Bestselling author and New Yorker writer Susan Orlean breaks down a semester’s worth of storytelling instruction in a two-hour online video course for Skillshare.com. For $19, you get tips and insight on 14 topics, from finding a story idea to collaborating with editors. Plus, a writing assignment: “Write a short piece of creative nonfiction on the most mysterious person you know.” One discussion board has already launched with the question “What’s your favorite piece of creative nonfiction?” (One answer so far: Sasha Frere-Jones’ 2010 New Yorker profile of James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem. “Its dialogue and description create an energy that seems to match the music, and Frere-Jones masterfully balances details and bigger ideas about trends and culture,” writes Alyssa Demirjian.)

Here's some of what you'll get:

1: Introduction (6 minutes, 43 seconds)

“You may ask why nonfiction. And I will make a very powerful argument for why learning to write effective nonfiction is valuable even if your interest as a writer is fiction, poetry, whatever genre. First of all, writing well is writing well. ... I happen to think nonfiction is a great basic primer on writing because you're working with the craft of fact, and using techniques to make that effective, elegant, creative."

2: Subject: Finding Your Topic (9:35)

“How do you find a good story idea? ... How do you figure out if it's an idea that will work? ... In practical terms, is this subject too narrow or too broad?"

3: Subject: Finding “The American Male at Age Ten” (7:15)

“He could have been any kid, so his individual story wasn't the motivation as much as the idea that it explored the very universal larger theme of childhood."

4: Research: Preparing for Reporting (9:10)

“I think the best reporting often can feel kind of uncomfortable.”

5: Research: Reporting (9:16)

“The writer should know much, much, much more than what they offer the reader. The reader without even being aware of it is going to be affected by the depth of knowledge that the writer has.”

6: Research: Organizing Notes (9:59)

“…Good nonfiction writing is reporting, thinking and writing. The reason I linger on the thinking is that it’s the one we often forget about.”

“By typing up your notes you reacquaint yourself with them in a deeper way. … You’re also beginning the editing process, the choice-making.”

7: Writing: Elements of a Story (9:41)

“You’ve got to be constantly aware of the texture and the rhythm of your stories.”

8: Writing: Dialogue and Quotes (6:02)

“If you can do reporting of subjects interacting with each other … the great advantage you have, then, is that textural exchange, which is the world presented to the reader without your interference.”

9: Writing: Description (4:45)

“If you take your favorite story and break out what percentage of them is pure description, in the best stories you’ll find that it is a little bit less than you might expect. That is because the descriptions that are in the story are really vivid, really memorable, and remarkably evoke enough that the reader fills in the remainder.”

10: Writing: Expert Opinion (3:16)

“Almost never is it very appealing to directly quote an expert.”

11: Writing: Conclusions (10:07)

“No story is ever finished. They end. They do not have to come to a crescendo and a completion that includes a recap and an assessment of everything you’ve already read. In fact, it’s almost an insult to the reader, to do that.”

12: Editing: Revising (9:58)

“There are three big questions to think about when you’re revising. One … is: How confident does the piece sound? Anywhere that you find an equivocation (“I think,” “perhaps,” “might have”) … step back, and revise. The reader wants to feel that the writer knows the material and is telling the story in a really authentic way.”

13: Editing: Collaboration (3:08)

“The easiest way to be comfortable hearing criticism, I think, is to not look at your piece as being done. The minute you think it’s done you’re no longer really receptive to input.”

14: The Ongoing Work of a Writer (8:51)

“There’s a lot of fear of thesauruses, which I do not have. Because I think a lot of times when you realize you’ve used the same words too many times – open yourself up to learning new words. Don’t use a thesaurus in a sloppy way where you slam in words you don’t really understand or that actually have connotations that are inaccurate. But work on language. It’s an easy thing to do. Read, collect words, enjoy words, appreciate them, and develop a bigger and bigger toolkit of language to use in your pieces to make them better, brighter, more vivid, more unique.”

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“The most important element in a good story is conflict. It’s seeing two opposing forces collide with one another.” That’s from Beau Willimon, the showrunner for House of Cards, and he said it at this year’s Aspen Ideas Festival, as part of The Atlantic’s “Big Question” series. The Atlantic also talked to former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, musician Yoni Bloch, The Moth artistic director Catherine Burns, PBS President Paula Kerger, The Newsroom producer (and former Obama speechwriter) Jon Lovett, and public radio’s Jay Allison, whose answer was, “Honesty. And grace.” Best two minutes and 46 seconds you’ll spend today, straight up:

The post Storytelling tips from the creative minds behind ‘House of Cards,’ ‘The Newsroom,’ PBS, The Moth and more appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Before Rebecca Skloot published the bestselling The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, she wrote magazines stories about science and about animals. You may remember her New York Times magazine piece "Fixing Nemo," about goldfish surgery, and her O, the Oprah Magazine story on the neuroscience of why it's so hard to change. In one of her most memorable stories, "When Pets Attack," Skloot wrote about the experience of nearly losing her pet Border collie mix, Bonny, to a pack of wild dogs—in Manhattan. The visceral, personal piece called out New York City on the loophole that allowed years' worth of attacks. We'll go ahead and tell you: the piece—the subject of today's annotation—is tough reading, but with a happy ending.

Quick questions to start:

Storyboard: We know how you came to do this piece, because the story tells us, but how do you get most of your story ideas?

Rebecca Skloot: Pretty much every story idea I've come up with has come from what I call "what" moments—moments that make me stop and go, Wait … what?! One of my favorite examples of this was the story I wrote about goldfish surgery. There's a whole world of veterinary medicine devoted to caring for people's pet fish—you can get them MRIs, cat scans, tumor removals, you name it. I found that story while sitting in a vet clinic with my dog. A vet walked into the room and a woman asked how the surgery went, he said, "Great, patient's up, swimming around." Then he started to walk into the back. I was like, "Wait, what? You did surgery on a fish? What kind of surgery?" He said, "I removed a tumor from its nose," and I was off, standing there with my dog, bombarding him with questions: How do you anesthetize a fish? Who pays for that? Why? I can trace most stories in my career back to those sorts of moments. Like: Wait, what do you mean there's a woman with a seeing eye horse? And what's an agoraphobia assistance monkey? I could go on, but the first and most meaningful example was when I was 16 and I said to my biology teacher, Wait, what do you mean there are cells that are still alive decades after the woman they came from died? For me, finding stories is all about taking the time to stop and follow your curiosity whenever something sparks it. That's sometimes harder to do than it sounds (you're busy, you're tired, you're doing something else, etc.), but it's so essential.

How do you work? What are your most important tools?

When I'm writing, I work at a treadmill desk, which has become essential for me in terms of keeping both my mind and body going when I'm writing and when I'm not. When I'm reporting in the field: My audio recorder, which is always on when I'm out reporting. My camera, with which I take absurd numbers of photos while reporting (the rooms I'm in, the people I talk to, the weather, the scenery, you name it), because you never know what details a photo will catch that will be valuable to you later. Of course a good pile of pens and notebooks.

You're working on a new book. What can you tell us?

It's hard to explain at this point (I'm not being coy; it would take me probably an hour to explain, just as The Immortal Life did in the early stages), but it goes back to my lifelong passion for animals. When it comes to finding stories, in addition to following my curiosity, as I mention in the annotation, I'm a big believer in following unique passions — the things you're obsessed with. My next book (as with my first) is one of those. In some ways, it started more than 20 years ago, in the freezer in the morgue of the vet school where I worked as a veterinary technician. The first story I wrote for my first creative writing class was about that freezer and the questions it raised for me about our relationships to animals. But really, this story is something I've been obsessed with since I was a small child.

The short summary, which doesn't do the story justice, is that it's about the role animals play in our lives and in science (two things that can't actually be separated). It's about humans and animals and ethics. In some ways, it's also about how I became the person who wrote The Immortal Life. That isn't the focus of the book — it's not a memoir. But underlying the questions in this book are the questions that led me to become a writer and to notice the story of Henrietta Lacks in the first place: What is the value of one individual life? How do you draw the line between the progress and benefits of science and its cost? But it's also about so much more. If you're curious, you can hear me explain the book in a bit more narrative detail in this interview (below). (And talk about it in this Q-and-A.) The portion where I talk about the new book starts at about the 20-minute mark. At the 11-minute mark you can hear me talk about what a derelict kid I was.

"When Pets Attack"
by Rebecca Skloot
New York magazine
Oct. 11, 2004

Eight months ago, if you'd told me I'd be obsessed with a little old Greek guy and fantasizing about killing his dogs, I'd have said you were nuts. One of the hallmarks of this story is its conversational, accessible, edgy voice. And your word choices – obsessed, fantasizing, nuts – ground us in the idea that we're kind of in for a wild ride. How much did the opening line change from draft to draft, or was this always the way you began? This opening line came out pretty much as-is the first time I wrote it, which is unheard of for me. I'm a compulsive rewriter, to the point where I usually rewrite every sentence many many times between the fist and final drafts. But I'd written this opening line so many times in my head before starting the story, it just kinda poured out.

If you'd said a little old Greek guy'sNice repetition of "little old Greek guy" – how did you arrive at that choice? I used "little old Greek guy" because that's what people in the neighborhood called him … in part I think his little-old-Greek-guy persona was one of the reasons he'd been able to get away with neglecting his dogs for so long, and why he'd never gotten in trouble when they attacked other people's dogs. He was just the cute little old Greek guy everyone in the neighborhood knew, the funny guy with the hot dog cart and, oh yeah, a bunch of dogs. That's how he'd been described by the New York Times, the New York Post, etc. He was a colorful quintessential Manhattan figure and people loved that about him. pack of eight junkyard dogs had been roaming the streets of midtown for years attacking people and tearing apart their dogs while city officials said, "Sorry, that's not our problem," I'd have called you a conspiracy theorist. A pack of wild dogs? In Manhattan? Never happen. Boy, would I have been wrong.The whole story is contained in this lede. It allows you to unpack from here. We know we're getting a public-policy issue, an animal-versus-animal issue – obstacles, which are so important to narrative. Knowing you, this was your plan. Discuss. Indeed it was. I never write ledes like this one. I'm not a fan of nut graphs or telling the whole story up front. I'm a big show-don't-tell person: I like to just put the reader in the action from the beginning, which is why most stories I write begin in the middle of a scene. But that wouldn't have worked with this piece. Audience-wise, this was one of the most challenging stories I've ever written, because it was pretty much set up to alienate all readers from the start. For the animal lovers, the problem was Who wants to read a story about a poor innocent dog getting torn apart? For the non-animal lovers it was, So your dog got hurt, bummer for you, why should I care? For me, the job of this lede was saying: Trust me, keep reading. I needed to broadcast that this wasn't just a sad story about a dog you may or may not care about; that I'm not a cop hater or an over-the-top bleeding-heart animal lover who's just upset because her dog got hurt; that I wasn't going to be melodramatic or gory—that in fact, I might even maintain a sense of humor while facing an awful thing. But really, the biggest messages of this lede was: You really want to keep reading, even if you don't care about dogs, or you care about them so much you can't stand knowing about bad things happening to them, because this story is about much more than my dog—it's about humans and animals and public policy and your life and your safety and the safety of the city. Hence this first paragraph: a rollicking overview of everything that was coming in the story without mentioning my dog at all. That was my way of showing everyone how the story related to them before saying, oh, by the way, that guy's dogs nearly killed my dog.

Here's how I know:Voice again. You have always written in a highly accessible style, which is part of what made The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks—a complicated narrative about human cell culture, commercialism, medical ethics and race—an international bestseller, and it's what helps distinguish your science writing. How did that develop over time, or did you always write this way? I've always written like that. I think that comes in part from my background: I was a science major who started writing about science before studying literature or creative writing. I skipped all the high school classes where people read the classics (long story), then spent most of my college years studying things like biochemistry and neuroanatomy instead of English. So my literary education was pretty lacking. I didn't even know that different writing styles like conversational vs. formal existed. I just knew there were science stories I wanted to tell, and when I sat down at my keyboard, they came out just like they would have if I'd been on a barstool telling the story aloud. I didn't realize "conversational writing" was a thing until grad school, when I found Elmore Leonard's famous rules for writers, which included this: "If it sounds like writing, rewrite it." I cut that out and taped it to my computer monitor where it stayed for many years. As I became a professional writer, my belief in the importance of conversational writing only grew stronger. Accessibility is so important when you write about science, ethics, and policy, and I want my work to be accessible to the broadest range of readers regardless of their backgrounds in science or literature. So for me, writing conversationally is about doing my best to let as many readers into the story as possible.

The Sunday before Christmas, I woke up to my friend Elizabeth pounding on my door. She was staying at my apartment, and had taken my dog, Bonny, out for a walk. When I opened the door, Elizabeth stood clutching Bonny's empty, bloody collar, screaming, "Something happened!" I grabbed my coat, a blanket, my cell phone, and a credit card, and ran out the door, barefoot.Walk us through these instincts, if possible. Plenty of people in this situation wouldn't have had the presence of mind to be so precise with the go bag. Did a background in veterinary training come into play? Oh yeah, my background in veterinary medicine helped in this situation (though it may be a chicken/egg situation—perhaps I ended up working in veterinary emergency rooms because this sort of reaction comes naturally to me … who knows). Having been through a lot of emergency veterinary situations, I definitely have the ability to shut down my own fear and emotions to focus on saving the animal. This has allowed me to help animals in some pretty crazy situations, but has also led to me nearly getting killed a few times (picking up injured animals on busy interstates, scaling a cliff to rescue a dog who'd gone over a long drop, that sort of thing; just recently, in fact, I nearly impaled myself while jumping the fence into my neighbor's yard to do CPR on one of his dogs—she'd suffocated when her playmate got his jaw under her choke collar then twisted his head several times, creating a tourniquet around her neck). In terms of my instincts in the Bonny situation, clearly I wasn't 100 percent coherent with them; if I had been, I probably would have grabbed shoes, given that it was snowing. Also, one thing I didn't mention here, because I was trying to avoid seeming too crazy, was that I was wearing a rather short nightgown when Elizabeth knocked on the door. I put my down jacket over it and spent several hours going around NYC in and out of cabs and vet clinics wearing a nightie, a down jacket, and no shoes. Eventually my dear friend Erik, who's Elizabeth's husband, went and got me some shoes and clothes.

Ralphie, my maintenance man, pointed toward a courtyard behind the building. "A pack of dogs," he said. That's when I saw the first puddle of blood and a fist-size chunk of Bonny's muscle on the sidewalk. "They eat her," Ralphie yelled. "Don't look."How—and why—did you decide to write about what happened? The moment I realized this was a real and broad story (dangerous dogs not being dealt with, legal loopholes, a city not enforcing laws, etc.) I knew it was an important one to tell on a local level, but also nationally, because things like this happen all over the country. Also: I was pissed. Because of my veterinary experience, the vet let me do Bonny's IVs and many other treatments at home instead of leaving her in the ER for weeks, so I was just there, cooped up in my 500-square-foot apartment, nursing Bonny (who was covered neck-to-hip in bandages and couldn't be left alone), calling various city officials in a maddening loop trying to get them to do something about the dog pack (which had taken to pacing outside my apartment waiting for us to go outside). As city officials told me over and over that there was nothing to be done, it's safe to say a significant amount of rage and determination built up inside me. Writing the story was definitely traumatic, because I had to live and re-live the attack and its aftermath, but it let me feel like I was doing something, anything, to fix the situation. In the end, it was cathartic.

I used to be a veterinary technician. In ten years, I went from general practice to performing daily autopsies in a veterinary morgue to being an adrenaline-pumped emergency-room tech who did CPR on dying dogs. I'd seen animals bigger than Bonny torn in half by packs, I'd seen missing limbs and decapitations, I'd done autopsies on dogs who'd eaten children, and I'd documented the contents of their stomachs for police reports. Which is to say, when I heard the phrase "pack of dogs," I had clear visuals of what I was about to find.I don't know if you want to talk about it just yet but this reminds me of a conversation we had the other day about your new book project, on animals/pets. Note to readers: I'm not pimping out Skloot's new book here. I'd like to think that what we're doing here is exploring how writers come up with story and book ideas, and how we sometimes follow the better (or louder) angels of our nature into subject matter. What you told me may or may not make it into the new book but it involved having to bear witness to – and participate in – things that most pet owners and animal lovers could never bear to see. Why are you drawn to such stories and to animals in particular, and how has that made its way into your work? What's narratively interesting to you about this material? I'm going to invoke John McPhee here, as I like to do: He once looked at everything he'd written in his career, and he found that most of it could be traced back to something he was interested in (perhaps even obsessed with) before he turned 18. The same is true for me (and many other writers). Pretty much everything I've ever written has to do with animals, ethics, science, policy or some combination of all of them. I tell stories about the complex and often ethically sticky situations that arise when those things meet everyday life. The root of some of this is pretty clear to me: My father got very sick when I was 16 and ended up enrolling as a research subject in a drug study that didn't go well. (I've written about that and its connection to my first book here under "What sparked your curiosity about Henrietta Lacks"). So I'm sure that's where my interest in science and research ethics and policy came from. I've also always been into animals and the ethics of our relationships with them. From the time I was 5 I was sure I was going to be a veterinarian; I later worked as a nurse for animals in general practices, research labs, shelters, even a veterinary morgue. There was a lot of beauty and humor in my work with animals. But I also found myself in some pretty shocking and ethically complicated situations, in part because I tended to work in places where animals ended up when they needed help but didn't get it. Those stories are important ones that most people never hear; they're the reason I started writing. (The first story I ever wrote was about the freezer in the morgue at the vet school where I worked, which was filled with pets who died at the hospital, but more so with dogs and other animals who were used in teaching and research). Those stories have never let me go. I'm a big believer in the importance of paying attention when a story grabs you. I've learned at this point that if I can't shake a story, I have no choice but to tell it, even if telling it is the hardest path to take. That's where The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks came from, and it's where all of my animal stories come from. My challenge is finding a way to tell those stories that works narratively, that allows the public to read stories that are sometimes upsetting while still enjoying them (because those stories are sometimes funny, uplifting, or inspiring, even in their sadness). My goal is for readers to get so caught up in the story that they get to the end and realize they learned quite a bit of challenging material, but getting there didn't hurt too much. I have no idea if that answers your question. I guess the bottom line is that it's less that I find these stories narratively interesting at the start and more that I simply have to tell them, so I look for the most narratively interesting way to do that.

I ran into the courtyard and saw Bonny curled in a pool of blood behind a small bush, eyes wide, intestines hanging out through a hole in her side. I scooped her up, wrapped her in the blanket and lowered her onto a picnic table. That's when the vet tech in me took over. I didn't feel my bare feet in the snow; I didn't feel anything. I just lifted the blanket, checked her heart rate, pupils, and the color of her gums. I thought clinical terms like lacerations and puncture wounds, but the reality was, they'd bitten her so many times it looked like she'd been sprayed with machine-gun fire. They ripped her body open from hip to armpit on both sides. They slit her throat so deep I could see her jugular vein. They pulled her legs in opposite directions, detaching her muscles from her bones, until Ralphie heard the screams, grabbed a two-by-four, and ran outside swinging. When he got there, Bonny had the biggest dog by the throat, but its jaws were twice the size of hers, and wrapped around her neck. No mistake: They were going to eat her.Gruesome; painful to read. How could you be sure you wouldn't turn off the reader? You can never be sure, but my hope was that at this point between the use of voice and story structure, I would have won the trust of the reader enough to do this. Though I'm still being very careful—it's a scary image, but pretty tame compared to what it could have been.

A few months before my 17th birthday, my best friend and I went to a grocery store for some coffee and eggs and came home with Bonny.The structure of this story is part of what makes it so compelling and bearable. You leave the reader hanging on the question of whether Bonny will or won't survive—you're sort of giving the reader an out—and take us into her (and your) past, letting us see both of you as characters. How did you arrive at this structure? I wanted the story to be a fast-paced straightforward narrative, and the pacing just came naturally as I wrote it. I knew I couldn't linger for very long on the attack story at any point because I'd risk losing people, so I knew I had to jump around pretty quickly to give readers a break from it, and to keep the tension building. We adopted her in the parking lot, straight from a cardboard box in the trunk of a rusted-out ChevyGreat detail. How did you remember that it was a Chevy? We had a photo of it, which I kept for many years. But also the car was just always part of Bonny's story from the beginning: Where did you get her? The back of a Chevy. with a sign that said FREE PUPS. Her littermates climbed over each other, but Bonny stared straight at us. She was maybe three pounds, with ears so big and pointy they met in the middle of her head. We named her after a hilly area outside Portland, Oregon, where we lived—Bonny Slope.

Now she looks like a jackal.Interesting. "Jackal" echoes the pack of attacking dogs and keeps that terrible thread alive in the reader's mind. Funny, that's true, but totally unintentional. We always called her Jackal as a nickname because that's what she looked like.

She's lithe and graceful as a greyhound, a 35-pound lapdog who loves full-contact wrestling, even at 15. She's part Border collie—a breed known for having eyes so intense they can lock on to a stray bull and maneuver it back into a herd. Bonny's got that stare. As we walk the streets, she'll lock those chestnut eyes on mine like, Don't ask questions, just follow, then she'll put herself between me and whatever she doesn't like, and steer me home.I love this detail because it tells us she was a confident, capable dog, and not bait. Was that your intention? In part, yes. But also, this was just the essence of who she was as a character, and an important part of showing our relationship. She was a herding dog and I was her herd. She was always watching over me, taking care of me. A lot of my drive to help her, and write this story, came from that. She'd recently seen me through a divorce and the death of my other dog, who I'd had since I was 16—this was the first time in her life that we'd been alone, just the two of us. She had always been devoted to caring for me. It was my turn.

Minutes after the attack, I held BonnyNow we're back in the straight narrative, action. in the backseat of Elizabeth's car and screamed at her to ignore the one-way signs and red lights. After crawling through 46 blocks of Christmas-week traffic to get to the hospital, and after Bonny went into the surgery doctors said she probably wouldn't wake up from, I did two things: I looked down at my blood-covered self, still barefoot, and I actually laughed. It was a deep, disturbed, this-isn't-really-happening kind of laugh. Then I lost it.I'm glad you didn't give us the details of you losing it. Why didn't you? I left this out for the same reason I deleted that licking detail in the previous scene, and the nightie earlier. It was essential to my credibility as the narrator: in control of the larger story despite the intense emotions of the experience. I needed and wanted to keep the readers' trust; part of doing that was keeping my promise to not make this a story about me and my emotions. One of the most crushing moments for me that's not included in that scene, and was hard to leave out: I was in the back seat yelling about the stop lights, cradling Bonny in my arms, holding her body together with a quilt my mother had made. In the midst of her cries, Bonny looked up at me in a moment of complete serenity and kissed my nose. The whole way to the ER, she alternated between screaming in pain and licking me, reassuring me, still taking care of me, even in a moment when she was in such desperate need. That detail was in an earlier draft, but I deleted it as part of maintaining that voice of balance and emotional control I set up with the lede.

The next thing I remember is Elizabeth saying we should call the police, and me thinking, Damn right. She called 911: "Sorry," the dispatcher told her. "We don't handle dog-on-dog complaints. We can't do anything unless they bite a person. Call Animal Control." So she did. "Dog-on-dog attacks aren't our jurisdiction," they told her. "Call the ASPCA." So she did. "We don't handle dog-versus-dog attacks," they said. "Call Animal Control." Elizabeth laughed: They just told me to call you. "Okay, then call your police precinct." Elizabeth got the 10th Precinct on the phone and said she'd like to file a complaint. "Sorry," the officer told her, "you can't file a complaint for a dog. Call the Department of Health." So she did, and guess what they said: "We don't handle dog-on-dog complaints. Call 911."Clever and highly readable collapsing of time/process in this graf. Discuss. Ha, thanks. One sure way to make readers glaze over is a bunch of back and forth phone calls with endless talk of organizations and acronyms. So I wanted to get through it all quickly because of that, but also to show readers what this felt like in the moment: A fast blur of blah blah blah calls from blah blah blah agencies all saying something totally confusing that I didn't want to hear.

Later that night,Nice, small move that pushes the narrative forward. with Bonny still unconscious after hours of surgery, I walked into the lobby of my apartment and overheard two neighbors talking. See the blood on the sidewalk? they said. Harry's pack did it again. This time they killed some dog named Bonny. I stopped. "Excuse me, did you say Harry's dogs?" "Yeah," one neighbor said. "That homeless asshole's crazy pack of dogs has attacked a bunch of people and mauled, what, a dozen dogs?" The other neighbor nodded. "At least." "They've been attacking people for years," my doorman said. "The city won't do anything about it."

Harry Theodore was born Theocharas Paleologos on a Macedonian goat farm and raised in Greece, where he trained Doberman pinschers to hunt and kill wild boar. He came to America at 18 with dreams of becoming an engineer, then went from factory job to longshoreman to hot-dog vendor. Business never did take off because his cart was always surrounded by a pack of German short-haired pointers. He got his first two dogs as a gift in the sixties, then bred and inbred them until he had more than 50.We're about to learn how you got Harry's story. Can you walk us through the different kinds of reporting you did for this piece? Much of it is observational, obviously, but I'm guessing you also relied on public records/documents. Yeah, I looked at court documents, public records—particularly those from earlier community hearings where he and neighbors testified when problems first started with his dogs; I read every media story that had been written about him, I talked with all of his neighbors, the people who owned the property he and his dogs lived on, etc.

Harry's in his late sixties now, five feet five inches tall, with a leathery face covered in gray stubble. He and his dogs live on 36th Street just east of Eleventh Avenue, a few blocks from my apartment, in a junkyard full of rusted hot-dog carts, car parts, and piles of garbage he scrounges from neighborhood markets to feed the dogs. The lot was part of a shantytown until the city cleared it in 1997; Harry moved in later that year when he got kicked out of an abandoned house on the East Side. He used to sleep in a wooden shack in the back of the lot, but it burned down years ago. After that, neighbors say, he started sleeping in a gutted van.

I've never talked to HarryHow come? I had a very clear agenda with this story—get Harry's dogs out of my neighborhood, get the city to do something about the larger problem his dogs represented. I couldn't ethically go to him as a journalist and interview him without identifying myself as the person whose dog his dogs had most recently mauled. He didn't want to talk to me, and I didn't want to talk to him. I was so angry I probably would have just screamed at him rather than asking him any journalistic questions. I didn't feel like it was necessary for the story, but I did feel it was necessary to make it clear that I hadn't talked to him, and where my information came from. —almost everything I know about him comes from the New York Daily News and New York Times. Five years ago, the Times ran a profile of him, a colorful and quintessentially New York character, a poor homeless man who could barely feed himself, yet opened his heart to the countless dogs he kept healthy, happy, and leashless—like "[a] shepherd . . . watching his flock." The thing is, that shepherd's flock would soon start attacking people and dogs.

The morning after Bonny was attacked,Now back to straight narrative. I started what would become months of calls to the same string of organizations: the NYPD, the Department of Health, the ASPCA, Animal Control, and the mayor's office. A number of the people I spoke to already knew about Harry's dogs. Officer John Baldino at the 10th Precinct told me, "I know who you're talking about. Those dogs are bad—I don't know why they don't stop them." A woman at the ASPCA said, "Oh, yeah, we get complaints about him all the time." (Just days before Bonny was attacked, the group had opened a neglect case; they've since opened another.) The Health Department had a report noting that Harry's dogs had recently bitten a man. Others hadn't heard of Harry, but they all said the same sorts of things: "There's no law against dogs attacking dogs." Or, "We don't handle dog-on-dog crime." My best bet, they said, was to get Harry's dogs picked up as strays. If I saw them loose, I should call 911 or Animal Control.Now we're moving into policy/exposition, i.e. structure.

Dangerous dogs (i.e., dogs that should be contained or confiscated) are defined in the New York City administrative code as "any dog with a known propensity, tendency or disposition to attack when unprovoked, to cause injury or to otherwise endanger the safety of human beings or domestic animals." Sounds straightforward.Again, voice: accessible without being condescending. But the problem is, not all relevant city and state laws list biting domestic animals as an offense. Even if they did, dogs don't qualify as domestic animals in New York—they're considered property. The inconsistent laws and the definition of domestic animal in effect create a loophole. City organizations can point to them and say, "See, there's no law against dog-on-dog attacks." The truth is, the city could tackle dog-on-dog crime under any number of laws—public nuisance, leash laws, destruction of private property, imminent threat to humans. But it doesn't.

"What you're dealing with is selective law enforcement," says Marie Mar, an attorney and a board member of the animal-welfare agency United Action for Animals.

And here's the unsettling thing: Dog experts will tell you that dogs who attack other dogs often go on to attack people around them as well.A fact that elevates the story significantly. Now everyone – not just animal owners – could or should care about the issue. "Dog packs hone their hunting skills in a series of escalating attacks," says Kenneth Phillips, an attorney and the author of several books on dog-bite laws. "They start with other animals, then often turn to humans, which means this could easily result in a dead adult or child and probably will."And boom, a whole different kind of urgency.

My neighbor Andrew Lauffer is the man who filed the bite complaint against Harry's dogs with the Health Department. "There were so many of them I couldn't see the ground around me," he says. "They were all biting me, biting my dogs." Harry's pack cornered Bob Lee on an icy sidewalk, and ripped his dog's flank. And 67-year-old Richard Foster was surrounded on his stoop. "Fourteen of them came out of nowhere," he says. "They knocked me over and pinned me down so I couldn't move." Then they went after his dog. In response to the attacks, Bob, Richard, and at least ten other neighbors formed a group called the Neighbors Concerned With the Dog Pack Attacks.Wow – did you know about this before you started reporting the story? No, I found this out after Bonny's attack, when I started doing research into Harry and his dogs. I'd only moved into the neighborhood about two months before the attack. If I'd known about this history, I would have figured out where he lived and made sure Bonny never went anywhere near his lot. And I probably would have started digging into it as a journalistic story.

They spent two and a half years fighting to get Harry's dogs taken away. They complained to the city and testified at community-board hearings in front of the Health Department (and Harry), but in the end they got sent in the same circles I did. Eventually they gave up.

One morning after Bonny came home from the hospital—after 87 stitches, more than a week in intensive care, and $7,000 in vet billsI appreciate that you don't go into detail about Bonny's surgery, intensive care, survival, etc. – you simply move the narrative forward without sabotaging the momentum with cheap melodramatics. Was that your approach all along or did some of the middle ground get cut? Yes, like with the licking-in-the-car detail and saying "Then I lost it" rather than actually showing me lose it, this was all part of the same conscious effort to keep the promise I made to readers at the start that this was not a story just about my dog getting attacked and how upsetting it was. I'm a big believer in telling personal stories not for the sake of telling them, but as a vehicle to get at larger issues that aren't about the person telling the story at all. That's what I tried to do here. —my doorman called and said, "Don't come downstairs—Harry's dogs are pacing out front." I grabbed my cell phone and ran downstairs, but they were gone. I called Animal Control. "Where are the dogs now?" the dispatcher asked. "I don't know, but they can't be far," I said. "They're probably headed for the lot." Sorry, he said, "We can't come pick up the dogs unless they're loose and you know where they are." Bonny was covered neck to tail in bandages, bruises, and stitches; she couldn't walk; my neighbors were afraid to let their children outside, but no one would do a damn thing about the dogs.

That's when I ran back to my apartment and did something most people can't do. I called press offices, saying, "Hi, I'm a reporter writing an article about a pack of dangerous dogs that's been roaming the streets attacking people and dogs for years. Numerous people have filed complaints with your organization, and I'd like to find out why nothing has been done."Oh was this when you went into reporter mode? Like you said earlier, we're always in reporter mode. It never really gets turned off. I'd been taking reporter-level notes the whole time, documenting everything with photos and tape recording conversations, but this was the moment that I realized I was writing a story about it immediately, and that it was a story about this big city/policy problem. (This was very soon after the attack, so I think somewhere in the back of my mind I knew I'd write about all of this at some point, but I didn't know when.)

Suddenly, people paid attention. Sort of. Mainly, they made excuses: Budget problems. Not enough officers. Not our jurisdiction. When I called Ed Boyce, head of the veterinary branch of the Department of Health, I mentioned the relevant law, and he said, "I'm aware of it. I can only tell you that dog-to-dog attacks are not enforced by the Department of Health." Who does enforce them? "No one enforces dog-to-dog."

Okay, I said, so how about going after dogs because they bite people? Nope,Good clear no-nonsense voice again. How long did you work on this piece, by the way? Bonny was attacked December 2003. I started pitched the story to New York Magazine in January 2004 and got the actual contract for it in July 2004. It was published Oct. 11, 2004. In the midst of this I was also trying to write my book, pay the bills (including all the vet bills, etc). he told me: The people who were bitten don't count because they were with dogs, so the pack was probably going after their dogs and the people just got in the way.

"So you're saying you'd rather wait until they maul a person?"

"That's what you're saying," he told me. "That's not what I'm saying."

Elizabeth couldn't talk about the attack until weeks after it happened.Smart decision, putting the details of the actual attack itself this deep into the story. Discuss. I knew from the start I wanted to use the chronological story of the attack as the frame for this piece, but that I couldn't start with the actual attack, which would have horrified the animal lovers and non-lovers alike. The fact that Elizabeth couldn't bring herself to talk about the details of the attack until later was a bit of a narrative gift to me (sorry, E!), because it allowed me to tuck the actual story of the attack late in the story without manipulating the structure to deal with putting it in as a flashback. John McPhee wrestled with this same issue of strategically burying gore while structuring his story "Travels in Georgia," which involved people collecting and eating road kill. They find some road kill in the first scene, but through various tricks of time and structure, readers don't see them eat that very road kill until very late in the story, and by that time they're already hooked and are going to keep reading to the end even if they get freaked out. That was my thinking with this structure as well.

She and Bonny had been walking down 36th Street when three big brown-and-white hound dogs pushed open the gate of Harry's lot and charged them. One grabbed Bonny by the head and lifted her off the sidewalk; the others took her hind legs and pulled in opposite directions. Elizabeth kicked the dogs and pounded their faces, yelling, "Somebody help—they're ripping her in half!" No one responded. Five other dogs ran from the junkyard and latched onto Bonny's face, tail, stomach, and throat. Harry eventually hobbled from behind the fence saying, "Don't make trouble for me, I have a bad heart." Somehow Bonny slipped away, flying up 36th Street toward home, her body torn open and bleeding, with eight dogs on her tail. That's when she ran into the courtyard, where the pack cornered her until Ralphie came along with the two-by-four.Ugh. You handle this beautifully, though. A lesser writer might have played out the gory details or resorted to sentimentality. Restraint is the way to go, and conveys just as much power. Did you find yourself having to scale it back as you moved from draft to draft? Thanks. In general, I always write long and then cut later – I can't write if I try to edit myself as I'm doing it. So I put as much in as I need to, then I'm ruthless about editing (I refer to it as the Vomit Then Clean It Up method). I know some writers find it hard to cut their stuff, but for some reason I'm unfazed by it. For me the hard part is getting the first draft out on paper, the rest is when the real writing starts.

I replayed that scene in my head for weeks as I watched Harry's lot, hoping his dogs would get loose so I could call 911 like everyone said I should. But it didn't happen.

So instead I called Channel 2, the local CBS affiliate. That night, the evening news showed pictures of Bonny after the attack and me lamenting the city's inaction.

It showed the rickety latch on the junkyard and Harry saying the reason his dogs attacked Bonny was because "somebody opened the gate." Most important, it showed Harry, standing in front of his lot, smirking and saying this: "If somebody opens the gate by mistake, they might attack somebody else."

Still nothing changed. I called the mayor's office again, the community board, the city council, you name it. They told me they'd look into it and call back. They didn't. People started saying I should sue Harry. But for what? His rusted hot-dog carts? An injunction that would take years to get, and that he'd probably ignore?

So Harry's pack is still going strong. A few weeks ago, a neighbor told me they cornered a group of children playing in front of the Javits Center. They barked and lunged until people heard screams and ran them off. A few days later, they tore apart another dog and attacked its owner, Hal Caplin, who ended up in the emergency room with twelve stitches in his face.How'd you find out about Caplin? He was my neighbor, and others pointed me to him when I started asking questions about Harry and his dogs. He called the health department and the police and got the same old story. As have others. The Times recently ran an article about a group of neighbors on the East Side who've seen their dogs get attacked and beheaded by two Rottweilers, but the city gives them the same we-don't-do-dog-on-dog line they give me. Maybe I'll call them next, to see about challenging the city together.

So yes, I'm still obsessed with Harry and his dogs. I'm furious about what they did to Bonny, but this is about more than my dog. It's about the city needing to fix a law—and a law-enforcement—problem. (Last week, City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz introduced a bill that would close the dog-on-dog loophole,Great timing for the piece. Serendipity or strategy? Total serendipity. but it remains to be seen if it will be voted into law.) It's also about an autopsy I did ten years ago on a Rottweiler who killed a young girl. I had to sort through that dog's stomach and take inventory: One long blonde braid with scalp attached. One child's ear.Oh dear God. This is like the Big Twist. Just when we think we've learned everything we're going to learn about this situation, we get an unexpected backstory. What restraint, saving it for now. Discuss? This is another one of those "Travels in Georgia" situations – it was important not to throw this out early, because it could have freaked readers out. But it was an essential detail for me both in the story, and in my motivation to write it, so I wasn't going to leave it out, I just had to include it carefully.

That dog had a history of mauling other dogs. Just like the Florida pack that killed 81-year-old Alice Broom in her front yard days before Bonny's attack. They'd terrorized Alice's neighborhood for months, attacking people, mauling other dogs. Neighbors complained to authorities but got nowhere.

A few weeks ago, as Bonny and I walked up Ninth Avenue with my friend David, I saw four of Harry's dogs trotting toward us. They were two blocks away, weaving through pedestrians during rush hour. Harry was a good half-block behind the dogs. Bonny didn't see them; if she had, she'd have been gone. Because here's the thing: After months of nursing, she walks and runs just fine.Shocking – and of course relieving – that this story has a happy ending for Bonny. In fact, she lived for years after this incident, right? She did indeed – she lived almost six very happy years after the attack. She died peacefully at home just two months shy of her 20th birthday.

She may never regain full use of one hind leg, but other than that she's fine, physically. Mentally is another story: She recently started wrestling with me again, but full contact terrifies her. And dog barks send her into a panic—she screams and flails, struggles to escape from her collar or bite through her leash so she can run home. So when I saw Harry's dogs coming toward us, I handed David the leash. "Those are the dogs," I said. "Take her across the street."

As David and Bonny crossed Ninth Avenue, I stood in the middle of the sidewalk, facing Harry's dogs, watching them run toward me. And I did what every city official said to do: I called 911.

"Are they attacking anyone right now?" the dispatcher asked. "No."

"Sorry," she told me. "Try Animal Control." I called Animal Control, the Health Department, and the mayor's office. I talked to a traffic cop, then called 911 again. Guess what they said: "Are they attacking anyone right now?"

"No," I said, as Harry's dogs ran past me toward the junkyard. "Would you rather wait until they do?" What has become of Harry and his dogs, do you know? In response to this story and the outpouring of reader responses, the mayor's office condemned the lot where Harry lived, spayed and neutered all his dogs, and sent all but two of them to a shelter in Pennsylvania. They moved Harry into public housing in the Bronx, where he now lives with two of the eight dogs that attacked Bonny. I lived in that apartment with Bonny for about four years, very relieved we no longer had to worry about Harry's dogs. Several years after we left, in a pretty heartbreaking development, I got an email from a woman who lives in the building the mayor's office moved Harry into – she found this story after Googling for information about Harry and his dogs; she reports that he's built his pack back up to 20 dogs again and, according to her, News12 "reported" it but "distorted the story." So it seems nothing really changed in the end. I've been considering doing some sort of followup at some point. It's really a national problem – since the story was originally published 10 years ago, I have gotten a steady stream of emails from people who've had similar experiences in towns and cities all over the country. Their dogs get attacked, authorities don't do anything, then they Google, find my story, and email me asking if any of the laws have changed. They haven't.

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The Washington Post’s new narrative project, Storyline, launched today under the editorship of economics policy correspondent Jim Tankersley, with the tagline “People, policy, data.” As Tankersley explains in his introduction, Storyline is “dedicated to the power of stories to help us understand complicated, critical things. We’re focused on public policy, but not on Washington process. We care about policy as experienced by people across America.”

Tankersley points to a series by The Oregonian’s Rich Read (Nieman Fellow ’97) as an example of what’s possible. In 1998, Read told a story of global economics and politics by following a single shipment of French fries from the Pacific Northwest to a McDonald’s in Singapore. (The series, “The French Fry Connection,” won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting.) “Those stories brought the crisis home in a way no textbook or straight news piece could, because at each step, they showed how global trends touched people’s lives and livelihoods,” Tankersley writes.

Some items from Storyline’s mission statement:

"We’ll tell those stories at Web speed and frequency."

"We’ll ground them in data — insights from empirical research and our own deep-dive analysis — to add big-picture context to tightly focused human drama."

"Some stories we will tell in chapters, across days and months, collected under themes that we call storylines. … Really, they’re big questions about our country: Who’s being lifted by this economic recovery, and who’s left waiting for recovery to kick in? How is the new federal health care law changing how we live and work? How are Americans adapting to life under Washington’s immigration deadlock? Is rural America being left behind in the new economy?"

"Sometimes we’ll let our visuals — our short documentary films and photo galleries and charts — do the talking. Sometimes we’ll push the boundaries of traditional narrative journalism, weaving those visuals together with text in fun new ways."

A while back, we talked about Storyline with Tankersley, whom Post editor Marty Baron has called “one of the nation’s top writers and thinkers about economic policy.” He told us:

[caption id="attachment_115969" align="alignleft" width="158"] Jim Tankersley[/caption]

“We’re going to try to do a bunch of different things, but they’re all unified around the idea that we want to help people understand the big important issues in America, and the policies that deal with those issues, and how those policies affect people. The way we’re putting it is that we’re going to tell stories on a very frequent basis, much faster than I think a lot of folks expect you can do with narrative, online. We’re going to frequently tell narrative stories with human drama, to help people understand things. We’re gonna tell stories with numbers and pictures, and really try to engage a different sort of person than the traditional in-one-chart kind of reader. And then we’re going to try to find ways to directly engage the audience and invent almost a new kind of storytelling. We don’t know exactly what it’s gonna look like, but we’ve got some pretty good ideas.”

You can read the full conversation here.

Related, in Nieman Reports:

—Rich Read on how he wrote the French fry project, Fall 2000.

—Former Oregonian writing coach Jack Hart and Rich Read on the writer-editor relationship, Spring 2002.

—Read on covering calamity by keeping a tight focus on people, Spring 2005.

The post Launched: Storyline, the Washington Post’s new narrative project intersecting policy and storytelling appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

The 2014 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference opens Friday at the University of North Texas. The Saturday and Sunday workshops are full but you can still register for the keynote events. This year's speakers are authors David Quammen, Lawrence Wright, and Sheri Fink, and other featured speakers include Amy Dockser Marcus, Mimi Swartz, Rose George, and Annie Jacobsen. Recommended reading from our past coverage:

>Collected wisdom from Alfredo Corchado, Susan Orlean, Kevin Merida, Rick Atkinson, Paul Hendrickson and more (2013):

It was meant to be a personal story. The key was to make it a universal truth. — Corchado

>Texas Monthly's Skip Hollandsworth on storytelling, listening, Hollywood, respect, and the importance of getting out into the world (2013):

I’m not a writerly writer. There are a lot of writers in this room who can put together a beautiful sentence and you go, “Wow!” I can’t do that. I’m not being deliberately humble. My bread and butter lives on getting a good quote or getting a good fact. If I don’t have that fact, then I’m screwed. I can’t write around it. I don’t have quite the stylistic ability. So, I’ve always known that, and being at Texas Monthly I’ve been around a lot of great writers and I have tried my best to keep up with them and the way I do it is by getting good acts, getting good quotes. And I knew this was my kind of story. You just don’t get in the way of it.

>"You Will Always Have Work and It Will Be the Best Kind of Work," by Richard Rhodes (2012):

The real poverty of the textbook school of writing is its apparent ignorance of the power of language to re-animate the world – the world of history, of technology, of science, of people, the natural world, whatever the subject might be. Stripping a text of its resonances, its rhetoric, of its performance of itself doesn’t make it clearer; it just makes it deader.

And, among our favorites, this talk by Vanity Fair’s Bryan Burrough, who brought the inspiration as well as the tips:

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

The post It’s Mayborn week! appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

For the better part of the last decade, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism ran the most popular narrative journalism conference in the country. For three days each spring, hundreds of journalists gathered in Cambridge or Boston to hear notable storytellers talk craft. The first speaker at the first of eight conferences was Nora Ephron, joined by fellow inaugurators Jill Lepore, Isabel Wilkerson, Gay Talese, Rick Bragg, Jon Franklin, Adam Hochschild, Ira Glass and Jacqui Banaszynski. The following conferences featured notables such as David Halberstam, Seymour Hersh, Norman Mailer, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Ted Conover, Anne Fadiman, Melissa Fay Greene, Ken Burns, Samantha Power, Tom Wolfe, Katherine Boo, Joe Sacco and Jamaica Kincaid. Thanks to Mark Kramer, who brought the conference across the river, from Boston University, the Nieman Foundation attracted an enthusiastic, loyal audience of storytellers.

From 2007 to 2009, journalist and editor Constance Hale ran the Nieman narrative program, and she oversaw the final conference. (The Nieman Foundation ended the conference as a cost-cutting measure, but the public part of our narrative initiative remained online, as the Narrative Digest, the precursor to Nieman Storyboard.) Since 2009, Hale has been writing language books and running journalism conferences on the West Coast. On Nov. 8 she'll relaunch a national narrative conference at her alma mater, the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. “The Latest in Longform” will be a “daylong exploration of nonfiction storytelling,” with an attendance limited to 75. We chatted.

Storyboard: Why a new longform conference at Berkeley?

Hale: It’s actually not new, in that the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley has hosted a number of professional development conferences for the past 15 years, with many of them about longform, even if we didn’t use that retronym. Midcareer journalists deserve the chance to come back to a top-tier J-school for an intellectual booster shot — we don’t always get on-the-job encouragement to aim high, or to experiment with the form, or to think about the most meaningful way to approach a story. Fortunately, the new administration at the J-school, led by Dean Ed Wasserman, sees the conference as a way to invite a national audience to partake of the incredible riches of this particular school and this particular part of the country.

How will the Berkeley program differ from the conferences such as the ones at Boston University and the Mayborn School of Journalism in Texas?

Those are first-rate events, but there are differences. First come the obvious ones: BU’s conference is on the East Coast, in the cold of a Boston spring, and Mayborn is in the South, in the heat of a Texas summer. This will be on the West Coast, in the fall. Berkeley is beautiful in early November. Then, more importantly, the J-school is exclusively a graduate school, and has long focused on deep investigative reporting, magazine writing, digital storytelling, full-length radio reporting, and documentary film and video, so it’s natural that the school would want to foster an exploration of edgy genres and innovative ways of telling important stories. Finally, Silicon Valley is just a tad south. Our location makes us immersed in the tech world and naturally engaged in refining ways to join the traditional universe of narrative fluency to the dazzling expressive tricks of multiplatform journalism. It’s no coincidence that magazines like Wired and happenings like Pop-Up Magazine and new ventures like Byliner and Matter and Medium and Shebooks were all hatched in the Bay Area. The Knight Digital Media Center is even housed at the J-school.

You spent several years running the Nieman narrative program, and you edited the online aspect of our program when it was the Narrative Digest. What did you learn from that experience and how will it affect the conference?

At Nieman, I learned that a tremendous amount can be taught about narrative journalism, and that it sinks in better when the “students” are accomplished reporters, skilled at organizing a lot of material into longer pieces, and already having developed their own narrative voices. Veteran journalists are ready and eager to take their writing to the highest level. So a conference like this is key for the evolution of the craft. And a little inspiration is such a gift; it’s easy to get beaten down by the exigencies of jobs in journalism. My hats go off to Mark Kramer and others in Northampton, Massachusetts, who had the original vision for such a gathering. And to those who have worked at various iterations of the Narrative Digest and Nieman Storyboard. They have spotlighted wonderful work being done, sometimes against considerable odds.

[caption id="attachment_116579" align="alignleft" width="183"] Constance Hale[/caption]

When I arrived at Nieman I felt that the term “narrative journalism” was a creature of the newspaper world. (At Wired we just called it The Feature Well.) And the Nieman narrative program was too centered on — and dependent on — the newspaper world. I tried to expand the concept, including more digital media and magazines and books. Nevertheless, when newspapers collapsed, the conference collapsed. Papers stopped sending staff. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the conference had become this behemoth at a downtown hotel with big ballrooms and ridiculously expensive food. Newspapers collapsed, the financial world collapsed, the Harvard endowment collapsed — the whole thing became unsustainable.

So at Berkeley we are stripping things down to what really matters. Journalists don’t need a fancy hotel, or $40 box lunches. They just need each other.

Who’s on the first lineup and what are they going to talk about?

Narrative conference stalwarts like Jacqui Banazynski and Adam Hochschild will be there. But so will some new faces. We won’t be announcing the lineup until July, but a peek at last year’s program will give a good idea of the high-concept, high-octane level of discussion.

Why limit the attendance to 75?

Like you, I taught narrative journalism to fellows, and I loved the teaching. My conferences tend to be a little less about panels and (albeit inspiring or interesting) war stories and more about pedagogy. I want conference speakers who are not just marquee names, but generous souls and great teachers.  I prefer ample small group sessions and master classes and lots of networking. In fact, my favorite Nieman event was the Seminar for Narrative Editors, which brought about 60 editors to Lippmann House for one weekend. I loved the intimacy. Happily, it turns out that 75 people is the perfect number for a conference at North Gate Hall, home of Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. We all fit in the library, where we have our plenary sessions. We can have breakout sessions of 12 or 15 people — like real seminars. We can get to know each other over the course of the day. We can insist that all attendees are experienced journalists — catnip for the editors we fly in from the East Coast. And we can build a speaker/attendee ratio that allows the possibility of meaningful conversations between them, not just lecturers and listeners.

How much does it cost and where will it happen and will there be a view?

The conference is held in the beautiful, rustic, unfancy North Gate Hall — it’s a classic example of California architecture, and started life nearly a century ago as the home of the School of Architecture. All the rooms are arranged around a lovely courtyard that is graced with wisteria and camellias. That counts as a view, right? We sought a price point freelancers could afford: $275 to the general public, plus $50 for extra master classes on Sunday, for those who want it. There will be a simple but delicious lunch and a California reception (i.e., wine and cheese) at the end of the day.

Narrative conferences have become a thing. Why? 

Everyone needs a tribe.

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An exciting word from the mothership:

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – The Nieman Foundation for Journalism has hired Louise Kiernan to edit Nieman Storyboard, a website that showcases exceptional narrative journalism and explores the future of nonfiction storytelling, and Steve Almond to teach Nieman’s seminar in narrative writing, offered each year to Nieman Fellows.

[caption id="attachment_115328" align="alignleft" width="150"] Louise Kiernan[/caption]

Kiernan, a 2005 Nieman Fellow, is an associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, focusing on narrative, investigative and social issues reporting. She joined the Medill faculty in September 2010 from the Chicago Tribune, where she worked for 18 years as a reporter and editor. She won a 2001 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting as lead writer of a series on problems with air travel and was a Pulitzer finalist in the same category that year for an individual project. Kiernan holds a master’s in journalism from Northwestern and a bachelor’s in English from the University of Virginia.

[caption id="attachment_115329" align="alignleft" width="150"] Steve Almond[/caption]

Almond spent seven years as a journalist in El Paso and Miami, working jobs that ranged from restaurant critic to investigative reporter. He is the author of four books of nonfiction, including the New York Times bestseller Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America and the forthcoming Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto, as well as four books of fiction. He also is a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine and has taught writing at Emerson, Wesleyan, Boston College, and Ohio State. Almond holds a MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a bachelor’s in English from Wesleyan University.

Storyboard’s current editor, Paige Williams, who for the past four years has also served as Nieman’s narrative writing instructor, has accepted a professorship at the Missouri School of Journalism, to begin in the fall. A 1997 Nieman Fellow, Williams writes for The New Yorker, has taught at universities including NYU, MIT, and Emory, and has won numerous awards for her work, including the National Magazine Award for feature writing in 2008. She holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and a bachelor's in journalism from the University of Mississippi.

For more than a decade, the Nieman Foundation has recognized the importance of narrative journalism and explored the craft through a narrative writing seminar for fellows; special events at Harvard; and the Nieman Storyboard website, which features posts on narrative technique from veteran storytellers and showcases contemporary nonfiction narrative in all media. The Nieman Foundation also published Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers Guide, featuring more than 90 essays on the craft.

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard educates leaders in journalism and elevates the standards of the profession through special programs that convene scholars and experts in all fields. More than 1,400 journalists from 93 countries have been awarded Nieman Fellowships since 1938. In addition to Nieman Storyboard, the foundation’s other initiatives include Nieman Reports, a website and quarterly print magazine that explores contemporary challenges and opportunities in journalism, and the Nieman Journalism Lab, a website that reports on the future of news, innovation and best practices in the digital media age.

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It isn't often that a narrative journalist's retirement makes the news, but when Sports Illustrated announced this spring that longtime writer Gary Smith would be leaving the business, the public eulogies — and the "Best of Gary" lists — began immediately. Smith, who spent 32 years at SI, wrote celebrated stories "that weren't so much about sports as they were about life," as S.L. Price writer put it. Four of Smith's stories won a National Magazine Award, and 13 were anthologized in Best American Sports Writing. In honor of his retirement, here's a Storyboard piece from August 2010. Smith appeared that year at the Mayborn Conference, a narrative nonfiction event in Texas, and talked about “Shadow of a Nation,” the story of a Crow basketball player named Jonathan Takes Enemy. Smith is "known for his ability to connect with his subjects," former Storyboard editor Andrea Pitzer wrote in that post, "and so we were very interested in the answer he gave to a question about how he enters others’ worlds as an outsider and develops intimacy."

[caption id="attachment_115966" align="alignleft" width="160"] Gary Smith[/caption]

Gary Smith: To become a longform writer and to kind of immerse yourself in different worlds, it’s almost like a double-railed track. Not only do you grow as a writer, but that other rail of the track is huge. Part of it is something you’re developing – some sense of self, getting a little more at ease in your own flesh and bones. So much of what happens in the interactions between you as the writer and the subject hinges on their trust in you, their confidence in you. And so much of that hinges on how comfortable you are. Any uneasiness you bring is going to cost you dearly.

I’ve sensed that and felt it and seen it as the years go by. The more at ease I became, the more the trust grew in that interaction, the more goods, the more treasure came back. It’s almost like you need to be very aware of both sides of that railroad track. If one is lagging behind the other, you’re going to really shortchange yourself in everything you get as a writer. That’s not the reason to do it — there are a zillion other better reasons to go on that trip. But that’s one of the biggest benefits of it.

As you’re walking as an outsider into these worlds all the time, how comfortable are you in doing that? If they feel your uneasiness, how easy are they going to feel about handing you their most intimate stuff to write about?

There’s almost an equivalence to that interaction, so the more they sense that you’re really there just to understand rather than judge is huge in how much they’re going to start giving … When you’re more relaxed, you listen, and you’re ready to flow with what’s being said and to hear something that’s sparking off three or four other questions in your mind. It’s because your mind is more relaxed; it’s not tense and tight and worried about getting that next question on your checklist.

When it goes from an interview to a conversation, that’s when things really start to happen in that interaction … but it’s not there at the beginning, I can guarantee you. When I was 25 years old doing this, I was nervous as a cat and worried and sometimes in awe of the person I was interviewing. It’s all just time, putting in time, and also really, you wanting to grow as a person and to throw yourself into circumstances that aren’t always the most comfortable right off.

...

Pitzer: Smith’s ability to get inside his subjects’ lives and ways of seeing the world is legendary, and so I found myself curious if he’d ever encountered a subject with whom he felt unable to connect, and if so, how he had handled writing the story. I caught up with him the night before his talk and put the question to him. He mentioned that Tiger Woods had spent a good part of their interview time watching Sports Center, but seemed unable to recall anyone for whom he just hadn’t felt empathy. Here’s what he had to say about it:

If I can’t get there, I shouldn’t even start writing. There should be some feeling for the human condition, in a way, and so if I can’t get there at all, then it’s like trespassing to write. If I’m going to write about pretty intimate stuff, I shouldn’t go there unless I can treat it with that kind of feeling.

I’ve started into stories and done a lot of research and then pulled out. But once I meet the person, I’m pretty dogged about just thinking "I’m going to find some connection and find my way into this person’s world and understand it and try to grasp it and render it." Even if there’s a lot of banging my head against the wall, I’ll just keep coming back at it and at it. That’s what I’ve found. Maybe it’s not smart, but that’s what I’ve done.

It’s funny, because that whole idea of crossing that abyss to the other, there’s something under it that’s compelling to me, I would have to guess. Why else would I be doing this so much, so long, and so feverishly for so many years?

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This year’s Investigative Reporters & Editors conference starts Wednesday in San Francisco, and there are no fewer than nine panels, workshops and master classes on storytelling. Registration is still open for IRE members ($100 for students; $260 for everyone else), but if you miss the conference you can find some materials — audio, video, tip sheets — online later at IRE’s website. For past Storyboard coverage of the conference, see the two-part Kiera Feldman series from 2012. This year’s storytelling speakers and the IRE abstracts:

The Art of Storytelling: Forensics

Speaker: Jacqui Banaszynski, Pulitzer winner and professor, Missouri School of Journalism
Description: Learn to investigate your own writing from the inside out. What are the habits and patterns that power your stories up — or drag them down? You’ll do a diagnostic of your own writing and discover ways to make your stories leaner, cleaner and more compelling.

The Art of Storytelling: Writing the data story

Speakers: Sarah Cohen, David Donald, Ben Poston
Description: From the first public records request to the final fact-check, keeping the writing in mind will prevent your stories from becoming mind-numbing data dumps. We'll walk through how to focus your early work on finding the best cases for in-depth reporting; how to keep your data analysis on track while finding your "compared to what?"; and how to draft the data-heavy sections of stories.

Presentation As a Storytelling Tool

Speakers: Anthony DeBarros, Brad Racino, Kate Marymont, Mark Nichols
Description: Design is key to attracting attention, keeping the public engaged and even getting people to do what you ask of them.
We'll look at examples from top newsrooms and share tips and ideas on what you yourself can do to design and present brilliant stories.

The Art of Storytelling: Structure, organization and finding characters

Speakers: Joan McClane, Raquel Rutledge, James Neff, Michael Schiller
Description: You've found the facts and have hard-edged findings. Now what? This panel shows you how to best exploit your materials to craft engaging investigations through appropriate story structure, proper use of characters, clear writing, and effective use of sound and video.

The Art of Storytelling: Toxic pipeline

Speaker: master class with Walt Bogdanich, assistant editor for investigations, New York Times
Description: Three-time Pulitzer winner Walt Bogdanich dissects his classic 2007 toxic pipeline investigation. These special panels are designed to dig deep into narrative arc, structure and character development.

The Art of Storytelling: Blueprints

Speaker: Missouri School of Journalism professor Jacqui Banaszynski
Description: Where to start? How to nail that ending? What to put where? Story structure vexes even the most experienced writers. We’ll explore ways to approach your stories as literal but creative structures — story houses built on a solid foundation, with an elegant flow and the most effective use of your material. All the great buildings of the world started with a sound, creative blueprint; you can build cathedrals of information and meaning.

The Art of Storytelling: Deadly neglect

Speaker: Chicago Tribune reporter Sam Roe
Description: Sam Roe, a Pulitzer Prize winner and three-time Pulitzer finalist, shows how to identify the narrative in an investigation, how to flesh it out with reporting and writing, and how to organize it to maximize impact and suspense. He’ll focus on “Deadly Neglect,” a story that started out as a run-of-the-mill nursing home project but gained power when Roe zeroed in on the agonizing ordeal of a 9-year-old boy.

The Art of Storytelling: Danger from above

Speaker: Louise Kiernan, career newspaper reporter/editor, Medill School of Journalism associate professor, and incoming editor of Nieman Storyboard.
Description: Pulitzer winner Louise Kiernan will take the audience inside her two-part narrative project “Danger from Above” as part of our “master class” series.

The Art of Storytelling: Building chemistry

Speakers: John Hillkirk, Alison Young, Alexandra Zayas, Chris Davis
Description: When it comes to investigative projects, storytelling too often takes a back seat to reporting. In this session, two reporter-editor teams will discuss how they worked through the conceptualizing and writing of two recent investigations: "In God’s Name" and "Supplement Shell Game." They’ll share tips for better collaborative storytelling, techniques for sharpening writing, approaches to storytelling on multiple platforms and building a positive reporter/editor relationship.

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