U.S. fellows:

David Abel, staff writer, the Boston Globe. He has covered dissident movements in Cuba, the rise of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, national security policy in Washington, D.C., and, in New England, a range of profiles and issues such as the politics of academia, the persistence of poverty and the effects of climate change.
Studying: the evolution of new media; the impact of rising income equality on the social fabric; the science and potential effects of climate change
You should read: his Kurt Vonnegut story. Nice lines: The prisoner of war who survived the incineration of Dresden nearly died in a blaze of his own making last year. A cigarette he left in an ashtray torched much of his East Side Manhattan brownstone.
Follow: @davabel

Laura Norton Amico, founder and editor, Homicide Watch, an acclaimed Washington, D.C.-based website for data-driven coverage of violent crime. “Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case,” is the motto. Through Kickstarter, Amico, a 2013 Nieman-Berkman Fellow in Journalism Innovation, is trying to raise $40,000 to fund and staff the site for the next year, through a student reporting lab. With six days to go, she is less than $9,000 short of the goal. To support this journalism, go here.
Studying: criminal justice journalism in the digital age, including useful tools and new models for crime and courts reporting
You should read about: the late Tawanna Barnes-Copeland, 41. Amico’s lede: Holding her granddaughter close to her side, Brenda Smith Sledge stood before her daughter’s killer this morning to tell him how much her family had lost.
Follow: @homicidewatch

Brett Anderson, restaurant critic and features writer, the Times-Picayune. His work has also appeared in Gourmet, the Washington Post, Food & Wine, Salon and The Oxford American, has been anthologized in eight editions of Best Food Writing, and has won two James Beard Foundation Awards.
Studying: the forces and people fueling the modern American food culture and their impact on the way Americans eat; the role food and restaurants play in communities during crisis
You should read: his James Beard Award-winning five-part series on the post-Katrina rebuilding of the restaurant Mandina. His lede: On Oct. 11, 2005, Cindy Mandina put a hip to the side door of Mandina’s restaurant and stepped into her new world of disorder. The tableau brought to mind a Salvador Dali painting. The asphyxiating aroma suggested the inside of a garbage bin.
Follow: @BrettAndersonTP

Chris Arnold, economy and housing market correspondent, NPR. Arnold, the 2013 Donald W. Reynolds Nieman Fellow in Business Journalism, has covered subjects ranging from Hurricane Katrina recovery, to immigrant workers in the fishing industry, to new table saws that prevent injuries.
Studying: the reshaping of the government’s role in housing after the collapse of the bubble; how the crash will shape the future of homeownership and the American Dream; obstacles to technological innovation in consumer product safety
You should hear: his 2011 Edward R. Murrow Award-winning series “The Foreclosure Nightmare.”
Follow: @Chris_ArnoldNPR

Alexandra Garcia, multimedia journalist, the Washington Post. She reports, shoots and edits video stories on topics ranging from health care and immigration to fashion and education.
Studying: how news organizations can create visual experiences that engage users; interactive storytelling forms
You should see: “The Healing Fields: Hidden Hurt,” about an annual three-day medical clinic in remote Appalachia for people without (or with too little) healthcare. More of her work can be found here.
Follow: @agarcia525

Jeneen Interlandi, freelance health and science journalist. She has written about biomedical research, public health and environmental science for publications including the New York Times magazine and Scientific American, and is a former staff writer at Newsweek.
Studying: the history of pharmaceuticals, the cultural forces that have shaped our relationship to medication and the impact that has had on our perceptions of illness and health
You should read: “When My Crazy Father Actually Lost His Mind,” and Storyboard’s recent Q-and-A with her, about how she did it. An excerpt: My father yelled at the social worker, who was present, and talked over the judge and lied about his psychiatric history. He presented his journals as documentation of the injustices he had suffered. He asked to read from them, a request the judge denied. “I came from Brooklyn, New York,” he said. “I fell off a bike, and now I’m in prison.” And then, “This is nuts.”
Follow: @JInterlandi

Blair Kamin, architecture critic, the Chicago Tribune. Kamin, a Pulitzer Prize winner in criticism, is the 2013 Arts and Culture Nieman Fellow, and is the author of the books Why Architecture Matters: Lessons from Chicago, and Terror and Wonder: Architecture in a Tumultuous Age.
Studying: architecture, landscape architecture and urban design as an examination of how to revitalize the field of architectural criticism in print and online
You should read: his Cityscapes blog. From “How Frank Lloyd Wright resolved his inner struggles:” Long before Frank Lloyd Wright became a professional great man who costumed himself in a porkpie hat and a flowing cape, he signed his drawings “Frank L. Wright” and carried out such humble tasks as preparing drawings of buildings for real estate ads in the Chicago Tribune.
Follow: @BlairKamin

Jennifer B. McDonald, an editor at the New York Times Book Review. She assigns reviews of fiction and nonfiction, and occasionally writes. Her beats include linguistics, race, popular history, dance, science and technology, sex and gender, art and media, and graphic novels and reportage.
Studying: canonical works of literature and philosophy, and the historical role of the critic in culture
You should read: “In the Details,” her review of The Lifespan of a Fact. Her opening: This book review would be so much easier to write were we to play by John D’Agata’s rules. So let’s try it. (1) This is not a book review; it’s an essay. (2) I’m not a critic; I’m an artist. (3) Nothing I say can be used against me by the subjects of this essay, nor may anyone hold me to account re facts, truth or any contract I have supposedly entered into with you, the reader. There are to be no objections. There are to be no letters of complaint. For you are about to have — are you ready? — a “genuine experience with art.”
Follow: @jenbmcd

Betsy O’Donovan, freelance writer and editor. The 2013 Donald W. Reynolds Nieman Fellow in Community Journalism, she has written and edited for newspapers in North Carolina, Idaho and Alabama; helped to create the first SportsCenter spin-off on ESPN; and launched a weekly newspaper in Waxhaw, N.C.
Studying: entrepreneurial models for community newsrooms, with a particular interest in establishing and protecting the value of original reporting
You should read: her editorials in the Durham Herald-Sun, where she became the paper’s first female editorial page editor. From “The ugly end of eugenics:” There is dramatic appeal in the firsthand accounts and tears of those who were cut open and permanently altered, an effect that is lessened when the stories are told by relatives and heirs. The state’s study of this situation has dragged on since 2002. If the state delays long enough, most of the eugenics board’s victims will die without compensation and state-funded medical care…. That would be a terrible failure of conscience. It is time to make good on what we can never make right.
Follow: @ODitor

Mary Beth Sheridan, an editor at the Washington Post. She has covered homeland security, immigration and diplomacy, and for 11 years was a Europe- and Latin America-based correspondent for the Associated Press, the Miami Herald and the Los Angeles Times.
Studying: international politics and economics, with a focus on countries struggling to transition from authoritarian to democratic systems, particularly in Latin America
You should read: her Libya coverage. From a piece on women’s rights: For Zentani, the revolution has transformed a basic relationship, that between women and the mostly male security forces. During the war, she traveled on rebels’ pickups as she delivered aid, a previously unimaginable experience.

Jane Spencer, international editor-at-large, Newsweek and The Daily Beast. A former Hong Kong-based environmental and technology correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, she was part of a team of reporters that won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, for coverage of China’s “Naked Capitalism” and the adverse consequences of economic boom. She is a founding editor of The Daily Beast.
Studying: new digital tools for narrative storytelling, with an emphasis on how emerging technologies can improve news coverage of global women’s issues
You should read: her piece on efforts in China to ban disposable chopsticks. Excerpt: As startled diners looked up from their pork fried rice, Cao Yu, a 26-year-old activist dressed as an endangered orangutan spoke passionately about the ecological perils of China’s most common eating utensil. ”Disposable chopsticks are destroying China’s forests,” said Mr. Cao, whose voice was muffled by the 2-foot-high ape head he was wearing.

Laura Wides-Muñoz, Hispanic affairs writer, the Associated Press. She is the Louis Stark Nieman Fellow, which honors the memory of the New York Times reporter who was a pioneer in the field of labor reporting. Based in Miami, Wides-Muñoz covers U.S.-Cuba relations, immigration and Hispanics in American politics and pop culture.
Studying: the nexus between immigration and economics, specifically how the global financial crisis affects the integration of immigrants into U.S. society; multimedia platforms for presenting data in dynamic new ways
You should read: her coverage of Hispanic issues. From a piece on the disparity in voter turnout in Florida: For years Puerto Rican turnout has been far below that of Cuban-Americans. One big factor: Those in Puerto Rico, while American citizens, can’t vote for president because the island isn’t a state, and many new arrivals aren’t familiar with mainland — and more particularly Florida — politics.
Follow: @lwmunoz

International fellows:

Karim Ben Khelifa, photojournalist and co-founder/CEO of Emphas.is, a website designed to promote crowdfunded visual journalism. He has covered conflicts in the Middle East and Africa and other stories around the world for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, Time, Le Monde and Stern. He is the 2013 Carroll Binder Nieman Fellow. The Binder Fund honors 1916 Harvard graduate Carroll Binder, who expanded the Chicago Daily News Foreign Service, and his son, Carroll “Ted” Binder, a 1943 Harvard graduate.
Studying: journalist-audience engagement, behavioral economics linked to crowdfunding and new business models promoting the diversification of visual storytelling
You should see: his photographs, of course, but also what he’s doing with Emphas.is – it’s like Kickstarter for photojournalists, with plans to expand into books.
Follow: @benkhelifakarim

Katrin Bennhold, London-based staff writer, the International Herald Tribune. She covers European politics and economics from London for the IHT and its parent newspaper, the New York Times, and writes a regular column on the economics of gender. She is the William Montalbano Nieman Fellow. Montalbano was a 1970 Nieman Fellow and a prize-winning Los Angeles Times reporter who reported from 100 countries during his 38-year career.
Studying: the economics of gender and motherhood, and the remaining barriers and costs of gender equality in the early 21st century
You should watch: her New York Times piece on French women’s place in society.
Follow: @kbennhold

 Ludovic Blecher, executive director and editor-in-chief, Liberation.fr. He has been in charge of the French newspaper’s digital strategy since 2008. He joined Libération in 2001 as a reporter and was later appointed editor-in-chief, and oversaw the merger of the print and web staff. As executive director of online media he was responsible for developing new forms of journalism and creating a new business model for news. He is the Robert Waldo Ruhl Nieman Fellow. Ruhl, a 1903 Harvard graduate, was editor and publisher of the Medford Mail-Tribune in Oregon from 1911-1967.
Studying: online media business models and ways to monetize high-value journalism
If your French is good, you should watch: him talk about press and the digital revolution.
Follow: @lblecher

Jin Deng, Beijing-based senior editor, Southern Weekly. For the past eight years, she has covered China’s economic policies and reforms at the regional and national levels as well as the country’s economic rise and its impact on the reshaping of the international financial order. Previously, she worked as a senior reporter for The Economic Observer and editorial director for Global Entrepreneur magazine.
Studying: how the democratization and fragmentation of information in the social media era will affect China’s journalism, society and politics

Borja Echevarría de la Gándara, deputy managing editor, El País, Spain’s largest daily. Since 2010, he has guided his newsroom toward a digital-first strategy, a move that allowed El País to become the most-visited Spanish-language news site. Previously, Echevarría founded Soitu.es, a news start-up that received numerous honors including two Online News Association awards. He began his newspaper career at El Mundo in 1995, reporting on science, social issues and sports prior to serving as sports editor and then international editor and deputy managing editor for online news. He is a Nieman-Berkman fellow.
Studying: the structural evolution of newsrooms around the world; how disruptive innovation is altering traditional business and workflow models for news; whether the practices of digital start-ups can be applied effectively in established newsrooms
You should watch: him talk about the digital progression of newsrooms and news startups at the 2012 International Symposium on Online Journalism.
Follow: @borjaechevarria

Yaakov Katz, military reporter and defense analyst, the Jerusalem Post; Israel correspondent, Jane’s Defence Weekly. He has covered Israeli military operations over the past decade including the pullout from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2009. His writing focuses on defense planning, intelligence analysis and military technology. He co-authored the recently published Israel vs. Iran: The Shadow War. Originally from Chicago, he moved to Israel in 1993 and has a law degree from Bar-Ilan University.
Studying: the use of censorship in the digital age to determine whether it is relevant and consistent with democratic values and if it can be applied differently, especially in coverage of Israel and the Middle East
You should read: his book Israel vs. Iran: The Shadow War, a national bestseller in Israel and just out in the U.S. The opening: In mid-July 2006 on an army base in northern Israel, a faint twilight enabled soldiers of the Egoz Reconnaissance Unit − the special unit of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for guerrilla warfare − to observe their commander as he discreetly conversed with the unit’s squad leaders. Occasionally the officers would glance over their shoulders at the group of impatient soldiers who stood with their heavy gear on their backs and loaded rifles in their hands.
Follow: @yaakovkatz

Chong-ae Lee, senior reporter, Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS) in Korea. She was the first female investigative reporter for the program “News Pursuit” and has covered issues such as drug distribution, illegal abortion, the human rights of prostitutes and the physical abuse of combat policemen. Chong-ae has won 19 awards including Reporter of the Year from the Journalist Association of Korea and the Korean Broadcasting Grand Prize.
Studying: journalism related to complex trauma, focusing on people who have experienced the effects of periods of colonialism, war and military-influenced dictatorial administrations followed by rapid economic growth

Souad Mekhennet, reporter and columnist, the New York Times, Der Spiegel and ZDF (German television). A German journalist of Turkish and Moroccan descent, she is the 2013 Barry Bingham Jr. Nieman Fellow. (Bingham, a 1956 Harvard graduate, was the editor and publisher of the Courier-Journal and Louisville Times.) She has covered conflicts and terrorist groups in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. She helped report the “Inside the Jihad” series for the Times and, with colleague Don van Natta, broke the story of Khaled el-Masri, a German-Lebanese man who had been kidnapped and sent via extraordinary rendition to Afghanistan. She co-authored two books about Islam and terrorism.
Studying: how the 2011 uprisings in Arab countries have influenced the long-term strategies of terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda, and how Shariah (Islamic law) deals with human rights, women and democracy
You should read: her “Inside the Jihad” coverage in the New York Times. From “In Jihadist heaven:” At his crowded funeral in Zarqa, one of his brothers praised Amer and other suicide bombers. “They are the best youths and good persons,” he said. “He was successful in life, but decided to fight the Americans in Iraq.” The mother of another of the young men, a 20-year-old engineering student, still believes that her son went to Iraq looking for a job. At the family’s home recently, she sank to her knees, weeping and clutching his physics book.
Follow: @smekhennet

Paula Molina, anchor and editor, Cooperativa, Chile’s leading radio news station. Since 1999, she has conducted daily interviews and has broadcast the news live, covering events such as the aftermath of the 2010 Chilean earthquake and tsunami, the miners’ rescue in the Atacama Desert and massive student protests. She has worked in print, television and radio.
Studying: new digital opportunities for improving the development, sharing and distribution of broadcast news content
Follow: @paulamolinat

Finbarr O’Reilly, photographer, Reuters. He began his journalism career as a writer and turned to photography in 2005. In 2006, he received the World Press Photo of the Year Award. Based in Dakar, Senegal, he has covered Africa for the past 10 years and has won numerous top industry awards for his multimedia work and photography. O’Reilly has worked on long-term projects in Congo and Afghanistan and is among those profiled in the documentary film Under Fire: Journalists in Combat, which was shortlisted for a 2012 Academy Award. He is the 2013 Ruth Cowan Nash Nieman Fellow. Nash was best known for her work as an Associated Press war correspondent during World War II.
Studying: psychology, with a focus on trauma and conflict zones
You should see: all of it – photos across 13 categories – but don’t miss his behind-the-scenes coverage of Fashion Week in Dakar.
Follow: @finbarroreilly

Beauregard Tromp, senior field producer, e-news Africa, a pan-African television news station. Previously, as Africa correspondent for Independent Newspapers, he wrote extensively on conflicts in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and the Niger Delta. He is co-author of Hani: A Life Too Short, a bestselling biography of liberation fighter Chris Hani, and has been recognized for his narrative on the outbreak of xenophobic violence in South Africa.
Studying: the practice of countries and global corporations purchasing large African land tracts to address future food shortages, and the impact on trade agreements, governments and local communities concerned about possible exploitation under “new colonialism”
You should read: “The Weight of Water.” An excerpt: This morning at 4 Maphello Sephiri will carefully extricate herself from the tangle of bodies littered around the floor of house No 8720 in Zone 8, Extension 10. She will place her baby, seven-month-old Mpho on the sunken double bed next to her mother, wrap a blanket around her shoulders and put the broken size 10 takkies on her size 6 feet. She will take the white 25-litre plastic bucket from the wall of containers next to the wood-fired stove and walk out the front door into the darkness.
Follow: @beetromp

San Truong (aka Huy Duc) is a freelance journalist based in Ho Chi Minh City who covers Vietnamese politics. After serving eight years in the Vietnamese army as a senior lieutenant, fighting against the Chinese in 1979 and against the Khmer Rouge in the 1980s, he wrote for leading newspapers in Vietnam including Tuoi Tre and the Saigon Economic Times. As a journalist working in a state-controlled media system, his guiding principle has been to “push the line, but not cross the line,” attacking corruption and promoting political reform in his homeland. Until 2010, he published blogosin.org, which was ranked as the most popular blog in Vietnam. He is the 2013 Atsuko Chiba Nieman Fellow. The Chiba fellowship honors the memory of Atsuko Chiba, a 1968 Nieman Fellow.
Studying: public policy, American literature and the history of Vietnam
You should read: the Committee to Protect Journalists’ appeal for press freedoms, referencing crackdowns on Huy Duc and other online journalists and bloggers. The committee wrote: Truong Huy San, a newspaper reporter who under the pen name Huy Duc maintained a popular blog known as Osin, was dismissed on August 24 from the government-run Saigon Tiep Thi (Saigon Marketing) soon after he had published criticism of the former Soviet Union’s crimes against humanity. It was lost on few observers that the Soviet Union was a key ally to your Communist Party-run government during the Cold War.

*Work isn’t available online for all fellows, and some don’t tweet. You can find the full bios at our main Nieman Foundation site.

Waselchuk has worked as a freelance photojournalist for many major U.S. newspapers and magazines. In addition to “Grace Before Dying,” her long-term personal projects include years of gathering images in Africa and tracking the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We talked with her earlier this month by phone about how she approaches her work, and about simplicity vs. complexity in storytelling. What follows are excerpts from our conversation and images from “Grace Before Dying.”

You’ve done freelance photojournalism for Newsweek, Time, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times – and other Times that I’m probably not remembering. And then you have these portfolios of extended projects, like your work documenting a prison hospice program or a hurricane. How do you think of the short-term assignments vs. the long-term projects?

Usually, the short-term assignments are how I get out into the world and I get to learn more about what’s going on. I learn best when I’m face to face with things. And it affects me more deeply than reading about it. So usually my long-term projects come from assignments that I’ve done.

Hurricane Katrina was not just an assignment, it was my experience. So that work is coming from an entirely new place. Even though I did a lot of work for newspapers and magazines while I was working on longer-term projects about New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf, usually the assignments are where I can enrich what I know, and it provides access and introduction. And they also help me earn a living.

I’m particularly interested in “Grace Before Dying.” How did that project get started? Did it come from a photojournalism assignment? How long did you spend on it?

Yes, that started as an assignment. I was commissioned by Louisiana Magazine to do a story, which was unusual. They wanted a photo essay about this hospice program, and so that was my introduction. It took a while to get in, about three months. And then the deadline for the magazine was pushed back as far as they could push it back, but it still came up very shortly after I started working.

I realized after the magazine had published the project that I really wanted to do more work on this, so I asked for permission to come back, not with any publication waiting for work, but on my own to try to see how deeply I could tell this story that was incredibly beautiful and moving to experience and witness.

You did the short-term project, and then when you came back in a more free-form situation. Did you approach the people differently? Did you shift gears?

I didn’t come back as a different person or with a different attitude. I always had the same sort of goal, which was to try to say in photographs how important the work that the hospice volunteers were doing was, and to somehow show the complicated journey that these men were on, and the complicated space in which these men were doing this work.

So photographically, I went from a traditional 35 millimeter digital camera to using the panoramic camera as my main tool. I wanted to see if it could do close-up work. I think this camera is more traditionally thought of as a landscape camera, but I wanted to see how it would describe what I was trying to describe. I thought it worked very well, and so I changed completely how I was approaching the project photographically. I went to black and white film and pursued my personal vision of what the work could be.

Can you talk about exactly who you were photographing at Angola, and what Angola is?

Angola is the nickname given to the Louisiana State Penitentiary. It was given that name when the land that the prison was built on was a plantation, for a century and a half. It was nicknamed after the people who were brought in as slaves. Most of the slaves came from the Angola slave port. And it kept that name, but it’s really the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Louisiana’s maximum security prison.

The program I was photographing was the hospice program, where both the patients and the volunteers are incarcerated. The volunteers are incarcerated serving either life sentences or very long-term sentences, as are the patients. I was really interested in how you get to that place of incredible humanity and love and selflessness in an environment that’s designed to punish and isolate. And also coming from a history that was most likely filled with violence or hurt, they are extraordinary examples of what we are capable of as human beings.

I don’t mean to put them on a pedestal, because they definitely have their problems. They’ve got their difficult days. And they’ve got a terrible history, most of them. In spite of all of that, what mattered at that moment was someone else.

You work the humanitarian side with your projects, and the journalism side of things, too. Do you see yourself as a storyteller, an advocate or something else entirely? What are you trying to do with your work?

This is a very crucial moment for me, because I’m in the middle of what’s possible, and what’s survivable. Right now, I consider myself a storyteller, and I feel like that’s my primary mission, but I’m interested in placing my work in community.

When I’m shooting, I’m in storyteller mode, and that to me is creatively wonderful and challenging. With the “Grace Before Dying” project, I think about how important it is to have the conversation around the work.

So through that I’ve built this traveling exhibit that was designed for prisons, initially, and it continues to tour the country in all kinds of venues. It moves around through grass-roots efforts. So small organizations can bring it to their community, and they move it around their community, and they then take charge of how this body of work inspires the conversation they’re interested in maintaining and putting in front of the public.

It’s been a powerful example to me in how I can really direct thoughtful and engaging conversations based on my own work. It’s also let me research how other photographers are trying to do this kind of work and getting their work out in the world.

I guess I’m both. The storytelling comes in the gathering of images, and the advocate comes in asking, “How do we then put this in community and encourage an intellectual or an emotional conversation, or both?” You want people to be smart, and also to feel.

When you think of a print story that’s a narrative, something in the story usually changes over time. Do you think of your work as having a narrative component? How do you think of visual storytelling?

In the book, the sequence had sort of a narrative structure. It’s not about the same people, but I had different ideas and aspects of the program that I wanted to show. So I brought people through the care part, and I also wanted to describe the prison and then (go)into the final days. It felt very sequential.

I think it was important for it not to be cryptic. It’s such an emotional story, I needed to ease people through it. I approached care, the final days, and then the dignified funeral. In the book, that’s the way it went.

It went almost the same way in the exhibition. The exhibition came first and broke down the different aspects of the program. I built it for other correctional facilities to host, because I really thought people could use the information to trigger conversations on “How can we incorporate some of these things in our end-of-life care program?” or “Can we start an end-of-life care for our prison population?” So I really broke it down into the different programs and how they helped the families of the prisoners, and how they did their own caregiving, the different aspects of it. The exhibition started out as an emotional but informational project.

The film “Kony 2012” has been in the news a lot this month.

I’ve been watching it.

It’s spurred a lot of discussions about voice and who gets to document stories. As someone who has gone many times to Africa, how do you weigh the question of telling someone else’s story in pictures?

It’s been a fundamental question I have continued to ask myself. I was based in Africa for 10 years. I have been asking myself that since the beginning, and it continues to push me. And I think that, more than anything, pushes my personal projects. I feel like my personal work – I don’t make it for anybody but myself. I can control how it moves in the world and how it’s seen.

The “Grace Before Dying” project has been transformative in a way, in that I have been able to do what I do, which is make photographs that focus on human connection and empathy and have an understanding of the way I am inspired by our best – the best in us.  I’ve been able to jump outside of the working world and create something that has its own life, has its own distribution qualities. It continues to resonate with audiences.

I feel like even the traveling exhibits are collaborative. The quilts that travel with the exhibit are made by the hospice volunteers. So their hands, their work, their own visual art are part of the photographic story. That collaboration will influence my future projects. And as I think about future work, collaboration with community is going to be part of how I work in the future. How the work is placed is fundamental to an ongoing conversation that I have with myself about telling other people’s stories.

Who does it benefit? What is the value of the information of the issue versus the empowerment of the actual community being affected by the story? All of these issues continue to be part of how I work.

I think when I’m working on my own projects, when I turn the story about the hospice program into a personal project, with nobody needing this work from me, I’m able to pursue a more honest line of thinking and produce work where I can slow down and have conversations with people, like the guys at the prison.

For people just coming up, who maybe haven’t had as much time to ponder these issues, one clear suggestion that rises out of what you just said is to think about what kind of role your work will have in the community and collaborate with the community. Do you have other tips for how people can approach something like a “Grace Before Dying” project?

Look outside the traditional field of journalism for inspirations on how to get your work out. Right now I’d say the Internet can be considered traditional. To me in journalism, your feet have to be on the ground. You have to be interacting with people. You can’t report without coming face to face with people and feeling as well as hearing as well as seeing. How can you honestly translate that in different ways?

Think of a way to get your project out in different directions. You can publish in a magazine. You can publish online. You can put prints up somewhere. You can have a conversation with your subjects about how they might want to see it.

Certainly “Grace before Dying” has been published around the world by magazines and newspapers, but nothing can compare to the way an exhibit creates conversation out in the community. It gathers people around a topic in different ways and inspires different kinds of conversations. But always the conversations are intense and, I think, enlightening.

Can you talk more about “Kony 2012”?

The great thing about it is that it’s an in-your-face example of so many things. I can list like 10 things off the top of my head.

Do you want to talk about some of those things?

I was alerted to this by my 13-year-old daughter, as it seems like many people out in the field were. She came to me and talked about it. Ten years ago I (had done) a story on the reintegration camps up in northern Uganda, so I told her about my experience.

Then the emails (about “Kony 2012”) started coming in, with all kinds of different conversations: “This is good,” because now everyone knows about him, or “This is bad,” because it doesn’t really represent the situation. It got very interesting. There were people who tried to look at it broadly.

Very few people talk about who’s funding the Invisible Children, besides all the people who want wristbands to demonstrate their concern for another continent’s conflict. The source of funding is always something that needs to be gone to first, but it still hasn’t reached that point. The self-serving documentary where the subject is not the actual issue, but the person who made the documentary is the issue – you can’t get a clearer example of having a documentarian incorporate himself in a story. That was to me truly bizarre.

I struggle with the viral video a lot. I don’t see a lot that’s helpful, except for how it helps this organization. And a lot of people disagree with me, but I think that part of the thing that I like to do with my work is to introduce complexity in a way that people can absorb it and maybe start to think about it and not decry a situation by making it simple, with a good guy and a bad guy.

I hope that’s what “Grace Before Dying” does, because these are the last guys on earth that we would consider to be heroes. They’re serving life sentences in Louisiana’s maximum security prison. So I think that trips people when they see this story – and angers some, but I really believe that we are more than our worst act. We have to be.

Here I’m coming into the advocacy thing – I think our prison system is unwieldy and overarching. We need to find a way to reduce sentences to make them more in line with international standards, reduce our incarceration rate and find a way to reintegrate felons and people who have served prison time, so our prison system gets reduced rather than continuing to grow.

What do you say to those people who argue that to convey a story to a big audience, you have to take off the rough edges of the complexity? That you have to tell the truth but not get lost in the complexity?

I do think you can take off some of the rough edges, but I also really think you can draw people in with a universal. We are connected to each other in really fundamental ways, and in order to tell stories that will connect with others you have to use those tools and look for common ground.

You can start with that, but you have to deepen the conversation, and you have to be honest about who this is serving, and what your goals are. If the goal is to inform people about the ongoing war and terror that the Lord’s Resistance Army is wielding against people in East Africa, you can certainly boil it down to a few facts, but you probably need to be more specific about what’s going on and clearer about those facts. One of the things that upsets me is that I don’t believe that their goal of capturing Joseph Kony is really their goal. I’m suspicious of it. The movie was just too self-serving. I think they themselves were surprised, but I think their goal was to continue to raise funds for their organization.

I’m kind of cynical, but I just can’t imagine creating a documentary without having the research and understanding the depth of the issue. It was built for the Internet, it wasn’t built for broadcast. It was built to be something they could put up without having any sort of scrutiny before it went out in the world. There was nobody it needed to pass by before it was published; they just put it online. It just makes me wonder what their real intentions were.

All images appear courtesy of Lori Waselchuk.

“You have this precious, incredibly privileged thing,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2007, “which is the reader’s attention for a little while. And you can make the slightest misstep and the reader will put you down. People will say that the reader lives in a busy world. But that’s not the reason why. The reason is that the writer blows it, and loses the reader’s trust.”

One of the best ways to lose a nonfiction reader is to write something confusing or opaque. Nobody wants to follow a mysterious stranger into a dark forest. Which is why it’s a good rule to do two things at the beginning of a long piece: Prove yourself as a good traveling companion, and point the way down a well-lighted path.

The Euphrates is a peaceful river. It meanders silently through the desert province of Anbar like a ribbon of life, flanked by the greenery that grows along its banks, sustaining palm groves and farms, and a string of well-watered cities and towns. Fallujah, Ramadi, Hit, Haditha. These are among the places made famous by battle—conservative, once quiet communities where American power has been checked, and where despite all the narrow measures of military success the Sunni insurgency continues to grow. On that short list, Haditha is the smallest and farthest upstream. It extends along the Euphrates’ western bank with a population of about 50,000, in a disarray of dusty streets and individual houses, many with walled gardens in which private jungles grow. It has a market, mosques, schools, and a hospital with a morgue. Snipers permitting, you can walk it top to bottom in less than an hour, allowing time enough to stone the dogs. Before the American invasion, it was known as an idyllic spot, where families came from as far away as Baghdad to while away their summers splashing in the river and sipping tea in the shade of trees. No longer, of course. Now, all through Anbar, and indeed the Middle East, Haditha is known as a city of death, or more simply as a name, a war cry against the United States.

That’s the first paragraph of “Rules of Engagement,” from Vanity Fair, a piece Langewiesche wrote in 2006.

It was a massive challenge. He wanted to explain an incident that at first glance seemed inexplicable – the U.S. Marines’ massacre of 24 Iraqis in Haditha the previous year. Any explanation would have been impossible, of course, without the deep knowledge he’d earned in his numerous travels through Iraq. But the reporting goes without saying. You can’t be a great nonfiction writer without being a great reporter. What led me through nearly 15,000 words of desert quagmire and military bureaucracy was Langewiesche’s voice.

Most newspaper veterans have heard an editor say, “That story practically tells itself,” or “Just get out of the way.” Well, I understand the sentiment. Some writers do wonderful work with a more straightforward delivery. But here’s why I never put down the story on the Haditha massacre: I felt as if Langewiesche wouldn’t let me. He wasn’t just saying, “This is what happened.” He was saying, “This is why it happened, and here is exactly how we’re losing a war being fought in our name.” He understood that in a story this twisted and complex, supplying the bare facts wouldn’t be enough. And he certainly couldn’t gloss over the rough details.

To begin with, the Marines didn’t do what they did for no reason. Their convoy was bombed in the road, causing two injuries and one death:

It is a requirement of understanding the events in Haditha—and the circumstances of this war—not to shy away from the physical realities here, or to soften the scene in the interest of politics or taste. Terrazas was torn in half. His bottom half remained under the steering wheel. His top half was blown into the road, where he landed spilling his entrails and organs. He probably did not suffer, at least.

In the frenzied aftermath, the Marines killed numerous civilians in nearby houses. And then a press officer put out a statement blaming the whole thing on the bomb. When Time magazine’s Tim McGirk asked about it, Langewiesche writes, “McGirk’s initial queries to the Marine Corps were rebuffed with an e-mail accusing him of buying into insurgent propaganda, and, implicitly, of aiding and abetting the enemy in a time of war. Whoever wrote the e-mail was out of his league. Negative publicity does indeed help the insurgency, but it’s the killing of bystanders that really does the trick.”

True, that last sentence could have come from any clever blogger reporting from a couch at a Starbucks in Kansas City. The Internet is polluted with opinions. But Langewiesche can get away with it because of his time on the ground in Iraq. He’s earned it. He’s spent so much time around the troops that his voice very nearly becomes theirs.

They talked about other things, their exploits, their party binges, the really dumb moves of their friends. They laughed and gave each other hard times. They gave each other names. When they mounted their patrols, they went up and down the designated streets and did their jobs as they were told. Be polite and have a plan to kill everyone you meet? Yes, sir, roger that, and on streets like these that would mean shooting the guy from up close, sir, at any false move on his part—is that what you mean by a plan? If the counter-insurgency mission in Haditha seemed half-cocked, so did any real chance for success in Iraq, but that was for others to decide—not for the soldiers who had to carry out the fights.

The story runs on to a convincing and horrifying conclusion: What the Marines did after the bomb went off was not as unusual as it might have seemed. Langewiesche’s unsparing analysis fulfills a requirement set forth by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in their classic work “The Elements of Journalism.” “A journalism built merely on accuracy fails to get us far enough,” they write, citing a group of scholars called the Hutchins Commission, who studied journalism for years and concluded that “It is no longer enough to report the fact truthfully. It is now necessary to report the truth about the fact.”

Thus, Langewiesche refuses to settle for the notion that a group of rogue Marines simply went berserk.

The clearing operations on Route Chestnut did not stand out as being significantly different from the other main act of the day, the use of missiles and bombs against a house that may well have contained a family. God knows there were enough body parts now scattered through the ruins. Killing face-to-face with an M16 allows you at least some chance to desist from slaughtering women and children, which is not true once a bomb is called down on a house. But there is no evidence that McConnell was even thinking about these matters. The photographer Lucian Read, who had been traveling elsewhere in Anbar, returned the day after the killings and later snapped digital pictures of shrouded corpses in the houses by Route Chestnut. Read believes McConnell was aware of the pictures; if so, he did not try to suppress them or to limit their distribution. McConnell was such a company man, such a by-the-book Marine, that, like the entire chain of command above him, he was numb to the killings of noncombatants so long as the rules of engagement made the killings legal.

The great Tom Junod talks about voice in his vivid and provocative appreciation of Barry Hannah. He says Hannah’s work taught him that “what makes a writer is not sense, but sound.”

Maybe he’s right. Or maybe, for Langewiesche, it’s both.

Thomas Lake (@thomaslake) is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. He has also written for Atlanta Magazine, the St. Petersburg Times, The Florida Times-Union, The Salem News and The Press-Sentinel of Jesup, Ga.

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.

The “something terrible” hooks me. You don’t have to know what or where Straus Park is – chances are you don’t – in order to get a jolt from the fact that something terrible has happened to it. You also learn something essential about the narrator of this essay: that he is the sort of person who notices when something terrible happens to a park. Often a reader’s interest in a personal essay hinges on an existing connection with the writer’s work. Jhumpa Lahiri, for example, could write a personal essay about her sock drawer and I’d read it. But when I first read “Shadow Cities,” I didn’t know who André Aciman was or what else he had written. I just liked that he could find disaster on a spring morning in that most serene of locations, a park.

The disaster, I discover, is that the park appears to be in the midst of being dismantled. And then I learn more things I like about Aciman. For example, he knows that a simple sentiment can power a short sentence. He is an exile from Alexandria, he is used to leaving cities behind, but having finally landed in Manhattan, he writes, plainly and plaintively: “I wanted everything to remain the same. ” Of course, that is not going to happen in a city whose archaeological layers shift before our eyes, and Aciman knows how to work that syntax too. From his bench in Straus Park, he piles up the accumulated nostalgia of a neighborhood, clause after clause:

Eighty-three-year-old Kurt Appelbaum, a concert pianist in his day, was sitting at such a bench; we spoke; we became friendly; one night, without my asking, he offered to play the Waldstein and the Rhapsody in Blue for me, “But do not tape,” he said, perhaps because he wished I would, and now that I think of it I wish I had, as I sat and listened on a broken chair he said had been given to him by Hannah Arendt, who had inherited it from an old German colleague at the New School who had since died as well.

Straus Park becomes, for Aciman, a place of all kinds of remembering. Its peculiar situation at the intersection of 106th Street, Broadway and West End Avenue affords him phantom glimpses of other cities, other selves – so much so that this “tiny, grubby park” slowly begins to seem like the hub of the universe. And it turns out that Aciman is wrong in jumping to terrible conclusions about it. It is being not destroyed, but restored. In writing about it, Aciman realizes that the city it has restored to him is not Paris or Rome, as he had thought, but a deeper shadow city, the one most essential to his wandering self. This is the revelation that makes “Shadow Cities” such a strong piece, an essay in the true sense of the word, an attempt through writing and reason to figure something out – something important, something lasting.

I’ve said that interest in a personal essay can hinge on familiarity between reader and writer. At the time he was visiting Straus Park, Aciman writes, he was doing research for his dissertation at Columbia. I did graduate work at Columbia too, and stood in the gloomy library stacks; I read “Shadow Cities” during my second year, in 1999, and was moved by it. I wondered whether it had inspired a horde of literary-minded visitors to stampede uptown on the 1/9 line to see firsthand this miraculous world within worlds, Straus Park.

But the New York Review of Books doesn’t have a stampeding sort of readership – devoted, but not, I’d bet, stampeding – and I realize now that even I, who was on campus almost every day and had been so moved by this piece of writing that I still think about it 12 years later, never walked the four blocks south from Butler Library to pay tribute. I think what this means is that it wasn’t Straus Park that I cared about after I read Aciman’s essay – that wasn’t the point – but the idea of Straus Park, that unassuming little place within a place you love that helps you organize your thoughts about all the other places you’ve loved and the person you were when you loved them.

Every time I reread “Shadow Cities” I bring to it my own memories, and something new in the piece stands out. This time it is this sentence, which comes after Aciman has chronicled all the places he’s reminded of when he sits in Straus Park. He’s talking about Rome and Paris and Amsterdam, and then he writes: “This, I think, is when I started to love, if love is the word for it, New York.”

We see the words “I love New York” a lot, but it’s a bumper-sticker sentence. It’s for tourists, for export. I love how Aciman’s sentence unfolds conditionally – how “love” is questioned, how it and New York are separated. It feels honest to love New York the way Aciman does, to call the defunct fountain in Straus Park a “septic sandbox” but sit by it day after day just the same and mourn it when you think it’s gone.

You can’t take the 9 train to Straus Park anymore, incidentally; the 9 is one of the things that disappeared from New York after 9/11. It was suspended in the immediate aftermath, came back for a few years, and then the MTA phased it out for good. There wasn’t really a need for it. The 1 makes all those stops. But I miss it all the same, even though I live in Brooklyn now and almost never ride the West Side line. I rode it on 9/11, on what must have been one of the last trains to run that morning – when I got on at 14th Street to go to Columbia to teach my class the towers were on fire, and when I got off at 116th they were gone. I suppose mourning the 9 train is my way of mourning everything that disappeared that day, that day when something terrible happened to the city, something that can’t be restored but whose loss has become part of the reason I love – and love is the word for it – New York.

Radhika Jones is an executive editor at Time.

For more from this new collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, check out the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for new inspiration and insight in the coming weeks.

Photo of Radhika Jones by Peter Hapak.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next week we’ll provide an in-depth look at just the Rainsville piece, but for now, we wanted to highlight some other efforts to tell the stories of a shattered town and help readers understand what’s been happening there.

“When Everything Is Gone, Including a Sense of Direction,” from Dan Barry, Richard A. Oppel Jr. and A.G. Sulzberger of The New York Times (via @alixfelsing)

Heading south on Main Street, you pass intact buildings and a seemingly undisturbed way of life, save for the inordinate number of people wearing shirts that say Red Cross or Federal Emergency Management Agency or Army Corps of Engineers. An honor guard of flapping American flags urges you on.

All seems fine, until about 15th Street, when unnerving signs of damage come into view. It is slight at first, a blown sign here, a damaged roof there, laid out as if to prepare the visitor, however gently, for what is ahead. Five short blocks later, a wasteland.

The first of two YouTube clips from izelsg* shows the power of audio; it includes sound and (very little) imagery recorded as the Joplin tornado moved over about 18 people who had taken shelter in a convenience store. This second clip revisits the spot and lets viewers see the devastation that the people from the first clip survived.

*who appears to be Isaac Duncan, a 23-year-old singer-songwriter

“Torn Asunder: How the Deadliest Twister in Decades Ripped Through Joplin, Mo.,” from David Von Drehle at Time (via @tomshroder)

An EF-5 tornado pens a signature that makes no sense. You stare and ponder until slowly it comes into focus: that’s an upside-down, half-buried piano; a garage-door spring; the colored gravel from a fish tank; a car bumper entwined in a brass bed; a flat-screen TV with a door molding straight through it; the little man from the top of a soccer trophy; a Barbie shoe. Clean up suggests a return to an orderly past. In the coming weeks and months, Joplin will have to scrape bare a blasted hole in its heart.

“A gloomy night spent searching for life,” by Michael Overall of the Tulsa World (via @gangrey)

A dog barks in the distance. A helicopter rumbles overhead. And from somewhere deep under the rubble across the street, an alarm clock is beeping.

But nothing comes from the debris where the firefighters are standing, and after a few moments, the firefighters start to dig.

Five or six strain together to lift a bathtub, turning it on its side.

The victim apparently did what experts say to do. Seek shelter near the center of the house, perhaps a bathroom. Lie in the tub.

The firefighters stop and bow their heads.

“As it recovers from tornado, Joplin can take lessons from other cities,” by Eric Adler, Scott Canon and Rick Montgomery of The Kansas City Star (via @alixfelsing)

When the Kents emerged and looked at the devastation around them — some houses obliterated, others sheared in half — they stood, in many ways, in exactly the same situation as tornado survivors in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and in Greensburg, Kan.

Kent, 52, an environmental engineer, knew that from that moment on “everything is different.”

“It is like 9/11. There will be life before the tornado. And there will be life after the tornado.”

What comes next?

Where will Joplin be a month from now? Where can it be in a few years?

And finally, here’s Brian Stelter, Media Decoder at The New York Times, on the challenges of being a newly-minted disaster reporter in Joplin and how Twitter did and didn’t deliver the story in a pinch.

“Swansea Love Story” from Leo Leigh and Andy Capper for VBS.tv (Vice Media), an episode of their “Rule Britannia” series. The filmmakers stick close to a group of young heroin users to explore epidemic drug abuse in South Wales, but they also delve into Swansea history and its shattered economy. Some scenes are hard to sit through because of their terrifying intimacy, while others may remind viewers that Vice Media is behind the movie. But the characters’ unexpected humor and frankness – and smart editing – make the story simply unforgettable. The link above is to the full episode, but you can also watch the trailer.

“Narcocorridos: Singing Songs of Drug Violence,” from Shaul Schwarz (edited by Brian Chang) on Time’s website. A look at the American cinematic and musical trend of transforming horrific Mexican drug violence into the stuff of ballads and folklore. In one scene, a drug lord custom-orders songs from a performer, who delivers.

“Homegirl Cafe” by Lucy Nicholson for Reuters. The daughter of gangbanging parents leaves jail and hopes to turn straight, waiting tables while she learns to box on the side.

“Five Days in the Favela” from The Guardian, part of a series looking at the slum communities in Rio. In this video “Pastor Nininho,” a DJ and evangelical leader, connects with his community in church and on public radio.

“Losing His Way,” by Peter Power and Erin Anderssen, part of a series on dementia from The Globe and Mail. This slide show is beautifully done, but it’s Mario Gregorio’s searing audio about living his life while he’s losing his mind that makes this story worth a look.

Two efforts we’ve noted before on the site also make an appearance in these categories and deserve a second mention: “Highrise: Out My Window,” a multicity, multiyear project from the National Film Board of Canada, records “the human experience in global vertical suburbs”; while “Take Care” from MediaStorm follows a teen mother who works to become a nurse as she cares for her dying grandfather.

Can you talk about how you got assigned this story and what reporting, if any, you did for it?

The shooting was on Saturday morning, and I would guess within an hour or so, I got a call or an e-mail – I think it must have been a call from Michael [Duffy]. He’s in Washington, and I live and work in the Kansas City area. He didn’t know what the story would be then, but he was pretty sure it would become big and important. He wanted me to be paying attention and getting myself ready to write.

By that Saturday night, I think he was pretty sure it would become the cover of the magazine. So that first day I was looking at that. And of course there was this enormous political firestorm among what I call “the cabal” in the article.

My reaction to that, the idea that this was a politically motivated act, was pretty extreme skepticism, just because I tend to believe in the Occam’s razor approach to events. The thing that happens most often is probably going to be the thing that happens again. Usually these kinds of mass shootings are products of mental illness rather than political motivation, and so I guess I spent a lot of Saturday going against the flow of where folks thought the story was going. Really that whole weekend was mostly spent just trying to sort out in my own mind what had happened, what it meant, and what was significant about it.

I did not go to Tucson. We did immediately send several people down there. My job in those first days was to figure out what had happened and what it really meant, what the takeaway should be. That was not an easy process. That was where being on a weekly deadline instead of a daily deadline was an advantage. I grew up in the newspaper business – I’ve only been in magazines for about four years. I definitely felt the advantage of not having to write my piece the first day.

You didn’t end up with a traditional news feature that says, “Here’s what happened.” But it’s also not a traditional narrative where you just build it from the inside out. It has a unique style. At what point did the story acquire that style?

This was a really interesting case in this ongoing figuring-out process that we’re doing at Time, trying to get clear in our own minds and for our readers “What is the function of a news magazine today?” Is it a digest of the past week’s news? Well, yes, it is a little bit a briefing. Is it a place for the tick-tock, the behind the scenes, the fly-on-the-wall stuff that was the meat and potatoes of Time and Newsweek for many years? Yes, a little bit of that, too – there still is some room for that. But where we really can bring value is in a story like this, where we can put the news and the meaning in a big frame with a new kind of angle, a new way of looking at it, and bring that all together in one place.

That was what I had in mind. That’s what I wanted to do. I knew it was not just going to be a tick-tock, though it needed to have some of that: “Here’s our sense of what happened there.” And it was not just going to be an analytical piece, but that it would have analysis in it. And that it would need to have a takeaway, where people would leave with an understanding of “What does this say about the times we live in and the meaning of life?”

That’s a big throwaway line, but one of my favorite editors that I’ve learned so much from over the years, Gene Weingarten, always taught us that really every good story should somehow be about the meaning of life. So I sort of tossed that off, but when you try to turn that into a real story, you are kind of  smashing several different genres, several different well-known styles, all into one. That’s kind of the challenge, the trick of it.

As part of that, you talk directly to the reader, using lines like “go ahead and cry.” That kind of second-person address can be a little dangerous. Can you talk about it as a srategy?

A couple of people have asked about this piece, “How long did it take you to write it?” One answer is that it took from Saturday morning to Wednesday night. But as far as the actual typing of words, the composing of sentences, it was really Tuesday before I started getting words on the screen. So it took all day Tuesday and then Wednesday morning finishing up the draft.

This theme emerged of “What is normal in America now, and why is our discourse distorting reality so much?” As I realized that was the theme, and that was what we were going to talk about, part of that was to speak to our readers. Time has a very broad cross-section of ordinary middle America, and the piece needed to enlist them in this idea that there is a normal American discourse that goes on where people are able to disagree civilly and are able to participate in a political process that is vigorous but not overheated and not violent.

As the writer, I was aware that people who buy our magazine and read it are basically – that’s them. They’re interested enough in events, but they’re not out on the political blogs 24/7. Most of them are not lighting up comment boards. So I decided that the way to kind of say to the readers, “I’m talking about you. You, my audience, are evidence of the case I’m trying to make,” was to come out from behind the curtain in a couple of places and speak directly to them.

I’m the father of a 9-year-old girl, and so the story of Christina Green spoke to me in some very emotional, powerful ways. That moment seemed like one where it just seemed right to momentarily erase the screen between the writer and the audience and say, “Look, of course I know what you’re feeling. You know what I’m feeling. Anybody would feel that way.”

Still, you’re right. It’s dangerous. It’s not a technique you would want to use all the time, but it seemed to me to underline the theme of the piece. That’s what you’re always trying to do as a writer: to get your sentences and structure to match your idea. It seemed to reinforce rather than distract from the theme. I actually wrote “Go ahead and shed a tear.” It was Duffy who made it, “Go ahead and cry,” which is so much better. In that vein of giving credit where it’s due to editors, he didn’t change much in the story, but he did change that, which made it a lot better.

What other edits did he make?

A few word changes. One paragraph was taken out, because it was biographical stuff about Loughner that was duplicated in another story in the package, but otherwise, no. A word here and there. That cry line was the biggest change.

If I recall correctly, in the lede, I said, “So much of the story is ugly and twisted that it’s best to start with something beautiful and good.” I had said that “So much is ugly and twisted that I want to start with something beautiful and good.” Duffy rightly suggested that since that was the only use of the first person, “Let’s take the first person out of the lede.” He was absolutely right about that, too. He’s an outstanding line editor.

Does he edit most of your work?

Yes. It changes if I’m moving into a different specialty. Mike runs the Washington bureau and is an assistant managing editor. So he runs my life, controls my schedule and edits the newsy stuff. But if I go off to do a science piece or a financial piece, I might end up being edited by someone else.

What exactly do you do at Time?

My title is editor-at-large. I don’t edit anything, so I don’t know why it’s editor instead of writer.  I am very much at large. Because of my background and Time’s appetite, probably about half of my time is spent on political stuff, broadly defined. Otherwise, I have always thought of myself as a generalist. So of the stories I’m working on right now, one is about neuroscience, one about history, one about monetary policy.

You were fed material for this piece. Do you usually do your own reporting?

I like to do all my own reporting. The Time tradition until just a few years ago was that there were people who reported and people who wrote, and they were two different things. Reporters would send files to New York, and then the writers in New York would write the stories.

For a variety of reasons, not least the very high cost of doing things that way, they’ve gone more and more in the direction of having people who report and write their own stories. And that’s part of the reason that I ended up at Time, because I like and can do both pieces of that puzzle.

In my newspaper career, being an anchor writer on a big breaking story was one of the skill sets that I developed and liked. So when we have a breaking news story, when we’ve got to pull in stuff from a number of places and people, I like doing that and know how to do it.

The reason I’m a journalist is that I have a short attention span, so variety is what I love. A long story this week, something 300 words next week, monetary policy, then going next to education, next to sports.

Is there anything else you want to say about the piece?

I’ve been pleased and a bit surprised. It did strike a chord. We got more mail on it than Time’s gotten on anything in years, so that’s intriguing to me. I think I did manage to put into words something that a lot of people were starting to feel. I wasn’t sure when I hit the done button what the reaction was going to be.

I’m never sure what the reaction is going to be, but after more than 30 years in the business, I know that sometimes it’ll be something that I like but it’s going to disappear without a ripple, because nobody else is going to care about it. There are other things that I think are completely benign and they set off a big firestorm because there’s something in there that I didn’t even realize was going to trip people up. This one I didn’t really know what to expect, and so I was surprised and pleased that a lot of people found it worthwhile.

I really had in mind lessons that I had learned from Gene Miller at The Miami Herald and then underlined for me by Mary McGrory at The Washington Post. Mary had the greatest line. She did this extraordinary work on the Kennedy assassination, and John Kennedy had been a friend of hers.

The line went something like “In the face of great emotion, write short sentences.” That’s a rule that’s served me well. Sentences get longer and longer when you’re working fast, when you’re working with a powerful story. The best thing you can do to get hold of what you’re doing, to get it under control, is to shorten your sentences.

In a later e-mail exchange, Von Drehle added a coda to an earlier answer:

I didn’t quite close the loop on a point I wanted to make. I started to say that people have asked how long the piece took to write, and that one way of answering that is to say I started Tuesday morning and finished Wednesday morning. But the main thing I’ve learned about writing is that you can’t have good writing without good thinking, and so the process of thinking through the piece, getting the idea clear in your head, is as much a part of the writing as the actual typing (or should I say keyboarding). Thinking may look to the outside world like sitting around, or cooking dinner, or driving to pick up the dry cleaning, or working out on the elliptical. But all those things may be part of the writing process if your brain is in gear.

We’ve also done a Q-and-A with Von Drehle about how the piece came together, but in this post we offer our editors’ responses to the story. Comments appear in the order in which they were made, and editors with any relationship to Von Drehle have disclosed it in the opening of their comments. For full bios on the editors, see our post last week announcing the Roundtable.

Jacqui Banaszynski
Knight Chair professor, Missouri School of Journalism

Ah, the most challenging of subjects in the hands of a master. David Von Drehle does so much to learn from, and all on a crazy deadline.

Verb tenses are counterintuitive but effective. Present tense puts us back in the scenes of that day. Foreshadowing restores suspense to a known conclusion. Von Drehle never cheats on the news, but there is hope in his chronological retelling: Maybe things can be different. (A nice underscore to his whole theme.) Past tense breaks the narrative for background and commentary.

Voice has unapologetic authority but an engaging casualness. The opening line is colloquial and intimate. All the little come-alongs (ie: “Let’s consider…” “Note the date…” “Go ahead and cry.”) make it feel like he’s talking to me over coffee as we ponder this senselessness.

Pacing that weaves short and long sentences, maximizing the power of short.

Character revealed through selected details. I see those third-grade teeth, and the woman young Christina Green should grow into.

The really big wow?  Focus. Von Drehle takes a subject everyone is writing about but chooses and sustains his core theme: the war on normal. Repetition of that word becomes a tool of structure, cohesion and theme-building. Even Christina Green as opening and ending: She’s not just the most innocent victim of one deranged man, but a metaphor for a better sense of America – Von Drehle reports it as a reality – under attack by “cabals” on both ends of a destructive screed.

Editor’s tweak: More sourcing written into the story or in an expanded byline box, rather than leaving so much to links. In the din of this screed, I want to know how reporters know what they know.

Finally, kudos to the reporters who provided the right raw material. Writing narrative means reporting narrative.

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

Jacqui did a wonderful job breaking down all the great things about this story. The storytelling is really strong and the reporting that feeds it is tremendous, particularly on what I imagine was a tight deadline. Watching the events unfold was gripping, despite having read so many accounts of what happened. Which is why we love narrative writing.

What I struggled with was so much time and attention on the response to the shooting. For me, it was definitely a case of less would have been more. The point is to call all those crazy reactionaries to task for having jumped the gun. It’s almost ironic that the cabal gets so much undeserved ink.

Yes, the story is about the war on normal, but the strongest message becomes the positive you can take away – that in America, this doesn’t happen that often. We disagree and argue and vote people out of office that we don’t like and shots are never fired, unlike so much of the rest of the world. That point is made, no doubt, but it’s drowned out more than I would have liked by the attention on Palin and Moulitsas and Ruddy, etc. Again, a little would have gone a long way.

I really appreciate a story that takes a loud event and brings it down quietly and forces you to think about something that deserves attention. And that’s what I loved about this story; I just wanted not to dwell so much on the madmen on talk radio and TV but on illustrating the fact that this day was an aberration and some of these people at the scene were amazing in their reactions. That was the power of the story, punctuated by that last line.

Kelley Benham
Enterprise editor, St. Petersburg Times

What struck me was the sense of control. Jacqui’s right, focus is the triumph here, and Von Drehle is a master at focusing a story even on deadline. It’s not just that he declares a theme and carries it out. He controls every element. Look how elegantly he tucks attribution and other necessities into the middles of sentences, how he saves powerful images for the ends of sections and how he slows time to let a scene unfold.

Paragraphs that in other hands would serve as mundane explanatory material become devastating by his word choice. Sarah Palin does not argue, she implausibly argues. He knows what he wants to say.

He writes with an unapologetic point of view, directly addressing the reader throughout. “Pay attention,” he says. “Go ahead and cry.” This signaled to me that as a reader I was in good hands. He was taking me somewhere and he had a plan. I don’t know that we could or should get away with so much point of view in a newspaper. But as an editor I’m usually pushing for more authority and not less. More narratives fall short because a writer is at the mercy of the material than because the writer is too much in control of it.

The risk with this approach is that it can feel heavy handed. I didn’t feel that way here until the last paragraph. Christina Green is an irresistible symbol, but by the time I read this piece I was tired of seeing her used as a metaphor. That’s a comment on all the coverage, not on this story alone, but I felt a bit manipulated by it. So the last line fell short for me, but only because the spell was interrupted in the sentence or two before.

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

I agree with the points made above – I love the urgency of present tense, the intimate voice, the pacing. I heartily agree that the reporting was stellar. And since so many positive points have already been made, I get to do a little nitpicking. I have four, but they are very small. Nit-sized nits.

Nit 1: Voice. It works so well through so much of the piece that when it doesn’t work, it’s startling. “Pay attention.” “How many times have we heard this story?” Those interjections worked for me. What didn’t work was when the narrator stepped too close, invaded my personal space.

“Go ahead and cry. … Feel the disgust rise up. … As any normal person would.”

If I don’t cry, am I not normal? These lines felt intrusive and presumptuous. They turned the focus from the story and onto me, and I didn’t like it.

Nit 2: I echo Maria’s observation about too much time and attention devoted to the cabals. What started as a great and gripping narrative took a jarring turn into a standard, almost shrill, opinion piece in the “Dramatizing the trivial” section and then, almost as jarringly, veered right back into great narrative when the section ended.

Nit 3: Sept. 11. That detail made me gasp when I first heard it, but because it was purely accidental that Christina was born that day, it almost immediately lost its power as a symbol. The ending would be as powerful – more powerful – without milking that date.

Nit 4: And, while this is completely unfair to Von Drehle’s great work, all of those hyperlinks drove me crazy. The last thing you need when you’re reading a powerful and engrossing work is a whole bunch of little clickable things that will take you out of the story. Let us remain immersed.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

Here’s what I think writers can learn from Von Drehle’s powerful piece.

Structure and flow. Think of the narrative structure and flow as similar to a camera’s movement in filmmaking. We open with the camera on Christina Green, following her to the shopping center. We get a glimpse as to why Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is there. The camera turns to Jared Loughner as he walks up to Giffords. Then freeze the frame. We step out of the action for a moment and the narrator provides us with background on Loughner and the possibility of schizophrenia. Then “the first bullet strikes Giffords in the head,” and we’re back in the action, if just for a moment. Then pause again: The narrator takes us through a long passage of commentary (more on this in a moment). We don’t return to the action until Dorwan Stoddard “heard the explosions.” Pay attention to how Von Drehle moves the camera, then pauses it for explanation, exposition and commentary, then starts the camera again. It’s almost like a dance, the way the narrative scene and the exposition move back and forth.

Repetition to emphasize theme. Jacqui is spot on: Read the piece again and look at how Von Drehle repeats the phrases “war against normal” and “war with normal” and “war on normalcy” and, finally, “this is how normal fights back.” He’s doing that not only for the cadence and musicality of the piece, but to hammer home what the piece is about: “This is how normal fights back, by rejecting fear and choosing courage.”

Use of metaphor for instant understanding. The use of metaphors and similes is hard to pull off. I encourage writers, even veteran writers, to stay away from them, or use them very sparingly. Von Drehle is a master, though, and he uses two in a row that I found effective. “Elected officials in swing districts are always in danger of losing, and when one of them does, the creators of the target lists can boast of their fearsome power. It’s like standing on a beach as the tide turns and claiming to control the ocean.” And then another quick metaphor right after that: “Like the Wizard of Oz, the cabal’s entire authority hinges on this ability to exaggerate its power.” The trick here is that the metaphors need to be based on experiences and references that most readers will connect with immediately. If you have to explain your metaphor, then it’s not strong enough for your piece.

Risk-taking. Von Drehle takes huge risks here. This piece is a hybrid, a blend of narrative (the shooting scene) and commentary (what are we to make of the “cabal”). I haven’t come upon many examples of commentary that weave in the narrative. (Fellow Roundtable editors, help me here if you know of any.) I suppose some op-ed columnists do a bit of this, but not to the degree that Von Drehle is attempting here. I admire that. Like Kelley, I don’t think we could run this piece in our news section, though we probably could in our commentary section. And like Kelley, Maria and Laurie, I would have encouraged the writer to scale back on the commentary — the passage that starts with “What is not normal is the reaction of a relatively small but very loud and influential cabal…” and ends with “The events of the past week should awaken us to the danger of further indulging their delusions.” Still: At a time when we’re all struggling to engage readers, let’s push for more of this risk-taking.

Chris Hunt
Assistant managing editor, Sports Illustrated

Full disclosure: I’m a colleague of David Von Drehle’s at Time Inc. and a longtime fan of his writing. He and I have discussed working together on occasional pieces for Sports Illustrated.

I agree with Tom and others about the power of this story and particularly the effectiveness of the narrative of the shooting. Great deadline journalism, vivid and immediate. But I also agree with Maria and Laurie that the section on the response to the shootings is too long and too jarring in tone.

“Cabal” may not be the best word for a group of commentators with wildly different political views, and it seems contradictory to say the commentators are “very … influential” but actually have a limited audience and exaggerate their own power. The section comes off as a rant against ranting, a bit out of character with the normality being extolled.

Still, the writing in the narrative is moving and beautifully controlled, and I admire the clear, strong voice throughout the piece.

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

Full disclosure: David Von Drehle wrote for me when I edited Tropic Magazine and he was a Miami Herald staffer. He was also my roommate and hired me to work for him when he was Style editor at The Washington Post. I later hired him to write for the Post Magazine when I was the magazine’s editor.

To me, the major lesson here is the Big Picture. Von Drehle was wise enough to see what so many were missing, and smart enough to realize that he had an opportunity to point out the forest everyone else was completely missing for the trees. So much of the commentary and reporting after the shooting went directly to the presumably causative influence of the virulently nasty state of political discourse in the country. Then it went from there to the political fireworks around assessing the BLAME for the nasty state of discourse.

Instead of getting hung up in those weeds, Von Drehle was able to see right through them to an obvious truth most of the back and forth was completely ignoring: The shooter’s war was not the war the rest of us are fighting. It was his own private war, and it had nothing to do whatsoever with the nasty nature of political discourse. It was instead a duel to the death with reality – he’d lost hold of it. He was a man drowning in a sea of abstraction, thrashing about violently and a danger to anyone who caught his fragmented attention. The searing political query that prompted his fixation on his victim was not about abortion, immigration, or the size and intrusiveness of the government. It wasn’t about the right to bear arms or gays in the military, or any other culture war item. It was: “If words have no meaning, what good is government?”

It was about mental illness pure and simple, and if you wanted to throw it in, about how someone with extreme mental illness was able to buy and carry a semiautomatic weapon with an extended ammunition clip. Von Drehle also saw clearly that in all the noise about the name-calling and poisonous partisanship in Washington, all the pundits and pols decrying the status quo were perfectly mirroring and reinforcing the status quo.

To me, the real strength of Von Drehle’s piece was that his was the first and most eloquent voice saying, “The emperor has no clothes.”

Paige Williams
Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

Such great points, all. The pleasant problem with being the last Roundtabler to comment is that by the end of the process the Y-incision has been made, the skin and muscle and soft tissue have been peeled away, the organs have been excised and examined and weighed. The autopsy is nearly complete. Nevertheless!

It’s super hard to write a deadline narrative, especially one that’s fact loaded and compelling and insightful and endeavors to be moving. You’re at the mercy of the reporting that comes in from the field and your own clarity of purpose/vision. In a story as widely covered as the Tucson shooting, you don’t want to rehash events, which so often happens on the fifth or seventh day, but rather to tell the story through some original prism. The shooting broke on a Saturday and this story ran five days later, which may sound like a long time but isn’t. Few can do it artfully. Von Drehle is one of the best. (His Hurricane Hugo narrative remains a model of deadline poetry and made the rest of us who covered Hugo see ticking-clock storytelling in a whole new way.)

He led us into the piece with a single-sentence lede meant to ease readers into difficult material. It’s a good reporter’s trick akin to the old stand-by: “To understand why (fill in the blank) is important, it’s necessary to understand (fill in the blank) .” In doing so he sets us up for what is almost a parallel narrative, and though we suspect the conflict will unfold as good vs. evil, it turns out to be swampier than that.

Which may be why the author chose to use directives: “pay attention” and “go ahead and cry” and “take a moment.” They serve almost as an annotation of the event/political climate, but were they necessary? Yes, they added texture and conversational accessibility, but it’s possible that they intruded on the narrative, even undermined it. Also, “note the date” was meant, I think, to locate the infancy of this particular wave of political ugliness, but does the paragraph achieve that goal? Did the author seek to show how much the rhetorical landscape has eroded since ’07? If so, we needed a beat more.

I appreciated how, instead of simply telling us about the virulence of the competing “cabals,” he deftly worked in the consequences of the warring by showing ours as a government that can’t manage to seat federal judges or reform programs. That’s important context.

Little tiny editing things:

In all the Tucson coverage it annoyed me to no end to hear/read people talking about Christina Green’s impending “career,” so I groaned out loud to see it here. She was nine. Nine.

Those “See this! See that!” links are on par with pop-up ads. And why on earth would we want anyone to click out of this story?

Some may want to cage-fight me on this point but I don’t think he needed “The ugly and twisted part comes next.” Maybe it exists for the sake of lede repetition but we already instinctively grasp the undercurrent of multiple-level gnarliness. Likewise, we don’t need, “He was an unhinged young man at war with normal.” At that point the conceit has been established, and the section would have ended powerfully enough on “…he wasn’t an expression of some dangerous new American norm.”

I experienced a wee reflexive cringe at “she entered this world as a ray of hope,” but whatever. Here’s a positive: Like Tom, I loved the ocean metaphor – that entire graf worked.

With regard to whether such a piece would be suitable for certain news pages, why not call it News Analysis and let it fly? R.W. Apple spent half his career doing just that for the New York Times and often helped me understand political nuance far better than a straight news story ever could have.

——

A final word from Storyboard Editor Andrea Pitzer:

Pondering the Roundtable approach, Jacqui Banaszynski notes that there are pluses and minuses to so many editors putting their fingerprints on a story. This kind of scrutiny is always a little unfair, as it can never take into account all the time and reporting pressures that happen in real life or the demands incumbent on a given newspaper or magazine. Our hope, however, is that seeing each editor’s take will help readers think about how stories work and ways to make them as good as possible.

Stay tuned for the next installment in early March. In the meantime, if you have a piece you’d like to see our editors dissect, please send it along to contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org. The story has to be already published, available online and strong enough to stand up to extended editorial tire-kicking.

I want to talk about craft. I want to talk a little bit about how I do what I do, and maybe give you some pointers, stuff I wish people had told me when I was just starting out.

There are essentially three venues we can work in: newspapers, magazines and books. I’ve done all three. I’ve done all three very well, and I’ve done all three very poorly. I can supply examples of each. I’ve written five books, one of which was number one on the New York Times bestseller list and two of which were read by about 17 people, most of whom were my relatives. I have been interviewed on Larry King, I have been interviewed on The Today Show, and I have sat in bookstores in Denver and had the guy say, “You need to quit signing now. I don’t think we can sell any more of those.” So, I have had the best and the worst.

Narrative journalism is the best way to get noticed in journalism; it’s the best way to get ahead. They’re the most memorable stories, bar none. I’m talking about a story, as we used to say at the Journal, that’s beginning-middle-end. It’s not an analysis of the Federal Reserve or anything else. It typically starts with a real-time lede, an anecdotal lede. It breaks out into a part that at the Journal we used to call the “nut graf”; at Time magazine I think they always called it the “billboard,” which is essentially a quick one or two paragraphs saying “this is what the story is,” a section where you say “this is why the story matters.” And then you get out of the way and get into the story and tell it as fast as possible.

I’ve been writing the same story for 25 years. They pay me to write the same story. Well, I don’t do the same story; I do the same structure. That’s the structure I’ve always gone with, and it works beautifully for me. I am stunned that more people in our profession don’t write narrative stuff. If you’re a daily reporter at your local newspaper, this is the way you get noticed. If you want to get something in a magazine, this is the way to get noticed: telling stories, whatever story matters to you.

Be picky

One of the real problems, of course, with writing narrative is that it takes a long time. I’m contracted to write for Vanity Fair, three pieces a year. That typically takes a total of six or seven months; each story will take six to eight weeks… the rest of the time is stuff that I will spend three weeks on then say, “This is not up to par.”

I think – in fact, I know – that I’m a lot pickier than some of my peers. I find a problem that too many people who attempt narrative journalism do is to think that applying the narrative form to material that’s subpar, that somehow elevates it. Well, it doesn’t. You’ve got to have the goods. I’m renowned, in fact, notorious probably, at Vanity Fair for throwing stories out after a month: “Sorry, not going to do that one.” “Why? Why? Why? It was a perfectly good story.” “No, it wasn’t good enough.”

Because here’s what a lot of us know but never talk about. The only advertisement for your services, the only thing anybody really knows about you, is what you publish. If it’s not as good as you can possibly do, don’t publish it, because you can do more damage to your career with a shitty story than you’ll do good with a good one.

I just went nine months without an article. It used to really bug me. It bugs me less now, when I know that after nine months, I hit the fence, I hit a solid triple. I don’t think twice about the stories I pass up. It frustrates my editor, but I guess my lesson there is be pickier, if you can afford to be.

Cold notes = old fish

When I start, I do my articles a little bit differently than George [Getschow, my former boss] did. In fact, one of the lessons that I took early on was something I thought he was doing wrong, and I came up with a way I wanted to do it. You’re doing a narrative story. Let’s say you spend six weeks gathering your material. It’s good enough; you’re going to publish it, right? George would always sit down at the end of the reporting and start to write. And I saw him; he’d freeze for at least the first few days. He would sit back in a writing room and freeze. I started doing that, and I would freeze. Why? Because you’re dealing with cold notes, and you’re dealing with, “Oh, shit. I gotta write this.”

I came up with a way that gets around this. It doesn’t seem to work for everybody, but it works really well for me. I find that the best writing is if you write when the material is fresh. It’s like fish; it’s like food: fresh ingredients. I try to write my stuff as fast after gathering it as possible. I get off the phone; I’ve just interviewed George for 30 minutes. I’m writing that up when I get off – no later than the next morning, because I want the sense and nuance and inflection. If I wait six months – I don’t know about y’all’s notes; mine tend to suck. I remember really well for two hours, maybe even two days. Two months later, I’m looking at my notes – and I know people who type up their notes, but I still don’t remember it as well.

So at the beginning of the first day, when I get the assignment, I start two files on my desktop. Let’s say the story is slugged Mayborn. I start Mayborn.reporting and Mayborn.writing. Everything I gather, obviously, goes in Mayborn.reporting, but unlike a lot of people I don’t wait to the end to start filling up Mayborn.writing. I start immediately. I write up every single thing I get in Mayborn.writing because I’ve found that I block, badly, badly, badly. And so, what I do is, let’s say I get a nice interview with George. I’ve got eight grafs, I write it up. It makes me feel good to be able to look and see that I’ve already got stuff written. Everybody knows that the worst part of any narrative project is the early stuff, when you don’t really have the confidence that you’re going to get enough to do it, and you panic, “I’ll never be able to do it.” We all have this. And I feel so [much] better about myself, when I can say, “Look. I have eight paragraphs.”

Every morning, the first thing I do when I go up to my office – I am so not a morning person – I go out, I light up the day’s first cigar, and I go up into my dot-writing file, whatever it is, and I just play with words, play with words with the goal of chopping as much as I can every morning, just cut, cut, cut-cut-cut, until I get down to the best stuff. Obviously, what makes some of us really good and some of us okay is knowing what to put or to keep in that writing file. Too many of us don’t know maybe what the best quote is, what your best anecdote is. There’s no tinkering for that; that’s something you learn from experience.

Cut and steal

Here’s my advice—steal, steal, steal. I’m telling you, George and I worked in a four-person bureau, and after nearly firing me about three times, he brought in a guy named Tom Petzinger. Tom was really, really good as a wordsmith. Tom was the master of The Wall Street Journal paragraph: topic sentence, example, example, quote. Not necessarily always applicable for a narrative story, but it worked very well for the Journal. And I just copied Tom. I copied everything he did. There’s nothing illegal or wrong with it; that’s what you should do. I copied Tom until I was relatively sure that George wouldn’t fire me – I’m not joking – and then I stole as much as I could from Hemingway, because I didn’t know any of these great writer guys. But Hemingway had these beautiful short sentences, so I copied Hemingway. That’s how I kept my job at the Journal.

Back to how I do it: the beauty of doing it with two files as you go along, for me, is that the moment I finish the reporting, I’m done with the story. Because I write every morning, just writing and playing with the stuff I’ve put in there, cutting as much as I can. And I’m absolutely ruthless. You can’t fall in love with anything you write, because shorter is always better. I know this is Journalism School 101, but some of us forget it. Your words are not nearly as great as you think they are. Fewer is always better. Every time I give Vanity Fair a story, and I write an average of eight to ten thousand words, and they say, “You’re going to have to lose a thousand words,” I say, “Fine. Go for it. It will be better.” And it always is.

This is just the way that I came up with to unblock myself. I never write a story from top to bottom. I find the easiest way to block is to say, “Gosh. What’s the first word of this story? What’s the second word? What’s the third word?”

The way I do it is I assemble the story like they’re blocks. Typically, I’ll have a little narrative section; somebody told me a story, maybe that’s six grafs. And eventually I figure out that goes with those four grafs. At some point, I’ll think, “Oh, that’s the best thing I’ve got; let’s make that the lede. That’s a really good quote.” I put it together like DNA, like papier-mâché. It just grows and grows and grows, and at some point, it fills the file, it gets up to about where I think it ought to be. Then I read it aloud, and then I let my wife read it, and if she thinks it’s as good as the last thing I did, then I know I’m done.

Every-other-paragraph but people

We’re writing long-form, right? I’m talking about anything over 2,000 from Bloomberg, anything over 5,000 words from a magazine, or any book. The biggest challenge – and I think sometimes we fall so in love with our words and we forget this – is that people are busy, and they are dying to put down your article. They are dying to put it down. If you’re introducing a new character, they don’t really want a new character; they want to find out what happened to the other character. They don’t want to turn the page; they’re dying to go do something else. So I put enormous energy into devising ways to trick them into staying with me.

There’s two ways I swear by, and I’ve done them in every single thing I’ve ever written. One way is a little cosmic, the other is very real.

I’m nuts for transitions. The transition is, essentially, that you’re going to lose them at the end of a graf, right? You don’t know where the end of a page is, so there’s not much you can do there. But the end of a paragraph is where you’re going to lose people. So I’m nuts for good active words at the beginning of a paragraph.

What’s the greatest single transition word? And is weak, because it’s just like, “I’ve got something else to say.” Nobody cares. But! But is the best one. Do you know why but is the best word? But says, “You don’t know everything yet. I’m going to correct something you think. You can’t walk away.”

The problem with but is, obviously, that it’s overused. So you don’t want to be one of those every-other-paragraph but people, because you’re crippled. I read those people. I’m like, “He’s overdoing the but.” And I read and, and I just think, “Weak, weak, weak. You can come up with something better than that.” And with? With is for real losers; don’t even go near with. If you’re really not into but, and you need something at the beginning, however is acceptable. I like however.

[The] absolute best transition word ever, and you can only use it about once every two or three stories, because people will ping you on it. I stole this from the other person in our bureau in 1983. He started an article with the single best transition word I’ve ever seen – a word you cannot walk away from: suddenly. Who’s ever going to walk away from a graf that starts “suddenly”? Suddenly something happened – I’ve got to know that.

I’m very big on transitions, but if your story blows, it doesn’t matter how many but‘s and however‘s you’ve got. It still gonna blow.

Mystery kills

My stories average 8,000 words. I’m a failure if I don’t get them to read the last sentence; that’s how I feel. I’ve failed. There’s only one way I know to get people to the end of the story – and this is a little cosmic, but I’ll try to make it concrete for you. You have to have some mystery. There has to be a holdback, something you’ve hinted at within at least the first 10 grafs, if not the first five. If you’re writing about a murder, it’s a murder mystery, well, that’s fine, it’s easy.

You can’t get all pretentious about this. I read stuff in all the great magazines, and I’ll see a writer try to do this, and they overdo it. It as to be hinted at, alluded to — you can’t just be saying, “There’s a great mystery; if you read to the end, you’ll find out.” The biggest thing is there has to be a story with an ending people want to get to. It’s that simple. If you don’t have that, you’re going to lose them somehow.

[For more, check out the rest of our Mayborn coverage, including posts on talks by Mary Karr, Gary Smith and Mark Bowden.]