“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.

Tom Junod’s “Can You Say … ‘Hero’?” is a celebrity profile, but the celebrity is the man in the gold cardigan who showed you how to tie your shoes. Of course, like any great story, it’s not simply about what it appears to be about. It’s about love and prayer, grace and humility, and the triumph of the human spirit through television. It’s about Junod, a stuffed animal named Old Rabbit that he had when he was a little boy, a rabbit that he lost. It’s about being a child – “You were a child once, too” is the chorus – and what we lose when we grow up and stop watching Mister Rogers.

Once upon a time, a little boy loved a stuffed animal whose name was Old Rabbit. It was so old, in fact, that it was really an unstuffed animal; so old that even back then, with the little boy’s brain still nice and fresh, he had no memory of it as “Young Rabbit,” or even “Rabbit”; so old that Old Rabbit was barely a rabbit at all but rather a greasy hunk of skin without eyes and ears, with a single red stitch where its tongue used to be. The little boy didn’t know why he loved Old Rabbit; he just did, and the night he threw it out the car window was the night he learned how to pray.

Occasionally, a fragment of the story will resurface in my mind. Mister Rogers, nude in a locker room, “slightly aswing at the fine bobbing nest of himself.” Mister Rogers, visiting his family tomb, “‘And now if you don’t mind,’ he said without a hint of shame or embarrassment, ‘I have to find a place to relieve myself,’ and then off he went, this ecstatic ascetic, to take a proud piss in his corner of heaven.” Mister Rogers, meeting a boy with cerebral palsy, “‘I would like you to do something for me. Would you do something for me?’ On his computer, the boy answered yes, of course, he would do anything for Mister Rogers, so then Mister Rogers said, ‘I would like you to pray for me. Will you pray for me?’”

For me, the piece is a talisman. It’s a chant, or what you remind yourself of when everything goes wrong, or a mantra about compassion that does not easily translate into any Western language.

The story works because it speaks to you as if you are the child you once were. It refuses to be snarky and dares to move you. Its author subjugates himself to his true master – the subject – in this case, the man we spent our collective childhood rapt before in the blue glow of a screen: “Mister Fucking Rogers.” Most stories move you forward. That’s how stories work: They unspool. Instead, Junod’s paean is a return, a transgressive retreat to a place where, before we fell from innocence, every day was a wonder and tying our shoes was a miracle.

In the end, Junod, Mister Rogers and a woman who is a minister in Mister Rogers’ church come together in Mister Rogers’ office. Holding hands, they bow their heads and pray together. Here, the true story reveals itself, piercing the heart with its revelation. “What is grace? I’m not certain; all I know is that my heart felt like a spike, and then, in that room, it opened and felt like an umbrella,” Junod writes. In looking backwards, we see all we’ve lost and feel the weight of that certainty. Having left something behind, we return when we can and take what remains of what was taken from us once upon a time.

Susannah Breslin is an award-winning blogger, freelance journalist and novelist. She writes the Pink Slipped blog for Forbes, and her work has appeared in Details, Harper’s Bazaar, Newsweek, Salon, Slate, The Daily Beast, Variety, The LA Weekly and Esquire.com.

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

Paige Williams: Now that we have the formal introduction I thought you guys might like something more intimate. Our spouses know us better than anyone, which is both marvelous and terrifying, and so I asked Mike’s wife, Sara, to tell us something about Mike’s writing life. This is what she e-mailed:

“He listens to music when he writes – really loud music, same song over and over again, usually one song per story. He drinks insane amounts of Starbucks iced tea while on deadline. He has a surfboard, and when he’s on deadline he loads his surfboard into our minivan – which basically means that nobody else in our family, which includes three kids and a dog, can fit in the minivan – and keeps it there, not because he’s going to actually manage to go surfing but it serves as some very oversized talisman that tells him someday he’ll get his story done and feel free again. He is obsessive and brutally hard on himself. He frets and fusses and procrastinates and complains and then eventually, usually two or three clicks past the 11th hour, will suddenly disappear. It’s like the lights go off. All noise stops. Even if he’s home, he’s not really there. The next time I see him – a day later, two days later – he’s got his story. It’s actually a pretty wild thing to watch. Because when he gets it, it’s beautiful.

“The other thing I both love and wring my hands over about Mike is that he is maddeningly, amazingly 100 percent unrealistic, all the time. His ideas and his aims are always big and odd. The same guy who told me that he thought it would be a good idea to take a 3,000-mile road trip with an 84-year-old and a famous brain has also spent the last seven years obsessing over a piece of cheese that sits in a cave in Spain. I see him reading something, or Googling something, and I start to realize it’s just another inevitability: He gets interested in a really tall man in the Ukraine and then suddenly, boom, that’s where he’s headed. Or charging off to live in a motel in Dodge City, Kansas, because two years earlier someone said something odd to him there. We hauled our three kids to Central India in the hot season because Mike had heard that the illegitimate heir to the French throne was hidden away there. We went to France and ate little songbirds once because Mike wanted to know what that would be like. People hurling themselves off a bridge in southern China? Sure, why not? Profile a chimpanzee for the New York Times Magazine? Only Mike. When people ask me what my writer-husband ‘covers,’ I usually begin by saying, ‘Well, his tastes are a little unconventional.’

“If I make it sound like Mike’s stories spring from his mind beautifully formed, I am telling only half the truth. He gets the voice of a story, writes a great draft, but then – BUT THEN – he worries over every single word and line until the very second it leaves his hands to go the printer. I’ve never seen anyone make as many changes in page proofs as Mike does. Some of us (me, anyway) have a tendency to hit a point when we think a story is done and just happily watch it go off to bed in the arms of an editor, but Mike is not that writer.”

We’re happy to have you here, Mike, and I thought we could start with you reading a bit from one of your pieces.

Mike Paterniti: [Reads a passage from the Walter Benjamin essay “The Storyteller,” in which Benjamin quotes Paul Valery: “ ‘Artistic observation,’ says Valery in reflections on a woman artist whose work consisted in the silk embroidery of figures, ‘can attain an almost mystical depth. The objects on which it falls lose their names. Light and shade form very particular systems, present very individual questions which depend upon no knowledge and are derived from no practice, but get their existence and value exclusively from a certain accord of the soul, the eye, and the hand of someone who was born to perceive them and evoke them in his own inner self.’ ” He then reads a short passage from his own Esquire piece “The American Hero in Four Acts,” a line of which – “And suddenly, impossibly, out of nowhere – you!” – made Esquire’s list of 70 Greatest Sentences.]

Williams: You say you wrote “The American Hero in Four Acts” in a voice you don’t really use anymore. How do you mean? Why the change?

Paterniti: I don’t think the change was intentional. The voice of every piece varies, but it’s always a mystery how you get there, how you find that voice. Is this a big voice? Is this a little voice? Is this a New York Times Magazine voice where we just want to go straight reportage, just tell people, “This is what I found and I want you to take it seriously; I’m not gonna bury it in this literary long form or creative nonfiction, whatever people want to call it, I’m gonna do it as a recognizable piece of reporting so you have to contend with this because it’s something that has to be contended with.”

Williams: So how do you get there? Does part of it depend upon the publication, in that your voice changes according to audience?

Paterniti: Yeah. I think about a piece I did about Bill Clinton for Esquire right at the end of his presidency, and I was with him on and off for almost three months. … I wrote a story that was really just about him, as a man. It never said his name. And it was at the end of his presidency, so came at a perfect time to sum up who he was and what maybe had motivated him – I was writing this extended obituary really. It was very freeing in some ways just to treat him as a man.

I think the thing people miss about Clinton is his rage, his anger. That’s what organized a lot of who he was then. But there was a great bit of detail that came from a conversation I had with a couple of his very close aides. They said there was a myth about the [Monica] Lewinsky scandal: that he had compartmentalized the scandal and was doing the work of America. His people kept saying that, and doing these photo ops where Clinton was being very jaunty and energetic. … On a normal day when he didn’t have a scandal he’d be doing a crossword and someone would be briefing him and other people would be talking to him and his brain was big enough to grab the whole thing. In fact, one aide one day said to him, “You’re not listening to a word I say, Mr. President,” and Clinton was doing his crossword and he looked up and just sort of repeated verbatim what the guy had just said.

But on this one day, during the Lewinsky thing, he apparently was sitting at the desk. He wasn’t doing a crossword. He was just moving objects around. People were talking to him and he just kept moving the objects. Finally one by one everybody left the room. At least two people who had been in the room said they thought he’d really had some sort of break.

I tried as best I could to recreate the scene – it was very much in passing – but it was embedded in this voice that had been stripped of all quotes and sources. I had positioned the camera so intimately it was like an extended close-up. And you were never gonna get anything else in that scene; it was like that Bergman close-up. It’s like you’re gonna see this guy wince, maybe cry; you’re gonna see him do what he does, which is smile and seduce, all these things he does so wonderfully, but you’re never gonna know exactly why. Or there’ll be a mystery to it. So that close-up committed me to that. I thought I had this amazing piece of reporting, but nobody ever commented on it. It was just totally lost. And included with the article I did this Q&A with him – me asking a question and Clinton going on for pages – and he said three things, and those were the sound bites that got picked up by everybody.

Williams: What did he say?

Paterniti: This was a week before the election, so one thing he said was, “I’ve already apologized to America for what I’ve done, but the Republicans haven’t apologized for what they did to me,” which just brought Clinton back into an election where Democrats were trying to keep him off to the side. And so for the last week the Republicans were like, “Do you remember that president that we used to have, who had those dealings with Monica Lewinsky?” And he suddenly became the news story for a while. But in the end, voicewise, I was okay with losing this great piece of reporting to the narrative that I wrote, because I had made that commitment as a writer and a storyteller. I said I’m just gonna have to let that go, it’s not gonna be that line in the New York Times Magazine that would have read, “a senior adviser close to Clinton says.”

Helen Branswell: Do you think if you’d written it differently – not necessarily as straight reportage but with another voice – that it might have gotten more attention or was it just because of the timing, the cycle, that it got sort of overlooked?

Paterniti: The article and interview didn’t get overlooked but that detail got buried in the flow of it. So I think yes, if I had really punched that up, that would have been the lead. Like, on the day that it came out, I went to New York and did the “Today” show and “Hardball” and “The O’Reilly Factor,” and we might have been talking just about Bill Clinton’s alleged breakdown in the White House.

Williams: A lesser writer might have taken that scene and done something sensationalistic.

Paterniti: I would have been curious as somebody coming to it very cold – my president had some sort of episode, or breakdown, and I want to know.

Williams: Is that what you came to think, though, that he actually had some sort of breakdown?

Paterniti: Everyone remembers differently, but I believe the guys who told me. They were very credible people who spent a ton of time with him. They were with him every day. I said, “Oh, was it just one day?” And they said, “It wasn’t just one day.”

Darcy Frey: I’m totally fascinated by this trial-and-error process of finding a voice that’s suitable to the right material. You try out an oboe and that doesn’t sound quite right so you try out a trumpet. Is there a point where you hit a voice that matches the subject? And how do you know that those two things have kind of synched up in the right way for you?

Paterniti: I think there’s a moment – this Guantanamo detainee piece I’m working on now is a good example. I’ve written five drafts. Each one has been 10,000 words. It’s taken way too long. I’ve had the luxury of protection from my editor, Joel Lovell, who’s been willing to move the deadline back, even though they’re at this point probably very angry with me. But I just think I found it. And I think I found it because it’s just coming up off the page – I can’t even describe it, it seems to be lifting a little bit off the page. And the things I’ve been struggling so hard to fold into the narrative have suddenly begun to arrange themselves. I think if someone said, “You just have to give it up right now,” this would’ve been my greatest failure. And now at least I’ve got a shot. But I’ve tried everything. I’ve done third person, I’ve done second person, I’ve done first person, I’ve positioned the story behind one character, I’ve positioned it behind another character, I’ve put myself in the middle of it – there’s nowhere left to go.

Williams: Have you changed the tenses yet?

Paterniti: I’ve changed the tenses. I’ve changed the font! I’ve changed what I was drinking.

Williams: Change the song?

Paterniti: I’ve changed the song!

Michael Fitzgerald: So where would you typically want feedback from your editor? What’s your normal process and is there give and take like Tom Junod talks about or is it, “This all has to come out of me?”

Paterniti: Oh, I’m so open to give and take, and to talk. I’ve had like a magical relationship with a couple of magazine editors. There’s a story I did early on for Esquire. It started in second person and after the first section it went into a very typical magazine setup – I went to Dodge City to live in this motel because I thought this was ground zero for the new American racism – so it was this establishing graf, this nut graf, and I sent the opening to my editor and got this one line back like, “You’re not interesting. Take the ‘I’ out of the story.” And it just exploded, this story. I finished it very quickly. Otherwise I would’ve gone down the “I” road. Just with that one little suggestion, I was like, “Thank you so very much because you’ve reduced the amount of torture I’ll have to go through to get this right.”

A really great editor – and I would include Andy Ward, who is my book editor and was my magazine editor – is an editor who’s editing the story right from the very beginning, the minute you mention the idea. And he’s directing the flow of thought and what makes it important and how you’re gonna excavate that, like what kind of point of view you want to take, which stance do you want to take in relation to the characters? There were a lot of times I’d call Andy and say, “Will you tell me why this was so interesting to you when we first talked about it?” Just to hear him talk back to me for two minutes. It’s not real elaborate, not real crafty stuff. Oftentimes I’ll just ask, “What’s the headline for this story?” A lot of times that helps me focus.

Fitzgerald: How do you deal with editors who aren’t so great?

Paterniti: I’ve been super lucky with editors, but when it’s not working I just work harder. And also I will lean on my wife, Sara. I’ll have her read or I’ll have an outside reader come in, like literally my emergency readers where I’ll say, “Hey I know it’s 9 o’clock on a Monday night but I’m dying.” But it’s hard when you don’t have a good editor. It’s really hard. And it’s really frustrating. And it does take more time. The reality of it is that you spend more time in the dark and you have to rely on yourself so much more. When you can’t quite find it that’s when you go through some deeper doubt about what you’re doing.

Williams: What is it about legendary editors like Andy? What sets him apart from other editors? And what do you need from an editor?

Paterniti: His work ethic is incredible. He boomerangs stories back. He’ll boomerang a 10,000-word story back by the end of the day. He just zeroes in on what’s weak. All he has to do is bracket it. He doesn’t even really have to write words anymore. I think that’s what it is; he’s just got a really crystal-clear sensibility of how it should work in your voice. He doesn’t try to be the writer.

There are plenty of editors, and I was one of them, who wanted to be a writer, who was going to be a writer, and who starts doing some writing on the page. When I was at Outside – back in this moment in time, when I was there, we were doing a lot of long literary pieces and working with a lot of great writers like Annie Proulx and Ian Frazier, and these guys were writing eight- and ten-thousand-word drafts. When people did stories that sort of didn’t live up to the Proulx-Frazier standard we would go in and rewrite them. And I guess that’s a sort of a famous saying at the New Yorker, right? “Editors love to see their words in print?” There’s incredible rewriting that goes on in many magazines, and the editors can be very heavy-handed when they need to be, and that’s what Andy tries not to do. And if a story’s gonna bomb he’ll pull the plug. He’ll work until the point where he feels he’s taken the writer as far as the writer’s going to go.

Philippa Thomas: How many times have you walked away from a story after you’ve gotten quite deep into it?

Paterniti: Never. I’ve reported one story that I didn’t end up writing, but that was because it coincided with other breaking stories that became a higher priority. If I actually start writing, it’s a steel-cage death match. I’m not leaving the cage. Even if I end up bloodied and it’s not my best, there’s no way to walk away.

Robert Rose: Surely the danger is to become too obsessive and self-critical, so how many times have you written something where the first draft is perfect and it’s gone out? And once the story’s gone out do you ever read it and think, “Great, that’s the best I could have done?”

Paterniti: No, I don’t ever think that. But I have had stories that have come like that, that have come in a draft or quickly. Sometimes it’s the extra leg of reporting that opens it up. There’s a plane-crash piece that I wrote. It was about a SwissAir flight from New York to Geneva that crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia. I went around and talked to everybody, all the families, and I went to a lawyer – there was a family of four that died, two parents and their adult children – and he showed me all these photo albums and then said, “Do you want to see what’s left of the family?” He slid this envelope across the table and it was, like, an ankle.

I had all this stuff and it was very powerful, but I couldn’t begin to write. I finally went up to Peggy’s Cove, and on the first day I went into this little fishing village, and no one would talk to me. There was this kind of hostility because they were tired of talking about this horrific thing. And I was driving out and it was spitting rain, and the sky was kind of that grayish purple, and all the clothes on the line – the wind had filled all the clothes. So they were just hovering. And that’s what I thought when I drove by; I thought I was seeing bodies in the air. And that was it. It was really that image that started it for me. And I just cranked it out. I already had all the reporting. I had written a lot of rough drafts sort of in my mind, like where is this supposed to start and how do I capture the grief as something tactile? But until there was the absence of bodies I didn’t know what to hang it on.

The times that it has happened quickly I think have spoiled me. It’s dangerous to have that happen, especially early in your career, because I think people begin to think, “Hey, I’m Jack Kerouac, I just type it out.” The stories that look and feel like they were tossed off, oftentimes those are the ones where you’re six or seven drafts in and you have to find some energy for it again, find a way back to it. And the standard is yours. I do think there’s a way to dial that back a little, to maintain your sanity. Not everything has to be epic and crazily lyrical. Some stories just need to be told. And your mental health as a writer is really important. A lot of times that’s why I do listen to music, something bigger and louder than me that I’m feeding off of just a little bit.

Rose: So what song did you listen to when you wrote that airline piece?

Paterniti: Oh man, I don’t even remember. If you go to numbers of plays on my iPod, there’s a disturbing portrait of a man who can’t let go of certain songs.

Williams: We need a play list for all your stories.

Paterniti: I listen to alternative music, mostly, but I have this old recording of this Springsteen song, “Growin’ Up,” from “Greetings from Asbury Park” – it’s a brilliant song and it’s this guy who in one moment is seizing the world through words. It’s just so beautiful. And that song has been on repeat for this Guantanamo story. Something about it is right. …

It’s like Blake’s songs of innocence and experience – there’s an incredible innocence in the ideals of this one Marine defense attorney who ends up defending an alleged terrorist, and all these dreams and delusions he’s had about America kind of get crushed. There’s something about that song, that hopeful innocent voice that is going to end up jaded, that’s carried me through a little bit. I don’t know why.

Thomas: When you were describing the SwissAir journey – I couldn’t work out whether you were reimagining all of that detail or whether they were taking you through the scenarios –

Paterniti: Besides one thing I’ve been told might be wrong – that Rob Gordon, the reporter, doesn’t really like hockey – there was this other thing that I had to guess at a little bit. In this hanger they had the plane, a schematic of it, and they were putting up dots for the people who’d been lost, where they thought they were sitting. So at one point in the article I name the seats and what was happening there, and that was guessing from the names on the board and asking the families, like, what they would have been drinking. I heard from a family that said, “I thought our guy was in 14C, and he wouldn’t have had that drink.” We went by the official version on the wall and interviews with families. So there’s always going to be some of that; no matter how much you think you’ve corroborated something, there’s always gonna be some nuance that somebody else might see in a different way.

[Read part 2 of the discussion with Paterniti, in which he talks about struggling with structure, meeting William Burroughs, and the most amazing storyteller he knows.]

His latest profile, “Can One Good Man Redeem a Nation for the Sins of Guantánamo?,”begins with 200 words on the founding of Guantánamo before turning to fired U.S. attorney David Iglesias, who was removed from his job the same day the prison opened.

Tom Junod

Junod informs us that last October, while Bush was still in office, Iglesias rejoined the U.S. Navy as a captain, in order to help try the Guantánamo detainees in military tribunals. Despite the firing, and his disagreement with using torture in interrogations, Iglesias believes in the ideals of the war on terror and aims to serve those ends.

Direct addresses to the reader and a conversational tone in transitions (including “oh yeah” and “a couple things you ought to know”) cloak Junod’s call to accountability. In a Tom Junod story, someone will always be held to account, even if it’s Junod’s own father spinning tales about his World War II singing career and the disappointment that followed. Every detail will be marshaled to bear witness to a larger idea.

In the case of the Iglesias story, in some ways, the accounting comes after the story, with the more recent decision to try some suspected terrorists, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, in New York City. Iglesias’ confidence that terrorists would not be tried in U.S. courts has since been revealed to be at least partly mistaken.

The question we end with is whether or not an honest man can expunge a tainted process and midwife just verdicts in a military tribunal. In the end, we come to see that Iglesias knows that the system is a good system and that he is a good man, and believes that is enough. But the lingering questions may be more likely to leave the reader unconvinced.

Excerpts from a September 2009 interview with Chris Jones on “The End of Mystery,” in which a team of investigators recovers bodies and determines the cause of a helicopter crash off the coast of Newfoundland:

Q: How did you find out about the investigation into the Newfoundland crash?

A: I live in Ottawa, Canada. This was a big story in Canada—it led the nightly news for the better part of a week. But I figured it hadn’t made as much news in the U.S. From the beginning, it was a very literary sort of accident, because there was initially one survivor, one body, and 16 people missing.

The kind of story I like is one where you find something that other people might ignore. What struck me was that they said the black box was sent to Ottawa to investigators. I wondered who would get the black box and what it would tell them. 

Q: At what point did you know how you would structure this story?

A: I can’t say I really knew until I started writing it. I didn’t make an outline for it. I just sort of started writing. I almost wanted the reader to follow the path of the investigators, moving from the big picture to smallest possible details.

When I was talking to Allan Chaulk, and he mentioned finding the rolled-up paper at the bottom of the ocean, I got goose bumps and figured that would be my lead. You’re in the dark, and all you have is these clues. Ultimately, I wanted to the reader to understand the process. I was amazed that out of all the wreckage and carnage, they found these little titanium studs.

Q: In the helicopter crash story as well as your earlier piece “The Things That Carried Him,” you stick to a relentless structure. One moves forward in time, trying to solve the mystery of the crash, while the other moves backward. How do you decide what to leave out?

A: “The Things That Carried Him” was originally supposed to be 6,000 words, which is standard for an Esquire feature. But as I was working on it, I still thought that was possible. But there are 11 sections, and I had written two when I realized it was going to be way over 6,000 words.

I called my editor, Peter Griffin, who is the great editor—I mean that—he is always right. I called him up and said, “Peter, I think this might be a little long.” It ended up being 22,000 words, and then we cut it back to 17,000. It’s funny to talk about that story being tight, because it’s massive. I don’t think I’m good at staying on point. Writing [the story] backward was his idea.

With the crash story, it was a little easier. To Peter’s credit, this story did get cut quite a bit. For instance there was another oil rig accident in which guys were lost, and I went into the difference between having the bodies and not having the bodies. He suggested we just get rid of that.

Q: Your scenes stand out as stories in miniature, each with a lead and a kicker. Can you talk about how you approach beginnings and endings of your scenes?

A: I’ve always felt that narrative relies on scenes. The best advice I ever got on writing was from my mom: to always think of my stories as movies. When I read them back to myself, I think, “Does it make sense? Does each scene fold into the next scene properly?”

That probably sounds really gross to people who are into literature, but for me that’s the best way to figure out if I’ve got the scene right. Because I want the reader to picture himself in that situation. I want the reader to be on board the Atlantic Osprey when they find the bodies.

The other thing is section breaks—they should have a lead and a kicker. I’ve always believed that endings are more important than leads. I view each section as its own little chapter. Grab the reader and keep the reader going. I want to give them every reason to continue. I don’t want something lame or clichéd.

Q: Your writing style seems to be plain description that lays out all the elements in the piece and then links them in these emotional moments of discovery. Have you always had the confidence to take chances—to have faith in your readers to make those leaps with you?

A: Faith is the wrong word—maybe “hope” is better. You know, as a writer, when I started at Esquire, I was replacing a writer named Charlie Pierce. He was my favorite writer growing up. When I started, I had this feeling I had to write like Charlie Pierce. After three stories, I got a call, and my editor said, “Stop trying to write like Charlie Pierce.”

So I have always written fairly plainly. I got so much praise for “The Things That Carried Him,” but I believe that anyone could write that story. If you do the reporting, the writing is really basic. I don’t do flourishes.

Q: Really? What about your powerhouse ending about the lone survivor of the crash—where you revisit the ideas that babies float and talk about the “cause and manner of life”? It read pretty literary to me.

A: Okay—very occasionally I might do that. I think those paragraphs stand out because they’re different than the rest of the piece.

But I’ll admit that very little of what I do is conscious. I’m working on this book about the golfers who have shot 59. 59 pushes a golfer from the subconscious into the conscious, and some of them can’t get back in their game after they do it. I’ve been totally paranoid that working on this book is going to do that to my writing.

That last graph in the helicopter story just kind of came to me—it just sort of popped out. And I don’t know why, but the “babies float” thing was one of those moments during an interview where it wedged somewhere into my brain. Where I get credit for my writing, it’s for these connections, but I don’t consciously make them.

Because I believe endings are so important, sometimes I do them first. But this story, I just started writing. When you do that, sometimes you get these happy moments or surprises that work.

I think the reason I don’t like a lot of my stories may be that I’ve never made an outline. And I’ve often been self-conscious about that. Five or six years ago, Esquire re-released the Gay Talese story “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” And they included Talese’s outline for the piece. It’s immense. And I thought, “Okay, I’m just a hack.”

David Foster Wallace wrote a piece about a child prodigy who became this great tennis player. He was so frustrated because she couldn’t explain anything about what she did. I’m teaching this year, and there are a couple professors here who can dissect a story—break down its architecture. I can’t do that. It sounds so bad, but in some ways, I don’t really think about it. I just try to ask as many questions as I can, and then I try to sit down and write a story that people will want to read.

Q: What do you think of narrative today?

A: Because journalism is in flux, we’re all talking about the death of news, how every journalist is poor and will live life in a hovel. I just don’t believe that’s true. I don’t know how to artfully make my case, but I believe to save ourselves, we’ve got to do good, long, true stories. Very few people can do them well.

I think it’s the out for individuals and it’s the out for newspapers as well. So many magazines and newspapers are making the mistake of going small. But the internet will beat you every time on small. I love [the Narrative Digest] because it makes me feel like so much good stuff is still happening. You forget about it sometimes.

But I still believe that if you write a really good story people will read it.

Q: How did you learn how to write?

A: I read a lot. My parents were both professors. Everything I wrote, my mom went over with a red marker—as a child for sure, and even as an adult. I had teachers tell me I should be a writer, but because I was a little asshole, I resisted. But I always liked words and sentences.

Q: Who do you read?

A: I love Tim O’Brien. And this will sound lame, but I really like Malcolm Gladwell. The thing that he doesn’t get credit for is his writing. “The Ketchup Conundrum” about how there’s a 1000 kinds of mustard but only one kind of ketchup.

I like when things read easily. I don’t like to see sweat on the page. When I was a teen, I loved Ernest Hemingway, because I was a clichéd young writer. In the long run, I think that was a good thing for my writing, though.

I also love Tom Junod’s “Mercenary” from a year or two ago. It was about a guy he met who claimed to be a kind of Blackwater guy, now hired to do security for a nuclear power plant. He wrote the story, and when then the fact checker started working on it, there were holes. The guy had lied about everything.  And Tom wrote the story in such a way—he had to rewrite it of course—that he could reveal that the guy was a liar—but slowly. You come to the realization that the story is wrong. And there’s this creeping dread. He took a situation that could have been a complete disaster and turned it into a great story.

I still read stuff like that all the time, where I feel totally useless as a writer, because I wouldn’t be able to write that piece. I’m lucky that I can pick pieces that I can actually do. You have to know what you’re capable of, to be brutally honest with yourself about what you can and can’t do. And occasionally go back and do the other stuff just to remind yourself why you don’t do it.