A young man named Davan Overton in unincorporated Oregon plays on his high school basketball team despite a tumor on his spine that has, since he was a toddler, hampered his motor skills and speech. If he takes a hard shot to the head, he may die, so basketball, a limited-contact sport, is Davan’s only outlet, and very important to him. His coach believes in giving Davan regular playing time, and Davan gets to shoot, though he’s painfully aware of how bad he is at it.

Here are the first two grafs of Griffin’s story:

In a small gym in the middle of nowhere, two boys locked eyes last fall in the final seconds of a meaningless, one-sided high school basketball game.

ESPN and the big broadcast networks never make it to Mapleton, a tiny unincorporated community situated on the Siuslaw River 45 minutes west of Eugene. The only video of the Mapleton High Sailors’ first game of the 2012-13 season was grainy and out of focus even before the shocked cheers of the gymnasium crowd shook the walls at the very end.

Soon, we meet a kid from the other team, named Ethan McConnell, whose nature led him to do something selfless, even inspiring as Davan kept shooting and missing.

If you hate spoilers, please pause now to read the piece and watch the accompanying video. 

What Ethan did was rebound — and then pass Davan the ball. Davan’s buzzer shot went in, and the place went crazy. Even the refs were cheering. The package – video, story and slideshow – drew a wide and positive response and, lucky for storytellers who like talking craft, also prompted at least one journalistic discussion, on Facebook, about the hard job of writing emotional stories without being exploitative or mawkish. One reader wrote that he thought the piece missed an opportunity “to explore the more complex emotions touched upon toward the end, about condescension versus generosity.” He continued:

Feels like that issue could have been the crux of the story and would have given a more profound insight into something that feels trivialized here purely for the “feel-good” factor. (The video almost explores this in more detail with Davan’s comments, but the sentimentality of the supporting material and music spoils it for me). Call me cold-hearted, but we’ve read these kinds of stories before and my sense is (the characters are) exploited somehow for entertainment, leaving me with the uncomfortable feeling that this kid is being subjected to further ridicule rather than being given a genuine degree of respect.   

Another reader argued:

I think that line between condescension and generosity WAS the crux of the story. The fact that the idea is introduced at the end – when we’ve gotten to know the characters, when we think we know what the story is about – is what makes it so powerful. Had the piece focused on (Davan’s) discomfort from the beginning, it would have been the story of a kid who is different wanting to be perceived as normal, and that’s as much a cliche as the feeling-good-through-sports story. But when you read at the end how this kind of thing happens to (Davan) all the time, that it has happened twenty times in a single game, you are forced to examine your own reactions; what looked beautiful now seems painful, and it’s hard not to feel complicit, because just a few paragraphs earlier, you had experienced the moment as uplifting. Could another approach involve the reader as much?

Now, three points of disclosure here: Reader No. 2 is Griffin’s wife, multimedia journalist and photographer Judy Siviglia, and Siviglia acknowledged as much in the comments thread. Griffin is a former Nieman Fellow and narrative student. Reader No. 1, who raised the point about sentimentality, is Finbarr O’Reilly, a current Nieman Fellow who is both a photojournalist and a skilled writer.

Together, O’Reilly and Siviglia raised interesting issues about decision-making in storytelling. With Griffin’s generous permission, we convened an Editors’ Roundtable for a critique and to see what a range of insights might add to the conversation. Today’s panel: Chris Hunt, a contributing editor at Sports Illustrated; Beth Macy, an award-winning features writer for the Roanoke Times, and a former Nieman Fellow; Ben Montgomery, a Tampa Bay Times reporter who runs the feature-writing archive Gangrey.com; and Tom Shroder, the former editor of the Washington Post magazine and founder of storysurgeons.com.

But first, the backstory, from Griffin, who writes:

Griffin

The story was the brainchild of multimedia journalist Rob Finch, who saw a short Sports Illustrated item on Ethan’s pass and saw the potential for a powerful video. He approached me to write a story to go along with the video. I was very much, and very happily, the sidekick to Rob and photographer Jamie Francis in the reporting process.

I went down to Mapleton planning on writing something reasonably short – 25 inches, maybe, rather than the 75 inches we wound up running. The story as we all initially saw it: A special-needs kid experiences a kindness from another student. That kind of piece can warm your heart, but it’s also something you’ve seen and read many times.

We interviewed Davan’s mother first, and she mentioned that he wanted to play football. When the three of us sat down with Davan, after Rob had him recount that game and that shot, I asked him in an almost offhand way about not being able to play football. He’d already talked a bit about his physical condition (and I’d already watched him get picked last for a kickball game in gym class), but something about that particular question took him in a different direction. He paused for what felt like a full minute and then described all the things he can’t do and all the ways he feels frustrated with his body and what his disability means to his life. Davan’s answer to the football question prompted me to probe deeper than I might have, on what that pass had meant to him. My writing goal was to give the moment its due. Cynical though I am, I could not deny that everyone who witnessed the pass and the shot felt something magical that night. Yet I also hoped to provide enough of Davan’s conflicted perspective to leave readers thinking about why these kinds of feel-good stories resonate. Is our enthusiasm about Davan, or is it about us, and how great we all are for wanting this kid to do well?

I initially tried writing this as an oral history, to introduce the scene and then step out of the way. Once I had a draft, I recognized (with a healthy nudge from my editor, Susan Gage) that the story needed narration, both to help you see the action on the court and understand what it all meant. I was hoping, without being too heavy handed or obvious, to structure the story in a way that would both drive readers through with some natural tension about what happened that night and also surprise them a bit at the end: I set it up as a story about a meaningful moment between two boys from two small towns. When the moment eventually comes, it turns out to mean something different, something maybe sadder and more emotionally nuanced than the reader might have expected.

That was the hope at least. I understand criticism that maybe I didn’t hit that point hard enough, or that I should have hit it harder earlier. I’m not sure how you write that piece for a metro newspaper such as the Oregonian. My goal was to tell this in a way that worked for two kinds of readers: those who simply wanted a heart-warming story about small-town sports in their Sunday paper and those who instinctively roll their eyes at heart-warming stories about small-town sports in their Sunday paper.

O’Reilly

O’Reilly’s response:

This is a discussion really worth having. Anna’s context reveals the thought process behind such a story and in light of her comments I’m far more impressed with her handling of the material – not an easy task, especially given the publication and readership.

Another thing that strikes me about these kinds of reactions to such sporting gestures is how culturally “American” they feel. Having grown up playing sports in Britain and Canada, good sportsmanship and fair play was always far more important than winning, and very much part of the broader social contract. Whenever we played American basketball teams in high school and college, they were always far more aggressive and “win at all costs,” which I suspect in some way reflects the American psyche.

We were always taught to make the sporting gesture, such as not running up the score against weaker teams or throwing the ball out of bounds rather than score if another team’s player was hurt and on the ground. If we tipped a ball out of bounds and the referee was unsure of the call, we would admit it was the other team’s ball rather than take advantage of the situation, even in a close game when it might mean losing. It would be considered lacking in good character to do otherwise.

The importance of sports and winning in American society is so great, and the amounts of money involved so vast, that reactions to simple, human gestures that non-Americans might consider normal feel somehow exaggerated. It would be interesting to see a piece that explores this issue on some level as well – why are we so moved by gestures that should be far more commonplace? What does this say about society as a whole?

The roundtable: 

Chris Hunt

I found the story well written and affecting. The structure works fine: the foreshadowing at the start; the short profiles of Davan and Ethan; the game and its aftermath. And I agree with Judy Siviglia that the story’s ultimate theme – the line between generosity and condescension – is in the right place and is sufficiently explored. What more, really, could the author have said about it? The idea is there for us to think about (we all have associations with it), and that’s enough. A danger in these pieces is excessive intrusion by the writer. Yes, it’s a sentimental story, but there’s nothing wrong with that. The quotes from Davan make it clear that he’s uncomfortable with the passes he gets from some opponents, and when he can’t quite say why he was not offended by Ethan’s assist, the author gives a plausible answer without overdoing it and without seeming to put thoughts in Davan’s head. Nice ending. Nice job overall.

Beth Macy

I was thoroughly enjoying Anna Griffin’s column about an unexpected kindness on an Oregon basketball court, especially her use of universal details – ”in the middle of nowhere,” “nothing but net,” “even teenaged boys” and their justifiably proud parents. I’m from a small town like the ones featured here, and the observers in the stands were people I felt I knew through Griffin’s keen eye and deft shorthand for detail.

The piece took on a welcomed depth, too, when I got to Davan’s “plastic smile” and we learn that this had all happened before, though not quite with such dramatic aplomb. I cheered for Griffin here, knowing that a lesser reporter would have left the complicated element out. As she writes:

But there’s a fine line, far thinner and harder to locate than the arc that separates two points from three, between generosity and condescension. Those of us on the giving end don’t always recognize it as quickly or as clearly as those who receive.

So true and so beautifully put. Then came an extended, six-sentence quote from Davan, though, that took me out of the narrative, the way most looking-back quotes do. A paraphrase in Griffin’s authoritative voice would have been tighter and stronger.

I wanted Griffin to own the narrative a little more throughout the story, especially in places where she relied on four- to six-sentence observer quotes from parents and school employees, some redundant and most too long. (Davan says the same thing more succinctly four paragraphs earlier, for instance, something a diligent editor might have caught.)

I appreciate that she gives Davan a voice in the story, but I wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted the reader to think about her quote choices, especially near the end: Was she uncomfortable herself with his discomfort and thought it best to let him try to articulate it? Was she intentionally passing that discomfort along to the reader?

While I admire that she delved into the complexities of the event, I wonder if a hint of it in the intro would have made for a more seamless read, elevating the sense of tension for the reader and giving her powerful kicker even more punch.

In the video, Davan’s mom said he “doesn’t understand how he touches people.” This story shows that in fact he does. That dichotomy, dropped in as a signpost earlier in the piece, could have been used to tease out the theme and build suspense, making an already moving story even truer and more complex.

Ben Montgomery

I think this came close to the perfect way to handle a story like this. Griffin gave us the  Good Morning, America version in the first three-quarters of the story – and I felt the right emotion in the right spots – then left us with something deeper to think about. To learn late in the story that this kind of here-you-go-buddy generosity happens occasionally and appalls Davan throws a blanket on the whole system. On the mom in the stands who negotiates backhandedly about him moving out and, between the lines, so much more. On the coach who approaches the opposing coaches before each game to make his case. On the town so excited to see their special boy score. On the players on his team who keep feeding him passes. It’s all a farce (if farce is too strong, then it certainly challenges the idea of competition) and it calls into question the whole operation. But what it doesn’t change is that very specific moment. Stop the tape. Let’s watch it in slow motion.

Davan’s not objecting. He catches the pass (yes, all of them, even the 20 from the kid on another team) and fires. He’s being generous himself, and selfish. He’s not dishing the ball to a better shooter. And Ethan’s moment? He scrambles for the rebound and appears to make a split decision and his parents have every right to be proud.

And there you have a legitimate moment. A climax. The falling action is how those actions fit into context, and Griffin gave us the complicated truth. To go any deeper – where else would you go? – would muck up a fine story.

It strikes me that this story isn’t about Davan and Ethan. It’s about the people around them, and what they made of it, and it leaves you wondering if anybody there ever thought about how Davan felt about so much patronage. Now they do. We all do. That’s what good stories do.

Tom Shroder

The story’s not perfect (on the critical issue of how Davan reacted to the gift throw from Ethan, the writer tells us “he reveled in the moment” instead of showing us), but on the larger issue of structure I like what she’s done. I like it that after the apparently triumphant moment (“Get ready for Good Morning America to call”) she comes back to Davan and we discover that this was a very mixed blessing for him. His discussion of the past instances, and how they felt, is powerful and revealing and seem completely honest and even eloquent. Then coming back to this instance, Griffin does a good job of defining how it was different – and better than the other ones. And aside from the aforementioned “reveled in the moment” loss of opportunity, the end is well handled, bringing us to a satisfying conclusion that feels neither saccharine nor clichéd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

On lively writing:

Jessica Pressler produces a fun read here, and I’d like to focus on how a lot of what is “fun” is a combination of lively, original language and acute observation. Throughout, she manages to surprise the reader with tart but entirely apt images – funny because they are both irreverent and true.

Consider the first description of the subject, Diane Passage:

When she laughs, her grapefruit-tree physique bounces merrily.

It’s more original and less vulgar than “tits on a stick,” and it goes somewhere, too – between the laughter and the merry bouncing you start to be predisposed to like a not-entirely-sympathetic character.

Passage giggles again, and the ensuing undulations manage to pull Barry’s attention back from the blonde who’d just passed by.

“Ensuing undulations” works so beautifully because it is a comically high description of such a low phenomenon, very Damon Runyon-esque – but also so true: We’ve all seen enough Barrys to know that head-swivel by heart.

Passage is one of those people that it feels like New York invented, though they thrive wherever male egos and dumb money coexist.

Another great observation – a fun clash of stylish language (“though they thrive”) and straight talk (“male egos and dumb money”) that is also poetry. A repeated one-syllable, two-syllable pattern pairing male with dumb and egos with money. A small slice of language perfection.

This next passage is a great use of what is always a smart writing strategy, which is to just give the readers the sensory info they need to draw their OWN conclusions:

His friend, let’s call him Paul, a tall, paunchy private-equity manager was quiet much of the evening but has become considerably more animated after a trip to the bathroom.

Now here comes another smart idea: wringing the meaning out of things others might pass by without comment. In this case, it’s a pretentious name with a transparent marketing strategy. Here’s how Pressler handles that:

Passage moved with her son from a small walk-up to a $7 million condo on the Upper East Side in a building so sure of its fabulousness that it was called “Lux74.”

Extreme compression is yet another artifact of good writing. Here Pressler finds a way to avoid the yadda-yadda of excessive background and tell the whole story in a phrase. The compression of how the character ended up so compromised is so extreme, and so plain spoken, that it becomes delightful, and hilarious:

As a kid, she’d dreamed of becoming a pop star or a veterinarian, but she couldn’t carry a tune and was allergic to hairy animals. By the time she was 18, all she really knew was that she needed to get the hell out of Detroit.

There are lots more like this to choose from, but I’ll end on one that I love because it cuts so directly to the truth of her character, and does so in a way that makes readers look at something familiar in a new way:

“If I was you, I know what I’d do,” said a male colleague one day in 2004, when she confided her problems. He eyed her curvy figure. “I’d go straight to a strip club.”

Some women might have gone straight to human resources. But Passage is a person who considers all offers.

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

On summary and momentum:

Let’s start with the obvious – a story about a stripper is going to grab a reader’s attention more than, say, a story about a trash collector. But Jessica Pressler does some wonderful writing here, drawing out a multidimensional character and engaging us with memorable scenes and details.

I particularly loved two graphs in her story, two graphs where she breaks from the action and tightly conveys what you need to know about this woman and the era she’s living in and the place where this story unfolds.

Many writers struggle with this kind of summary. It takes understanding your subject, building connections with the reader, writing in a conversational tone, and most of all, expressing what you know with authority. It also means having the discipline to take pages and pages of notes and provide only what the reader needs to grasp necessary background and to keep him hooked.

Look at what Pressler manages to do in this graph:

Passage is one of those people that it feels like New York invented, though they thrive wherever male egos and dumb money coexist. She’s the kind of woman who is able, through physical charms, nifty tricks of persuasion, and sheer gall, to inspire men to pay for … well, everything. She’s like Holly Golightly, if Holly Golightly had to kick a guy in the nuts when she went to the powder room. Which, in postrecession New York, she might have.

Pressler describes Passage in the present, who she is and who she plays. She gets you to understand that this kind of woman needs a city like New York to really work her magic, because “male egos and dumb money” are more prevalent there than in a place like, say, Norfolk. She compares her to Golighty, Audrey Hepburn’s character from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” one of pop culture’s most famous female hustlers. And she moves Golighty into the modern world, into Passage’s world, with a tease about having to kick a guy in the nuts. In four sentences, you have a pretty good picture of a woman who knows how to work her assets and get what she needs.

And then there’s this graph:

But not so long ago, Passage wouldn’t have entertained the idea of sexually humiliating a man for a mere $100. She wouldn’t have been at this bar, with these guys, taking a small puff of Barry’s spit-covered Habana cigar because he’d thrust it in her face and said “Suck it.” Until quite recently, Passage was the happy protagonist of a modern-day fairy tale: A single mother who, four years ago, was plucked off the dance floor at Scores by a financier who promised to change her life. And change it he did.

Here’s where Pressler invites the reader into Passage’s past. After the earlier graph, you think well, here’s a woman who lives this life because she’s wired this way and it’s better than getting a real job. But then you find out that it’s really about survival and how Cinderella lost her prince (in a not-so-Disney version). And again, there’s a tease, wonderfully appropriate for the subject matter, but also inviting you to find out what happened. How can you not keep reading?

Those teases are particularly important. In any piece of long-form writing, every paragraph needs to build momentum. When you’re in the middle of the dramatic narrative, it’s not hard to keep your readers moving along – there’s action and dialogue and often suspense. But when you step away from those scenes, you can’t bring the story to a complete stop. You still have to keep pace.

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

On how tone reflects character:

The focus of Jessica Pressler’s piece is a not-terribly-admirable character, a woman named Diane Passage who is a gold-digger. The story can make the reader feel uneasy and voyeuristic; it’s borderline tawdry, reflecting a world of hucksterism, populated by people with loose morals and a love of wealth. And it’s written in a breezy, gossipy tone that makes the writer – and the reader – feel like a part of this world. (The second-person “you” in the lede helps draw the reader in, whether he wants to be drawn in or not.)

All of this is, of course, deliberate. That glibness and breeziness camouflage Pressler’s fine reporting and eye for detail, which are the real backbone of the story. And that gum-smacking tone echoes (and thus reinforces) the larger-than-life character of Diane Passage.

Pressler did not write the piece in first person, nor did she write it precisely from Passage’s point of view. Yet the story seems to inhabit Diane, through language and sentence structure.

As a kid, she’d dreamed of becoming a pop star or a veterinarian, but she couldn’t carry a tune and was allergic to hairy animals. By the time she was 18, all she really knew was that she needed to get the hell out of Detroit.

As the story progresses, the reader encounters careless language that is used in a very deliberate way: “Great – not only was she broke, she was being publicly slut-shamed.” Or, “He was a schmoozer.” Pressler walks a fine line here, writing in Diane’s voice but with a broader perspective. That’s what makes this piece so fine – her understanding of Diane’s character, blended with her understanding of Diane’s flaws and limitations. The swagger only goes so far, and underneath you can feel the fear.

“A girl who knows what she’s doing can easily get a free dinner along with her drinks,” shows us Diane’s bravado, but it also shows the sadness of her situation, a life where she is getting by from meal to meal. (Albeit meals at fabulous restaurants.)

This swaggering tone makes Diane seem vulnerable and sad in a way that a story written in a more traditional journalistic tone cannot. There is much in this story that is hinted at, never stated directly.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

On when to let your character tell the story:

We’re taught to limit the quotes in our stories. Quotes tend to slow down the storytelling. Readers pause and step outside of the narrative flow as they “listen” to the character talk to them.

So we’re advised to select only the strongest quotes, using only those that advance the plot. We paraphrase the rest.

But Jessica Pressler veers from that guideline in her profile of Diane Passage. She quotes Passage extensively, particularly in the second half of the story. And her approach works well for this story. Here are some takeaways:

Use quotes when the protagonist is a natural-born storyteller. When Passage describes one of her clients’ unusual requests, it’s hard to imagine a narrator conveying the situation’s oddness and vulgarity in the way that Passage can.

We went into this little area and he was like, ‘First, go into the restroom and make me wait,’ ” she says. “So I went into the bathroom for like fifteen minutes and I was texting all my friends and then I came out and I kicked him in the nuts and he was like” – she drops her voice down to a meek whisper – “ ‘Thank you.’ ”

Use quotes when they reveal the protagonist’s motives and thought process. It’s clear throughout the story that Diane Passage is no dummy. She could probably achieve many other things with great success. But through her quotes, we come to see that Passage is not interested in a conventional life. Listen to how she rationalizes the life of the stripper:

During the day, I’d watch these sales people talk and jump through hoops,” she says. “And at night I’d go to work and watch these girls making $400 an hour to get people to go to rooms where nothing happens.” She widens her eyes. “Like, these girls are better than people who went to school and got master’s degrees and bachelor’s degrees.”

Use quotes when they unmask the character’s emotions. Don’t tell the reader that the protagonist is sad and disillusioned. Show it through her behavior and what she talks about. In the following quote, Passage offers Pressler a glimpse into her heart, if only briefly:

And eventually, between the dressing-room talk, the abject behavior of men on the Scores floor, and her own disappointments, Passage started to rethink her approach to dating. “I used to believe in love and romance,” she says. “But I felt like in a lot of cases I was contributing too much to my relationships. It was time,” she says, laughing, “to let someone else contribute.”

Use quotes when your protagonist’s voice exudes personality. You don’t want to overdo it, but you can enrich your story with the cadence of your character’s voice and the colorful words he or she uses. Think of how a radio story comes to life when a person with an unusual voice is interviewed. You can almost hear Passage as she describes, in her own style, the black-tie events she had to attend:

Some of those black-tie events were so fucking boring. We went to one at Blackstone? Their holiday party? I was like, I can’t believe I spent so much time getting ready for this.”

Use quotes when the protagonist is both sympathetic and seriously flawed. Passage is a complicated person (as most of us are), and Pressler does a good job at humanizing her. At the same time, Pressler lets Passage hang herself with quotes that reveal her to be judgmental and hypocritical.

“He always just saw the romance,” she says now, “but that’s not how I saw it. I saw 80-year-old men with 40-year-old wives. I saw a lap dance, a blow job, a Mercedes.”

In general, you’ll want to use only your strongest quotes in storytelling. But when you’re writing about characters with larger-than-life personalities, it will make sense to let them tell a lot of their own stories.

For more on this article, read the Storyboard Q-and-A with Jessica Pressler. For full bios of the Roundtable editors, see our introductory post.

Is there a story you’d like the Roundtable to tackle? If so, you can send a link to us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

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

Give me a little background on the story.

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

How the U.N. was funny?

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

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

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

I’m sorry, but I do.

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

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

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

The special needs kids’ party was the same day?

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

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

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

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

What his mother has told you.

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

“They’re all the same.”

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

He makes a joke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it still would have been a good story.

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

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

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

Yes.

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

Which was why I wrote you.

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

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

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

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

The humor.

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

I hadn’t thought of it quite that way.

Taking a deliberately juvenile approach as a way to manage –

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

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

Are you writing about yourself in writing about him?

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

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

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

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

Do you write a lot and then cut it down?

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

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

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

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

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

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

For full bios of the Roundtable editors, see our introductory post.

Chris Hunt
Assistant managing editor, Sports Illustrated

On the importance of the setup and kicker:

This story reminded me of the French film “The Return of Martin Guerre,” in which a character who appears out of nowhere might or might not be who he says he is. Like the movie, the lede of “Blindsided” both makes you care about Jerry Joseph – an overgrown child of misfortune longing for a home and a family – and plants seeds of doubt about him. The supposed facts of his life are carefully attributed: “He said he didn’t really know what day he was born. His parents were both dead before he turned 5, he said. . . .  Jerry Joseph’s birth certificate read January 1.” The attributions indicate that we don’t know these things to be true. Jerry’s life, another character guesses, might be a dream.

Even Jerry’s feelings at his birthday party are either reported or imagined by others. This deftly tells us that this story will be substantially about the way people reacted to Jerry and that we may never hear the truth from him. We will learn it, though: A line about Jerry’s foster father, Danny Wright, hints that the mystery has been solved (“It’s a moment Wright keeps coming back to”). It’s logical to imagine right away that Jerry Joseph will turn out to be a fraud (especially if you’ve been reminded of “The Return of Martin Guerre”), but as a reader you’re in the same position as the people around Jerry, and you won’t know for sure until they do. You have to read on.

Even after the mystery is solved, the story’s final section keeps it alive. We know Jerry Joseph’s real name is Guerdwich Montimere, but we really don’t know who he is. We only know who he wants to be, perhaps even believes he is. The author repeats the theme of the story, which he stated once before, well into the narrative: “Every man dreams about it. … How much fun it’d be to replay the game of life if given a second chance.” We finally meet Guerdwich, and he says his name is Jerry.

Paige Williams
Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

On suspense:

This is worth repeating: We’re often too quick to refer to any long feature story as a narrative. Just because a piece is long doesn’t make it a narrative, and just because a piece is short doesn’t not make it a narrative. One of my favorite narratives is an 835-word story by the wonderful Larry Bingham, about a Texas man who, at age 98, learned how to read.

A narrative contains arc, character development (doable even in a straightjacket, as Bingham proves), nuance and, to some degree, suspense. By suspense I don’t mean sounding the Here’s Some Drama! gong via strained writing and an authorial desire to make structure do the hard work of reporting/writing; I mean perfuming the air with an intriguing question or two. A mystery on any scale keeps us turning pages.

Mooney’s piece lent itself to a slow tell because the story itself is a mystery – that always helps – but he easily could’ve ruined the thing by overwriting, which tends to happen when you’ve underreported or when you’re stumped by the mechanics of a story that’s missing some of its natural parts. The development of suspense started not with the writing but rather with the reporting. In keeping key questions in mind as the investigator/writer, he nurtured them on the page: Is Jerry a fraud? Who the hell is Jerry? If he isn’t who he says he is, why all the fakery? How will Coach Wright, and Odessa, handle the revelation?

Those answers are the destination; Mooney seeds the story with foreshadowing details that move us there. Details about trust. Details about warning pings that sounded when Jerry first took off his shirt. Think of these as Chekhov’s firecrackers.

Also, as crucial as it is to work toward a killer kicker, it’s just as important in a story of this length to hone section kickers. Individually, Mooney’s section kickers keep you reading; collectively they’re the dovetail joints holding the whole cabinet together.

Examples:

• “Who were we to question his story,” Anders says. “He was the first Haitian most of us had ever met.”
• Just when you knew where Jerry was going, he went in a completely new direction.
• He needed to know one thing: Was there a girl?
• “Where’s Jerry, Daddy? Where’s Jerry?”

His ultimate kicker is powerful in its simplicity and also in its complex message about human identity. Plus, it leaves us in a moment of currency and forward spin.

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

On the art of withholding and revealing:

A lot of writing involves deciding how to release information, what to reveal now, and what to conceal for later. The idea is both to make a complex set of facts painless for the reader to absorb by managing the download of information, and (as Paige notes) to create suspense. Michael Mooney proves to be a master of both in this piece, a mastery he demonstrates before you even get beyond the lede. In the very first paragraph, he jumps right in to the literal middle of the story, but by careful selection of what facts he presents, he manages to make a complicated story comprehensible.

He economically conveys, in this order; 1) the mystery, 2) the unusual circumstances, and 3) the foreshadowing that something is wrong with this picture.

The mystery is conveyed directly, but with sparse information: “He said he didn’t really know what day he was born. His parents were both dead before he turned 5, he said, and he’d never celebrated a birthday in his life.”

The unusual circumstances: “But Jerry Joseph’s birth certificate read January 1, so on New Year’s Day 2010, his family gathered around him. It would be a new year, a new decade, a celebration of Jerry’s brand-new life.”

The incongruity is the cherry on top: “There were flimsy cardboard hats and streamers and wrapped gifts. Jerry, who at six feet five and 220 pounds was several inches taller than anyone else in his adoptive family, was presented a white cake adorned with candles in the shape of a 1 and a 6.”

Note how he chooses to never actually say the age “16.” Allowing the reader to pick this up only by indirection ironically manages to magnify its significance. Without ever saying it directly, he’s assured that every reader will emerge from the lede knowing that the mystery of Jerry’s origins and his age will be the most discordant issues in what otherwise might just be a feel-good story about a privileged family adopting an underprivileged boy.

Two paragraphs in, readers are already far more involved and curious than if the writer had simply explained what the story would be about in a traditional nut graf. He has delivered a keen intuitive sense of what will make this story worth reading, and a sense of delight in anticipation of a story told in a dramatic, rather than pedantic way.

He keeps his narration steadfastly nonjudgmental by taking Jerry’s increasingly implausible claim that he is not a fraud at face value – a stance that pays wonderful dividends at the end, when we discover that Jerry’s insistence that “I am not that person” has taken on more than a literal meaning, that Jerry’s lie has become, on some level his truth.

The overall principle here is one of respect for the readers, and an understanding that the more you enable readers to divine for themselves, using expertly arranged clues, the more they will get out of the reading experience.  Of course, this is a risky strategy, because it requires unerring judgment to prevent the sense of enlightenment a reader experiences from degrading into mere confusion. Mooney’s sure hand here removes any threat that will happen.

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

On developing character without the character’s help:

The question that drives this story, of course, is “Who is this guy?” and not “Is he Jerry Joseph or Guerdwich Montimere?” Who was it that the people in Odessa met and became attached to – a decent person or a fraud? Or possibly both?

The writer here has to reveal character, and has to do it without the character’s help.

That’s a dilemma we find ourselves in from time to time. Sometimes, a person is reluctant to share his story. Or he clearly wants to embellish his tale, to make himself come across in a stronger light. Occasionally, we’re writing about someone who has disappeared or passed away.

It’s not impossible to succeed in those circumstances, but it is challenging.

A reporter is forced to ask people who crossed paths with the character to help provide the telling details.

Michael Mooney does a lot of work here. He shows us what they saw:

• Danny Wright … noticed the kid get misty-eyed, just as he had at his first Christmas a week earlier.
• Lots of people saw him out there in the hot August sun. Three miles each way, jogging through the streets like he was Rocky or something.
• He skipped down the halls when he thought nobody was watching.

He tells us what Joseph told townspeople:

• He said he didn’t really know what day he was born.
• He’d been homeless in Haiti, he said.
• He said that most of his life was spent herding goats.

He gives us physical description, mannerisms:

• The kid had all sorts of tattoos, inflated pecs, and shoulders like a racehorse.
• Jerry had a beautiful wide smile and what nearly everyone describes as an exotic “swagger.”
• Fans remarked that with his flat-top haircut and the way he always seemed drenched in sweat, Jerry looked a little like Boobie Miles, the star-crossed running back from the Friday Night Lights season.

He shares what people were thinking about this guy:

• A few of the teachers joked that Jerry was secretly an adult.
• Anders wondered if maybe the kid wasn’t some kind of prodigy.
• “He knew the game like a coach.”

And the nicknames they gave him:

• They called him Grandpa and the Haitian Sensation.

He describes Joseph’s actions:

• Jerry was popular with the teenage girls, a good employee – never late, never snapped at anyone, never had any money missing from his register.
• Just seconds into the first quarter, he snatched the ball and drove the length of the court, throwing down what several teammates describe as a “gorilla slam.”
• If he thought he’d miss church, he made sure to e-mail Pastor Skelton saying he’d be thinking of them.

Imagine the litany of questions Mooney had to ask – what did Joseph do and say? What did you notice about him? What were you thinking each time you were with him? What were your conversations like? How did you react to him? Why didn’t anyone challenge his account of his past?

All those answers built this story.

At the end, readers are left much like the townspeople, holding out hope that it wasn’t a total betrayal. But if it was, at least we can understand how a stranger managed to win this town over.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

On finding the emotional core of the story:

(Full disclosure: I was Mike Mooney’s editor when he was an intern at The Dallas Morning News in 2007.)

While the character of Jerry Joseph stands at the center of “Blindsided” – he is the reason for the story, after all – Mike Mooney develops the emotional heart of his story through another central character: Danny Wright.

As Maria Carrillo notes, Mooney paints the portrait of Joseph through the perspectives of people whose lives he touched. Still, Joseph remains an enigma. Is he the ultimate con man, or is he psychologically damaged, or is he both? We may never know, and that’s where Danny Wright comes in.

Most stories need a central character that readers can identify with, and it helps if the character faces a dilemma.

Wright is a good man. He’s the 50-year-old basketball coach who used to direct the local Boys & Girls Club. He’s known as “Dad” or “Pops” around town, and he and his wife have taken in as many as 18 kids over the years. “The oldest of five in a single-mother household, Wright has been taking care of kids his whole life,” Mike writes. “It’s why God put him on this earth.”

Wright always sees the good in people. The dilemma he faces is that, while he can see a lot of good in Jerry, he can’t decipher what’s truth and what’s fiction in Jerry’s story. His faith in people is shaken.

Mooney’s storytelling benefits from Wright’s ability to observe what’s around him and reflect upon it. For example, the first scene – of the birthday party – is based largely on Wright’s memory. And the question Wright asks in hindsight launches the story. “It’s a moment Wright keeps coming back to, when Jerry closed his bright brown eyes. What could the boy have wished for? he wonders.”

Like Wright, we are driven to ask this question throughout the story as we learn more about Jerry’s fabrications. When Wright finally learns the truth about Jerry Joseph, we feel his heart breaking – our hearts break, too – even as his anger rises.

“This is you,” Coach Wright said, barely able to contain his anger.

“That ain’t me,” Jerry said.

“Look,” Wright said, leaning in, “I’m not asking for confirmation. I’m telling you. I don’t know what you’re pulling, but you need to get your things and be on your way.”

By the end of the story, Wright’s family is torn – his wife and kids still love Joseph, but the coach has his doubts. And he’s no longer sure whether he can still help needy kids.

Mooney’s story, then, is not only about the mystery of Jerry Joseph. It also follows the emotional journey of Danny Wright, from faith through betrayal to doubt.

For more, read our interview with Michael Mooney about his story, or take a look at our previous Editors’ Roundtables.

Is there a story you’d like the Roundtable to tackle? If so, you can send a link to us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

Our editors didn’t read each other’s comments as they wrote or see the email conversation between Storyboard and Bearak about his narrative.

For full bios of the Roundtable editors, see our introductory post.

Paige Williams
Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

On using the first person:

Journalists tend to have strong opinions about whether we should put ourselves in stories. Some support first-person reportage depending on the circumstances; others suggest they’d rather dine on dung than appear anywhere in a piece of work, despite the fact that first-person presence has a solid history and an important place within the craft. Whenever I give a little quiz asking students to match short first-person passages to the author, even practiced journalists are surprised to find the writers are Dickens, Orwell, Gellhorn, Didion…

In the right situation, readers connect powerfully to story via the personal pronoun “I.” A writer should deploy the “I” as carefully as a surgeon chooses a scalpel. The device itself lends nothing without legitimate intent. To me, first person works in Barry’s piece for three reasons:

It isn’t gratuitous. The narrative/personal quest depends upon use of the first person and especially upon the author’s relationship with Golden, a trusted source and keeper of the pivotal crime-scene video.

It allows for authoritative class contrast. By revealing details about his own lifestyle Bearak puts less fortunate residents’ economic circumstances – and the larger societal issues of law and order/mob justice – into a more intimate context than readers would’ve read in a depersonalized account.

He keeps the spotlight on others by remaining a minor character and keeping a respectful distance. While the author’s journalistic quest clearly drives the narrative, being present in the story allows him to bear witness in a quiet but powerful way and to authenticate what otherwise would have been a secondhand account of a horrific event.

Jacqui Banaszynski
Knight Chair professor, Missouri School of Journalism

On structure:

Structure is one of the peskiest challenges facing writers. Once you move past the basic (and backwards) logic of the inverted pyramid, questions of order and placement plague rookie and veteran alike. What stays in? What comes out? What goes where? Constructing a complex story can be like building a jigsaw puzzle of multiple dimensions, with images on all sides, ill-fitting tabs, no edge pieces and no box cover picture to follow.

In “Watching the Murder of an Innocent Man,” Barry Bearak does the most sophisticated thing a writer can do when confronted with that complex puzzle: He gets simple. Not that his story is simple. Far from it. Bearak leads us through more than 7,500 words, takes us deep into several distinct and difficult subcultures, introduces us to more than a dozen characters, weaves between present and past, and includes both intimately detailed narrative and sweeping social context.

It would be instructive (and fun, in a word-nerdy way) to diagram Bearak’s entire piece.  Lacking time and space for that, I’ll note these points:

Chronology is the core. That’s what I mean when I say Bearak gets simple. He starts in a searing moment that puts us in the scene and sets the stage for everything to come. After two paragraphs of narrative he pulls out into some establishing context. Then he quickly returns to the narrative through the first long scene, ending with a cliffhanger. But after that, the piece builds along a fairly straight chronology. We are pulled into the story in the same way Bearak was ­– through the video of the murder – and then follow him step by step as he tries to untangle the thicket of questions and characters he confronts. Pay attention to the places where Bearak uses a fairly direct time stamp to hold the story together: “… each day, widening the arc of our meander.“ “Within a week, Golden and I had become a marked pair.” “One recent Sunday afternoon…”

A quest drives the story forward. That’s true of any gripping narrative: The writer sets up a core question, then spends the rest of the story answering that question. (This is different than a story’s core meaning, or theme.) What makes Bearak’s story a bit different is that the quest is his. We are taken along on his search for answers. (A literary friend once told me there are only two storylines in all of human history: A stranger comes to town, and a man takes a journey. Bearak’s story encompasses both, and he is both the stranger and the man on the journey.)

Narrative is woven rather than broken. In complex pieces such as this, one successful approach can be a “broken narrative”– a structure that goes back and forth between narrative or action scenes and contextual or expository scenes. Bearak takes that foundation and makes it more elegant by weaving context directly into the narrative.  He slips a line or two of geography or history into the running story. As I read, I imagined a French braid with strands constantly being worked over, under and through. If you re-read the piece just to see how characters and their backstories are introduced, you’ll see that braid. Bearak is able to pull off that intricate weave because the core chronology is straightfoward and strong.

Characters are clearly identified. It’s tough for readers to follow this many characters in a piece. Yet we never lose track here because Bearak remembers to provide some brief reminder of who each person is. That’s just one of the ways Bearak answers the readers’ question when the reader needs the answer.

The story comes full circle. The chronology drives relentlessly forward, following Bearak’s quest. It ties together – is made whole – by ending where it began, with the boy who fingered the murder victim. This is also a tried-and-true structural device. But what makes Bearak’s use of it so stunning is that he comes back to Siphiwe not where the story started, but where the story took Sipihwe – to a place of defiant and inevitable despair. As such, Siphiwe was able to speak for the much larger defiance and despair of a country and a culture.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

On a sense of place:

Barry Bearak knows that evoking a sense of place isn’t just a matter of presenting a background landscape. He uses carefully selected sensory details – sights, sounds, smells – and movement to transport readers to South Africa.

“Put me there,” is a simple way an editor can encourage writers to think about the sense of place. The writer can provide context to the story by showing, rather than telling. She can also create a mood that permeates the story – anger, joy, sadness.

Bearak does this sparingly in his murder story. That’s important, because, at least in this story, we don’t want the plot to slow down and linger too long. Let’s pay attention to Bearak’s sketch of the South African township. We hear music; we watch women pinning laundry and storekeepers brushing away flies; we smell garbage and sewage; we learn that some of these areas have bureaucratic names like Extension 1 and Extension 2.

The road abounded with township life: good music playing over bad radios, women pinning laundry to droopy clotheslines, storekeepers brushing aside plump flies in the butchery. People were curious about the mob’s intentions, and some followed along as if dutifully joining a militia. In a few blocks, the pavement of Thubelihle gave way to hard-packed dirt and stones. A busted pipe had gone unrepaired for months, and the escaping water cut a trough in the ground that now carried a stream of garbage and sewage. The odor was bracing, but there was open air ahead, a large, marshy field that separated Extension 1 from the squatter camp in Extension 2…

What we see is that life goes on under some outrageous conditions. And we get a hint about why these conditions are a factor in the violence. People are curious. They don’t see things getting any better. They start to follow a mob. Who knows how ordinary people will act as the mob grows violent?

Bearak uses a second sketch to show the economic disparity in South Africa, the wide gap between the townships and the gated communities with beautiful names.

I live in much different circumstances, renting a house in the Dainfern Golf and Residential Estate, one of dozens of gated communities built in a city overwrought about crime. The perimeter is fortified with high walls topped by electrified wire; guards patrol the landscaped roadways and roundabouts. Houses are large, and many front entranceways are ornamented with waterfalls and fish ponds…

He’s also showing us this place because he wants to be honest about his comparatively (and understandably) sheltered life in South Africa. He may not be able to fully understand what life is like in the townships, and he’s being straight with us about that. He uses a sense of place not just to set a scene but to help define and explain the dynamics of his story.

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

On keeping the reader engaged in a depressing story:

Everything about the subject of this piece – a mob in a crime-ridden squatter’s village randomly settling on an innocent man to vent their rage – screamed “Don’t go there,” and yet, go I did. Why?

Or to rephrase the question: When a writer wants to explore unremittingly depressing material, how can he keep the reader’s attention and deliver something that feels like enlightenment rather than a fist to the face?

Bearak accomplishes that here, through what I would call “elevation.”

I mean this almost literally. The reader is raised to a great, almost godlike height and allowed to view these hideous events as if from a mountaintop. Every piece can be seen in its relation to other pieces. What seems nasty and brutish on ground level is still nasty and brutish, but from the mountaintop it plays out on a scale so grand that the meaningless becomes meaningful, and the horrific becomes tragic. It’s the difference between watching a slasher film and Macbeth.

A word of caution for those of you who may want to try this at home: It is impossible to make a reader feel as if she is getting the Big Picture unless the writer has gotten there first, with full focus and resolution. It requires a mastery of the subject so complete that every detail, every factoid and quote, snaps into place.

But even that’s not enough. The writer has to find the right voice, the voice that communicates a buffering distance without sacrificing any of the intense reality. This is what Bearak does superbly here.

From the very start, he speaks in sweeping statements that never stray into overgeneralization. The central antagonist is “a bad boy wanting to become a worse boy,” and “an unlikely guide to lead [the growing mob] into their dark work.” These sentences are simultaneously simple and mythic, like those in a fable.

That same calm certainty continues throughout the piece, making the tale unfolding seem like the most natural course of events in the world, instead of a living nightmare. That works because, seen from the mountaintop, evil IS a natural part of our world; it has prime causes and immediate causes, and it flows downhill like a creek becoming a river. Consider this introducing paragraph that stays focused on the flow, even as it elevates to get the longer view:

A few men lifted him onto their shoulders so that the crowd, already in the hundreds, could see him better. Then an older man, wiser about these things, said to put the boy down. More than likely, they were about to kill someone. No one in the mob ought to be too conspicuous.

Elevation is again expressed by the impressionist dabs of paint with which the context is painted:

The road abounded with township life: good music playing over bad radios, women pinning laundry to droopy clotheslines, storekeepers brushing aside plump flies in the butchery. People were curious about the mob’s intentions, and some followed along as if dutifully joining a militia.

“Good music playing over bad radios” is classic, an observation wrapped in a description, and like any precise yet poetic observation, it becomes a metaphor for the larger reality. The elevated distance in the perspective is expressed time and again in word choice. When the mob emerges into a field with a busted sewer pipe, the odor is described as “bracing,” an obvious understatement that communicates the idea that living with filth is simply something to be endured.

Bearak is constantly choosing precise understatement over hyperbole. Notice the low temperature of the language when he places the immediate in the context of the general:

Mob justice is not uncommon in Diepsloot, and most often it involves the swift capture of a supposed criminal, the villain there to beat up, to stone, perhaps even to wrap in a petrol-soaked shroud. But this undertaking was something entirely different. The vigilantes had walked a long distance on a hot day in the uncertain pursuit of unspecified thugs — all on the word of this talkative boy.

The elevated view allows us to watch these horrors unfold and see for ourselves how a quest for vengeance and some kind of justice so effortlessly turns into simple thuggery. Note how Bearak refrains from labeling this transition point, but lets our Olympian ability to see inside the perspective of the participants do the work. Pay attention especially to his use of the word “despicable” in the following:

Siphiwe led the way, back along the dusty paths between the shacks to the edge of the marshy field. The spaza shop was locked, and though empty of people, it was actually well supplied with soft drinks, biscuits, beer, toiletries and paraffin. The mob nevertheless busted through the walls, and Siphiwe rooted around in a back room, collecting for himself two pairs of sneakers, a Nike track suit and a nylon jacket. The shop was set ablaze, again to the noisy approval of the crowd, though this, too, seemed scant retaliation against murderous thugs. Where were those despicable people?

“Elevation” does not mean glossing anything over. To the contrary, it means being able to look at things with the unflinching, unblinking acuity of an eagle’s eye. Note the calm tone, the accumulation of simple words and sentences that seduce us into watching, instead of turning away, as a very uncomfortable truth about the nature of human beings plays out before our eyes:

The video shows Farai already on the ground, using his left leg to try to block the blows of a man swinging a heavy piece of wood. Others are pelting him with rocks from behind and hitting him with sticks. At this point, it is still possible to imagine the young man’s escape. He can speak; his movements are spry; there is barely a smudge on the lilac of the shirt. But by the next scene, he is sapped of strength and badly injured. His frantic efforts to get away have failed, and he has landed in a filthy, water-filled ditch. As he crawls out, his hands groping at the dirt, a man in blue pants kicks him in the chest, and Farai flops backward with a splash. Some in the crowd, including children, scoot around to get a better look.

The video then jumps ahead. Farai is again on dry ground, lying on his back, seemingly near death but still breathing. Blood is leaking from his head. He barely raises his left hand, and this trivial movement somehow becomes a cue for the beating to resume. A man wearing a white cap wallops him seven times in the face and neck with a plank, the assailant’s arms reaching high to amplify the force of his swing.

—-

For more, read our interview with Barry Bearak, or take a look at some of our previous Editors’ Roundtables.

Is there a story you’d like the Roundtable to tackle? If so, you can send a link to us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

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

Kelley Benham
Enterprise editor, St. Petersburg Times

On writing about emotion:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Hunt
Assistant managing editor, Sports Illustrated

On the pacing of details:

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

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

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

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

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

On narrative unity:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, Corey,” his dad said.

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

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

Paige Williams
Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

On Voice:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

On focus:

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

Say to one scrap of paper.

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

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

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

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

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

On the importance of being there:

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

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

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

We learn more about his family’s financial situation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, Corey,” his dad said.

——

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

How did you first hear about Ben McDaniel, and at what point did his disappearance become a story?

In late February. I’m trying to read the papers out of the Panhandle, large and small, because of my work on Dozier [School for Boys] and also because there are places along Florida’s hidden coast that are untapped. There’s very little news coverage, and what’s there often gets overlooked. It’s golden for someone like me who has the freedom to go up there and do work. I caught a small story in, I think, the Jackson County paper.

McDaniel’s family, Patty and Shelby, had announced a $10,000 reward, and the story was about Edd Sorensen, who in fact is in my story. He’s a pretty fantastic recovery diver and cave diver. Sorensen had told the local paper that this was dangerous – basically, “I can understand them wanting to find their son, but they’re going to get someone else killed by putting up this money.”

I immediately recognized that this was a pretty fantastic story, and that if the material held up, it could be really great. You have a mystery, first of all; the guy went in and hasn’t been seen since. Hanging onto that mystery, you have some really interesting human conundrums: the grief of the parents and friends, and the risk for the cave divers.

Pride was involved as well, for the divers who’ve gone in and come out empty-handed. They’re saying, “Look, take our word for it. Trust us. We’re the best of the best, and Ben’s not in there.” They felt like the McDaniels’ insistence that Ben was in there was sort of an insult to them: “They don’t believe us. We’ve told them, and now they’re putting up this reward.” There were strong feelings of hurt and embarrassment as well on the part of the divers.

So it seemed like this whole mess of emotion swirling around this great mystery. I kind of held onto it for a little bit. I think I brought it up at one of our weekly meetings, just to see how people would react to it and whether they would have the same reaction that I did, which was “Wow, this has real potential.” I heard that out of the people in the room, so I took the opportunity to go out and do some real reporting.

How long did you take to report and write the story?

I was working on some other things at the time. I’d say probably I took a trip up there for three days. And then maybe another four or five days on the phone back home, reporting. And maybe four or five days writing. So two weeks, 2 1/2 weeks in all.

When you sat down to write, you had this material – I don’t want to ruin it for any readers – but when you sit down to write, you have a mystery without a simple solution. How did you approach structuring the story?

That was cause for great anxiety in the beginning, because I had the ambition to find Ben McDaniel myself. That was a real desire. I was thinking, “Maybe if I talk to enough people, I can find this guy.” Or at least find some evidence that he met his demise or that he still exists. That was the mindset that I went in with.

Three-quarters of the way through the reporting I was like, “I still don’t have an ending. I don’t know where he is, and people are still going to be disappointed if they read this story and then get to the end and there’s nothing to tie it up. It’s still as much of a mystery as it was in the first section.”

So driving back from the Panhandle, I called a friend, Michael Brick, who is down in Austin. We talk about stories a lot. I kind of called to hear myself tell him the story, to see where it went. We had really bad reception. Because of the spotty reception, I had to be brief. We kept getting disconnected. And so each time I would be like, “Forget all that. Dude’s missing. I don’t have an ending.”

And at some point I started to think of this story in a different way: This is a story about grief and how the dominoes fall when a man goes missing. And that helped, because then it became not a story about Ben specifically, but a story about all the people left behind to try to solve the mystery. Then it was just thinking about the story through that prism. Because there’s no ending with Ben, it gave the rest of us the ending.

You focus on Emily. Did she give you that ending herself?

Gene Weingarten sent me an email yesterday, and I think [Tom] Shroder may have put him up to it. Weingarten loved the ending, and he was wondering if that was mine, or if I just went there.

It came from her, but I felt like quoting her there would have screwed it all up. She is thinking very seriously about diving into that hole to see for herself if Ben is in there. She’s an open-water diver, and it takes a long while to get cave-certified. She’s thinking seriously about saving up the money to get cave certified and to go down in search of him. That came at the end of our talk.

We were supposed to talk at 7 on a Wednesday night. We had a hard time getting in touch. Our conversation wrapped up about 11:30. So 4, 4 1/2 hours on the phone. She and Captain Hamilton and Ben’s parents, they all entertain these theories. They’ve entertained some really wild theories: “Could he be in witness protection?” “Could his ex-business partner have followed him to Florida and killed him?” But after they run through the theories, it all circulates, and one theory leads to the next.

Near the end of our conversation, she was going back and forth about whether Ben had the capacity to commit suicide through going through the hole, or whether he had the capacity to leave and put everybody through this incredible grief. She was saying, “If only we could see down in that hole, then we could rule that out as a possibility.” It struck me to ask, because she had mentioned that she was a diver, “Have you ever thought of going down there?”

She said, “Yeah, I sure have. I know it would take a lot of money, and I know it would take some time, but that’s a serious part of my thinking right now.”

When I heard that, it gave me that – I don’t know how to articulate this, but there’s a spot that I hit sometimes in reporting… It’s like I have to stand up. It’s almost a mix of anxiety and happiness and sadness, these things that typically exist on opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. But I felt that, and the light came down on me, and I thought “That’s perfect.” If the possibility exists that Ben went through the hole because of his brother, then the possibility exists that she’s going to go through the hole and pursue Ben. It just felt like the right way to end the thing.

So you realized that was an important moment right then?

When she said it, when that came out of her mouth, I thought, “That’s the end of the story.”

I noticed that midway through the story, you start throwing out questions. There are no questions asked in the first half, but the second half has 13. It’s an unusual approach to writing a mystery narrative.

That’s news to me, that there’s such an extreme change. I do know that up to a point, we know exactly where Ben was leading up to his disappearance. We have an unlimited amount of facts about the days and hours leading up to that dive. And after that it’s eight months of questions. So it’s not surprising to me that the story changed in that regard, because the rest of the story can be one giant question mark. It’s just a matter of handing it over to the readers to entertain the same questions that I had and the same questions that Ben’s family and the people trying to find him had.

Did the story change drastically in the process of writing or editing it?

The one big change was really just a matter of adding a line of the section about three-quarters of the way through the story that solidified the idea that if Ben was grieving his brother’s death so much that he abandoned this life, whether purposefully or with disregard for his own safety, if he went through the hole to deal with that grief, then it’s the same kind of grief that might bring Emily into that hole.

I wanted to make that as clear as possible without being ham-fisted. And so I added a line about something his parents had entertained and said, maybe not directly but close: maybe Ben wasn’t running from something; he was running to something. I wanted to put that thought in the readers’ minds before I hit that beautiful monologue that Chuck Cronin delivered about why people go into these crazy caves, and then sort of bring it down with the powerful ending that belongs to Emily. So it was just a matter of adding that line.

I overwrote the thing, which I always do, I think the first draft might have been 6,000 words, and it ran at 3,400. It wasn’t Bill [Duryea, my editor,] who cut a lot out of it. It was just me trimming a lot of stuff and removing the scaffolding – a lot of self-editing. And I had turned it over to some people, which is not uncommon, for general thoughts.

I got some good advice from Jon Jefferson, who’s half of the writing team of Jefferson Bass. He regularly makes appearances on the New York Times bestseller list for a series of books called “The Body Farm.” He writes with the guy who started that body farm at the University of Tennessee, Bill Bass. Jon just has a way of applying fiction techniques to nonfiction that I’ve come to appreciate. He offered some feedback and some good advice.

You mentioned overwriting. There are so many approaches writers take to organizing their stories, from meticulous six-level outlines to just sitting down and starting. How does overwriting fit in with your approach?

I outline, so I had an outline. I knew where I wanted to go. It’s weird, because the overwriting is not the excessive use of adverbs for me. It’s including too much information, stuff that might be unnecessary distraction. For instance, the first draft included the theory that Ben could have gone into witness protection, which is something his parents were leaning toward for a while. I reported that out, and figured out they don’t do that. The federal government doesn’t fake death to protect people. And beyond that, there’s nothing in Ben’s history to suggest that he may have needed to go into witness protection.

That theory was pooh-poohed, but I included it in there, because I thought readers might have the same question themselves. It was just four or five paragraphs going down that rabbit hole, and then shutting that idea down. So going back to trim, it seemed unnecessary. I thought, “I’m not sure people will make that jump, and if they do, that’s OK, I’ll just disregard it in its entirety, not even bring it up. It’s not going to hurt the story.”

There were a couple paragraphs in the first draft about why north Florida has so many underwater caverns. I talked to a geologist at Florida State University to set the scene a little more, including this chunky bit about how these caverns are formed over the years. I was trying to teach people about geology that I was curious about. And then I thought, “There’s not a place for it. I want it to be really tight.” Even if it’s 3,400 words, I want it to read like it’s 20 inches. It’s a lot of cutting and stripping away everything that is unnecessary.

Anything else you’d like to say about the piece or about narrative journalism more generally?

I find it so incredibly useful, beyond the editors who work at the St. Pete Times, to have a team of people who aren’t going to bullshit you, who don’t mind taking a look at what you’ve written and giving you feedback. I think I sent this [Michael] Kruse, Konrad Marshall, who is in Australia now but is a great feature writer. Wright Thompson read it. Jon Jefferson read it. And each of them had a different thing to say about it, like “in this part, I think you should go here.” “I need you to establish better the dimensions of the cave at the restriction.”

This is before I even turn it over to Bill. At the point that I feel like I have a solid draft, I want feedback from people who aren’t reading it for grammar mistakes or for style and spelling. I just generally want to know “How did this story make you feel? How could it be better?”

Some of it you use, and some of it you disregard. I don’t know if I’ll ever turn in a story that I feel might be important without having distributed it to a few trustworthy friends to offer feedback early. I want to make that a regular part of this process, because I found it to be really useful.

That’s a new part of your process then?

It’s not totally new, but I think I probably sent this to more people than I have before. Normally, it’s one or two. Kruse is my regular go-to guy for feedback; we talk stories all the time. But sending it to five people? At first I thought that everybody would say something different, and it would confuse me. That’s not the way it went at all. Everybody did have some different thing to say, but I found it all useful.

Each month, we talk to the reporter who wrote the story while the editors pass around their comment sheet. The editors write about the piece without hearing from the reporter; the reporter talks about the piece without knowing what the editors will say. Tomorrow, we’ll post our interview with Montgomery [update: interview is now up], but here, we offer our editors’ take. Comments appear in the order in which they were made. For full bios on our editors, see our January post announcing the Roundtable.

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

There are so many things to like about this story. For starters, it’s nice to see a piece that is essentially straight chronology, from beginning to end. You watch it play out as it happened, and you know what the people in the story knew at the time, so you’re trying to figure out the mystery as they did.

I love how patient Montgomery was with this story. (Full disclosure: I’m a fan of Montgomery’s, and he works with a close friend of mine.) He introduces the situation, you meet all the important characters, and he keeps probing. Montgomery never rushes. He helps the reader to understand what the divers are looking for and what they see or don’t see (strong reporting there), and he builds up the frustration – for the parents and the sheriff and the girlfriend. He walks through every possibility – accident, foul play, escape, suicide. You start to want answers as much as the people who are looking for the diver.

I do think there are a few places where Montgomery reaches and didn’t need to. For instance, he says that at 6-feet-2 and 220 pounds, the diver was hard to miss. That doesn’t sound like a particularly large man to me. And boy, he went too deep – no pun intended – when he waxed about what exists at the end of the line.

Maybe it narrows to nothing, or maybe it opens to another chamber, another world, a far away place that few believe Ben could go.

Narnia?

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

About two-thirds of the way through this piece, I thought, “Uh oh – he’s not going to tell me what happened.” And while this is brilliantly reported, and beautifully written, I wonder if a slightly different focus would have helped the reader feel less dismayed when they realized the answer to the mystery was not forthcoming.

Montgomery is very strong at building tension and momentum. He is great with details – the chat board messages, the crisp list of dangers of cave diving (“the silt can blind”), the 10-inch hole (though that should have been mentioned only once, not twice). He can turn lovely phrases. (Such as, maybe Ben “ascended into a new life” And the strong last line.) And he has the mechanics of pacing, and pivoting, down very well, ending each section with drama and at a point where I absolutely must read on.

But since the mystery remains a mystery, it seems to me that it would have helped to have a stronger driving question than “what happened?,” since that question is not answered. One suggestion: Perhapsfocusing on Emily Greer would have worked – since she ends the piece, and she sort of represents hope and the future and the possibility of eventual resolution, she might have been cast as a stronger character throughout the piece, which could document her journey from happy girlfriend to bereft girlfriend to determined girlfriend.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

Ben Montgomery is a top-notch writer because he is a top-notch reporter. His precision with details brings authority to his storytelling. To see that, read the first section closely. You learn about the temperature and weak breeze the day Ben McDaniel disappeared; the temperature of the spring; what McDaniel was wearing; the fact that he was testing his equipment and jotting in his dive log before he went for the dive; the words on the warning signs at the mouth of the cave.

I also admired the reporting Montgomery must have done to understand the history and dangers of cave-diving – and to be able to describe the mouth of the cave, the narrowing tunnel, the gate and the tight spots.

I agree with Laurie: Montgomery’s challenge here is that the diver’s disappearance remains unsolved. I’m not saying we should avoid telling stories with unsolved mysteries. But, in order to approach a satisfying end, the storyteller needs to discover some other resolution, large or small. Maybe Montgomery’s point is that, when we lose loved ones (especially those who disappear without a trace), we’re left with holes that we can’t fill.

I would have encouraged Montgomery to frame the story even more so from McDaniel’s parents’ or girlfriend’s vantage point, and then figure out what epiphany they might have experienced. Perhaps it’s enough to say that, living with that terrible loss, they committed themselves to making sure the diver would not be forgotten.

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

What I like most about this piece is the simplicity, the almost “Dragnet” accumulation of short, clear sentences that patiently lay out the forking maze of a conundrum, pursuing one possible line of explanation after the next, only to reach a blank wall every time. I disagree that the failure to come up with a solution, to answer the mystery, is a failing. In fact, I think it is the whole point of this piece, and I think Montgomery realized that and then set out to write precisely about that – the lack of a reasonable explanation, no matter which way you turn; the way there are things in the world that defy logic and refuse explanation.

There were a few times when he got too enamored with the poetry of his writing. He pulls off a great moment and gets at something real:

Every time you challenge yourself, every time you overcome your fear of the dark and tight spaces and death, you resurface more alive, born into a new world. The air smells cleaner. Food tastes better. Sex is sweeter.

Then he follows it with a line that’s pure pose:

Who knows what exists at the end of the line? Maybe it narrows to nothing, or maybe it opens to another chamber, another world, a far away place that few believe Ben could go.

Unfortunately, he steps off a cliff at the end when he says of the girlfriend:

She’s been thinking lately about what it might look like down there in the dark. She may never get over this without knowing what’s past the last restriction. She dives, not in caves, not yet. But she could. She’s much smaller than Ben. She could fit.

This is either really her thought, that she wants to go past the last obstacle, in which case he erred badly by not saying so explicitly. Or, she has no intention of doing that, in which case he was being dishonest.

Chris Hunt
Assistant managing editor, Sports Illustrated

My own full disclosure: I once participated in a three-day writers’ conference in the wilds of southeast Georgia with Ben, who’s a mensch and a fine musician in addition to being a fine writer. Like Maria, I’m a fan of his.

The story is deeply reported and beautifully written, but I agree with Laurie and Tom that it didn’t overcome the problem posed by the unresolved mystery. Ben might have attacked the problem head-on, foreshadowing it early and then writing more about the agonies of unexplained disappearances, perhaps in place of the purple passage Maria cited. As it is, the what-happened-next approach builds our anticipation and can’t help but leave us disappointed when we realize we won’t find out what ultimately happened.

Couple of quibbles: The chronology in Memphis was a little fuzzy to me – when did Ben’s business and marriage go kablooey, and when did he reconnect with Emily? – and I missed a general description of Vortex Spring, which I couldn’t quite picture: What does it all look like, where is the dive shop, etc.? Still, the story grabbed me. The writing is spare and vivid, the pacing just right, and I cared about the characters. Great work.

Jacqui Banaszynski
Knight Chair professor, Missouri School of Journalism

Montgomery weaves a tale that lures you ever forward to learn what happened next? That is craft, not trickery. Pay special attention to foreshadowing and cliffhangers.  Montgomery plots this as a movie, setting up the core character and suspense, then hopscotching from scene to scene, leaving bread crumbs along the trail: warning signs at the cave, jimmied gate lock, abandoned air tanks.

Study the reporting for depth (broad cast of characters), detail (dollars in the wallet, name of the dog), precision (size and shape of the cave and the bodies worming through it) and creativity (gin-clear water). Great writing is born of great reporting. Montgomery reports.

Flaws:

The story is unduly long. Basic redundancies could have been excised with a squeegee edit.

Too many confusions. What triggered call to cops? Did Ben go through the keyed gate when the other divers saw him disappear? When did the girlfriend enter his life?

Ending. Casts story in a new light with a late-appearing and underdeveloped character.

This is a good yarn about an unsolved local mystery and the people caught up in it. That should be enough (though, alas, that might be a hard sell to editors these days).  But it overreaches, forcing the mystery into a morality tale. Dial back the gothic (especially a lot of the soul-searching lines, which tip from show over to tell) and let it be what it is: a mosaic of people connected by and unable to shake this mystery.

For more, read our Q-and-A with Ben Montgomery, who talks about how and why he chose his ending and the importance of having a group of readers you trust. And if there’s a particular piece you’d like to see dissected by the Roundtable, send a link for the story to contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org. Stories must be already published, available online and strong enough to stand some tough love.

Comments appear in the order in which they were made. We asked editors to note what they thought did and didn’t work in the piece, and to explain why. (For full bios of the group, see our January post announcing the Roundtable.)

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

As you read “The Boy from Gitmo,” pay attention to Michael Paterniti’s decisions.

He starts the story in the middle of the action. We’re in the C-130 with Eric Montalvo. He’s thinking: “What the fuck have I gotten myself into now?” Paterniti allows the mystery to unfold.

He controls the point of view. He tells the story primarily through Montalvo’s perspective. But there are passages where we shift POV – the scene where the two U.S. soldiers get injured and a few passages on the boy’s experience at Gitmo. In a story with several characters, the writer selects who has the primary POV, and who, if anyone, has the secondary POV.

He tells half the story before identifying the prisoner. We know him as “the boy” or “the kid,” only learning his full name when a judge rules him no longer detainable. We realize the prisoner is not only young, but stripped of his identity.

He uses surprising language, transcending standard description. Some Kabul glimpses: “the ash taste of burning refuse blooming,” “a low cloud of dust sparkles,” “the women cocooned in blue burkas.”

I wanted more about Montalvo’s history. We learn just a bit about a friend’s murder and Montalvo’s discovery about his father. A little more context would have helped me understand his motives: “Being here this time, too, has triggered that unconscious need to do something for those who can’t do for themselves.”

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

Paterniti did a great job of reporting this piece and figuring out a theme and a structure, and he worked just as hard when it came to the writing of it. He never slacks off. His descriptions are terrific and his verbs are surprising and strong: Things stalk and ping and wedge and sweep and skitter and butterfly. (Butterfly! What a great and unexpected verb.)

Montalvo is “slightly fattened.” The boy feels a “spindled pain” in his head. The view of Cuba from the plane is brief but brings an instant picture to mind. The piece is a delight to read.

As Tom says, the point of view is primarily Montalvo’s, and so Paterniti uses language that Montalvo would use. But when he switches, for a nanosecond, to another POV, he does it deftly. Again, it’s all about careful selection of words. (The boy wonders what judge or “wizard” will make the decision to get him out of Gitmo – “wizard” is brilliant, because it reflects his complete bafflement and lack of understanding of the process.)

Regarding structure: It’s basically straight narrative, starting when he heads off to Cuba, ending some years later in Kabul. But there are crucial pivots to work in the background, and, again, he does this deftly. The pivots are short and vivid and they, too, are narrative. There’s no leaden backstory here, no plodding experts. The action, even though it is not always going forward, never stops.

The last line is powerful, but I wonder if it is truly earned – despite Montalvo’s demons, I think it applies more to the boy than it does to Montalvo himself. It was the only thing about the story that I questioned.

Kelley Benham
Enterprise editor, St. Petersburg Times

I also tripped over the last line, but only the last line. The story carried me along effortlessly for more than 9,000 words.

The headline and blurb lead the reader to believe this story is about the boy, but it’s about the lawyer. The boy causes some key changes in Montalvo and how he sees the world, and the boy shows the reader something new as well, but we see it from Montalvo’s perspective. That’s why it’s a problem that I don’t understand him better. Like Tom, I finished the story hungry for more on his background and his motivation. I wanted more emotional punch.

Paterniti attempts to address this in a couple places, most notably here: “Montalvo will never be able to explain it to them, or anyone. Not even his kids. This boy needs him. It’s that simple.” But I found that unsatisfying. After such a long story, I wanted a richer conclusion.

That said, this is a gorgeous story. It’s a schooling in descriptive writing and in use of language. Paterniti always leaves me marveling at his ability to put me under a spell.

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

This is one of those rare pieces of journalism that reads, front to back, end to end, like a fine work of fiction. It allows the reader to inhabit a world, inside out, and a stream of riveting events, characters and conflicts that flow from beginning to end.

It does this through

1) Language – telling the story in words that convincingly mimic the spoken cadence of contemporary American warriors thrust into the hellish belly of wars in alien and hostile territory. Consider this first moment where the story suddenly lifts you out of your complacency and places you back down on the edge of your seat, where you stay for the rest of the wild ride. As the attorney meets the terrorist he is assigned to defend, shackled to the floor, the two have this exchange:

“Don’t you know that if that door were opened and we both were out there free, I’d kill you?” Nothing has prepared Montalvo for this kind of venom, but his reaction is visceral. He leans forward and says, “Don’t you know that if that door were open and we both were free, I’d kill you first?”

Wow. And when the attorney meets the possibly innocent child accused of throwing a grenade at American soldiers:

Despite everything, the alleged enemy seemed, well, hopeful. As if a clerical error had been made. Like the boy believes he should be going home soon, once he’s been heard by the president or judge or wizard, whoever’s in charge.

The wizard. Beautiful!

2) Absolutely stunning detail, vividly described but not overcooked. Describing the grenade attack:

In the next instant, Lyons lies slumped over the wheel, unresponsive, blood gushing from a tear in his femoral artery. His legs are mangled; his left foot is missing a toe. Meanwhile, Martin, who’s still in the passenger seat, looks down at his hands to find them covered in blood. But whose?

There are some misfires, but they are insignificant compared to the overall achievement here. Unfortunately the primary fault is in the lead. Let’s retire the “This is a story about” gimmick in the first sentence. WAY overused and totally unnecessary in such an amazing tale as this. If tempted to use that, force yourself to think of something powerfully unique to this story.

Jacqui Banaszynski
Knight Chair professor, Missouri School of Journalism

Ditto the writing lessons: sparkling verbs, language steeped in situation and character, narrative structure that spools out like a surreal movie. The “wizard” behind this piece is Paterniti himself.

Note the reporting behind that wizardry:

Interviewing:  Few traditional quotes. External and internal dialog, and other interview-based storytelling, develop character and put readers in the scene.

Background and documents: Lyrical writing is grounded in deep, fundamental reporting – homework essential to credible narrative.

Observation: Descriptions of place and action give the story the quality of being not so much read as experienced.

Yet I found too-frequent speed bumps:

Confusion of time, place and character. I often had to backtrack to orient myself. The lead defense attorney comes out of nowhere. What is a “bad attorney’s back”?  Who apprehended the suspects at the bomb site?  Over what time period did the boy’s weight drop?  Deft time and place cues would help ease shifting time sequences. Attention to pronouns would delineate multiple characters. (Sometimes the story reads as if passages were cut, then not rewoven.)

Transparency. Paterniti’s signature use of detail often serves as its own implied attribution. But this subject is politicized and opaque (which makes the reporting all the more impressive). A few sophisticated clues – direct or secondary sourcing, first-hand or reconstructed scenes – would aid understanding and trust.

Cohesion. Was this primarily about Montalvo’s motivation, which seemed underdeveloped, or about abuses at Gitmo and beyond?  The opening and ending didn’t tie the whole together.

Paige Williams
Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

Disclosure: Mike is a friend.

All I can do is echo my colleagues, particularly with regard to Montalvo’s motivation and the risks of helping Jawad. As an editor, I’d have had few large questions: Why the talk about a court martial, for instance? I didn’t understand how Montalvo’s actions rose to the criminal level.

Other edits are at the local level. The conflicting use of italics: Early on ital indicates Montalvo’s thoughts (What does a forty-pound dip in a growing male indicate?) but the device kind of wanes. Also, I’ve have pushed for small tweaks: “Unlike the al-Bahluls of the world, who face their incarceration with defiance – spitting and throwing feces at the guards – the boy is known to call out his mother’s name in the moments of his deepest despair.” It wasn’t clear whether Jawad called her given name (surely not) or “Mother” or what. Dialing it in: “Unlike the al-Bahluls of the world, who face their incarceration with defiance – spitting and throwing feces at the guards – the boy is known to call for his mother in moments of deepest despair,” or even: “The al-Bahluls of the world face their incarceration with defiance – spitting and throwing feces at the guards; in the boy’s moments of deepest despair he is known to call for his mother.” By ending the sentence on the strongest possible word, this option would leave us at “mother,” which is more emotionally powerful even than “despair.”

But do you see how I’m reaching?

Chris Hunt
Assistant managing editor, Sports Illustrated

I love this piece. What affected me most was the sheer feeling of it – the outrage, frustration and despair. The story works brilliantly as a metaphor for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. Many of the same forces that make it impossible for Montalvo to help Jawad – fear, corruption, conflicting agendas, mutual incomprehension – also doom the U.S. effort in Central Asia. It’s a great example of using a small story to illuminate a larger one. I didn’t feel shortchanged on Montalvo’s motivation. We get enough of it, and if there’s still some mystery there, well, who knows what finally motivates people?

The one awkward break in chronology comes at the end, when Jawad’s flight to Pakistan is inserted before the final scene of Montalvo and Jawad in Kabul. The story changes focus and point of view seamlessly, with one minor exception: During a description of Jawad’s interrogation that seems to come from government documents, we suddenly read something that could only have come from Jawad or from the writer’s imagination: “They keep … blasting him with words until he loses his grip on them, until an opaque glow comes between him and them….”

Many of the descriptions are terrific: the “arid land of organ-pipe cacti and big loping rodents called banana rats”; the taxi “hitting people with the open door as it goes, the bloody legs dangling”; the boy appearing “again and again in Gitmo’s strange pointillism, hungry, lonely, trading for whatever he can.” There’s the occasional head-scratcher (“a hollow thud, like an empty bottle rolling on the floor”) and non sequitur (“al-Bahlul is also among the most doctrinaire, having been locked away in solitary for years”), but these are minor quibbles. To repeat, I love the story, and it’s all about the feeling.

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

I agree with so much of what’s been celebrated, particularly about the terrific reporting and word choice.

I also love this story for its restraint. Writers sometimes struggle with drama. They feel compelled to make sure you understand that THIS IS A DRAMATIC MOMENT. Here, Paterniti never overdoes it.

This scene is brilliant:

In a room, she waits for her son. And then comes a young man with an impressive beard and blemished skin, a heavy brow, and dark, penetrating eyes. Her first reaction is, no, there must be some mistake here. But the man insists he belongs to her. She reaches out, to touch his head, her hand to the spot where her son had always had a knob, and then she knows and can’t speak anymore, holding him close.

Look at what he didn’t include.

Great lessons here as well in how to use dialogue and quotes. The voice in Montalvo’s head conveys a lot of the doubt and angst he has about his personal choice, and what he says out loud is essentially him answering his own questions. He’s explaining why he had to get involved. It’s very effective.

I do think the writer is trying too hard with the lead. And like others, I thought the ending felt wrong. The attorney doesn’t seem free – in fact, quite the opposite. Also, the idea that “this boy needs him” exposed the emotional crater in the story. I related to Montalvo as a parent, and that’s what tied me in knots. The most wrenching dilemma here is whether he loses his own family to save this kid.

Some would say this story isn’t so much about the attorney as it is about America’s bad behavior and the madness we’ve created, but I’d say, I’ve read that story. I was drawn in by this man’s quest to right a wrong.

—–

See what Michael Paterniti has to say about his story, and stay tuned for the next installment of the Editors’ Roundtable in early May. (Or check out prior Editors’ Roundtables.) 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 worth a tug or two at its seams to see how it works.