I wanted to know something about her inner life, with which I could not identify at all to start with. My biggest fear was that I would come to dislike her thoroughly in the course of living with her. Wil Haygood spoke in the last session about unlocking the front door at the end of the day, opening your door, and finding your subject on the couch waiting for you. My fear was that I would have to move.

“But that didn’t happen, and it didn’t happen largely because the things I was able to find out about Ayn Rand continued to intrigue me. As I folded them into what I knew about her version of the narrative of her life, she became more interesting rather than less interesting.

“All I can say is that I tried to include nothing that didn’t answer the questions that were drawing me to write the book in the first place. Since this is the only book that I’ve had the experience of writing, I do know that each project presents its own peculiar challenges. But this one for me was to uncover the inner and outer influences that created I think a very unusual, a very powerful woman who continues to influence our leaders’ thinking today.”

John Aloysius Farrell is with the Center for Public Integrity and has previously written for The Boston Globe and The Denver Post. In addition to stressing the value of assembling a complete chronology for the central character in a story (his run as long as 1,000 pages), he discussed his latest book, a biography of celebrated trial attorney Clarence Darrow, to be published this month.

“The theme of my talk is what you should leave out. I wanted to give you an exclusive look at the last anecdote that got chopped from my manuscript. It takes place in about 1926 or ’27, after the Monkey Trial, after Darrow was at the peak of his fame. And it takes place in New York, where a young cub reporter was called up to the city desk by his editor, who said, ‘Clarence Darrow’s in town, kid. I want you go to go out there, and I want you interview him before he goes to this black tie dinner, and I want you to write it up for tomorrow’s edition.’

[He tells a tale of a cub reporter trapped into helping a partially naked Clarence Darrow get dressed for a formal event.]

“Now you see my regret that I didn’t include that. Why didn’t I? Well, any of you who are newspaper people know the phrase “never let the facts get in the way of a great story.”  Or as a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer once told me “Jack, that’s what footnotes are for.” If an anecdote is too good to be true, put it in the book and then go back to the footnotes. Aside from the fact that it was sort of demeaning to [Darrow’s wife] Ruby and coarse, I left it out because I just wasn’t sure of the provenance. New York newspaper people of that time were not known for their, um… [audience laughs]

“It could have happened, and it might have happened, but in the end I chose to leave it out, because what you leave out is as important as what you put in. You have to be very careful. More importantly, when you leave it out is important. This was the last thing I cut.

“I have a couple former colleagues in this room. Those who know me know I tend to write very long. The original manuscript for “Tip” was 1,000 pages, and it was published at like 760 pages. You think that I would have learned when it was time for the second book, but I didn’t. I wrote another thousand pages, and this one – in this day of e-books and brevity and it being very important to appeal to the reader – came in at about 550. But in each of these cases, as I came along to something in the writing, and I had all this research, I said to myself, ‘Do I need a quote here? Do I want to put this in? I’ll just put it in now, because I really like this quote, and I’ll cut it out later.’

“No, no. You have to do your triage right from the start. Otherwise you end up, as I did in both cases, with months of rewriting and condensing and putting in new numbers for your footnotes. And you also end up with choppy prose. If there’s anything drives me nuts as I read both manuscripts is that I can tell where the cuts are. I just hope you can’t.”

Jane Leavy, who spent many years as a sports reporter and feature writer for The Washington Post, has written two sports biographies – “The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood” and “Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy.” For the BIO audience, she discussed her personal connection to Mickey Mantle and shared a story from her time at the Post:

“I think the most instructive thing I can say about turning reporting into narrative starts with my first trip as a reporter for The Washington Post, when I was sent to Houston, Texas, to interview a guy who was a great running back for the Houston Oilers, Earl Campbell. Earl Campbell was told I was coming, and the PR mechanism went into effect. Well, Earl Campbell did not want to talk to this Washington Post reporter, or any reporter.

So he bolted from the practice facility with me running after him, which is hilarious in and of itself. Remember this guy was the best in the world at the time, and here’s this little white girl running after this large black man, and chasing him down. And he runs into a men’s room, a cinder block thing at this practice field. And he goes into the men’s room, and I stand outside the men’s room. Every once in a while, he would stick his head out, and I’d still be there. And I’d wave, and he’d go back into the men’s room. This went on – I kid you not – for five hours. I wasn’t leaving, and he wasn’t coming out.

“Lesson No. 1 about being a biographer: You chase their asses down, and you don’t leave once you’ve found them.

“No. 2, when he did finally make a run for it, I stuck my whole body in front of him. He didn’t run over me, which he clearly could have done. He just looked at me, scared to death, and said, ‘No comma.’ I did two things at that point. I wrote it down, because we all take notes, and nobody was going to believe it anyway. And I went into the men’s room. It had been a long five hours.

“The story there, the material, is nothing. My editor said, ‘What did he say?’ I said, ‘He said, No comma.’  ‘He said No comment?’ ‘No. No comma.’ Well, they weren’t going to let me write that. So I wrote some story, some nonsense, and it didn’t have any quotes from Earl Campbell.

“And years later when I sat down to write ‘Squeeze Play’ – which is really my life as a female sportswriter, except that I never did sleep with a catcher, honest – I realized that little moment taught me more about how to organize and how to impose structure on material than anything before or since. Because the words themselves, the notes, were nothing, but the narrative was that he was scared of me. I had a kind of power that he was terrified of. We all do, when we write about people.

“That power, for me, can be paralyzing. I don’t know about you guys, maybe if you’re only writing about dead people it doesn’t matter. But the dynamic there, which was that he was not necessarily – unlike a writer or a pol or a great lawyer  – he was not able to tell his own story, and he might not have been inclined to do so had he had that ability. But he didn’t. So it was my job to impose on the story that I was able to glean from other sources, from history and teammates and other interviews, what the narrative was.”

Thank you to those Storyboard readers who saw our Monday post and helped raise awareness worldwide of Dorothy’s detention. Dorothy, an American, Canadian and Iranian citizen who works for Al Jazeera, had not been heard from since she was detained April 29 when she arrived in Damascus from Doha. Syria transferred her to Iran.