[dc]P[/dc]eter Hessler’s books about China have resonated with both Western and Chinese audiences, an accomplishment that seems unlikely today, when the “China story” has become a political and diplomatic battleground.

Hessler is the China correspondent for the New Yorker magazine, a position he also held between 2000 and 2007, when he published two of his four books on China. His first book, “River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze,” documented his experience teaching as a Peace Corps volunteer in a small town in the southwestern Sichuan province in the mid-1990s.

“When I wrote ‘River Town,’ I assumed that any Chinese person who read it would hate it,” Hessler told Nieman Storyboard. Instead, he was surprised by the positive response.

He credits that partly to nostalgia: During a time when Chinese society was changing so quickly and dramatically, few people had time to reflect on the experience. With a combination of humor and boots-on-the-ground discovery, Hessler dove into the stories of students, entrepreneurs and archaeologists while etching out a sense of time and space, and using his perspective as a foreign journalist to guide Western audiences. His magazine works shows that same signature style.

[caption id="attachment_165852" align="alignleft" width="400"] Peter Hessler[/caption]

In 2011, Hessler was awarded the MacArthur “genius grant” for his “keenly observed accounts of ordinary people responding to the complexities of life in such rapidly changing societies as Reform Era China."

After spending a few years covering Egypt for the New Yorker, Hessler returned to China in 2019 and took a teaching job at the Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute in Chengdu, the major city in south-central China. His stay coincided with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in Wuhan and the rising tensions between Beijing and Washington over trade, China’s treatment of its Uyghur ethnic minority, and a spate of other issues.

Among them was the expulsion last year of more than a dozen U.S. journalists from China as part of a tit-for-tat dynamic that had started with the Trump administration curbing the number of Chinese journalists in the U.S.

In his story “The Rise of Made-in-China Diplomacy,” which appeared in March in the New Yorker, Hessler explores the intricacies of U.S.-China trade ties, mainly through the experiences of a Chengdu-based export entrepreneur, Li Dewei. Hessler connects the dots between Li’s 2020 sales and the stimulus check sent to many Americans. He pulls the curtain back on the U.S. government’s claims of a “decoupling” from China, showing how quickly Chinese entrepreneurs pivoted to meet the demands of the American market.

“Decoupling had been envisaged as an economic process, but the market links were stronger than ever,” Hessler wrote. “The separation was happening almost entirely at the human level.”

The story exudes his trademark humor, including a riff on “Amazonglish,” — those oddly named products that pepper the site with descriptions that are not quite grammatical. The Amazon shopping experience, previous U.S. policies toward China, and Hessler’s own full-circle return to teach in China transform this trade-centric story into a Hessler staple: an easy-to-cross bridge between the world’s two largest economies.

In May, Hessler announced on the social media platform Douban that he and his family would be leaving China after the university declined to renew his contract. He would not discuss details, but said he had hoped to stay in Chengdu at least another year.

In a Q&A with Storyboard, Hessler talked about the benefits and luxuries of allowing a story to develop over time, about how he works to understand China from the ground up, and about what is lost when there are fewer foreign correspondents working in the world's most populous — and increasingly powerful — nation. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

[dc]H[/dc]ow did the story of the pandemic business pivot come about?
Shortly after the pandemic started I did an initial piece on the lockdown experience. By the time I was done with that piece, things were opening up again and I wanted to do some reporting on how people were responding to all the changes. As part of that, I wanted to meet somebody doing business here, and I met Li Dewei. It struck me when he said he seen a benefit from the U.S. stimulus checks in his sales. I realized that these links are really tight, and these people can really tell what’s going on. I wrote two more stories after my initial pandemic piece without mentioning him because I thought he would make a longer-term story following his reactions to the pandemic.

I’ve lived in China before, and for a time in Egypt. Things in places like this often move very quickly. In the 1990s and 2000s when I lived in China, you could often go to a place repeatedly over a period of a year or so and see changes that would create the trajectory of your story. In fast-moving societies, that’s a tool that a journalist can use. It’s longitudinal research, which journalists often have trouble doing because they don’t have the resources to spend years and years on a story. But in these places it can be more condensed. In this case, I was able to spend eight months or so, and see a lot of changes in Dewei’s thinking and experiences as a businessman.

How did you meet him? Did you look for someone who was involved in U.S.-China trade, or did you meet him first?
I asked a friend if he knew somebody who was doing export trade. It’s not that common in Chengdu actually — it’s not like being in Shenzhen — so I was very luckyy. But my friend here is very well-connected. I think he and Dewei went to the same high school, and these networks can be quite strong. Again, this is a pattern I’ve often followed in my journalism: I have students here that I’ve been in touch with for 20 years. I’ve learned that you go back to people, meet them again, and the story deepens.

You mentioned the idea of longitudinal research and how in China temporal events can be more condensed. Why is it important for a story like this to give a sense of how things develop over time?
My father is a sociologist, so I grew up thinking about social sciences long before journalism. I took one nonfiction writing class at the end of my university time, and then over time, I developed this interest in journalism, but I had this prior exposure to social sciences — to anthropology and sociology. They think a lot about methodology — how you do research — and the idea of longitudinal study is important.

Efficiency is very important for journalism, which sometimes can be a problem. One advantage I have is that I don’t have to write that many stories; I’m not tied to the news as much as a typical journalist. I can be more deliberate about how I structure things.

There are advantages to following a story as it unfolds. Chinese people don’t see themselves as the center of the world as much as Americans do, and so sometimes their attitude is, “Well, I’m not really very important.” Or, “This experience isn’t very important, so why are we talking about this?” They just won’t tell you much or they’ll condense the story a lot. Even in the U.S. that can be the case: The details that somebody tells you about a story that already happened might not be the same details that would strike you if you had observed that story unfolding.

So my goal with a project like this was to visit Dewei every month, to see how he sees things at this point, and then at that point. If I had gone to him in January of this year and said, “What were the last eight months like?” I’m not sure the story that he would tell me would be the same one I observed. I’m not sure that he’s going to say, “At the beginning of this pandemic, I had a totally different view of what was going to happen. I thought that U.S. trade was going to be screwed, and so I was trying to make plans elsewhere.” He probably wouldn’t have emphasized that as much as I did in my story. It gives a different kind of legitimacy to your analysis because I had these interactions at these three moments over time. Not every story works this way, but I have often structured things so while I’m doing this, I’m also doing a lot of other reporting. I did a story about teaching here the second phase of the COVID strategy, when China kind of had stamped everything out; it was about how they did that and how it worked, seen partly through the eyes of my students. Then I did another story about Wuhan. If you’re careful, you can have these different threads going at the same time. Even if you're a journalist doing intense news stuff, you can try to set up projects where you’re visiting a group of people or an individual or a place periodically and tracking something.

It got harder to meet with Dewei as time went on. This is often true in China because sometimes people get a little suspicious as to why haven’t you written anything yet. I had to work harder to meet with him in the end than in the beginning. He was also getting busier. I would have liked to have met him more in the last three months of the story, but fortunately I was able to meet him enough.

In my third book from China, “Country Driving,” there’s a section about a factory in Zhejiang. I went to this development zone over a period of three years and focused on one pair of entrepreneurs, watching their experiences from when they set up the factory to when they got their machinery to when they hired their workers. I was able to watch these things happen over time, but it was a constant negotiation because they didn’t understand why it was taking me so long. You have to spend a lot of time reassuring people when you’re doing this kind of project.

You’ve got to reassure people that you’re not engaging in espionage. Especially in the old days before I was known here as a writer, people were always afraid that I was gathering material to start a business. Now I’m better known as a writer here, so Dewei knows that I’m not a businessman. But he’s still worried about secrets getting out. There are a couple of name brands that he was using that he got touchy about; he asked me not to put them in the story, and I didn’t. They were really funny names and would be good details in the story, but he let me use the other brands and I wanted to make him feel comfortable.

You mentioned that the movement of time feels faster in China. I've worked here for a few years, and understand what you mean. But how would you explain that to journalists who have not covered China?
The pace at which Dewei is making decisions is really intense. I meet him in at the end of March or maybe April, soon after the pandemic started. He’s thinking that his American stuff is getting cut and he’s going to produce now for the Chinese market. In less than two months, he’s completely abandoned that. Then he starts this pet business, and he gets that going. Somebody like Dewei just works all the time, and this is true of a lot of people in China. There is also more of an appetite for risk, and the competitiveness is so intense that they have to make quick decisions.

In the past, there was a level of instability that is deep in people’s minds. That aconditions you to make quick decisions and to adjust and abandon old plans without torturing yourself about it. I think that’s very hard for an American.

Part of what we’re seeing is that Americans psychologically are not in a good place right now. That’s partly because they lack flexibility; they were accustomed to stability. Average Americans, especially white Americans, could expect their lives to get better, not to have huge challenges. That has changed a lot in the past 20 years, and I think people have difficulty adjusting to that. I don’t see that same difficulty here. People don’t expect things to stay the same. They understand that their fortunes can go up and down.

You said you met Li Dewei through a friend. I’ve also noticed after moving here that one of the best ways to go about earning people’s trust here is to go through someone they know. How do you see the process and how has it evolved over time? Was it the case in the 2000s that it was hard for people to trust a foreign journalist, and are people more trusting now? Or has it become even more difficult?
In the 2000s, I wrote about a lot of people I met by random, like those factory people I wrote about in my third book. In those years, I never worked with a fixer. I would just go to places and find people to talk to. I have solid Chinese, but it’s not my best strength. But I spent maybe a year working completely solo and just depending on myself to find people. I think sometimes over-reliance on fixers can be a mistake — it can dull certain instincts you have, and certain sensibilities. I think I’m actually pretty decent at making people comfortable in China. Some of it is unconscious — body language and who knows what. But I started here in the Peace Corps in 1996. I was one of only two foreigners living in a really small place in Sichuan province. That kind of experience is so intense that you learn a lot about communicating with people and trying to make them feel comfortable with you as a foreigner.

My situation this time has been quite different this time for a number of reasons. I go back to Fuling a lot, where I lived in the Peace Corps, and I know a ton of people there. Our familiarity is really deep. And I know a lot of people here in Chengdu. I have relied more on friends and people here to introduce me to folks than I did in the past. I could be efficient because I already had these networks here, some of them more than 20 years old at this point.

The political problems have not caused me great problems personally as a reporter. Some of it may be location – Chengdu is far from Beijing and people are here just more laid back. It has surprised me though. I thought it might be harder.

Even when I went to Wuhan last August, I didn’t know what would happen — I thought they’d just turn me around after two days and ask me to go home. I told my editors, “I’m not sure if this is going to work, but it’s worth trying.” And after a few days, I sent my editor a note saying, “I’ve been able to do good interviews.” There’s always an unpredictable element to it. The main thing is to get yourself out there and see how far you can go.

Your story about Li Dewei's business is rich in detail and has a clear narrative line. How did you decide what you put in and what to leave out? For example, I didn’t see much about the government’ new “dual circulation” strategy to reduce reliance on foreign trade and boost domestic consumption, but we got glimpses of that through some of your personal experiences.
With U.S.-China relationships so politically charged, a human element is often lacking in stories about China. It’s also just lack of contact — there aren’t enough journalists here now, and it’s very hard for journalists to move around, especially if you’re based in Beijing. Beijing has had tighter restrictions during the pandemic, and the journalists there are overworked. It’s hard for them to do long features and take off and do long research trips.

The thing I can do is have more of a human element in my stories, and that also includes my own personal experience. I’m in a Chinese danwei (work unit). I’m at a university, my kids are in a Chinese school. Those details have often been parts of my stories because they can help orient the reader a little bit and humanize this experience to some degree. That doesn’t mean you’re making everything look great, but it helps people understand that there’s a human element to this. Everybody in the U.S. is intensely aware of how much their routines have been changed and what their day-to-day life is like now; I want to give them some sense of that here as well.

For this piece, Dewei’s story is the thread that organizes it, but I also wanted to include this larger sense of the U.S.-China issue. It’s interesting to see the differences in students and interactions now compared to when I was first here in the 1990s. I’m trying to convey that — the way the universities feel, the fact that universities here are huge, modern places now, but you still have the Marxist Institute.

I also wanted to include, for example, the embassy closure. It’s fascinating that while all this business is going on and all these long-distance connections, the personal links are also getting pulled apart. An American institution is disappearing, the same way the Peace Corps disappeared.

And the Fulbright program to China was suspended in 2020, something that also happened for a year in 1989.
It’s kind of tragic. Those are big mistakes, in my opinion, by the U.S.

How would you say that your presentation of China for a mostly U.S. audience has changed in the past 20 years? What are some of the things you used to include in terms of context or angles 20 years ago, and what is different now?
Again, it’s a little hard to compare because all of my recent writing here has been in this weird pandemic situation. And this has been the biggest crisis in U.S.-China relations that I’ve experienced. I was here during some other times when it was tense, but it was never like this. It’s also a very different type of Chinese government; it’s become more repressive in the last decade.

I feel like from the beginning of the pandemic, there was a risk of portraying China in inhuman terms because of the political problems and the nature of the start of the pandemic. We can see that in the waves of racism in the U.S. against Asian Americans. There also have been times when the Chinese demonized Americans or other foreigners, and you could feel it on the street. I don’t want to contribute to any of that.

How do you navigate being told that you are pro-China?
Part of it is by not having any social media presence. I’m not on Twitter; I’m not on Facebook. I don’t really like computers, and I don’t like phones either, so I just don’t do those things. It’s better for my sanity.

You’re a celebrated China writer and an important figure for many of the current China correspondents. What do you think has contributed to so many people resonating with your China reporting over time?
I don’t know. There was more of a connection by Chinese readers than I expected. When I wrote “River Town,” I assumed that any Chinese person who read it would hate it because I was describing life in a somewhat poor part of the country, and I was talking very honestly about what it was like. I thought it was positive, but I also knew the Chinese tend to be very sensitive about these things, so I expected that book to make people unhappy. But I was surprised. Then, when my first book was published in Chinese – it was “Country Driving” – I didn’t expect anybody in China to really care. But people connected with it.

The Chinese are very generous in allowing a foreigner to tell these stories. That doesn’t happen everywhere. It didn't happen in Egypt; most educated Egyptians did not like what I was writing about society there. I thought they were unfair in the way that they would attack me or my wife or other outsiders for writing about the society.

That was true in China in the past. For example, Pearl S. Buck, who really knew China and wrote about it very accurately — educated, elite Chinese hated her at the time.

That hasn’t been my experience. I think some of it is nostalgia because I was here in the ‘90s when so much was changing. It was also very hard for Chinese to record that moment because it was so intense and so demanding that they didn’t have a minute to sit back and think what’s happening to us. As a foreigner, I had that luxury; I could step back and observe things.

The Peace Corps also was a very useful way to first come here because I arrived with very few preconceptions. I hadn’t been trained in Chinese studies, and I was dropped into a very average place, in a small city. It gives you a very efficient introduction, and was also very human because so much of my time then depended on interactions. I was part of a Chinese university, part of a Chinese danwei, and so I was part of the system in a way that journalists rarely are. That experience also made me take poverty pretty seriously because the people I was teaching and the people I was friends with, most of them had been poor pretty recently and I could see what the differences meant in their lives,. It wasn’t abstract in Fuling in 1996.

One of the reasons that I wanted to come back as a teacher this time was because one of the challenges of journalism is that you’re kind of separated from society. After 20 years of being a journalist I felt it would be good to have a role here where I’m part of a Chinese institution and where I’m interacting with people in a way other than just being a reporter.

What has kept you in China for so long, and keeps you returning? What is about this place that makes you want to tell stories from here?
It grabbed me because of the energy. The first time I was in China, in 1994, I was traveling as a tourist. I happened to go through Beijing and some other parts of China, and it felt like there was a tangible energy, that people were doing something. Then being in the Peace Corps helped me understand how this was happening on the ground, and it was pretty inspiring. The young people who I was teaching had come from very poor backgrounds and now were making something different with their lives. I also liked being here. There was a lot of humor here. As a writer, humor is one of my tools. To me, that’s part of how you humanize a place and make it relatable, and China has always had a lot of that.

Then, of course, as time goes by, your connections to a place deepen. My wife is Chinese American, and she spent more than a decade writing here as well,. So it’s quite natural that we would both  feel this connection and want to come back.

You mentioned that this is the most difficult time in U.S.-China relations that you’ve experienced as a journalist, and it’s also a time when foreign journalists’ access to China has been severely limited. In this context, if you were a correspondent here settling in for the long haul, what would you focus on? What do you think is important to convey and report and document about China now?
It is different for people who are formal correspondents. For me, because I also was teaching, my top priority had to be the pandemic. This is a global public health issue, and all over the world, people need to know what’s happening in other countries. The second priority was the U.S.-China situation. Those were the crises things that I felt an obligation to write about.

If you’re a correspondent based in Beijing, it’s an incredibly difficult time. It’s almost like the Chinese government fell into a trap — the Trump Administration expels Chinese journalists and then the Chinese expel American journalists, and they seem to think that it’s good for them. But actually this was a period when, after the initial mistakes and cover-up, China basically handled the pandemic well. Society has functioned more or less normally, but there have been very few people here to document that. And the reporters who are here feel embattled. They’ve got to renew their visas every three months, their colleagues have been expelled, they’re not happy. You’re not going to get a lot of positive coverage in that situation.

Why do you think it’s important that we still have foreign journalists in China? Because there seems to be a distancing on both sides. What can be lost, and why is it important to still do this kind of work?
There’s almost a belief that you can do things remotely — that you don’t really need that many people on the ground, that there’s enough information on Twitter or Weibo or whatever. There is a lack of respect for the on-the-ground experience and reporting — a lack of respect by the media organizations, in some degree by readers, and by analysts.

If you were to make a case for why American audiences should still learn about the daily lives of Chinese people, what would that be?
The U.S. government sometimes portrays a pretty extreme picture of what China is — the Chinese government — at a time like this. That sort of the rhetoric and the extreme nationalism, the antagonism, can be way on the edge. But interactions with the average people are not like that. Even during this time, I don’t experience tension on the street as a foreigner walking around. If I introduce myself as an American, I don’t feel animosity. That’s important to convey because a lot of the government mouthpieces would suggest that that’s the Chinese approach to the outside world right now.

There may be important sensibilities that are larger than those on the ground, and maybe in the long run those things matter. We don’t know for sure. But it’s important to convey both of them. Political tensions are not necessarily permanent, and there are deeper trends in society that may be more significant and that we have to keep track of.

It’s also unequal. There are many Chinese in America; it’s easier for them to get information about America. On the other end, it’s really hard. We don’t have enough people here. We can’t really trust the Chinese media to portray things as they should be portrayed. We really depend heavily on having people here, like journalists, who can try to capture this for us.

Are there still China stories you want to do that you haven’t done yet?
Lots. It’s still a great place for a reporter. Right now I have 50 students who are doing reporting projects all around Chengdu. Most of kids are not even journalism majors — they’ve never done anything like this before. But they turn up really fascinating stuff just because it’s everywhere in China. One student this semester — he’s in engineering — had an internship in a mine, and he met a woman who was like a psychologist for this mining company. What a fascinating thing, right? He did this great profile of her.

Just in my daily life here, too, I see stuff all the time that I would like to write about. There’s a shortage of reporters, and a shortage of time, and a shortage of investment in those reporters and in their research, But there’s no shortage of material.

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Simina Mistreanu is a journalist based in Beijing. Before moving to China, in 2015, she covered local politics in Portland, Ore. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

The post Foreign reporting: Peter Hessler on seeing China through a personal lens appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Editor’s note: The Oregonian’s Simina Mistreanu spoke to seven narrative journalists for her University of Missouri School of Journalism master’s project on longform. Last week, we ran her setup, a piece on the challenges and importance of longform narrative, plus her conversations with Pulitzer winners Lane DeGregory and David Finkel, and with Amy Harmon and Anne Hull, about craft and purpose. The series ends today, with The Oregonian’s Tom Hallman Jr. and Esquire’s Chris Jones.

Tom Hallman Jr. has worked at the Oregonian for more than 30 years, and won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.

Mistreanu: How do you choose your stories?

Hallman: I never set out to be the social issues reporter, or the race reporter, or the trauma reporter. I got into those areas because of my curiosity about the way people live or deal with tragedies or deal with race. So it came from the story first, and those issues were secondary, which I think is very different from someone who says, “Well, I want to cover social services.” They approach it with a different take on what they need to cover. Usually way too much policy, reports, officials. If you come to it through the story, through the people, you have the ability to reach readers. So that’s how I discovered that. I would say it grew out of covering the police beat because that’s where all these things collide. You have race, poverty, all of it collides there.

So you were a police reporter at the Oregonian.

Yeah. I had done some other stuff at different places, but I was a police reporter here for like 10 years.

Like Max’s job?

Different. Back then, I worked in a press room at the old police station, and I could wander around and stop and talk to detectives, see reports. It started when I was an intern here one summer, then I came to the police beat — that was my job, day cops — and they had some people fill in who really messed it up. Because I had open access to everything. I would come up to the front desk, and they would just buzz me out back, and I would wander from robbery to vice to homicide, and then make a loop. Well, some of the people who weren’t all that qualified to cover police started taking stuff right out of reports and putting it in the paper, or didn’t understand, so they really did clamp down on us. I had a press room at the police station, and I spent more time there than I did in the newsroom. I would work from 7:30 to 2 o’clock down at the police station, and then come up from like 2:30 to 4 in the newsroom. So my world was really on the street with the detectives, with the street cops.

When was this?

1980 to 1991 or something like that. And I love it because you got to cover the reality of these issues you’re talking about, not from the spokesman or the professor. You want to talk about race things? Well, then go out to a crummy area of town and see what it’s like, see what the frustrations are, and the tensions between the cops. You want to see what trauma is like? Go to a car accident and watch people. So I grew up that kind of way, much different than coming from the top down.

So when did you start writing long-form stories about these issues?

I was part of a golden age of journalism. When I got into business, we actually used manual typewriters and glued the paper together and used pencils to edit. When I came to the Oregonian, nobody really talked about writing. It was all about reporting. And pretty much breaking news and covering beats. And so there were these big gaps that nobody cared about. And the police beat was one of them. The police beat was a place for alcoholic reporters, screwups and young people. And my competition was an alcoholic from an afternoon paper, who never left the press room. He sat and read a book, and all he would cover is the news of the day. I was 26 years old, something like that, so I had no competition, and I would get out and talk to these cops, see these wonderful stories, and since the paper didn’t really care about productivity in a sense, like “What do you got for today? What do you got for today?” I could do my little news things, and then have the freedom to do these other stories.

So I learned on the job about writing: the murder victim, the rape victim, the drug dealers. I remember going for a ride-along with the vice squad; we picked up hookers. And I was in cars with the hookers, and the dialogue … Because this kind of writing was so different, nobody knew really what to do with it, and so they gave you the space. They just let you do it. I learned from doing it. … It was more like free form, learning that way. And that meant some of the stories were way too long, they meandered, great openings, terrible endings, all that stuff. But whatever interested me I would go for, and they always said yes, so I learned from doing that. In the early years, there were no other writers doing the things I was doing. They had feature writers, but it was more feature, like, people hey, they jumped out of their skins, you know, cliché-written stories. There were other people at other papers doing it, but we really didn’t know about each other because there was no Internet. You knew when award season came around. I can’t remember what was the era this started, but there was a movement with this kind of stuff. And some of the names were big names: Ken Fuson, Tom French, Jacqui, all these people. I remember first hearing about Jacqui when I had won some kind of low-level national award, and they had talked about hiring her here to be an editor, and she didn’t do it, but I was awre of who she was. And then these conferences started. People would go to these conferences, and they would talk about writing.

The Nieman conferences?

Before that even. But I remember at one, you have to think of the heavyweights that were at this thing: Richard Ben Kramer, all these names that are now authors, they’ve done books, but at the time they grew out of newspapers. During that era, the best writing really was in newspapers, the narrative writing. Before all that came to be, I was kind of dabbling in it and learning my way, and then I grew as the movement grew.

How did you start writing narratively?

The police beat had such a drama, such characters, such a lingo that the way we were writing it was sterile. It was the kind of thing you would go out and you would do something, and you would come back and you would tell people — not people in the newsroom, but friends — “Oh, I went on this undercover drug buy, and here’s what happened.” But the stories that ran in the paper were stripped of any of that stuff. So it was a really natural built-in story. So it grew out of that way, more the excitement of what I was seeing than thinking, “Oh, here’s a good scene.” The beat I had shaped how I wrote.

Why did you keep doing it?

It was a challenge, I loved the learning, you would look around the newsroom and see people, I’m 58 now, I was ancient. Looking back, how old are you? 25. I look like an old man to you. The same way when I came to the paper, I’d look at guys my age and think, who are they? And a lot of these older reporters were burned out because they had done the same story. I liked to ask them how do you do them? It was always interesting. I would never have the perfect story, so it was exciting to learn how to do it. And there was a power to it; you would get the reader response. Letters and phone calls. I still have some of them. People loved the stories. They loved the worlds I took people to. And then I started to think, here’s a real story, how to tell it like a narrative. And I kind of fumbled my way into that.

How do you choose the stories you want to pursue in depth?

I have to have access, there has to be enough meaning, and power in the character or the world, and I have to be intrigued enough that there’s something there. I don’t care about, like this plane crash in San Francisco, I could care less about covering something like that. Everybody will cover that.

What do you mean by meaning through the character?

What can these readers learn about life through this character’s life, or how they lived their life; what can you learn? So there’s got to be depth to the story.

Doesn’t everyone have a story with depth?

Everybody in the business?

Everybody in the world. How do you select among the stories out there?

For the newspaper, if it’s not somewhat close to the news or some universal event, yeah, I can go do a story about the security guard in the front lobby, but I would have to make it so people found something there. You’re right; everybody has a story.

(How has selection evolved over time?) The whole era of the police stuff, which would be undercover drug guys, prostitutes, murderers, stories that had a built-in structure. Then there was a whole era of stories about places. Places or events or people in institutions, like I followed a woman getting out of prison; what was it like. And then I started to drift into places where there was no story, but something would intrigue me, and I would hang around long enough and go, Oh, my God, there’s a story, or there’s the person with the story.

What sorts of places? What drew you to them?

I would say a lot of the police beat stories were about places: the world of the detective, the world of the undercover guys. There was a fascinating world because it had its own rules and lingo, and I liked getting into that world and writing about it. I also liked the medical world. Then I did stuff, not as much, a little bit with attorneys. But I really liked the medical stuff a lot.

Why?

Life and death. It’s amazing to sit with a surgeon who became a friend of mine, sitting here like you and me, and an hour later she goes and operates on a baby’s brain. And I watch her. She’s no different than me physically, but something in her can do that. And it was incredible to watch a human operate on another human. Drama, what was at stake.

What is your role as a reporter?

To figure out the story, to convince them to let me into their world, not get tired and bored with me, and put up with questions that don’t seem to make sense, but they’ll go, “I’ll talk to this guy.” Because most people don’t know their story. I would never do a profile on a doctor. I would do a story on a doctor in the world doing something that would reveal something. And I started out intrigued by something or somebody, and follow that curiosity to figure out what the story is. Then kind of work backwards in a way. Most stories aren’t clear-cut, like beginning, middle and an end. They’re kind of all over the place, and you search for the story.

When you say story, do you mean the narrative or the meaning?

Both. I’ll give you an example. Somebody called me about a story; it was about a school issue, which I could care less about. But while we’re talking, the guy tells me he’s going to Arizona for the winter. I start talking to him, I say, “What do you do with your home?” He says, “We clean it out and lock it up for four months. And we have an African-American woman cleaning our home. Hmm … Interesting, kind of, right?” My mind works like this: I grew up in Portland; I remember as a kid seeing those black women standing by the bus stop down in the mall. As a little boy. Cleaning ladies. I thought, “That’s an interesting story. Would you mind if I talk to, could you give me her number?” He sets it up; I call this lady. She doesn’t know why I’m calling. I just said, “I heard about this; can I come meet you?” She’s like, “Sure.” She has no idea what I’m there for; I don’t even know what I’m there for. And while we’re talking, I notice this big Bible on the side of the table, and I ask her, “So tell me about the Bible.” And all of a sudden I start to realize the story. She grew up in a sharecropping farm in the South like a lot of kids, very poor. She left home, this guy came to town, married her, took her out here to Portland. Her father gave her this family Bible; that’s all they have had. She taught herself to read with this Bible, and every day she would slip through the Bible and what the message would be for the next day. Her husband, they have like five kids, he’s an alcoholic, he abandons her here. And she has a choice: she can go back to the sharecropping farm with the kids and live there, but the kids have no future. Or she can stay in Portland, where they have a future, but she has no skills. She flips through the book and lands at the Book of Job, which she says means patience. So she cleans homes for 55 years. Toilets. Walks to Lake Oswego. Raises five kids.

Now this was an interesting interview to deal with because the kids … I had to get these kids to talk to me about their mother. I told this one girl, who I could tell didn’t dislike me, but was very weary of me. I said, “Look, I’m a white guy. I can’t dance.” And that broke the ice, and she told me an incredibly powerful story that I got because of that. Because she listened. She trusted me. The girl was in her high school class one day, and heard her rich, white classmates talking about the cleaning lady. And she realized they were talking about her mother. Like the reaction you had right there. She wore raggedy clothes, and she was ashamed of her mother. And she came home and told her mother, “I’m ashamed.” Her mother said, “This is who I am.”

So this story has some very powerful moments. When you think about the honesty of saying that. The story ends with these kids coming over for dinner. Now they’re grown. Here’s the end of story: In walks an attorney, a school teacher, a businessman and a nurse. All from cleaning homes.

When the story ran, the Portland Trail Blazers honored her at Center Court. The story won a national writing award. The woman called me afterward and said, “I never thought my life had meaning until I saw your story.” And I told her, “The life had meaning. The story gave it structure.”

That’s how narrative comes to be. Not sitting around saying, I’m going to write about race and what race means. I’m going to tell a story about one woman that moves a city.

That story can be told in a thousand different ways. How do you make that decision?

It’s like music. It just sounds right; it feels right. Now Jacqui would tell that story maybe just like I did, maybe completely different, her story could be better, mine could be better, you might have one. It doesn’t matter which way we tell it, but it’s got to be told like a story. You can tell that story through the eyes of the daughter. You've got to pick something. That worked for me.

What do you mean tell it like a story?

You wouldn’t put a nut graf in there, “A Northeast Portland woman, who turned 75 last week…” You don’t know until the very end what happened. She cleaned homes.

What are you trying to accomplish with these stories?

Make people feel something. Love, anger, sadness, happiness, any kind of emotion. How often when you pick up the paper do you feel anything? When you read a story, you can feel something. You could cry. I can cry over my own stories, the good ones, not the bad ones.

I feel like crying when I read your stories. But it’s not sadness.

It makes you feel something. Yeah. I can read stories that I’ve written, I know how it’s going to end, I know where the moment is, and I can get teary eyes reading it. Even though I’m the guy who did it.

So how do you do that?

You just do it. You follow your heart. That’s what a story is. You want the reader to feel first. You don’t want the reader to go, “Oh, I am reading a story about a woman who cleaned homes, she’s a black woman, that’s great how things have changed.” You want to be in the middle of it, going, “Oh my God, her kids are ashamed of her. Oh my God, I feel for her.” Once you get them to feel something then you can give them the information. But you got to feel something. That’s why writing is an emotional process, not an intellectual.

So are you basically saying that you are trying to include moments in the story that people can relate to?

Yeah.

How do you give value to a moment like that, in writing? How do you give it life?

Through the details. Let me give you an example. I did a story about a guy who was mentally retarded. In the story, he had a crush on this girl. The girl’s parents were driving him. He’s 25. And I have a scene, which I’ve reconstructed, where he reaches over and holds her hand in the car, and he’s really nervous. Have you ever been like that? And he squeezes her hand. My next sentence was: And she squeezes back. It tells you everything. That moment when she squeezes back makes your heart, “Oh,” makes me feel good, makes me like the girl, makes me like the guy, makes me feel good. And when you’re done with the story, you hope they’ll have a bunch of those moments where they cry or they feel something.

So basically recognize these moments and then make sure you — 

We all recognize them.

As people, not necessarily as journalists.

Yeah, that’s the problem. The journalism gets in the way of it. That’s why some of the greatest writers in history were not journalism students. In my career, I worked in a car wash, a grocery store, a Greyhound race track, volunteered at the Veterans Hospital, bartender. To me that’s better than saying I went to Harvard, I had internships at The Washington Post, my SATs are perfect. Because that very background makes me see those moments. I’ve … in cars when I was 15 with the homeless guys, bums. Or I pushed guys around the VA in their wheelchairs, I listened to them tell stories.

How did you realize this was what you wanted to stick through, emotion through writing?

Because I can’t live any other way. Emotion is just who I am.

When you’re making the readers feel emotion, do you hope anything else will happen beyond that? Why are you trying to do that?

Because it reminds them that they’re alive. Most of us are very isolated. A story has the power to make somebody stop for a while, and think, and feel. Why does a guy paint? I mean, Bruce Springsteen is worth billions. He doesn’t have to write another song ever. Why? Or why does somebody have to do anything? I think it’s because it becomes part of who you are. That’s a difficult thing to understand at your age. I think if somebody gets older, they realize what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are. They learn who they are. I think it’d be very difficult … You can have somebody who’s young, who’s a great writer, fantastic at putting the sentences together. But they’ve got to go live life to be a storyteller. That’s why you get me somebody who has lived a lot of life, you can teach him how to put a story down, but a lot of people don’t recognize a story. And the way you recognize a story is you get out there and you live life.

So readers stop and they feel something, and they feel alive. Is that it?

Is that it? What else can it be? That is good, because in that moment I take this stranger and this stranger, and I’m in the middle, and I bring them together. And that’s the goal, to make them connect and feel something, or read something and be changed, even if it’s for a minute. Some stories can change you for a long, long time. Decades.

Sometimes better, more thoughtful. Think of someone who might be a borderline racist but doesn’t think they are. Have never really met a black person. The only black people they know are from TV shows. And they read that story about the cleaning lady. When they start they think, “Oh, I don’t want to read another story about an African-American. I’ll bet they’ll be complaining about something.” And by the time they get to the end of the story they’re weeping. And they have been in the presence of grace, and courage, and wisdom. And it changes their life.

Or take someone who grew up in the city, and thinks people in the rural areas are hayseeds. If you write a story about somebody out there on the land, and it makes them stop and think, wow, I’m not that much different. Or someone who’s terrified to come to a city and wants to live out in the middle of some isolated place, is afraid of the bad guys coming to rob her home, and you write a profile about a cab driver, and in that they see themselves, and go, “Wow, that’s not as different as I thought.” That’s how a story can help, too.

What would you want written on your grave?

He was a good man, and a great father, and a wonderful husband.

Where does storytelling fall?

What’s the biggest story you can ever write? Your kids. I’ve been here 34 years next year. I’ve won all these awards; you walk down that hallway, there’s all these awards. The day I retire and I come back two years later, I’ll be an old man walking through the newsroom. Nobody will care. But the love you put in with your family is what matters. Those are the best stories I will have ever written – my daughters. And the stories, I will live on not in the newsroom, but in the readers. Who 200 years from now, no matter how you read it, if you pick up that story about Sam Lightner, I’ll be dead, everybody involved in that story will be dead. But they will pick it up and they will cry, and they will go, “Oh my God, I can’t believe it.” Nobody will pick up the story about the city council or the budget or the crime two years from now. Go to the Pulitzer books, go to the Pulitzer feature writing, investigative, breaking news. You’ll read some of the investigative and breaking news stories, and go who cares? Every one of the Pulitzers for feature writing will move you. You can read Jacqui’s story 20-30 years from now, and it will still have the truth in there and the power of it.

Empathy – Uncle’s Tom Cabin, I was in Romania and I could feel something for this old man from another world. To what extent do you see your stories like that, timeless?

Not all of them, because even a great narrative might not have that kind of power, but I bet you there are 20 to 30 that do have that timelessness and the lessons. And none of them are really related to the news. None of them were considered sexy stories when I started them. All of them probably were within 15 miles of the newsroom. They were just there.

How do you see yourself in relation to your readers?

A teacher and a partner, at times a guide, at times walking alongside them and not that much different from them.

Do you consider yourself happy?

Yes.

What contributes to that?

That I have a very rich life outside of the newsroom. I play guitar, I ride the motorcycle, I go on my big motorcycle ride Thursday, I do ballroom dance, I do martial arts, I have a whole wide range of people that I know that have nothing to do with journalism. In the same way cops should not be hanging out with cops and doctors should not just be hanging out with doctors. Journalists tend to be a very isolated group. I also think most of my career, I did not hang out in the newsroom. I came in to write. If you look around the newsroom, most people come in, they pick up the phone, they get their stuff on the phone, they write their story, and we’re in a bubble. So for me to get out and walk downtown, I would go out and talk to the cab driver, I would be part of the world. And when you’re part of the world, it makes you think, and it makes you happy.

Do the stories make you happy?

Yes. In two ways. One, it’s wonderful to take moments and scenes and you structure them in a way that you know this is powerful. And I know when somebody reads it, they’re going to cry or laugh or whatever. So there’s that power. There’s also the power of the mystery of the story. Even as much as you know how to do the scene, how to control it, there’s still something else that’s in you that you really don’t get, but the story brings out in you. So I like that.

You’re basically saying that you discover something in yourself?

Yes. And then the third part is when it’s written, you send it out into the world and you see what happens. Which is pretty cool.

How does the selection process work for you?

Finding the story? What intrigues me. What interests me. You know, I’m 58, I’m kind of like a boy inside. I’m 17. I’m very curious about stuff. How does something work? How do you that? How do you put that together? What’s it like to do something? I don’t ask a question just to make conversation; I really am interested. And so the more questions I ask, all of a sudden I think, that’s kind of cool. That’s a good story.

If I were a creature inside your brain, what would I experience?

You would feel how my emotions would go up, and then I would feel something.

As you realize that oh, that emotional moment fits here?

Both. As I’m watching it, knowing this is an incredible moment and I’m witnessing something as a human, and at the same time going, “That’s an incredible moment for the story.” Then to actually write it and struggle with the writing; how do I make you, who weren’t there, feel what I felt through words? That dance is good. That’s challenging and fun, too. My emotions would go up and down. I would feel them and then try to manipulate the reader to feel the same way.

Is it difficult when you’re trying to write emotion into those moments?

No. Because I feel them.

But you said it was challenging. And pleasurable.

You watch a surgeon talking to me, and 15 minutes later go into a room to pick up a baby and put the baby into her arms, and say goodbye to the parents, and walk back and start operating. I felt something when she took that baby. The challenge is how do I get the reader to get what that means? Is it the way she does this on the child’s hair? Is it the fact that she always wears pearls so that when the kids wake up they see the pearls? What is it? And so part of it is asking questions, part of it is being observant, and part of it is structuring it in a way to build to those moments.

How do you decide what details to pick?

How I feel.

So you’re basically your own test reader?

Yeah.

Do you ever doubt your choices?

Early on in the process when you’re writing you struggle with it because you’re not sure if it’s right, or you can’t get your hands around it, and as the process goes on, I’m more and more confident. So when I turn a story in, I’m a very easy person to edit. Because I’ve done it, I can’t make it any better. Which makes the editor’s job fun and challenging, because if they’re going to edit, they can’t just copy edit, they have to story edit, which is, you know, fun for an editor. … I don’t fight over words at all. I can tell you why I had that sentence there. If you want to get rid of it, explain to me why it will make it better. And if you can, then hey, I’m all for that. Some people fight over a single word. I don’t.

Where does the pleasure come from?

The act of creating. I like the journey and the struggle and the fun and the learning in the doing of the story.

Have you had periods of time when you were disappointed with journalism?

Yeah. When you realize because of space limitations or time you only get to capture a bit. Or you get the opportunity to tell a story, and because you can’t devote the time to build a relationship with the person, you have to let it go because they’re not operating on your timetable. And I think that’s changed, too, over the last 10 years. There’s not as much space. A long story now can be 45 inches. I wrote a 6,000-word story about a guy working at a coffee shop. That would never happen now. They read them different online. Online, I have a 6,000-word story about a guy working in a coffee shop, and right above it is a story about a car accident. And they’re both given the same prominence. Maybe down the road people will read things differently.

Has there ever been something more serious than being disappointed in the changes the media is going through?

I look out in the landscape, and there are some really good young narrative writers out there. There’s a guy at The Washington Post that’s great. I think he’ll win a Pulitzer this year. What’s happening is the next generation is taking over. And they’re better at their age than my generation was at their age. There’s some great storytelling out there. It’s going to take the commitment of the publications to say it’s valuable, readers want it, and then create a platform for that.

What has kept you doing this for 30 years?

Mortgage. I don’t know what else I’d do. It fits me.

You obviously put in a lot of emotion to offer that much emotion. Has it ever felt draining or too much?

It can be draining, but not in the classical way. We fool ourselves if we think we’re the one in the story. We’re watching it. It can be draining when you watch something, but no. I still like it.

I know a lot of people my age who are reconsidering a future career in journalism.

It is different. Because the role of the reporter is much more directed by the institution than it used to be. I came in when there was a city editor, two assistants, and then all the reporters. So you could come up with an idea, and the editor would almost lose track of what you were doing. While now you got an editor on a team; it’s much more controlled. And I think it’s harder for a younger person to develop their passion or their interest when you don’t have the freedom to go explore.

Is there more?

I like to tell stories. I like people. I like getting into these different worlds. I feel like I’m going to school every day. I’m not bored. At 58 there’s a lot of guys bored with what they’re doing. I’m not bored. So that’s why I like it.

Satisfied?

Yes. Because I was able to do it on my own terms. Twice I was offered a job at the New York Times. The first time, my wife was pregnant, and I turned them down. I came back, I was still the police reporter here, no big deal, working Sunday through Thursday. I’ve written two books, Pulitzer, finalist twice, I won all those awards. But I’ve been a great father. I didn’t have to lose my life for the awards. And the bottom line is the Pulitzer is just a piece of paper hanging on the wall. So I was able to do it on my … I didn’t expect it. I didn’t think, oh my God, my goal at 25 is I’m going to win an award. I was just like, I like to cover the cops; it’s kind of cool how they are. I am happy with what I accomplished. But I never hung an award on the wall ever until my wife for Christmas like three years ago had the Pulitzer framed. But they were in boxes, in the closet; I never had any of them hung up.

So how do you think you were able to do that, to be accomplished both in your career and in your family?

In my life, I always put the job in perspective. When I was covering the cops, I would work 7:30 to 4, and at 4 o’clock I would get up and leave. I went home, I played with my kids in the park, a game of bass, I was there for dinner, which kept me balanced, living the life. At the paper I would say I had a crummy beat, the police beat, which allowed me to grow and learn at my own pace, and I was lucky enough to learn from the first group of editors, who were more interested in reporting than writing, and then work with Jacqui for a while, Jack Hart, these really good story editors. I got lucky that way.

How old were you when you got married?

I was almost 24. I just celebrated my 34^th wedding anniversary Sunday.

Congratulations!

Thank you.

So how important do you think this balance was for your work?

Critical. If you don’t have the balance, you start to become jaded with the world, and you can’t see stories in the world if you look at it as jaded, and the more you’re out in the world, you get story ideas, you hear things, you have to have the excitement about being in the world. If you’re sitting in the newsroom 12 hours a day, you have nothing left to give the world. You go home and watch TV. So you got to get out. You got to dance or play music, ride bikes, do whatever it is to renew your spirit.

How do you do that on a long term? How do you make sure you stay on track?

You find what moves you. Do you listen to music? I listen to music all the time. I can feel myself fill up listening to music. And I can feel myself feel melancholic listening to music, which I like, too. I like hearing the sad songs. Or whatever. You find ways to renew your spirit that have nothing to do with going and drinking or whatever, but what makes you, you. Whatever that is, you figure that out.

Are stories renewing your spirit, or are they the thing in which your energy goes?

Both. Because when you get to go do a story about somebody, the black cleaning lady, it renews my spirit to be with her, it renews my spirit to write about her, and then to get the response; in three different kind of ways. One is human to human, the other is writer to story, and the other is journalist to reader.

In those moments that you said are the ones that reveal emotion and make the story powerful, what else do you pay attention to, except for the details you select?

For a while there, many of my stories, especially the stories that were, a lot of the award winners, I would start a story not sure where it was going; I would be there while it unfolded. So I was able to pick the moments, and go, this is going to be a big moment, or this is a moment, or I’d better be there for that moment. Not necessarily knowing why, but feeling. In addition to feeling something, being able to have the access to be there when it happened was a big deal. There’s not as many opportunities to do that now because those stories take so much time.

And then when you write it, how do you make sure you don’t screw it up?

You probably screw it up anyway. Less is more, No. 1 – and I’ve violated these rules. Don’t try to overwrite it. If it’s a beautiful, simplistic moment, trust that the moment is powerful enough for the reader to get. You don’t have to be overwriting it. And let your heart be the guide, and if you’re, “Oh, my gosh, I really feel something about it…” and figure, well, the reader will feel that, too.

If you were to point out three major happy moments in your life, what would they be?

Birth of my kids. I wouldn’t say getting married because you’re not aware of what it is, but I would say the story of a marriage, sharing good times and bad times. And I would say winning the Pulitzer, not necessarily for me, but for what it meant to my parents and my kids and the people who had been there on the journey. That was a cool moment. The publisher. There’s a picture. I had been a finalist twice before, and there’s a picture in New York that they took at the moment they called my name. And you can see my father, he has tears in his eyes, and I’m walking around, I put my arms around the publisher’s shoulders, who was the kind of guy you really didn’t do that with. But it was a very powerful moment, and I realized that was cool for them. They were both alive to see it, that my parents were there, my kids were there.

Is this a job worth offering half of your life to?

Yeah. Because you’re going to offer it to something. Because at the end of this journey, do I want to look at a file drawer full of cases I’ve prosecuted? No. The doctor thing is pretty cool, but only if I can be like a brain surgeon. I wouldn’t want to be a dermatologist. I was drawn to the drama of it. That’s pretty cool: heart surgeon, brain surgeon, yeah. Because you change lives. But these stories, you bet. It’s great. I can pick up stories I wrote 30 years ago and go, I love this. Yes. No, it is worth it.

Because they have changed lives?

Because they will live on past me. Maybe in 20,000 years it will change, but in 300 years, you’re still going to cry over the same things you cry about now. And when you read a story of mine, or any of the other Pulitzer stories, too, that’s power. That’s life. And when you read them, to think that in 100 years any one of those Pulitzer winners will be dead, but yet Jacqui’s story will speak to somebody, even though she is long gone.

***

Chris Jones is a longtime writer for Esquire and a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award. He writes the back-page column at ESPN The Magazine.

Simina Mistreanu: How do you choose the stories you end up working on?

Chris Jones: It’s a process. I sort of go back and forth with my editor and decide what stories to do. I pitch a lot more stories than we actually do. What I look for in a story: I like stories that have stories behind them; they’re not just about something on the surface, but they’re about something larger. I like stories probably because I’m vain and I like to think that I can maybe write a story that matters; I like to pick important subjects generally. That’s not always true, like someone breaking The Price Is Right isn’t actually an important story, but I like to do stories about important subjects — emotional subjects often.

What’s an important subject?

That’s a good question because sometimes stories that don’t seem important actually have something touching behind them. And I think the Price Is Right story is a good example of that, where it’s really just about a guy who breaks a game show, but it’s about dedication and obsession and being good at something. And those are important. But often I sort of fall back on that idea that if a story isn’t about life and death or fatherhood or, you know, world-changing events, the political moment or things like that. ... I’m definitely drawn to stories about life and death. You know, once you’ve done stories like that it’s hard to see the same value in a story about something more frivolous. But there are lots of great stories that don’t have a body in them. I don’t want you to think that I’m thinking someone has to die in a story for it to be important. Some stories have a better chance of being stories that count to people, and, I think, if I’m being honest, I’m always trying to find those stories.

For your experience so far, what are readers looking for in your stories? What are you trying to offer them?

It’s hard for me to say what they’re looking for. My hope is always that I’ve given them something to think about. My hope is that they don’t finish one of my stories and then immediately forget about it. And certainly I’ve written my share of totally forgettable stories, but the hope is always that it’s something that sticks with people. I can’t say that when someone’s reading a story, is that something they want? I don’t know. I know when I read a long story I hope that I’m rewarded in some way, that I’m given something that makes me think, “Ah, I’m glad I read that.” Sometimes that can be just 20 minutes of diversion that isn’t TV. But I like when a story gives me something to really think about, that maybe changes the way I look at something or how I think about my life, or how I think about someone else. I don’t know if most people go into stories wanting those things, but I like stories where I feel like I got something in exchange for my time. And that’s what I try to get. I think a good compliment you can give to a writer is that he or she never cheats the reader, that you’ve given them something of value for their time. I guess that’s what I try to do.

What are your favorite parts through this process?

My favorite part is the reporting. By far that’s my favorite part. I love going out on the road and talking to people. I love that moment when you find something interesting or a little nugget, a little detail. I love meeting people; I love traveling. I love that kind of detective work. Sometimes I think about alternate careers I might have done; I think I would have been a pretty good detective because I like digging. I like that sort of looking in files and trying to crack tough nuts, people who maybe don’t want to be interviewed. And then when you get those moments that you know are going to count in a story. You know, you find those little details or that moment in a story that you know is going to play a big part in your final product. At this point, I kind of know when you get one of those moments. That’s sort of what I love doing. And I love the feeling I have at that time, when you’re sort of going, “Oh, I got one here. I got a really good story.” Finding ideas is okay. It’s frustrating sometimes. You pitch so many that don’t get taken. Sometimes you go through a slump where you’re trying to find something; you’re trying to convince yourself that something’s a good story: Oh, yeah, I know, I think I can make this a good story. But you have the ones that are going to be great, you kind of know, and your editor kind of knows. Writing for me is actually pretty hard. I’m not one of those people who just sits down and just flows. I work. Writing for me is work. I don’t dislike it, but I much prefer reporting. My dream job would be to be able to report something and just hand it out to somebody else.

Can you give me an example of a moment that you felt would count for the final stories?

Yeah. It’s different moments for different stories, but it’s funny how they kind of stick with you. Like I can remember really clearly the moments when I got those moments. Do you know what I mean? It’s funny, when I think about stories I often think about the reporting and those very particular moments when I got something. Like I’m thinking, you know, the soldier story, I can remember very specifically, there’s a scene in that story where Michael, Joey’s brother, tries to put his ring on his finger and the glove kind of, and he’s got this glove that’s stuffed with cotton. I remember very specifically their aunt Vicky telling me that in a Cracker Barrel restaurant over lunch. I just knew that scene was going to be an important scene in the story. In “Animals,” the one about the Zanesville Zoo shooting, I can remember seeing Steve Blake for an interview at the police station, when he told me about this tiger being shot and this puff of fur going off his back, and you could see his spine. And down he goes, he said, and down he goes. I can still hear him saying that, and the way he said it, I can hear it perfectly. I think a great story has to have those scenes or those moments that really catch in people. And what happens invariably is when you’re reporting those moments they’re catching you. I can remember the moment I got them. It’s often crystal clear. Even the stories that are old, 8 years old, I can remember the moments when I found a particular thing that I thought would count.

What do you do so that you make sure the readers would react to those moments in a similar way in which you reacted when you experienced them?

You can’t guarantee it. Sometimes you think they’re going to be a big moment, and you screw it up. It’s like lost in translation somehow, you don’t convey it well enough. So your job is to write in a way that gives those moments the importance that they should have. And that comes down to things like the language you use or where it is in the story, how you build to that moment, is it the start or the beginning of a section. I often put important moments in starts or beginnings of sections. I like to use section breaks as like beginnings and endings in some ways. I’m trying to think of the theory, there’s a word, “Chekhov’s gun,” is that what it is? It’s where you put like a little hint of something, and you think it doesn’t matter when you first see it, you’re kind of like, that’s a weird detail, but then it really counts later. You set the reader up in some ways. You think it’s just a little note, and then all of a sudden, it means something much bigger later in the story. Teller, the magician story I did, has a bunch of those in it, where you think it’s just some mundane detail, and then at the end it all kind of becomes important. That’s a story in some ways you have to read twice to pick up on everything because you think it’s just nothing, and then when you get to the end of that story and you think the whole story’s a trick, you kind of go like, “Oh, shit!” There’s moments where it matters more. I think the biggest thing is structure, it’s like placing those moments in the right spot in your story. You might not necessarily lead with them, or maybe they’re an ending, or maybe you use them as a section break, or, you know, those are the decisions that you make. … In writing a story, you make a thousand of those choices, like where something goes or the words you’re going to use, and you hope you’ll write it in a way that means those moments have as much gravity in the story as they did to you when you first found them.

Is this an intellectual process?

I think it’s both intellectual and feel. I think there’s some writers who really sort of plan, like outline and really plan things out deliberately more intellectually than I do. For me a lot of it comes down to feel, and that’s always a frustrating thing. I always hate it when I talk to people about how they do things, and they talk about feel. It’s a really hard thing to pin down, but it’s true that sometimes you write a scene and it just feels right. It feels like, “Oh, I got that.” In my Roger Ebert story, where he gets really mad that they’ve taken down the videos of Gene Siskel, there are these videos of Gene Siskel he had put up, and has taken them off the Internet and Robert gets really mad about it. I have a spot memory of writing that scene in my basement in Montana and knowing it just was right, it just felt good. I was like, okay, I got that. And then you don’t touch it. I don’t have to mess with it. You get those moments when everything kind of falls into place. And I don’t know why they happen. I think some people try to make them happen and do make them happen intellectually. They plan it out: This is how I’m going to write the story, and I do this, and I do this, and I do this. I’m less like that and more like I just do my best to make it. You know, I listen to music that inspires me, and I try to just let things flow. And hopefully you get one of those moments when everything kind of drops into place. It’s hard to explain: It’s like, you know how athletes talk about being in the zone, where you’re just keyed in, if you’re a baseball player you can see the pitches really well and you just feel comfortable and you feel like everything’s kind of clicking? In writing you get those moments, too. There’s some nights when writing is a real struggle, and you’re sort of chugging away at it, you’re not really capturing it properly. You mentioned flow in your original email. Whenever it’s not flowing, when you’re just kind of hammering at it. And then there are other nights when it just kind of comes. And I wish I had a better explanation for why those nights are like that because otherwise I would do whatever I needed to do to guarantee I was going to have one of those nights. But they’re rare. They don’t come very often. For me, anyway.

Do you think the work is better when it comes easier?

Oh, yeah. The final product? Almost invariably the stories where the writing you get those moments are better stories. For me. This is for me. Yeah. The stories where it just pours out, those are usually better for me as final products than the stories where I had to really wrestle. It’s hard to be objective about that because I’m not reading my stories the way a reader does. I can see everything that’s missing, I can see all the hard parts, I can see where I struggled, I know the sentences where I feel like I didn’t quite catch them. So I’m not sure there’s the same difference in stories that I can see, but definitely the stories that I like, at least at some point during the process I had that moment where everything kind of came.

Does this happen when you write or when you report or both?

Well, I think those stories happen when I’ve done a good job reporting. I think my goal is always to report a story to the point where I can just tell the story, where I know it back to front, do you know what I mean? You don’t really get those flow moments in the reporting; you certainly get those moments when you get a great detail or whatever, when you’re reporting. But for me, those really transcending moments where the writing just comes, I think almost invariably, I’ve reported a lot, I’ve reported really well. I don’t know why particularly you get those. You’ve probably had them. Where you’ve had those two- or three-hour little windows where the words are just coming, and you feel like everything’s flowing, and you feel like it’s all sitting right on the page. I think those invariably come from good reporting, but they don’t always.

So you’ve been doing journalism for more than 15 years now?

Too long, dude. Yeah, 15 years.

Why have you kept doing journalism?

I have so many answers to that question. Well, I can’t do anything else, the money is pretty good, the lifestyle is pretty good. What I will say, nothing is ever, you know, we were talking about those nights when it just comes, like I live for those. Maybe if it was always like that, I would be less into it. In a strange way, I think there’s something elusive about those moments or those stories, and it’s like I guess I’m kind of driven to have that feeling again. I know how good it feels. It’s like a drug. For me, those nights are like drugs. And those stories, you know, 15 years, I probably got six or seven or eight stories that I really, really like. Which isn’t very many; it’s one every two years. But I’m proud of those stories, and the feeling that those stories give you is — I don’t know, it doesn’t feel like work. At its best, this job, you feel like you’re stealing money. I feel like I’m stealing money. Sometimes I feel like I would do it even if I wasn’t getting paid just because I love how it feels. But it’s not always like that. There are times when this job is really frustrating.

What do you think sets apart those six or seven or eight stories from the other stories you’ve written?

Everything kind of clicked. There are stories where the ideas was good, and the reporting went well, and I had one of those nights writing them, and the editing was good, and it looks good on the page. Like the whole process is good; do you know what I mean? It doesn’t necessarily mean that story was easy, the process was easy, but in the end everything worked. And again, that comes down to that awful feel. Everything just fell into place. Except it doesn’t fall into place because you make it happen. Everything just kind of works, and you know it. There’s a moment when you kind of know. Sometimes I’m sitting there and I’m trying to convince myself that the story is good; oh, it’s pretty good. You start talking yourself into it. The ones that are really good, you don’t have to convince yourself. You’re like, I got that one. But it really is rare; it just doesn’t happen that often where it’s just like everything clicked. And sometimes it matters, I think, too, the response. I think in some way my opinion of a story is colored by the reception it got. There are a couple of stories of mine that I liked that no one gave a crap about.

Which ones?

There’s one I like, it’s called “The End of Mystery,” about investigators. No one read it, no one talks about it, I still like it. But a lot of the ones I feel particularly good about are the same stories that kind of caught people. My favorite story I’ve ever done in terms of a story I just love is Teller. I loved working on that story, I really liked the final product. Yeah, that’s probably my favorite one.

It is a magical story.

So we started this conversation talking about important stories. That’s not especially important. That’s a story about a magic trick that someone stole. But again, that story is about passion and dedication and belief, and Teller, I guess I just loved how much he cared about magic. Yeah, I just loved how much he cared. To see someone that passionate and, you know, everything today is cynicism, people shitting on stuff, and he believes so intensely that magic can be this beautiful thing. I loved it. I loved everything about him, and I think that’s part of why I feel that way about the story. If you asked me what story am I proudest of, I would probably say Joey, the soldier story because I think that was important that we did that, but in terms of a story that I just loved, I loved the Teller story. I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant, talking about stuff I like because there’s a lot of stuff I hate.

I remember when I read the Teller story. It just felt like it was one of the most beautiful stories I’ve read in my life.

Thank you. That’s all Teller there. That was one where I think the idea was cool, magic tricks and Teller was so awesome talking about it, and even some of the supporting characters had really good stuff. Joe Stenmeyer, the magic inventor, was really cool. And, you know, you talk about weird stories. That one, I can’t remember if I said this in Romania or not, but I had a totally different ending. A totally, totally different ending where it was fictional. I made up the ending. And then I got high one night, and I was reading the story, and then I finally realized that it was a trick. I had this moment where I was like, “Holy shit, he’s just played a huge trick on me.” The whole ending changed because I had this moment where I was like, “Oh, my God.” Just this moment of realization which I’m not sure I would have had if I hadn’t smoked a joint. You talk about flow, that night my brain opened up, and it was like, "Oh, crap," but I think it made that story much better.

To what extent is it caring about the people you write?

That’s a lot of it. That’s the best advice you can give someone, I think. I will take the reporter with the biggest heart in the room every single time. I think it matters so much. I think you need someone who is curious about the world — that’s where the ideas come from, right — someone who is curious about the world, who sees the world differently or has questions about things where people don’t have questions. Reporting. There’s a skill to reporting I think in terms of talking to people and knowing where to go for information, but reporting really comes down to care. It comes down to being willing to put in the time and to be careful with people, to be empathetic, I think that’s how you get good information. And then writing, a lot of it comes down to labor, just being willing to sit down and work and work and work and cross-write, in those moments you can be motivated by fear of losing your job, or you can be motivated by money, or you can be motivated by deadlines, but the best stories, you’re motivated because you really want to tell a great story. You care about the people in it. It matters so much, Simina, that you care. It’s like you can tell in a second when someone didn’t give a shit about the story they were working on. It comes out in so many ways. It comes out in lazy reporting, crappy writing, where someone should have gone back and worked on it more and they didn’t; you can see that from a mile away.

And how do you see the care?

You can see care in just the way when you look at a beautiful piece of furniture or look at a really good movie, you can see that someone took the time. You look at a beautiful Japanese zen garden, you know, they don’t just happen. That happened because someone worked on it and worked on it and worked on it and cared about the little details and polished it until it was perfect. And you can see that in stories. You can see it in how much reporting was done, if you finish a story and you don’t have any questions, it has answered every one of your questions and let you satisfied, and there’s sentences in there where you just close your eyes and you go, “Oh, they nailed that.” I still read stories where I think, “Oh, that is perfect.”

How did this work in “The Things That Carried Him?”

How did it work in terms of care?

Yeah. Did you feel connected to Joey?

Oh, absolutely. I felt super connected to Joey; I had never met Joey, but I felt super connected to him, cared a great deal about his mom, still care a great deal about his mom. I knew that was an important story from the beginning, but as I worked on it I became more and more invested in it, as I saw people’s reactions to the fact that I was doing a story or to my question. … I had a particular moment, it was quite early, where I went to the port mortuary, where all the bodies go in Delaware, and in the military, they have this tradition of giving coins. Not like quarters or dimes, but they melt their own coins, it’s almost like they’re medals. They’re not medals, they’re coins. And the head of the mortuary was a woman named Karen Jiles, and she gave me this coin that was, one side it had a folded flag, you know, with white gloves, and it represented the mortuary. And she said something, she was like, “When you write this story, I want this sitting beside you when you write this story, and I want you to look at it, and I want you to remember what you saw here and how much people care, what it means to us.” She said something like, “I don’t want you ever to forget what goes on here.” And I’m really glad she did that. I don’t think I would have forgotten, but, you know, when I wrote that story I had that coin siting on my computer. And I felt in some ways like I was part of the journey of bringing Joey back. I felt like everyone who did that had cared so much and worked so hard, and I felt like if I let them down, I would regret it forever. So I just did my best to write a story that they would be proud of. That they would read and say was right and was true. It was just one of those stories where I felt like I couldn’t cut — not that I do this anyway — but I didn’t want to cut any corners. I wanted it to be perfect. I can’t say that it’s perfect, but I can say that I tried my hardest. I can say without any doubt that I put everything I could into that story.

How does a story like this, where you care a whole lot, which is also very sad, how does it affect you?

It affects me a lot. I think some reporters are better at that than I am. There’s a debate here, I think, about objectivity and maintaining distance, all that kind of stuff that they teach you in journalism school. I don’t maintain any distance; I don’t try to maintain distance; I think that’s a shitty way to treat people. If you’re asking them to open up to you, I don’t see how you return that favor by being a wall. So I feel it, and I feel it during the reporting; I had lots of moments during that story where I was crying with people. I cried with Aunt Vicky at Cracker Barrel; I cried a lot with Joey’s mom. I pulled over at one point driving back from her house and cried on the side of the highway. There’s a cost to that. It’s hard. I worked on that story for eight months. My wife will probably tell you I wasn’t an awesome husband during that time. I was pretty consumed by it. And then when I was done, I went into a pretty deep depression after that story. Partly because it was such a sad subject, and partly because I didn’t know what to do next. You know, when you have one of those stories, a lot of a writer’s life is kind of structureless, like you don’t know what you’re doing day to day, you don’t really have any — I don’t anyway — have any patterns and routines. When I was working on that story I knew what I was doing. I knew it, and I knew it counted. I knew it was important. So I was motivated every day to find the next piece of the puzzle or to write that paragraph. And when it was over, I was kind of like, "What do I do now? What do I do now that’s going to matter as much?" And the truth is, I haven’t written a story since that matters as much, and I probably never will. I’ve sort of come to the realization that that was probably the most important story I’ll do. There’s a definite cost, but at the same time I feel like if you don’t invest yourself that way, if you don’t care, you’re never going to get those stories. You’re sort of making a deal. I’m making a deal where I’m deciding it’s worth this cost for me to do this.

Why do you think you won’t write another story that will be just as important or more important than that?

I just can’t imagine it, I think. And that story is now 5 years old, and I haven’t come close to it. I can always hope that I’ll find a story that everything happens the way that story happened, but I think I’ve slowly come to the realization that I will probably not. I don’t know; I feel like that story was special. Again it was kind of those ones where everything worked. Esquire let me write 17,000 words. I don’t think that’s ever going to happen again. Everyone was so helpful. Everything just kind of fit. That’s not to say I won’t write stories, you know, Teller came after that. That story will probably be the best I can do.

To what extent are you pursuing heavy subjects now?

I still pursue heavy subjects. I haven’t had a great year this year. I haven’t done much this year. I did Hugh Hefner in April. Not many people read that story. It didn’t do very well. I tried on it, I liked doing it. I have a story coming out in the September issue about how they make money, how they physically make the new $100 bill. So it’s not a story about life and death. I think it’s interesting. I’m doing a story now on the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination. I’m still drawn to those darker subjects for sure. Even Teller, Teller’s kind of dark. It’s a story about magic, but it’s pretty dark.

Yeah, but it does have a lot of heart.

I haven’t done a celebrity cover story in — I guess they don’t give them to me anymore. Sometimes I think I’d like to do one just to take a break from the dark stuff, but who knows, I’d probably do a celebrity cover story that had a body in it by the end.

You were saying at some point that you were considering doing something else other than writing. Are you still thinking about doing that?

Yeah. I still think about it a lot. Not because I don’t like writing. It’s a couple of things, I think. I think a lot about — this probably explains a lot about the stories I do — but I think a lot about how I’ll look back on life whenever I’m dying. Will I have done everything I wanted to do? I think about that a lot. Will I be happy with my life? And sometimes if, in that moment, if I’ve only written, if I didn’t do anything else, will I be, “Okay, that was good”? And sometimes I worry — I don’t think I will keep writing if I stopped caring about it. I had a moment — I actually tweeted about it, I think — I had a moment a couple of weeks ago where I had a really good writing session, it felt really good, I was grateful for that, I had one of those nights, I was grateful I had one of those nights, but I always have this little fear that’s the last time it will happen. If I stop caring, I think I’d stop doing this. I like to think I would, anyway. I hope I would.

What do you think might make you stop caring?

I don’t know. You see it happen. You see where people just get tired or stop investing themselves so much. Sometimes I worry that having kids, as they grow up, maybe it’s right that my priorities change and I want to spend time with them rather than travel and work on stories. Maybe that’s the correct order of things. Maybe places will stop wanting to have me work for them. A lot of this stuff isn’t in my control. I like to think that I’m grateful when it happens now, and that I’m mindful of the fact that it probably won’t always be like this. Especially writing about sports, Simina, you see all the time that people peak and then they disappear. And that’s how it works, kind of. There are writers who are great in their 70s and 80s, but I don’t want to presume I’m going to be one of those people. If I am and I’m happy, great. I don’t want to talk my way out of it. But I’m aware of the fact that it probably won’t last forever. Then I’ll do something else, and hopefully I’ll find something I’ll care about as much.

What are some of the things you’re most proud of now (in life)?

I’m proud of my kids. I try to be a good dad. I’m proud of some of the work I’ve done. I like to think that I’ve worked hard. I like to think that what I do, whether it’s working on my house, you know, if I renovate houses, stuff like that. I was sitting in our bedroom looking at the floor that I refinished. I worked my ass off on this fucking floor. But it’s good. I’m proud of that. This floor had shitty pink carpet on it, and all sorts of paint, and now it’s a beautiful wood floor. I feel good about that. But you know, 50 years from now, somebody’s going to come back and paint it, put shitty pink carpet back on it. So it’s part of the deal. That’s a sad question. I like having experiences. I think that’s what life is about. For me, it’s almost become more about that than concrete accomplishments. Like was today a good day? Did I do something good today? Did I do something useful today? Did I do something that made me or someone else happy today? I think I’m having a mid-life crisis, Simina. I think I’m having it right now. You’re trying to make it count. Like you’re trying to make the time count. Man, that’s a hard question. I think I’ve got a lot more work to do because I don’t have that long a list of things I’m proud of. You see people in this business all the time who were once really good and then aren’t. And it’s like what happened there? What changed? Why aren’t they as good as they used to be? Is it because they physically can’t do it, because reporting does take some stamina, is it that? Did they stop caring as much? Did they get distracted by other things in their lives like their families or a different passion that rose up in them? What happened there? I don’t know. And I think it would be the height of hubris if I just sat here now and say, “You know, when I’m 70 I think I’ll be doing really good work.” I have no idea. Every time I see an athlete who’s great being a dick to somebody, the way I make myself feel better is that I know that in 10 years they’ll be retired and no one will care about them anymore. No one gives a shit that Michael Jordan was Michael Jordan. He has no power now. He thinks he has power, but no one cares. And he was the greatest basketball player ever. Wayne Gretsky, the greatest hockey player ever, now just loafs around golfing. That’s just how life works. I’m mindful of the fact that one day people will stop giving me work and students like you will stop caring what I think about writing and no one will care. I think that is inevitable, and I think I am prepared for that. It’s a pessimistic way of thinking, I think it’s realistic where I think it won’t last forever. I think about that time when it will stop. What will I do then that makes me feel as good as those nights of writing make me feel now? I don’t take it for granted. I’m aware of how good I have it right now. I was in the Esquire office on Monday, and I was talking to Granger and Peter, my bosses. And I said to them, I was like, “Thanks for the ride. I really appreciate the work, and I appreciate being part of this for like 11 years now.” But Granger could quit tomorrow, and then everything changes. I’m just aware.

Where do your stories fall in this? Are they immortal?

I think so, yeah. Some of them disappear the day they came out. They have different lifespans. Some of them will last longer. But I think we’ll still read something like “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” Certainly when I was younger I had this vanity that people would be reading my stuff years from now. I don’t know now if that’s necessarily the case. I think there’s so much to read and there’s so much information out there. I do my best to write a story that someone will think nicely of and will remember, but I can’t imagine that even 20 years from now people will be talking about my stuff. I don’t know. I think some stories have a better chance of lasting than others. But I don’t think any of them will last forever. Holy crap, that’s depressing. What am I doing?

If you were to talk to someone who’s just starting out and is thinking of dedicating a few decades to this type of work, what would you tell them? Is it worth it?

Yeah. As much as I’ve been talking about doubt and fears and terrible things, my working life has been great. I can’t imagine many other things I could have done that would either give me the life or the pleasure that writing has. For me, it’s the perfect lifestyle. Someone made me work 9 to 5 somewhere, I would have topped myself a long time ago. I couldn’t have done it. The travel has been amazing. I’ve gotten paid to go to meet interesting people and watch amazing things. I’ve had such a good deal. And my work products are these very tangible little stories that hopefully people like. And I do think there is like a minor magic in being able to write something that gets printed on a piece of paper that can ship to California or Romania or Missouri, and then someone just sits there and reads it. And I wrote it here in my house. I still think that’s pretty cool. I can think of a lot worse jobs for sure. It occasionally has its frustrations and disappointments, but I think that would be true of anything that you care about. I can’t imagine caring about something and being perfect at it all the time. I don’t know anybody that lucky. So this is a pretty good level of luck where I do get to experience that sometimes, and I can stay at home with my kids, and I can go on a plane and see somewhere new and make a good living doing that. I have nothing to complain about. I think that’s probably why I think so much about it ending, because I don’t especially want it to end. If I can give myself credit for something, I’m aware of how good I have it and I’m grateful for it. I know there will come a time in my life when I’ll look back on this and go, “Wow, that was a good run.” I always think, when you look at someone, you know, the Olympics, there would be a gymnast who does something insane, I always think about them being 80 watching themselves on TV, and remembering when they could do that with their bodies. You know, when they’re 80 and sitting in a wheelchair and they’re watching themselves doing backflips in the air. Like what’s that like, to look back and see that moment when you were great?

Does it make any difference whether it’s storytelling and not medicine?

Literally lifesaving? It threw me for a loop because once you see someone’s life come back, holy crap, once you see that happen, you’re like what am I doing? I should be doing this. If I’m capable of doing this, this is what I should be doing. I had a really hard time after that because I was like well, I should do that. I think I’d be pretty good at it, and I think I can do it. Why would I tell stories when I can go out there and I can start people’s hearts back up? But stories can still change people. You can’t literally bring them back to life, but you can make a difference to someone’s life. You can make someone feel better, you can make someone think about things a little differently, you can make them see things a little differently. You’re not changing a life in the sense that you’re saving it or ending it, but you can make small changes. And that’s a lot to ask from a job. That’s a hard standard for success: Did I save a life? That’s a high standard for success. I think in that moment when I’m starting a story, I’m just hoping it’s a good story. To be honest, I’m not sure I really think that deeply about it. OK, I’m going to do my best to make sure this is a good story. I think it’s the story that matters in some weird way. That sounds pretty awful, I think, when I’m saying, “All that matters is a story.” But I think that’s kind of true. For me in that moment. Maybe afterwards when I look back I’ll feel good about the effect it had on someone or whatever. But most of the time I’m thinking I just want to make the story as good as I can.

Why is this important?

Because it’s what I’m doing. If I am spending that time and energy on something, I want it to be good. If I was doing it and it was shitty, I wouldn’t feel good about it, I wouldn’t get satisfaction from it. It’s important to me, if I’m going to do something, it’s important that I do it as well as I can. It’s just how I am. My wife and I always talk about this because I refuse to do things I’m not good at. Like I don’t cook because I’m bad at it and I don’t see any point in doing it. Whereas she likes to do many different things. (She’s just learning, and that’s part of the process. Whereas me, I’ll just do two things with my life because those are the things I’m good at.) I’m nuts. Why waste time on something you suck at? Why don’t you just go to the restaurant?

Finkel — it was important to him that he was in the middle of a great story and he was grateful for that.

Sometimes, like Finkel, at the detriment of your own safety. I can honestly say, when I have one of those stories, I’m consumed by it. It’s all I think about. Again, my wife will start talking about those times when I’m here but I’m not here. I’m present but I’m not mentally present because I got one of those stories going on, and it’s just … I know what Finkel’s talking about. You’re so excited to have one of these things, you’re just doing everything you can to make sure you don’t blow it. Because that’s the worst feeling, when you know you got one, when you know you got the material and you fuck it up.

How do you maintain that over the years? Is it natural?

That’s the question. I don’t know. Right now, it’s almost natural. It’s just how I am, it’s just how I’m built, so when I’m in that moment, I’m excited and happy. But that’s my question, is always will it last? Maybe it will. Maybe I’m totally wrong, and when I’m 80 I will still get as jacked up about a story as I do now. But I don’t know. I see it so many times when people don’t maintain … Maintain is the right word. Like to maintain that standard is hard. To be consistently decent is hard. Right now it is natural that I feel that way; I keep expecting that at some point I won’t feel that way. When someone will call me with an assignment and I won’t want to go. And I think that moment, it’s got to happen. … I don’t think you can make yourself care. I think you do and you don’t. Today I woke up still caring, tomorrow I hope I’ll wake up still caring. The day I don’t want to go and I don’t care, then that’s the day I’ll probably do something else.

Reinforcements —

No. Check, people saying nice things. That’s a little bit of fuel. But ultimately I think it comes down to you. … If you’re going into a story and you don’t care about it, I think you’re cheating the reader. I think there’s a writer out there who would care about it, who would do a good job, and you shouldn’t fuck it up. I think you have a responsibility. I mean, if I’m asking someone, “Can I tell your story?” and deep down I don’t give a shit, that’s a pretty lousy way to treat somebody. To ask them to give you something when you don’t really care. That’s a pretty dirty thing to do to somebody. And I can tell people, I can look them straight in the eye and tell them I care about getting the story right, doing a good job, being careful. I would hate to say those things and not mean it. I think that’s a moral responsibility you have as a reporter: if you’re going to ask somebody to tell their story, you’d better care about what you’re hearing.

Simina Mistreanu just got her master’s in journalism from the University of Missouri. She grew up in Romania and worked as a journalist there for five years before coming to the United States, in August 2011, on a Fulbright scholarship. She is now a resident at the  Oregonian and is working on a yearlong project writing stories about Roma. She loves Portland, especially for its zippy Argentine tango scene.

The post “Narrative Sweat & Flow,” Part 4: Tom Hallman Jr. and Chris Jones appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Editor’s note: The Oregonian’s Simina Mistreanu spoke to seven narrative journalists for her University of Missouri master’s project on longform. On Tuesday, we ran her setup, a piece on the challenges and importance of longform narrative. Thursday, we published her conversations with Pulitzer winners Lane DeGregory and David Finkel. The series ends next week with The Oregonian's Tom Hallman Jr. and Esquire's Chris Jones. Up today, lightly edited for clarity and length, the New York Times' Amy Harmon and the Washington Post's Anne Hull.

Amy Harmon won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting, for her “striking examination of the dilemmas and ethical issues that accompany DNA testing, using human stories to sharpen her reports.” She’s the author of Asperger Love, an ebook published by Byliner and the New York Times.

Mistreanu: How do you choose the stories you work on?

Harmon: It kind of depends. My first narrative story, really, was the story that I did that was part of the project at the Times, a big project called “How Race is Lived in America.” That was in 2000. So for that particular story, the editors had chosen a format. They were interested in the relationships between individuals of different races, kind of in everyday life, but in a variety of settings. At the time I was writing about the technology and the Internet. I was doing news and feature stories. I really hadn’t kind of discovered narrative form. For that one it was a little bit set. I did find my characters. So I mean, I had to find my characters and I needed to make sure I had a good setting, but that one was all of it preordained by the editors. The next set of stories that I did, that had more narrative, was the series called “The DNA Age,” which was the series that won the Pulitzer. In that, I really drew a little bit from my own experience. I got interested in the subject because I had just had a baby, and I had been offered genetic testing, and I didn’t know what genetic testing was, so I kept it in the back of my mind that when I came back from maternity leave I would look into what other kind of genetic testing was available. I try to do stories that illuminate some intersection of science and society. And within that, I try to find trends, like maybe something that’s new that’s affecting people’s lives, and then I try to find a narrative vehicle through which to tell the bigger story of the conflict that it’s causing in people’s lives, and in society. So all of those things need to kind of be satisfied, I guess.

Like, for example, the recent story that I did following the development of a genetically modified orange, which might be the first genetically modified fruit, mainstream fruit, that Americans will be able to consume or not consume. There’s sort of a big debate going on about GMO, genetically-modified organisms, are they good, are they bad, are they part of an evil attempt by Monsanto to take over the world, or will they help feed the world? It’s a scientific development, the ability to create genetically modified organisms, genetically modified crops, so I wanted to write about that. But I really only wanted to write about it in a narrative form because it’s been written a lot about already in terms of here’s what Monsanto does, here’s what the other side says. So I was thinking the way to shed light on this would be to find the right vehicle to tell it, and then I stumbled upon a mention of the possibility that orange growers might need to try to develop a genetically modified orange because of a disease that was affecting the orange crop, and I thought, wow, if I can get an orange grower who is trying to do this to talk to me and give me the access that I would need to make a narrative out of this, and follow his journey and the obstacles that he’s facing that would be a contribution to the broader conversation over the social and scientific conflict around it. So I did it. But had I not found that vehicle, I might have just chosen an entirely different subject to write about.

So how important is this, social issues, in your stories? Why is it important for your stories to cover social issues rather than be simple technology or science stories?

It is essential. The sort of social conflict is essential. That is what I’m drawn to write about. And I think because it’s life, science is important. It does affect people’s lives, and often I think science especially more so than issues of policy, or politics, or poverty, or war, which are sort of in our faces a little bit more. It’s hard to avoid them. I think science kind of gets generalized, and it’s in the science section, and we read about it and we write about it in terms of this new development. It’s a news story: This new development happened. We don’t really (look) into how it’s affecting our lives. I am interested in kind of the double-edged nature of what a scientific advance is. It can benefit us, and yet it often poses new problems for us.

What are your favorite parts in this whole process?

My favorite part is definitely the reporting. There are parts of the writing that I love, like at the end. The reporting, because I try to do these narratives that are really observed, they’re kind of like fly-on-the-wall. They’re a different kind of narrative, too, I guess we should say. They’re more explanatory. The narratives that I do really tend to be kind of immersion narratives, story narratives, where it’s all show and very little tell. So I like just being an observer in people’s lives, and getting them to trust me, and writing stuff that’s kind of intimate and trying to understand how these science issues are playing out in people’s lives, up close.

It’s basically the openness you get from people and being able to talk to them and be part of their lives.

Yeah, I guess, I should say over time. That’s a really crucial element in stories that I do, that they take place often over a year, sometimes over two years, or even sometimes I’m reconstructing things that happened 10 years ago, 20 years ago, but often I’m in their lives for at least a year. It’s not like the only thing I’m doing, but that aspect of it, the ability to follow them and kind of get to know them (out of) their lives is the kind of input and the kind of trust and intimacy that you can’t really get when you’re doing a one or two-week story just gathering anecdotes for a little more standard feature story.

Is that more rewarding to you than figuring out the science? You write stories that are narrative, but they also have a strong explanatory part, where you break science apart and then explain it.

Well, that’s true. And I love learning about the science, too. It’s a hard question; it would be hard to separate those two things. Yeah, because my stories do bring together these two different elements, I try to. It’s the people in whose lives the science is playing out. And I really like getting close to the people and getting the whole picture of their lives. But I also spend a lot of time talking to scientists that are not really necessarily involved in the particular story, life story that I’m writing about. Just to make sure that I understand the background. And that’s what I love, too. The parts that I don’t love, there’s always a pressure, a time pressure, and a feeling like editors are breathing down my neck. “What exactly are you spending all of this time on?” So as long as I can kind of block that out. I mean, I also love the reactions. I love when stories get a reaction. It’s very gratifying, especially given all the pressure.

Do you ever get absorbed by your work to the point where you feel like it’s important in itself, you experience time differently, you’re “in the zone”?

Well, yeah. I guess I would say that could happen in two different ways. One is because I’m really part of these other people’s lives for some time. To some extent I’m taken out of my own life. That can be good and bad. It goes with the reporting, and it is in a way enjoyable. It can be disruptive to my own family life because when you’re doing this type of story, you know, things happen on weekends, often families are involved, so you want to be like at a family event, but that means you’re not necessarily at your own family event. But yes, in that sense I do get hooked up in the reporting. I get deeply into the science reporting, too. I keep realizing how much more I need to understand. That happened with this genetically modified food story. I didn’t know anything at the beginning, and I didn’t totally understand what genetic engineering was, and then I had to understand genetic engineering in different contexts. I’m looking at genetic engineering in agriculture, but I wanted to make sure I understood it in medicine and so — yeah, I always have 10 more people I really want to call. So there’s that. That is very pleasurable. Except for the constant feeling like “uh-oh, this is taking way too long.” The writing can be a pleasure. You get to sit down with all of your notes and you try to figure out how to make a story out of them. And then certain parts of writing the story, when the writing is going well — it’s not exactly that I lose sense of time; it’s just that I want to be doing it all the time. I feel like I have something important to say; it’s very hard to figure out how to say it right and how to say it in a way that’s emotionally gripping and that will affect people, but I just want to be doing that all the time.

What do you think makes the difference between when that happens during writing and when it doesn’t happen?

I wish I knew. I wish I could always have the first kind.

Like does it happen when the reporting went particularly well? Is there usually a set of conditions that will make writing enjoyable?

I think the fun writing comes from when you finally reach the point where you feel like you are authoritative. You can answer any question, you’ve done all the research. So much of this reporting, for me, is distilling huge amounts of information into a theme, into, not even like you come with an explanation, but preferably into some dialogue or some theme where it’s communicated through showing, not telling. You know, I’ve talked to all these scientists, I’ve witnessed all this stuff going on in my characters’ lives, and then I have to find a way to communicate important information both about science and about the plot of the story because I want you to keep reading the story. I have to find a way to distill that in a few lines. When I still don’t completely understand every element of either the science or what’s happening in my characters’ lives, it’s not (ideal). And that’s the tradeoff because I want to do more reporting until I really know. Sometimes I work with that, and I feel like I just have to write it because it’s taking too long, and I’m on deadline, and I’m going to be fired if I don’t write the story. And then, you know, when it’s hard I realize like, okay, despite all of these factors, I have to go back and ask more questions.

What are the most difficult parts of the process for you?

I guess the writing. The writing is harsh. I’ve tried different ways, I’ve tried doing outlines, I’ve — recently, I’ve adopted new technology — I started using this program called Scrivener, which was very helpful, actually, although it took a lot of time. I think it made me more efficient than I used to be when I was using Microsoft Word. But the writing is the most painful part. Just getting the pieces of the story, and the arc of the story, and making sure that the character, the conflict, is clear, and my character changes, and has an evolution, and it's all kind of trying to illuminate a bigger theme of, you know, trying to communicate scientific information and illuminate the bigger theme of the conflict in society. These are three levels of the story that I’m trying to write in almost every line of the story: the science, the individual story of my character, and the bigger story of the social conflict. So that’s hard; it takes time. I guess the most difficult thing is this feeling of time passing and not doing my job well enough.

I read again and again the first part of the first story in the cancer series. It had a very interesting structure, where you start micro-narratively, and then you go to science, and then you go to the social aspect, and then you go back. Are there certain things you do in order to keep these three levels, to represent them well?

Honestly, I don’t know. I mean, I make outlines in which I note each of these levels to myself, and figure out how I want to work with them. But the most important element in the outline is how to successfully tell the story. And then I have thematic points, like a list of thematic points that are mostly points of information that I try to stick into the outline. Actually I think it’s Jacqui (Banaszynski) who calls it the spinach. You know, leave the spinach out. But I don’t want to leave it out; I want to put it in. So, yeah. That’s what I do. But it’s not a very thorough process that I can really recommend.

You can’t recommend to anyone because —

Well, it’s a little haphazard. I have one that I think is perfect, and then I start writing it and it completely changes, and I sometimes go back to change the outline. So I don’t know whether I’m wasting my time by making the outline and I should stick to writing. I think it really helps, actually, to work from an outline, even if you have to go back and change it. And the other thing I guess I always do is know what the ending is. That’s probably the most important thing to do because I’m writing to an ending. Because the ending is, in most stories, it’s going to kind of bring everything together and make it worth it for the reader to have read my beginning and the middle. So I want it to be a payoff.

You’ve been doing this for how much time now?

Well, I’ve been a reporter — I started right after I graduated from college, in 1990. So that’s like 22 years. But I wasn’t really doing narrative stuff. Is that what you mean?

No, journalism.

Yeah, it’s been a long time.

So is it worth it to spend big chunks of your life doing it?

I would say it is. I can’t think of any other job — sometimes I’m a little jealous of my friends who are academics, who, like, have tenure, so you get to kind of breathe, and I have to worry about deadlines. It’s hard because there’s so much pressure. But I can’t advise a better job than my job because I realize I get to spend months learning about new things that are important to the world and then writing this out into a story that will hopefully make a difference to the world. I love the work. I do complain about it constantly. I should say that, too. If you asked my husband, I don’t know if he would say that I love it because, you know, he sees the other side. He sees how stressed out I get when I’m feeling like it’s going too slowly or it’s so hard.

What do you hope to achieve, ideally, through your work?

I hope to communicate a better understanding of the important science that is affecting our world with stories that are emotionally gripping. I don’t think people pay so much attention to science stories that are just telling it straight. I think it’s really important for a functioning society that the majority of the citizens understand climate change or genetic diseases, or cancer, things that I’ve written about, why it’s happening the way it is, why it’s unfolding the way it is or why it’s not unfolding the way it is. So I think that people don’t really understand it that well, or often are suspicious of scientists or are not sure what to believe. I think the best way to explain it is through stories that are emotionally gripping because everyone loves the story. They won’t mind that it’s about science if they are drawn into a sympathetic character facing a conflict that has to be resolved. You know, the classic narrative form. And that’s what I’m hoping to do, illuminate these scientific trends through classic narrative form.

I’ve been asking people about how they manage to strike a balance between their work and family lives. And the men I’ve talked to so far, I think all of them told me that while I was working on that book or that story, my wife could tell you that I was not a very good husband or father because I was so absorbed and dedicating so much time and attention to it that I was not so much involved in the family life. How does that work when you’re a woman?

Yeah, well. Honestly, I’m very lucky that my husband takes up a lot of slack for taking care of — we have one daughter, who’s 9. You know, she’s young and needs a lot of care. So you know, when I’m traveling or when I’m writing 24 hours a day, when I’m rolling out of bed and writing, you know, I really depend on him to help. And it’s not easy for him. I’m not as present of a partner, and it definitely has put strain on our relationship, as I say, to be candid, and you know, the only thing that kind of saves it is that it’s going to be over eventually. But of course, with these stories, people always ask, what’s your deadline? There’s not like a strict deadline. A lot of it depends on what I get and editing it, and if I can answer all my set of questions, so that’s part of it, too, is that you don’t know when it’s going to be over. It used to be that I would be putting her to bed and I would be writing by the side of her bed, waiting for her to fall asleep, but at least I would be keeping her company. And now she’s more able to tell me to stop working. So, you know, you could say that’s not being a good parent. On the other hand she sees me doing something that I love to do and that I think is important and that gets lot of reactions and hopefully makes a difference in the world, so I like to think that I am actually being a good parent that I’m modeling that for her.

***

Anne Hull won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, with colleagues Dana Priest and Michel du Cille, for “exposing mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, evoking a national outcry and producing reforms by federal officials.” She is a former Nieman Fellow, Class of 1995.

Ever since the 1990s, you’ve been writing stories about race and class and immigrants. What drew you toward that area?

I’ve just always been interested in people at the outer edges of society. The nonmajority class. I don’t want to use the word “minority,” but those who are outside the majority and who are sometimes marginalized, who are strivers but who are trying to get closer to that middle. It’s just naturally what I’ve always been interested in. Some journalists write about the powerful; I just tend to write about those without power. It’s partly because it’s the social justice mission, but I just also love hanging out and reporting in those kind of niche worlds. It’s a lot more raw experience trying to figure out how to get ahead. And that’s largely why I do it. It’s most intellectually satisfying, but it’s also most personally satisfying.

You said that reporting is more rewarding in those environments.

It is for me because I like it. If you were to take a congressional reporter, they would probably be bored out of their mind because it’s a different rhythm. In this sort of reporting, you’re really staying with people for a long time. And you’re watching hours and hours of nothing happen. And you just have to be prepared for when that moment happens. And that’s not like traditional reporting. Or, again, you take a more formal, official reporter, who might cover Congress. The off-camera detail, so to speak, how people think and feel and smell and the dialogue, that really has very little place in traditional reporting. So just as I wouldn’t be crazy about going to Congress and covering something, it’s a different skill set, really. It’s also how you talk to people. Sometimes there’s more formal, I say formal, I don’t mean it’s better, but when you deal in a more official realm you might not speak to people who, you know, are on the street, or in the shelter, or in a bad situation, locked up, whatever. I just have always felt more at ease in that world.

When did you discover that you liked these types of stories?

It’s all I’ve always done. I literally started doing this sort of stuff from the very get-go. I have kind of a different background. I didn’t go to college. I went to college for one year — I went to Florida State University — and prior to going off to college, I was hired at the St. Pete Times newsroom, St. Petersburg, Fla. And so I started working in a newsroom when I was 18. Went off to college for a year. I don’t know, for whatever reason I didn’t like it, I was homesick, I missed working in a newsroom, so I went back to the newsroom and learned everything there. You know, I went to the weather desk, and then I went to the city desk, really just doing — they’re not minimum-wage jobs, but around that area. But it was always in a newsroom. The features editor sent me to a Madonna concert to write about the phenomenon of Madonna. Opportunities such as that. And then just slowly from there I kind of worked my way up. Luckily, the St. Pete Times was, and is, a fantastic, not only newspaper, but learning environment. David Finkel worked there then, and Tom French. (Narrative) is a tradition that that paper encourages. And had it been today, I’m not sure it would have worked out that way, you know? So I was just allowed to sort of come up in a very unusual way. And I didn’t have to go through the normal channels of college, internships, and then trying to find a first job. I just stayed at the St. Pete Times. And then only when I was a reporter after, I don’t know, seven years, I could then go cover cops. And then I was put on the courts beat. So I did things all in reverse. But in terms of just wanting to cover people who are outliers financially or economically or socially, racially, ethnically, that’s just always been something I’ve been interested in. My mom was a middle school principal whose most fulfilling days were in scrappy schools in tough neighborhoods. Maybe we’re just the same.

What do you hope to accomplish with these stories?

Just in a very basic sense to get readers in touch with how other people live. And I never want to, you know, be scolding to readers or poke a stick in the eye of a certain social policy. I really want to just kind of peel the curtain back on a world that they don’t see. And if I can do that, that’s sort of the best I can hope for. You know, these sort of stories often don’t bring results like journalists are trained to bring. The best example of this sort of stuff is Katherine Boo from the Washington Post. For instance, she wrote a piece in The New Yorker called “The Marriage Cure” during the Bush White House years. Did you read the piece?

Yes, yes.

An easy route would have been to use the whole piece to talk about how bad the Bush policies were. Instead, she did just an incredible portrayal of poverty and how hard it is to get out of it. I’m not saying all we can hope for, but that’s a big step, to get people to engage and to think about these issues in a new way. The circumstances around the Walter Reed reporting were different. And that was just like, there were Senate hearings, and the world was turned upside down, and conditions for soldiers were improved, and I had never experienced something like that. Most reporters never do experience something like that. But for me it was especially new because I’m used to writing about issues people don’t care so much about. But for the soldiers they cared, right? And it was an investigative piece somewhat.

What are your favorite parts of your work?

It depends on the story, but usually it’s reporting. That’s my favorite time. Just because I’m a voyeur, and I love to be in someone else’s world. It’s just the best, you know? You’re living on their time schedule, you’re living where they live, you’re doing what they do, you’re eating what they do, you’re observing what they do. It’s anthropological in a way, but that’s my favorite time. The most difficult time is the beginning of the writing process, which is extremely hard for me. Take a writer like David Finkel. He is extremely structured. He knows where he is going to start and where he is going to end up in a story, whether it’s a short story or a book. I’m not at all like that. I kind of, you know, the analogy would be say there’s a big forest, and Finkel would take his machete, and he knows where he’s going to get to the middle. I’m sort of dropped off in the middle, and I start blindly hacking my way out. It’s just a different process. So for me the beginning stages of writing are the toughest, and the best stage of writing is redrafting. Once I have a draft, that’s really when I get started: Okay, now I know what it’s about, and now I can go. So I would say reporting is the best part of the process, and then redrafting second to that.

How do you write your first draft? Do you have a structure, or do you write?

I try to organize my notes very well. I always keep my notes, transcribe right away if it’s possible. If I’m on the road, in a hotel room, that’s what you try to do. You try to do it every day so you don’t get behind. And so it’s fresh. So I keep that good organization, the file; it’s a huge Word document. And it’s broken up into chronology of reporting and also subjects in the reporting, like characters if you will. But I call them subjects. And then you try to do an outline. Some editors say — David Maraniss, for instance — that in a piece of 3,000 words, you can probably get four, five themes across. And you think about themes, as opposed to the exact, you know, what you’re doing in the next step. But for me I think what works best is doing an outline and at least forcing myself to have a little bit of a map to start. Otherwise, you’re just kind of lost. For me, doing an outline is like sitting down and doing trigonometry. It’s not fun. Not fun at all, but you have to do it. My mind just doesn’t think linearly.

During reporting, like some of these places where you report are difficult. In the Walter Reed series, the people were going through all sorts of suffering and problems. How do you deal with situations like that?

You know, the first objective is to get the story. So you’re really thinking about how you can get the story. And with Walter Reed it was more complicated because we didn’t want to get discovered. So we had to do all this reporting without anyone finding out. There’s just a lot of logistics to that. And, of course, you’re seeing some terrible, heartbreaking things. I tend to see a lot of those in a lot of stories I do. This was just a little bit more extreme because you have physically and psychologically injured, demolished people. And it does wear on you, but every reporter has different coping mechanisms. While I’m in the moment, reporting, I don’t want to say it doesn’t bother me, but you’re so focused on getting exactly what you need that the feelings are deferred. And usually once the piece is published, maybe after the second day, that’s when you’re kind of like, “ah, holy cow!” Then you start feeling everything. When I have one of those big stories in, and it publishes, and there’s no problems with it — you know that by the second or third day — then it’s just an utter emotional collapse. You’re just exhausted. And sad, often.

Is this how it happens even when you have several weeks to work on a story?

Yeah. Usually. What’s a good example of a daily? Okay. I had to go cover Hurricane Katrina. And that was very difficult reporting logistically and also emotionally. But again, I was writing every day — not every day but very often — you don’t have time to really feel, although in Katrina for some reason it kind of got to me, and I had a couple of hard days even getting through my day. It was just really upsetting. Usually when you do those longer-term things, you’re with somebody so long you stop being surprised. When you see a soldier without legs, missing an arm or a head bastion, it’s terrifying at first, but then it becomes more normal because it’s all you’re seeing.

And you’re thinking about the story and what —

You’re thinking, “What do I need? What do I need to ask?” And that again, that was an extra layer of complication because we couldn’t get found out. So I’m basically doing all of my reporting in a place that I can’t be seen there. That was very difficult logistically. But think of what you’re trying to get at, is do you ever feel sad, and how do you deal with it? And, yes, of course I do, but I think most reporters would say that you couldn’t function if you just crumbled. You have to get through it. And you’re very focused on getting everything you need. Because your adrenaline is usually getting pretty high, and you’re very focused on getting what you need. The best thing you can do is get what you need. There was a situation in Katrina where people really needed help, and I was asked to help people get out of New Orleans, and that was really difficult for me. I had just written a story on someone, and she wanted a ride out, and I couldn’t give it to her. But before I said yes, I couldn’t do it, I called my editor. He says, “You know, you’re not a first-aid worker. Your job is to report what’s happening.” And that’s really hard. It’s easy for an editor in Washington to say continue with your reporting, but it’s hard for me to look that person in the eye, who has just given me three hours, and say, “I’m sorry; I can’t help you.”

How do you relate to people you write about? How do you see your role as it relates to them?

I’m just a reporter. I’m not a friend. I’m just a reporter, following them everywhere. Sometimes I’m quiet, and other times I ask questions, but it’s just basic reporting. I don’t really relate per se. I’m just with them all the time. It’s more a question of not relating, but when to ask your questions, when to watch and be quiet, and when to ask your questions. But you always want to remind them that you are not a friend, that you are a reporter. People tend to let down their guard after days or weeks go by, so it’s a fine line between always reminding them that you’re on the clock, and this is a job, and you’re working, but you also need them to open up as much as possible. It’s a double-edged sword. But I just always make sure they know I’m a reporter and I’m here to do a story; I’m not here to hang out and drink beer.

Do you get attached to people you spend more time with?

Sure. Some more than others. It’s just like normal life. You kind of click with some people better than others. It makes the job a little more difficult when you don’t click with somebody, or when you don’t like somebody, or when you see them doing bad things, so that’s when you just again have to reserve judgment almost like you reserve emotion when you’re upset.

You said your second-favorite part is rewriting, redrafting. Why is that more pleasant than the first draft?

Because once you have a first draft, you have something to work with. Think of it — an analogy would be sculpture. Is it easier to take a big block of ice and start there, or is it easier to me to take an ice block that’s already been kind of started, and then you can go in and do stuff. It’s just a temperamental preferential thing I like to do. It’s getting that first draft down and telling myself that first draft doesn’t have to be perfect. I’m just trying to get the building blocks down so that I can then really start to work. Everyone is different. Finkel, he’s mostly a one-draft guy. He writes 85 percent of what’s in the paper. I tend to in my first draft to write 50 or 60 percent, and I often do two or three write-throughs, which I love doing. A lot of reporters think it’s an insult to have to go back and write again, but I’m really, I pray that I’m asked that.

Writers who have described experiencing flow say they’re completely absorbed by what they’re doing and sometimes lose track of time. Do you ever experience that, and if yes, in what parts of the process?

What do you mean? Like I spend a lot of time watching subjects work. What do you mean in terms of me feeling that?

Does it ever happen that you get so absorbed by your work that it flows? Do you get into “the zone?” Or is it always completely conscious and rational?

Yes, sometimes time flies. Like two days pass, and you’re not really aware that two days have passed. Other times it’s more tedious. It just depends on the story. I did a story once on a group of Mexican women that come from the central highlands of Mexico and went to North Carolina to work in the crab houses. And basically I stood on concrete eight or nine hours a day watching them pick crabs, and the time does go slowly then. So I’m absorbed in it at first, but after a few weeks doing that, you have to find ways and little tricks to keep engaged because the minute you kind of go offline, you’re not going to be reporting, so it’s best just to walk away from the situation. But yes, in some situations reporting is tedious. In others it just flies by.

What is your favorite story that you’ve done so far?

One of the favorites is the crab-picking story, for the St. Petersburg Times, called “Una Vida Mejor.” That has a special place because I love journey stories, and that was ultimately a journey story. A journey across geography, and a journey across race, and a journey across class. And, you know, it was a bus ride. It was just great. It was a road trip in some ways. And I loved being with those women during that experience, watching everything. In total, that has a special place for me. But I did a story on second-generation immigrants in Atlanta, in the South, and that was awesome at the time, and I did a story on gay teenagers, which was great. So stories that I can really sink into are the ones that I’m closest to. And I keep in touch with half the people I write about, so I think that’s a sign of a connection that’s formed. I mean, now it’s a little different because you’re always nervous as a reporter to get the facts right, obviously, and to get the themes right, but now there’s this thing where social media and people comment, and readers comment, and it’s really a cruel experience for the subject. I have to balance sort of warning them of what it’s going to be like. Some people say, “Don’t read the comments.” Well, that’s kind of impossible. You’re going to read the comments if you’re written about. It’s just brutal, so mean and ugly, and I almost feel bad for the people I’m going to put through that. That’s the new angst, you know?

If you were to have a few like best-practice pieces of advice for when you’re working on stories like these, what would they be?

First of all, if you can make sure you’re interested in it, that’s kind of the first. Are you curious about it? You have to be curious about it or it’s not going to work. You’re just going to be kind of going through the motions. And the other best practices, it’s really the amount of time you can spend to get to know the individual and to get as close to the truth as possible, whatever the truth is. A lot of that investment in time, in reporting, is no longer available to journalists. I’ve always told journalists who, you know, want to know how to do it, how to get ahead, it’s like, “You know what? You have to do what you want, but you have to work for a place that’s going to support the kind of writing you do.” If it’s a little, tiny paper in North Dakota that will hire you, you need to go there and to get the experience. So many people want to start out at a big paper, and it’s not going to happen. You have to have the patience to go through those steps of a career. It’s the only way you learn stuff. The only way you learn journalism is to do it. It’s not like medical school, where you really have to learn something. You don’t have to go to journalism school to learn how to be a journalist.

When did you start journalism?

1985. Almost 30 years. Unbelievable.

Was it worth it?

Oh, yes. A million times over. I couldn’t do anything else. I can waitress, but there’s nothing else I know how to do. Yeah, it’s a great time to be a journalist. I feel like I lived in a golden age of journalism, whatever that was, and we’re probably entering a new age, and it’s neat to be able to straddle these two worlds. I mean with the Post just being purchased by Jeff Bezos — who knows how we’ll conceive of the possibilities? I’ve lived the best professional life I could ever want, and it’s giving me a real life, you know? You can’t break the two apart.

What do you feel that journalism has brought you?

A sense of — gosh — you can do something with your curiosity that’s productive. I’ve always been a curious person, always as a little kid. Like spying, you know, just very, very curious. Question-asking to the point of annoyance; so this is something that you can kind of do and reveal to others how a certain world works. It just fits naturally with my personality and what I like to do.

Does it get better with time?

It depends. You really have to keep mixing up what you do, or you will feel like it’s deja vu, Groundhog Day, though always wrestling with the same fundamentals. It’s a little harder for writers who don’t want to become editors. So we stay writers, but it’s a different sort of adrenaline feeling when you’re 50 years old than it was at 30, so you just have to keep picking stories that keep you interested, and keep working for a place that allows you to do that; that’s the other side of it.

Mixing it up means — 

Mixing it up could mean doing a piece with another writer — you know, when Dana Priest and I teamed up on Walter Reed, that was mixing it up. I almost never wrote stories with anyone else. That was brand new. Maybe going back and doing dailies, which I’m not very good at; that’s one way to mix it up. You could take a break and edit for one year, or you could change beats. You just always have to be thinking, how am I going to stay interested? Because if you’re not interested, it really shows in the writing.

Have you ever thought about doing something else?

Never. I’ve had periods of extreme struggle, but never like I wanted to do something else. It’s hard to describe. You’re just like hitting the wrong chords, and everything you try doesn’t quite work out, and it’s really depressing. So you have to figure out ways to get through that. And for me it’s other writer friends. You just need your little tribe around you to kind of whine to or express your fears, all that stuff.

Was that like a writing block?

It’s kind of everything. It’s a confusion over what you want to say in a story, a difficulty with the writing; you might pick a subject who’s not easy to write about, and all these things combine to make it a really difficult experience. You know, writing is very tied to confidence, and if your confidence is shaken, it’s more difficult. No other way to put it.

But can you be not confident after you’ve had a successful career, after you’ve won a Pulitzer?

Oh, yeah. It can happen to any of us any time. So sure. There’s no way to say what brings it on. You just don’t know. But it’s very stressful because you’re used to having things — nothing’s ever easy, but you’re used to having things work out a little more.

When you choose your stories, do you ever wonder, what is a category of people who are having a really bad time now? Should I try to find someone and tell that story, or is it just — how do you choose your stories?

Well, first of all it’s how do you choose your topic, and then how do you choose the subjects is a separate matter. Say it’s immigration. Then your choosing of the subject, of the person, tells the story one way or another. I would never really choose to do a story about immigration, and then have the character or the subject be someone who’s just made it and they’re on top. You want to find those people who are struggling, who are ascending and on the way up. That’s the story of immigration. Everybody writes the story about a successful person. So I spend a lot of time trying to think, okay, what is my responsibility for the news? For instance, when I did that immigration series I had to study the census really hard to see where immigration was happening. And I also then had to drill down further and say, what kinds of jobs are those new immigrants having in the South? So that means I do have to get someone from the service class because that’s where the news is. So you select based on trends and facts, but then when it comes to a person, it comes down to two things: Will they talk to me? Will they let me get in their life for three weeks, or three months? And then the second criterion for me is can they articulate their thoughts? They don’t have to be Shakespeare, they don’t have to be great in English language, but they have to have that ability to kind of express their thoughts. Honestly.

So now do you have any issues that you really want to cover in the future?

I would love to cover the idea of suffering and deprivation in America; what our idea is of going without. It’s very difficult to write about the people at the high end. They’re just private. They don’t want any — the analogy is the gated community. That’s how they live their lives; they don’t want a reporter; they’re private people. Whereas lower-income people, people without a big stake in things, they let you come in and write everything. So one reason you see so many stories on people in the lower tiers is because they’re accessible. And it’s very difficult to get people at the higher end to let you do that. I like to think about ways to do that. There are certain writers who have done it successfully, so I see how they have done it and study that way.

Who are some writers that you like?

In this realm or in general? There is a reporter, Robert Frank, from the Wall Street Journal. He wrote a story, it was a collection of reportage, but maybe 10, looking at really rich people in America. It was called Richistan, and it was about this community of ultra-rich people and how they made it. But each one let the reporter, Frank, into his life or her life. And so that’s the kind of stuff I’m really interested in. Again, it’s more that anthropological stuff. But you have to convince people to let you in, and almost every reporter I talk to now, as social media gets bigger, as the web is more present in our lives, it is more and more difficult to get people to let you into their lives. And I’m talking from every strata. They’ll always say, “What’s in it for me? Why should I?” And often you don’t really have a good answer. So you always have to think about that before you even ask someone: Why should they? Why should they do it? What’s in it for them? You know, I’ve had the mother of a gay teenager in the Bible Belt in Oklahoma say — you know, if I was going to write about this kid, Michael; he was 17, 16 at the time, he was just coming out, very evangelical community — and his mother said to me, “Will this hurt Michael?” And I couldn’t answer. I said, “I don’t know.” All she had in her mind was Matthew Shepherd, of course. But I can’t say, “No, this won’t hurt Michael. Nothing will happen.” Because you really don’t know, and that’s what’s really hard, to look at someone and say, “I don’t know.”

Is that important in telling the story of poverty? Is that part of it, or is it just a completely different thing?

In terms of asking a more wealthy person to let me write about them? Oh, yeah. Really the bar is 20 times higher for people who are wealthy, and it’s almost impossible. You can see this with the crash of Wall Street and with the rich Wall Street guys, you’ve hardly seen any personal profiles on them. Either the ones who were presidents of these hedge fund houses, or even the ones who went to jail or the bankers who’ve been indicted. You don’t see any personal profiles on them, and there’s a reason: They don’t want it.

What would you tell someone who is starting out in journalism? Why is this profession worth it?

It’s nothing you can ever force. I think of medicine sometimes, parents want you to grow up to be a doctor, and you’re smart so you’re like, yeah, sure, I’ll be a doctor. But with journalism it’s not really like that; you have to want to do it, and you’re not going to make a lot of money, and you have to be comfortable with that. So why should you do it? If you like to do it, it’s the best job in the world. There’s nothing more satisfying than telling someone’s story and illuminating a problem. But it does take a lot of work, and I notice with a lot of the younger generation, they kind of want to stay at the desk all day and do stuff on the computer, but that’s not really reporting. They sometimes have difficulty even talking to people face to face. Students often email me questions. And I ask them to call me on the phone. At some point, you're going to have to deal with humans, hear their voice or look them in the eye; that's half the battle of reporting. It's a matter of fairness. The rising generation is just — temperamentally, it’s more difficult for them to interact with humans. There has to be human contact in reporting.

Maybe there is more interaction via social media than anything else.

Absolutely. But you can see, as a reporter, you can see the limitations in that. It’s great if you want to meet someone in a bar or whatever, but in terms of getting information from them for a story, it’s not the best.

Why is it like a gift to be able to tell someone’s story?

I don’t know why it’s a gift. I just consider it a gift because I love doing it.            

So it’s like a circle.

I consider it a privilege more than anything to be able to go into someone’s lives, enter their world and hang out and observe them. It would not be possible without them. So when I get to come into that other world, it’s a privilege to spend time reporting on them; that’s how I look at it.

Do you see yourself ever doing anything different?

No, not really. I enjoy teaching. I taught at Princeton a couple of years ago with a seminar of 16 students. We spent the entire semester on covering the marginalized, the outlaw, the in-between dweller. Many of the students come from a comfortable background, so it was interesting for all of us.

Coming Tuesday: Part 4, conversations with Tom Hallman Jr., of the Oregonian, and Chris Jones, of Esquire.  

Simina Mistreanu just got her master's in journalism from the University of Missouri. She grew up in Romania and worked as a journalist there for five years before coming to the United States, in August 2011, on a Fulbright scholarship. She is now a resident at the  Oregonian and is working on a yearlong project writing stories about Roma. She loves Portland, especially for its zippy Argentine tango scene.

The post “Narrative Sweat & Flow,” Part 3: Amy Harmon and Anne Hull appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Editor’s note: The Oregonian’s Simina Mistreanu spoke to seven narrative journalists for her University of Missouri master's project on longform. On Tuesday, we ran her piece on the challenges and importance of longform narrative — go here for the setup. Today and Friday, we’re running her interviews with some of the writers, lightly edited for length and clarity, with the final set of interviews to run Tuesday. In them, you'll learn what drives the narrative journalists, and how they approach their reporting and writing. First up: Lane DeGregory, of the Tampa Bay Times, and David Finkel, of the Washington Post.

Lane DeGregory won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, for her “moving, richly detailed story of a neglected little girl, found in a roach-infested room, unable to talk or feed herself, who was adopted by a new family committed to her nurturing.”

Mistreanu: First of all, how do you choose the stories you write?

DeGregory: We have a meeting every Monday where we sit around the table and pitch ideas. In probably like 75 to 80 percent of the cases, I come up with the idea rather than being assigned to me.

What kind of stories do you choose? What makes something become interesting to you?

I’ve been doing this for 25 years now, so I want to do something that I’ve never heard of before or at least a way of doing something that’s not been done. I’m really particular about not wanting to rehash the same story that people have read before, and I try to find a different way to do it. I’m definitely drawn to narrative; I want something that is going to happen as I follow it rather than recreate something that happened completely in the past. If there’s something that I can be there to witness or some kind of a turning point in a life, then I want to be able to be there if that happens, not to just have somebody describe it as it already happened. My editor pointed out, and I hadn’t really realized this, but I’m really drawn to stories of women and girls. More than half of my stories, I tend to be drawn to stories of motherhood or sisterhood or girlhood, or some kind of theme stories about murder and poverty. I tend to write through women’s eyes.

Interesting. And that was something you were not aware of?

No, I didn’t intend to do that. I didn’t really even think about the fact that I did that. It’s certainly not exclusively female, but (my editor) said to me last year, “I’m going to enter your Pulitzer packet this year as a story with women and girls.” And I was like, “What?” He said, “I’ve noticed this really nice theme in your work, your stories have some emotional connection to feminine characters.” And I was like, “Really?” Like I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but then I went back and looked at my work. It was true, I mean there was an imbalance to the gender that I covered.

I noticed in the short presentation you have on the Tampa Bay Times website, that you said you write about people who aren’t in the spotlight very often. Is that something you made a point out of doing?

Yes, that’s definitely true. The two stories I’m working on now are about these really prominent, famous women. One woman who’s about to run for governor and the other one is a woman who is the chair of the journalism department. They are the first two people of any kind of public figure that I’ve written about in a long time. I usually don’t find myself stories about people who are already in the news. I like to find people that are in the shadows, and that have been maybe been overlooked by the rest of the media or the community.

Why do you feel it’s important to write about the people in the shadows?

Because they are a lot of the ones who are being affected by a lot of our social programs, and reporters do a really good job about covering, okay, X-number more people went on welfare this year, or X-number of people are on food stamps this year, or X-number of people left their children because of poverty this year. So I let them look for numbers and trends like that. Who are those people who are being affected by these programs that we’re making? So when we had a news story about how many more people were getting food stamps for the first time, I went out and found a young mother who was signing up for food stamps for the first time. When there was an issue in Miami where they had all these people that had been convicted sex offenders. And actually these were men, not women. But the sex offenders had served their time, they were let out on probation, they were living under a bridge because the city had issued this ordinance that they couldn’t live within 200 yards of a school or a playground or a library, and because the community was so densely urbanized there was no place like that for them to live. So I heard this news story on NPR about there’s this bridge now where all these people are living, and I went down with a photographer, and we spent three days under the bridge living with them, writing about what that was like. I’ve made some calls today to try to find some Syrian refugees, but they’re being relocated by Catholic Charities. Sort of the people who are in these news events. You know, you hear numbers or trends or whatever, but I like to see the people that are being affected by that, and give them a voice.

So your purpose, basically with these stories is to give them a voice.

Give them a voice and put a face on whatever data-driven policy, law, debate they’re having. Give a voice to the people that are being affected.

When did you start doing these types of stories?

I came here in 2000. And I had been at the Virginian-Pilot for 10 years before that. I did some of these when I was at the Pilot, but I was mostly a news reporter there. I worked from a bureau for my first seven years, so I was covering, you know, two, three, four stories a day, and two towns and a school board and the court system, and all that other stuff you have to do as a news reporter. I became a feature writer in 1998, and for two years at the Virginian-Pilot I kind of learned how to do that. I kind of learned how to go from being a news writer to a feature writer. But my stories at the Pilot were a little more soft. They weren’t as issue-driven. They were more like, “Oh, I met an interesting person,” or there was a cool profile. You know, I wasn’t seeking out issues or necessarily trying to highlight anything that was going on; I just was looking for interesting stories. In 2000, I came here; I’ve had the same editor since I came here; I love him. But the way the paper operates has changed in the last 13 years; when I came we had a daily feature section. So every day there would be four or five feature stories. Then we went to one day a week. And now one day a month, we have a magazine. So there’s a lot less room to do sort of the traditional here’s a good story, or here’s a human interest story, and a lot more emphasis on enterprise. So, make it mean something, find a bigger context for this, or more of a connection to an issue.

So they have to be more newsy or more related to the news even if they’re human stories.

Yeah. That’s not always true; there are still stories that don’t have anything to do with news at all, but I think in terms of what we’re looking at bigger-picture wise, it’s definitely something more newsier.

What are your favorite parts about your work? What do you enjoy the most about your work?

I was just talking to my husband last night. He’s got a new job, and he’s not used to it yet. And I said, one of the things that I love about my job is the dichotomy. Some days you’re out there talking to strangers and in a situation where you’re in a public place or you’re at an event or something’s happening. And you have to suck up everything around you and be 100 percent on call while you’re out there doing that. And convince this person to let you in and trust you and share this intimate stuff. But the other half of the job, you know, I’m sitting in my T-shirt in my house with no makeup on looking out the window writing by myself with my computer. And that’s kind of hard, too. You know, it’s a very public but also a very private profession. And I like that there’s both ends of that. I feel the dread, and I’m afraid, I still get nervous, and I have butterflies in my stomach before I have to go meet somebody. I get that adrenaline, and I’m worried — what am I going to say? and how is this going to go? And then I get to my car and go home and be by myself and turn the radio off and just think for that whole drive, “What just happened?” “How do I process this?” I turn everything off, I try to be in my cave to make a sense of what it was that I just witnessed. But then I’m home, and the next day I write almost entirely at home. I have a little, tiny office with a big window. I love that. I love that I get to go home and be at the total opposite end. The dread and the fear of looking at the computer and being alone with your thoughts and in your head. I like the opposite ends of the profession that allows you both to be as public and as private as you could possibly be.

So you are still nervous and excited about interviews, after more than two decades of doing this?

Oh, yeah. When I went to interview a woman the other day who’s a doctor and running for governor, I was about to throw up, I was so nervous. And I was thinking, why, why am I nervous?

You’re a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Yeah, and I think that maybe part of it is that, oh, I’m supposed to be at a certain level now. What if I can’t always live up to that, you know? And the other kind of concern is the one I had when I was your age: Am I worthy to tell people’s stories? That’s a huge responsibility to get someone to open up to you and trust you to tell a story about them to thousands of strangers. And I always have that: Am I worthy? Am I good enough to do this? Gosh, they gave me this amazing access or insight or whatever; I don’t know if I’m magician enough to pull off this trick. You know?

What do you try to do to make sure you live up to this responsibility?

I try to think about myself in their shoes. I try to put my head where I think their head is, and how would I see the world if I was that person. I think when I was younger, I felt people through others; you know, if I was going to do a story, I’d interview other people around you and that shaped who I decided you were. But I think now I try much harder to get to know that person and inhabit their mind and their life before I let other people weigh in.

Is that what you’re trying to do with your stories as well, help readers see the world through your characters’ eyes?

Definitely. That’s my intention always. And maybe that’s one reason I like to write about people that are sort of, I don’t know, controversial, or maybe that’s not even the right word. People that other people might look down at, you know. So that you can say, look, I’d love to be able to share an ordinary part of extraordinary people, or the extraordinary part of ordinary people. I think humanizing a bad guy or vilifying a good guy is so important because it’s not ever black and white. You know what I mean?

How would you describe your objectivity toward your sources? Do you consider yourself objective?

Every journalist is going to say that they try to be objective, but I don’t really think there is such a thing in people stories. You can’t help whether you like somebody or you don’t like somebody. It happens even if you try not to. You know, I just try to find the other side of that. Sometimes that person helps; even the most egregious people that I write about, if I can find something human or something that makes that connection with the readers, I think that’s important. My editor is really good about it, too. I’m a lot more sappy than he is. I fall in love with my people I write about more easily. I’m a lot less cynical than most journalists. So he always says his hardest job is to “un-Hallmark me.” I think that’s a good balance. Emotionally he and I are at different places in our personalities, so it helps to have him sort of weed stuff out that might be too, I don’t know, emotive.

I mentioned that I’ve been looking at the concept of flow. Creative people, when they work, they sometimes get into this zone where they lose track of time, they are completely absorbed by their work, the work becomes the main purpose of their actions more than anything else. Do you ever experience that while reporting or writing?

All the time. All the time, especially when I’m writing. I think it’s a blessing and a curse in a way that I can’t turn it off. Like if I’m in the middle of a story, I’ll go to a baseball game with my husband, and all I could think about was how the ending was going to go. You know, we’re watching the baseball game, our team is about to go to the playoffs, and I’m like, should I end it over here, or should I end it over there? And do I need to call this person? “Are you there, hello?!” I’m checked out. I’m trying to adapt. I have two teenage boys, and they’ll be talking to me about, you know, whatever football game or band concert, or whatever they’re doing, and I realize I’m really not listening. I’m thinking about my lede, or I’m thinking about how I’m going to transition from the big idea back into the narrative. I shut them out sometimes, you know, and those aren’t purposeful. When I’m home and I’m writing, I want to put myself in that zone, and sometimes I can’t get there. I only write after I’ve already done my laundry and washed my dishes and got my house in order. You know, some people can get out of bed and start writing. I have to shower, I have to, you know, do something. Usually the laundry and the dishes are the physical thing that I want to do between the time I take a shower and the time I start writing so that I’m kind of getting my house together doing these minor tasks. I’m thinking in my head about my story. You know, rather than sitting at the computer, looking at a blank screen, thinking, Oh my God, what am I going to do, I find a great satisfaction out of getting my house in order at the same time I’m getting my head in order. But I have to go into the office and write without my notes. I leave my notes in my car or in my kitchen. I leave my phone, I won’t turn on Facebook or Twitter, I just write in a Word document because I don’t want anyone messaging me from the office. So, yeah, I very much go into this cave when I’m actually doing the writing part of it, where everything has got to be shut off.

Do you get into the zone when certain conditions are met?

I got to set it up. And I write at night a lot. My kids, you know, they go to bed at 10 or 11, and my husband is a drummer, and he doesn’t get home until 2 or 3 in the morning, so a lot of the writing that I do is between 10 at night and 2 in the morning, when the house is quiet and dark, and the kids and the dog are asleep and my husband is gone. And then he comes home, and we’ll have a glass of wine at 3 in the morning, or something, and how was your day? How was your day? The timing is weird. And I think some of that is carried over from college and grad school because I was the editor of both my high school and my college paper, and we would finish the paper at midnight, that was the deadline, and then I’d have to go to the library and do my homework and write my papers. So a lot of the writerly piece of my life has always been late, late at night.

Have you ever thought about doing something other than journalism?

No. I mean I knew I wanted to be a reporter since I was 5 years old. I grew up in Washington, D.C., during Watergate, and I thought that was the coolest thing. My dad read the Washington Post while we ate cereal every morning. He would read the paper out loud to me and my sister. I just thought that was the coolest thing ever. My mom was an English teacher and a frustrated novelist, and my dad was just one of these totally gregarious, you know, he’ll talk to every waitress, like “What’s your dream, honey?” He just wants to know everybody’s story. And I think the combination of my parents and growing up during Watergate, during the height of D.C. journalism — other than babysitting I never had a job that wasn’t journalism. I sold car ads, I took classified ads over the phone, I pasted up pages, I designed pages, anything you can think of that has anything to do with journalism, I did since I was about 15 years old.

What did you father do for a living?

He’s a nuclear physicist. He works for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

So you never had a moment where you felt like the profession has let you down.

Yeah. I’ve certainly lost a lot of my friends in this profession. I would say at least half of my friends that started out after grad school with me are now doing something else. Of course I’ve thought about trying to sustain myself. I’m 46 years old; I need 20 more years, you know? And I’m tired. In the last couple of years, I’ve been writing more stories off the news, meeting more deadlines, less time to take your time with writing. So did I think at this age that I would be making this little money and working as hard for it? But is there anything else I want to do? Not really. I’m going to teach. This spring semester I’m going to teach a class at the University of South Florida. I’m trying to get a book done; I’m working on an anthology with a publisher. Some things like that on the side, but in terms of having another profession, no. Every time I think (that) what to do is teach journalism, I think I’d rather keep doing journalism for now. As tiring as it is, and as much as — like, right before you called I found out that I’ll work on Sunday. You know, crap like that still happens. I’m making 5 percent less money than I did when I won the Pulitzer Prize. In these four years we got our salary cut, and they stopped paying our 401(k), and they stopped paying our insurance. So I told you my husband had a new job; he had to go get another job. Our kids are about to go to college, you know, and we’re broke. And that sucks, to feel like I’ve made it to a certain level of my profession where I aspired to be, and still not be able to put a full tank of gas in your car sucks. But the satisfaction and the joy of still getting to meet all these really interesting people and be a part of all these walks of life, and be in the middle of a group of smart colleagues, and, you know, then seeing my name in the paper and having 300,000 people read it — I’m not willing to give all that up just because I’m broke.

So mainly the enthusiasm has been maintained by the people you get to write about, by the stories, the colleagues?

All of the above. I can’t think of another profession where you get paid to just explore the world. And almost anything I’m interested in, if I can find a way to tell a story, they’re like, “Okay, go.” I get to learn what it’s like to be transgender or to be a teenager whose mom is dying. You get to (explore the world) and get paid for it. And, you know, would I like to write a book? Yeah, I’d love to write a book. But I also love the instant gratification of I wrote the story today, it appeared in the paper tomorrow, I go to the grocery store and I see 17 people that have read it and want to talk to me about it. Then another 700 people email me or Twitter me or whatever. Cool! That’s a lot more instant gratification than when you put a book out there and you hope someone buys it.

Do you ever worry that this interest will run out?

I hope it doesn’t. There have definitely been times in the last couple of years, when I’ve been like, “What am I doing?” and my husband was like, “You should go make so much more money doing…” My friend who is the spokesperson for the hospital, or one of the reporters who is the spokesperson for the airport, they make three times as much money as I do. But if I had to get up every morning and be over there, writing press releases for the airport, I’d be so dissatisfied. So I think if it does come a point in time when I’m either too tired or to burned out by following these stories, I think that would be a time for me to be an editor. Because really, I do like coaching other people. I like working with young reporters; I feel like I can see a story and help it, but I’m not willing to give up my authority to just be out of the office three or four days a week and write at home. I don’t want to sit in meetings, I don’t want to have to be tied down to somebody else’s messed-up story when I can still be doing my own, for right now.

What’s your favorite story that you’ve ever written?

Two actually, and for very different reasons. I mean, “The Girl in the Window,” that won the Pulitzer Prize, that was probably the best story that I ever happened upon. Forget how I executed it, but just to be given that opportunity and that tip to tell that journey of that girl was amazing. And, of course, the aftermath was life-changing for me in terms of affirmation. “The Girl in the Window” made a really big difference. It had a 33 percent increase in the number of calls to the child abuse hotline. I know at least three kids who got adopted because of that story; and I know that family had a trust fund set up through the website that someone created after seeing my story for donations that are going to help keep that little girl at home and cared for. That’s hugely gratifying. That’s a really tangible difference that that story made that I’m very, very proud of. But my other favorite story didn’t do anything except for marrying my two favorite jobs, which are being a mom and being a reporter. It was my first first-person story that I’d written. It was called “I brake for Bo-Bo.” You can look it up if you want; it’s not very long, but it was the first time I wrote a first-person story about my little boy. When he was 4, he dropped his stuffed elephant out the window, and I come into work the next morning and told all my friends at our Monday morning (meeting), like “Oh my God, you can’t believe what my kid did yesterday. And I drove all around looking for this stuffed elephant.” Everybody in the room was like, “Oh, my kid’s teddy bear,” “Oh, when I was…” Everybody had a story about some kind of doll or animal that got lost. So my editor was like, “Lane, go write that story.” And I was like, What story? It never occurred to me that it was a story to write for the newspaper. But other than “The Girl in the Window,” it got more hits and comments than anything I had written. I never thought of my own life (as) having anything interesting enough; it never seemed like it was important or interesting enough as the people I write about. And that was the first time he gave me permission to kind of say, no, this is a universal story that happens to a lot of people. Go write your take on it. I was like, really?

So these stories that have had very different effects on people. One has caused tangible changes, and the other just resonated with people. What do you hope your stories accomplish? Do you hope that they will bring changes to the system, or is it enough when they help people empathize with other people?

I think all of the above. There’s definitely stories that I write that I think, “Oh, this is going to help this person, and maybe it will change something,” or I want to make policymakers think about something in a different way by having to invade these people’s lives for a little bit, you know? But some stories I just want people to think about themselves a little bit. Or to see the world in a different way. Just talking about it makes a big difference to me, people talking about my story. I did a story a couple of weeks ago about a 99-year-old man who goes to work at a fish factory every day. Nothing happened in that story, though. There was nothing at stake, there was no movement, but everybody was talking about that story. And that was so cool that just this little slice of life made people stop and be grateful for another day, or look at an old person differently, whatever it was in their own lives that they didn’t have it as hard as this guy. I think Mr. Newton helped influence a lot of people, and I hadn’t expected that kind of reaction.

All of the men I’ve interviewed have said they are grateful to their wives for taking care of everything while they were writing that awesome book or story … not a great dad or husband. How do you do this as a woman?

I am so glad you asked me that question. That is such a great question. It is something that my female friends and I talk about here a lot because, if you look around our newsroom, most of the editors and most of the other men at the level of what we’re doing, not only are they married, but they have stay-at-home wives, or they have wives that work part-time, or they have wives that work at home. So that they do, they have their backs all the time. My editor, his wife packs his lunch every day for him. He comes in with these beautiful lunches in a little lavender box. And I’m like what? I maybe have a carrot in my refrigerator today. My house hardly ever has food in the refrigerator, we eat out, we do carry-out a lot. I am not the cook and Betty Crocker mom, wife that I wish I was. That’s definitely something that had to go out the window. I told you I do my housework right before I write my stories, and I think I had to incorporate that somehow or I would have never washed my dishes. Do you know what I mean? But my husband, he was on the road for two years. He was on the road with his band for the last two years, and I was completely alone. ... He’s going to pick up the kids right now. He wasn’t around to do that. Thank goodness my editor was understanding about letting me work at home, and knows that I work late hours because a lot of that schedule is so that I can be there to get the kids after school, or get the kids to baseball practice, or get the kids to play practice or whatever it is that they’re doing. I usually have a chink of my day between 3 and 6 o’clock that I’m not very productive because I’m driving them back and forth trying to take care of their life. Which is why I can’t resent it if I’m working sometimes until 2 in the morning because I just need those four hours  later at night. I think my boys have grown up knowing a lot more about the way the world works than most kids because they went with me to Miami when I went to stay under the bridge with the sex offenders. They went with me to the Heart Gallery where all the foster kids’ faces were hung. They met a transgender person that I was writing about. They went to the jail with me when I had to interview a guy. They’ve been to these places and seen these things, and I think they’re more worldly than other kids, I hope. But I also know that I’ve missed my older son’s first date. I got sent on a shooting that I had to go cover in Orlando, and I was supposed to take him on his first date, and the little girl’s mom took him instead. And he was texting me pictures but I wasn’t there. Do you know what I mean? So, yeah, it’s a huge balance sheet. It’s pros and cons on both sides for sure. But neither one of them has any interest in being a journalist, by the way.

Have you felt like you’ve missed out on anything, either in your profession, that you could have done things that you didn’t do because you had a family…

I think both, of course. Professionally, I would never have signed myself up to go embed with the war, to do foreign correspondent work; I would have never wanted to be gone that long. And then … fellowships or things like that. I would have loved to go be a fellow at Nieman for a year or to apply for a fellowship at Michigan or somewhere. But I didn’t want to uproot them from their school and their friends, and I didn’t want to be gone from them for a year. So I never even tried to pursue any of those sort of upper-echelon awards in the profession, or fellowships or travel. I’ve gotten to take them on some travel stories, which has been cool, the paper paid for us to go to Costa Rica, and they paid for us to go to Outer Banks, North Carolina.

So you asked the paper to allow you to take the kids with you.

Well, they paid my ride. Then I paid for the kids’ ride. But I got a week off of work to go report a travel story, and they got to come with me. They had a bonus and perks from that as well. But, yeah, I’ve missed my wedding anniversary, I missed the kid’s first date, I’ve missed birthdays, not the kids’ birthdays, but my husband’s birthday, we had to do it another day because I had to work or something; my own birthday party one year. I got to my own party two hours late because I was writing a story on deadline, and all my friends were already drunk when I got there. And I got there, and I’m like Hey! You know, you definitely miss things; you definitely get called to lose some things, and I guess that’s just part of the price you have to pay. I’ve thought about, oh … it would be so much easier to own my own time. But that’s not true; because you call on all the people that are working for you…

Do you feel like you have advantages as a writer and as a journalist from being a mother?

Oh, yeah. Most definitely. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that sort of my career has just become from covering news to doing more features and human interest about the time I had my kids, you know? That transition I don’t think was coincidental. I was fortunate that I think I was definitely feeling that emotionally I could connect with people more than I was able to do that as a news reporter. But also kind of seeing the side of life and what mattered. … I didn’t get the satisfaction out of bringing people down as much as I did before. And I also think it really humanized me in a sense that before that I was a news reporter, I covered only the beat, and I was Lane the reporter; I wasn’t Lane mom or Lane, 30-year-old woman. When I was pregnant ... I had a belly, and I was throwing up on the water, and all the fishermen laughing at me, and there was no hiding or pretending that I wasn’t a pregnant woman. So all of a sudden, we were talking about my baby and my husband and my life, and I had to connect with them as a person, not just a journalist. And I think that was a huge turning point for me because people … who wouldn’t be nice to a pregnant woman, right? Everybody was really nice to me, and it kind of gave me the permission to go. … I don’t have to cut off and the idea of what I think of as a reporter. I can just be me, and it’s OK. And it became a whole lot easier.

What do you think gives you energy to do both things so well?

Diet Coke. I drink about five to six Diet Cokes a day, I swear. I don’t drink coffee, which is unusual for a journalist, you know. I came into the profession after the era of flasks in the door, cigarette smoking in the newsroom, but I have a little refrigerator full of Diet Coke cans. I don’t know, that’s a good question, too. I laugh because I feel so tired all the time, you know. I never feel like I have enough time to like exercise, or paint or walk the dogs. My life is really my boys and my work. I kind of wonder how that will change. My older son is a junior in high school. … I really only have three, 2 1/2 years until they’re gone, and I think about that a lot, like what will I do with that extra half of my life.

What do you think you’ll do?

I think if I was going to write a story about me as a third person, I would say that I would do a lot more journalism, but I hope that’s not the case. I think right now I would rather tell myself I’m going to get in shape, I’m going to start riding my bike again, I’m going to read a whole lot more than I ever get to read right now because I want to read not only the stuff I have to read for work, research. I want to travel; I’d like to do a lot more travel stories for the paper. That gets me back to journalism again, you know? (laughs) Be able to be gone and not feel like I’m leaving the kids alone would be a huge difference. Probably the types of stories that I’d do. I don’t want to do stories about war right now because I don’t want to be gone that long. But I think I’ll be looking for a bit more national-type stories and things like that.

***

David Finkel won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting, for his “ambitious, clear-eyed case study of the United States government’s attempt to bring democracy to Yemen,” and is a 2012 MacArthur “genius” grant winner. He is the author of two books on the Iraq war, The Good Soldiers and, just out, Thank You for Your Service. He edits the Post’s stellar narrative unit, which includes the writers Eli Saslow, Stephanie McCrummen and Anne Hull (whose interview in this series is coming up Friday).

Mistreanu: How do you choose the stories you’ll write?

Finkel: It’s a great question. I don’t know what the answer is. I’ve been doing this a long time, and at the beginning I’d do everything that I was assigned to do. And over time I developed I guess a specialty in narrative reporting and writing. The stories usually came not as assignments, but out of conversations with whoever my editor was. An example was an editor came to me at one point and said she wanted me to think about doing some kind of story or a series of stories about when George Bush was president, his primary foreign doctrine, which was democracy promotion, and she said, just think about how to turn that into a narrative, a storytelling thing. So that became a series of stories I did out of Yemen in 2005 or 2006, in which I told the story of a U.S.-funded project to bring democracy to Yemen: Here were the intentions, and here’s what happens. So that’s an example of how, at some point, instead of just getting assignments, this came out of conversations with editors: What would be an interesting thing to pursue? What’s an important theme, and then how do you turn that theme into a story that would engage a reader?

How did The Good Soldiers come about?

That came out of one of these conversations. I was still writing at the Post then; now I’m editing. My editor said: “There’s this thing happening with this new attempt in Iraq, why don’t you write a piece about the soldiers heading into it?” Fort Riley, Kansas, I went out to do a newspaper story on them; I spent probably a couple of weeks with them as they got ready to leave and go overseas, and at one point, the guy that is leading the group, the battalion commander, said to me —

Kauzlarich?

Kauzlarich, yeah. He said to me, “It’s interesting you’re doing this story, but you oughta come visit us halfway through and see how we’re doing, and maybe at the end even consider writing another piece when we come home because I don’t know how, but this experience is probably going to change us.” And I thought that was fascinating. So instead of doing two more newspaper stories, I published the story in the Post and then I got in touch with Kauzlarich, said I wanted to do a book, he said, “Come along,” so I went. I went not knowing what would happen to us. You’ve read the book, so you know that it turned into a story, but this is a type of journalism where you don’t know the ending when you go — you only have a question. In this case, the question was, what would become of these young men? And then it took me, the journalism I do, of just going and staying and staying and staying and watching as the story unfolds until there’s a story to tell.

In this case, the focus was on the soldiers rather than the policy or the surge.

Yes, it was not a policy book; it was the far-end of policy, the effects of policy. This wasn’t a book about strategy, about what was being decided or funded or thought of in Washington, but what happens at the far end. I’ve talked about this before, but this was four or five years into the war, and policy books had been written about the war, and memoirs were coming out, but no one had done a journalistic, observed journalistic look at what’s happening on the ground. So that was the idea — what’s happening? What will happen for them? We’ll see. So I went.

How was this process for you, being there?

Well, this is a little different. It was the first book I had done. This thing I was describing earlier in Yemen involved being in Yemen for four months, but this was different. I wasn’t prepared for it, and it was hard. It was physically frightening. But at the same time I was guided by the thought that this is a consequential war in my lifetime and for whatever reason, I’ve been given a good seat to observe it and to write about it, to add to the archives of the war. So don’t complain, don’t screw it up. Just go do the work.

When you’re reporting, when you’re out, you usually try to figure out what scenes to pay attention to, what people to talk to. How did the reporting process change when you were there with people dying around you?

Well, I didn’t know in the beginning. I knew that Kauzlarich would be one of the people I would be writing about. Beyond that, I didn’t have any clear characters or clear ideas. And you know from your own work, in reporting, when you’re trying to figure something out, you’re just trying to absorb everything and write it down and pay attention to everything, and it can be a little wearing and frustrating because you don’t know what the story is yet. You’re just kind of going along, trying to feel your way and learn your way until you reach the point of having some confidence that you have a story to tell. So the people I ended up writing about and the things I ended up describing weren’t evident at first. They were things that unfolded organically as my time there continued. Certain events would happen, and they were worth writing about and exploring. You know, for all the 12 things I did write about there were a thousand things I didn’t write about. That’s the choices a writer makes, right?

How would you describe this professional experience now, of being there and working on this story?

In 30 years of doing this in various forms, I consider this the crucial work of my writing time. It mattered to me more than anything else I had done.

Why?

Well, first of all, the particular kind of journalism I like to do and I respond to isn’t pack journalism, it’s the work of the journalist who goes to a place that matters and also the place where others aren’t. There are plenty of people coming to war, of course, doing extraordinary work, but no one up to that point had done this kind of reporting where you stay and stay and stay and then write the full story. It wasn’t using these people to write about war. How do I explain it? I wasn’t trying to write a war book. I was using the war to try to write something more intimate about what becomes of someone who’s sent into something of consequence, and what is perceived to be the lost moment. What happens to them. And that was a rare place to be. It was frightening, it never lost its sense of importance to me, it could feel overwhelming at times. In my mind, what these soldiers were going through mattered, and I got to be there. That’s a profound thing.

How was this different from when you covered the Kosovo conflicts?

Well, because I tried hard in my coverage of Kosovo, but when I compare the two, Kosovo I felt like I visited. This story I felt like I stayed long enough to inhabit. It’s not to diminish that work or to come across as boastful about this work. I don’t mean it that way. What am I comparing? I did as well as I could on Kosovo. But this, it was almost like, this seems silly, but the previous 30 years had led me to this assignment, this place, this moment, this chance to write a big story.

Do you think you were aware of that while you were there?

No, I don’t think so. I knew it was a consequential war and as the months went on, I saw what was happening, I knew I had something, a story to tell in my hands, but as I’m sure you know from your own reporting, when you’re in it you’re just in it. You’re not removing yourself and thinking about whether this is big or small or anything else. You’re just trying to get the thing done. You’re just trying to get through it.

Who used to be on your mind while you were reporting? Were you thinking about the soldiers or the readers?

All of it, right? I mean, of course I was trying to pay attention to what the soldiers were going through. I was trying to make sure that what I would end up writing would have emotion to it, that it wasn’t my naïve emotion I was writing about, but it was a true representation of what the soldiers were feeling. That requires, I think, again, not visiting a story, but being willing to stay there for a long time until you know that you’re not telling your story but you’re telling a true story about them.

Was there anything else you were doing to make sure the emotion you were conveying was true and was theirs besides spending a lot of time?

Well, spending a lot of time, listening, talking to people, going out, just observing. All the usual stuff we do as journalists. I mean, who knows? I didn’t really know until the book came out and then people responding to it, soldiers of all stripes, that what I hoped for was working out. That I had done something that to them described their own experiences. Again, I’ve mentioned this many times to many folks, but the emails continue to interest me. I’ve gotten so many emails from soldiers saying a version of, “I came home, I didn’t want to talk about it, I can’t talk about it, I’ve read your book, now I give your book to people and say, ‘Read this, and you’ll know how it was like and why I can’t talk about it.’” If I had gotten that email once it would be nice, but I’ve gotten a version of that email hundreds and hundreds of times. That helps me think that I did get to their story, I did get to a version of their story, I did get that part right.

This might sound strange, especially considering the subject of your story, but did you get enjoyment at any point working on this? Was it exciting?

No, it wasn’t. No. It changes from day to day. Some days were unbearably sad, some days were infuriating in many different ways. Some days were just nothing at all, they were just days with funny moments. I’m not going to answer that question well, and it’s not because it’s a bad question. It’s just that I don’t have a good answer.

I also wanted to ask you about the tone of the book, the way in which it seamlessly moves from very difficult moments to lighter moments. It’s funny at some points.

It is funny at times. I mean, there were incredibly boring moments over there, there were moments that were as funny as anything I had come across, and then again, there were these moments that were off-the-chart sad and angry.

Were you intentional with the tone in which you were writing the story?

Well, yeah. I mean, it’s not just turning on a recorder and then transcribing what’s on the tape and that becomes a book. It was a 15-month deployment, so at the end of it I had basically a 15-month chronology of what had gone on. And that’s when the writing begins. You, first of all, want to tell a true story. But you also want to tell something that reads like a story. And that involves — it can’t be a one-note thing. If this is something unbearably sad, you can’t continue just to have that one note playing again and again, of sadness. That would be unbearable for the reader and also probably pretty boring. There’s pacing, there’s a different tone — I mean, you want a reader to read it. So, yes. Again, not a good answer. I spent nine or 10 months writing the book. Which is to say I had nine or 10 months to take this lump of chronology and fashion it into a narrative. To turn chronology into something more than chronology, into a story that’s all the arc of storytelling, from the beginning through a journey to an ending.

What were you hoping the story would do to the people who read it?

Get their attention, affect them, give them specific people to think about whenever they would go on from the book to read in general ways about that war or Afghanistan or any war to come. To understand, for instance, if they happened to come across a headline in the paper that says something like, “Three people killed from roadside bomb in Iraq or Afghanistan,” that they would have a fuller, deeper understanding of what that headline actually means. These wars have not been paid attention to by many people, and I had no idea if anybody was going to read it, but if they did read it, I wanted them to walk away with a fuller understanding of what was going on. And I don’t mean just in terms of a war, but in terms of the transformation of these young, eager men into the men they became by the time this was over with.

How did you stay strong while reporting this story? How did you make sure you wouldn’t get overwhelmed with what was going on?

Well, I mean, the luxury I had over there, unlike the soldiers, was when it got to me, when I could feel myself not being a very good reporter, not listening as closely as I needed to listen, when I felt myself getting a little tired, I could take a break. I could arrange for transportation away from there either into the city of Baghdad, where I could stay for a few days recharging my batteries at the Washington Post bureau, or back to the States to do some reporting here. And that’s a luxury the soldiers didn’t have. I’m quite aware of that. Every three, four, five, six weeks I could take a break. They could not. Except for 18 days of home leave, they were in it for the duration.

Did you ever feel like a dad?

A dad? No, I didn’t. It’s complicated enough feeling like a reporter. It was important for me to maintain some distance. I mean, I wasn’t there to be a social worker. I wasn’t there to be a friend. I wasn’t there to be a comrade or a leader. I was there to get as close as I could to what was going on but never forgetting and never letting them forget that my role there was not as friend or personal confidant, but as journalist who was going to possibly take everything they were saying and use some of it or all of it or none of it in a book that was going to be read by all kinds of people who didn’t know them. There was always some signal when I was talking to guys to remind them not only that I wasn’t a soldier but that I was a journalist performing and producing journalism. A recorder would be out or a notebook or just some signal of what the relationship was. I wanted them to be aware of that at all times.

Were you hoping for higher changes? Were you hoping that officials and people in Washington would act in the future based on the book?

No, no, nothing like that. I would like them to read the book, but as far as a book like this producing changes, no. Maybe policy books can do this or that, but this wasn’t the type of book that would. The most it could do was remind people, too, whether they’re people in charge of the war, people with no connection to the war, that the war is, and all wars are, filled with people like the ones they were reading about. That’s the best I can hope for. That they would be able to think specifically about the population inside the war rather than abstractly. I mean, look, again. I said this to you because I think it’s true: There’s no breaking news in this book. There are no headlines. Everybody knows that war is scary, it’s dangerous. To some people it can feel exhilarating, but it’s a lousy — it’s a horrible fact, to be inside a war. It’s a horrible place. That’s not exclusive to this war or this book. That’s been written about again and again through history. So in this case it was just I’m telling an old story that’s been told before, but I’m telling it I guess in a modern moment: this war, these people.

One of the powerful contrasts I found in the book was overlapping what was going on in Washington, the kind of discourse people were having, with what was going on in Iraq.

Right. But this is not to say one was right and one was wrong. It was just to point out that any war is so many wars. And so the little quotes from Bush at the beginning of each chapter. The intention there wasn’t to make fun of Bush. It’s not up to him what’s going on in 2-16 on a particular day. It’s to show, again, one war is 90 wars. Like that day in September when Bush was in Australia saying, “We’re kicking ass.” To him, that’s the truth of his war on that day. And I don’t quarrel with that. That’s what he thought. Now in this unit, it so happens that day was the day that a roadside bomb went off and three guys were killed on the spot, the fourth lost his legs, and the fifth … nearly killed him. Same day, same war, totally different experiences, and to the people involved each is as legitimate as the other.

What are some of the reasons why you do this type of work?

Let’s see. I think it’s because I’ve always liked writing. I went to school, and I ended up in journalism school in Florida in the mid- to late 1970s, which happened to be a time when newspapers were on the ascent, and they were fat with profits, and they were fat with people trying to figure out how to do narrative journalism. And so being in Florida, I would read these stories in the St. Pete Times and the Miami Herald and think, “I want to do that.” And then it was just a matter of figuring out how to do it. But I’ve always responded to this kind of storytelling when it’s done well. And so I started to set out; that’s what I want to do.

What’s attractive or important?

Oh, well, I guess I grew up reading a lot, I like hearing stories, being told stories and telling stories. It’s just a different move. Now I’m at the Washington Post, and there are reporters who can’t write terribly well, but they can report in ways I wish I could, and they’re just great, great reporters and investigative reporters, and then there are other people here who like reporting, but they like writing as well. I just sort of fall into the second category. One thing I like to think is that underneath every sentence in that book is not just flimsy writing, but there’s a piece of reporting. Above all, it’s a reporting book and the writing is secondary. I consider the book an act of reporting first and foremost. But why I like to do it? I don’t know. That’s a great question. I just sort of always wanted to do it, I kind of like doing it. At this point, it’s the only move I have left, right?

What kept you doing it for such a long time?

I feel very lucky. I mean, I can’t say what my life would have been like if I had done something else. I can’t know that. But I do know that by doing this I’ve traveled to five continents, and I’ve seen people at their very best and their very worst and their very middling trying to figure life out, and almost every day, it’s caused me to lead a life that feels very engaged — not perfunctory, not going through the motions. It’s led to an interesting life.

Engaged in what way?

Thinking. Making sense of things. Not feeling mechanical about what’s happening in a giving day. It’s pretty damn luxurious to be able to live a life that feels full of being able to consider things, think through things, see things, ask questions, see life unfolding, with pretty limitless, go places, go pretty much where I’ve wanted to go and stay as long as I can and figure stories out and then tell stories. I mean that seems like a pretty good deal.

What has kept you from falling into a somewhat monotonous way of seeing  journalism?

Again, a pretty rare luxurious position here where I don’t face the same time constraints and the daily demands that a lot of other reporters have. So I have time on my side. I used to love being a daily reporter. But could I be doing daily reporting after 30 years? Probably not. Someone once said — and I didn’t quite understand —that a good life is a felt life. I get it now.

Did you think at any point about doing something else?

Sure. Every day.

And why didn’t you?

I don’t know. Lack of imagination maybe.

Have the types of stories you’re drawn to changed with time?

Yeah. They’ve, I think, gotten harder. And this is an interesting point now because I wrote that book, I’ve just finished this next book, which was basically a book about what happened to some of these folks after they got home: grief, mental wounds, and again and again. It’s volume II of a story that’s been told a bunch: People go to war, people come home from war. But I wanted to finish the story, and now I finished it, and this is an interesting period where I have to figure out what to do next. And it’s not that I lack ideas, but every idea I’ve come up with so far seems a little frivolous. Maybe that’s natural. I’ve been embedded in this story every day for more than six years. As much as anything, it’s defined the last six years of my life, and like a lot of reporters I know, I’m fairly obsessive, so I’ve obsessed on this thing, and now I’ve got to decide what’s the next story to do. I just don’t know.

What would the project that you would want to start now look like?

I really, honestly don’t know. I understand the flaws of my works. I can pick any page in that book and pick a sentence at random and wince a bit at the way it was written. Life is a process of constant rewriting, I guess. And so it is with most of the work I’ve done, and most of the work I’ve done, I never want to see it again. I don’t want to. But this work, despite its flaws, which I can see, unlike the other stuff I’ve done, I’m proud of this. So if I didn’t write another thing, then I think I can be content with that because I’ve written something that matters to me, that I’m proud of. On the other hand, if I didn’t write again, it gets back to your earlier question: What am I going to do? Beats me. So it’s an interesting moment.

To me it’s very obvious why this work is phenomenal, but what makes it special to you?

What makes it special to me? That it was hard and it mattered and I went there and I stayed and I got it and I did it.

How did the writing work? Were you just working on this book when you were writing it?

Yes. Every day. I’m very slow. So I was getting up every day for like, I guess, 10 months, and writing my way from one sentence to the next to the next until I eventually got to the end.

How many hours did you work a day?

It depends on the day. Some days I would start at 6 in the morning, and I would still be there at midnight. And I wasn’t a lot of fun, according to my family. But I’m probably not that much fun anyway.

How exposed were you to danger when you were there?

A lot.

Because I couldn’t tell in some situations whether the scenes were reconstructed from interviewing or whether you were there.

Some that I wasn’t there for I reconstructed. But I was there for most of it and I mean most of the book is based on observed reporting, not recollections. Not being told what happened, but being present for what happened. It was not the worst place in the world, but it was a bad place. And if you’re on the base itself, a lot of mortars, a lot of rockets, then when you’re out in the convoy, every road had roadside bombs waiting for you.

Did you ever think that you might die?

Yes.

And was it still worth it?

Yeah. But I can say that because I know the ending: I didn’t die. I think of people I know who have died covering wars and was it worth it for them? I have no idea. But I sure wouldn’t have wanted to die.

Again, I’m sorry if I keep repeating the same questions —

Because you’re trying to get an answer.

I’m trying to picture myself in that situation —

Yeah. But you can’t picture yourself in it until you’re in it. If I had known what was going to happen, would I have gone in the first place? I’m not sure, but I didn’t know what was going to happen, and once you’re there, you’re a reporter. And as I said in the book, underneath everything I felt fortunate to be there. If I’m going to be a journalist and I’m going to be a storyteller, well, this is the great story, so, you know, shut up and tell it.

That makes perfect sense.

It makes sense when you don’t know what you’re getting into. That old, bad story, what was it, frogs and boiling water or something, they don’t realize what’s going on because they’re in the water and then slowly, incrementally, it’s getting hotter and hotter until at some point they’re no longer a living frog? It’s not like they’re jumping into boiling water; they’re starting up out of a pleasant pool, and then incrementally it keeps changing. It’s a bad analogy.

Is your main duty to tell the story, or to tell the story of those people, to do justice to their lives or experiences, what is it?

For me, the obligation was to tell a true story. It was their story. Not my opinion, not to declare something good or bad, won or lost, to remain as invisible as possible and to watch them. You know, when I’ve given talks about this to people, there’s always a question about why didn’t I write the book first person. I’ve read first-person books that have blown me away; there’s been great first-person work done. But in this case, this book, who cares what I went through? The point was to write about what they were going through, these soldiers, and they were doing their jobs, and I was doing my job. My job was to write about what they were going through. So of course it had to be a third-person book. I would like to think that anybody who reads that book would come away not knowing very much about me. But I thought about it. I mean obviously, like anybody, I was emotional at times and angry at times. But I don’t think you know very much about me when you finish that book. You do know something about what it’s like to be a soldier.

So in this continual process of figuring out life, do you have any conclusions?

I think the conclusions, the best conclusions, are what the people who are in it think. That’s not a deflection. It’s true. On the other hand, in this particular battalion there were 800 soldiers, 800 different opinions. Some people came home thinking it was worth it, some people came home thinking it was a waste of time. And most of them were in the great gray middle, where they weren’t thinking in these grand terms, they were more like, pardon my French here, but what the fuck just happened? And as I learned in the second book, they’re still thinking about that, and they’ll get to think about that for a long time.

Coming Friday: Part 3, conversations with the New York Times' Amy Harmon and the Washington Post's Anne Hull. Coming Tuesday: Part 4, conversations with The Oregonian's Tom Hallman Jr. and Esquire's Chris Jones.  

Simina Mistreanu just got her masters in journalism from the University of Missouri. She grew up in Romania and worked as a journalist there for five years before coming to the United States, in August 2011, on a Fulbright scholarship. She is now a resident at The Oregonian and is working on a year-long project writing stories about Roma. She loves Portland, especially for its zippy Argentine tango scene.

The post “Narrative Sweat & Flow,” Part 2: Lane DeGregory and David Finkel appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Editor's note: First, an introduction, by Jacqui Banaszynski, the Knight Chair in Editing at the Missouri School of Journalism, and winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing: 

Whenever aspiring young journalists ask how to learn to write, I tell them I know of only two ways: by writing, and writing, and writing some more; and by reading good writing, with a writer's eye. My friend and student Simina Mistreanu went one better, going straight to the authors of the work she most admires, and interviewing them about technique, struggle, persistence and purpose. The project was the capstone of Simina’s graduate study at the Missouri School of Journalism. The result is “Narrative Sweat and Flow,” a deep dive into the minds of seven* of today’s top narrative journalists. I first met Simina four years ago in her native Romania. She was among a pioneering band of young journalists committed to independent reporting and literary grace in a culture accustomed to propaganda, fluff and managed facts. Without existing quality publications to write for, they pooled their pennies and passion and created their own, with Decat o Revista, a magazine that survives edition to edition yet has held on for five years. Simina came to Missouri two years ago as a Fulbright scholar. She successfully defended her master's last month, and now has a one-year reporting residency at The Oregonian.  I asked her recently what she found most surprising and most inspiring in her interviews with the narrative masters. Her answer was the same for both: “They’re all insecure.”

Now, here's Mistreanu's "Narrative Sweat and Flow:"

They have written powerful stories about life and death, illnesses, cures, poverty, discrimination, trauma and hope.

To do that, they embedded with soldiers in Iraq, rode buses across the Mexico border, tracked a corpse over continents, delved into conflicts in Africa, and lingered around Boston hospitals and Florida orchards.

They gave their subjects time and their full attention for months in a row.

They put everything into narrative form, strewn with emotion, so that readers would want to follow the characters’ journey toward a resolution. Along the way, they intended to illuminate social dramas and build empathy.

Narrative writers covering social issues have produced some amazing work in the past two to three decades. Their stories, published in newspapers and magazines, revealed truths and gained appreciation from readers and the industry.

The best of their stories read as easily as page-turning fiction where the reader gets caught up in the characters, is moved through a compelling plot and is drawn into vivid, intimate scenes. To produce these stories takes months of immersive reporting, in-depth interviewing, context gathering and then often painful writing and rewriting.

This work often takes a toll on their lives and relationships, ranging from depression to a perceived imbalance in their personal lives.

“To some extent, I’m taken out of my own life,” says writer Amy Harmon of The New York Times.

Yet for many of them, reporting and being part of other people’s lives triggers what psychologists refer to as “flow” — a state of being “in the zone,” completely absorbed in the activity, when work comes along easily and time seems to expand. Some of the best creative work is done while people are in the zone, psychologists say; people from different professions and backgrounds have said such experiences were among the most meaningful of their lives.

Moreover, these journalists find purpose in shedding light onto difficult, often heart-wrenching issues. Telling true stories is a privilege, they say, and a basic instinct.

“When you got one on the line, there’s an adrenaline rush,” says Chris Jones, of Esquire. “It becomes primal almost when you got a good story. … I’ve spent my life trying to have those moments, pursuing those moments. When you get them, you kind of become blind to anything else.”

Seven* writers, all of whom are either Pulitzer Prize or National Magazine Award winners, talk about the sweat, tears and joy of writing narratively about social issues such as poverty, race, illness and trauma. They talk about flow, stalemates, the power of stories and how, in the end, they care about the story so much that they just find a way to get it done.

In seven years of doing journalism in Romania and the United States, and working on stories ranging from breaking news and business briefs to deep-dive narratives, I realized the stories that mattered most to me and my readers had three things in common: First, I had allowed myself time to do extensive reporting and to get to know the people and the issues I was writing about. Second, I tried to use narrative writing techniques to engage the readers and tell a good story. And third, the stories happened to be about people who were disadvantaged or struggling to overcome a burden, and about the system that put that burden there in the first place.

Whenever I felt like the readers could empathize with the characters and learn something useful about the system, I felt that my work was worth it. The work was enjoyable and rewarding, if painful at times, and I felt like I was offering something meaningful to the world.

I wanted to explore the question of motivation, satisfaction and meaning with the masters themselves and get a glimpse into what might await me down the road if I follow their path. I took a final master’s project at the University of Missouri as an opportunity to explore that question. 

Flow

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, now at Claremont Graduate University, has spent the past half a century studying “flow” — the state in which a person is so absorbed in what he or she is doing that nothing else seems to matter. Csikszentmihalyi grew up in Transylvania during World War II noticing how most of the adults around him were overwhelmed by the war’s tragedies and unable to live happy, satisfied lives. He became interested in understanding what contributes to a life worth living, and that led him to psychology.

Csikszentmihalyi believes people achieve happiness by being fully involved with every detail of their lives, whether good or bad. The best moments occur, he says, “when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur — the swimmer’s muscles might ache during the race, or his lungs might feel like exploding — but people end up describing them as some of the best moments of their lives.

There are two main prerequisites for flow: One’s attention must be invested in realistic goals, and skills need to match the opportunities for action. Thus, the person concentrates his or her attention on the task at hand and momentarily forgets everything else.

A mountaineer cited in Csikszentmihalyi’s research described it like this: “When you’re [climbing] you’re not aware of other problematic life situations. It becomes a world unto its own, significant only to itself. It’s a concentration thing. Once you’re into the situation, it’s incredibly real, and you’re very much in charge of it. It becomes your total world.”

Flow is experienced in similar ways by people of different occupations and backgrounds. Csikszentmihalyi’s studies have included surgeons, physics Nobel Prize winners, farmers in the Italian Alps, teenagers in Tokyo, and factory workers in Chicago.

Innovators and people who work in creative fields have also described doing some of their best work in “flow” conditions. In the long run, these optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery, or as Csikszentmihalyi puts it, “a sense of participation in determining the content of life,” which he posits comes as close to happiness as anything else.

Moreover, people use these experiences to reinforce a meaningful pattern, a life theme. “When that is accomplished, and a person feels in control of life and feels that it makes sense, there is nothing left to desire,” Csikszentmihalyi wrote in his book Flow.

Journalists have been studied in a context somewhat related to flow, for the book Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet, written by Csikszentmihalyi, Howard Gardner and William Damon. The authors described good work as something that is both of excellent quality and socially responsible, and found that journalists tend to produce good work when they pursue a moral mission such as informing the public, supporting democracy and creating social change.

That connection — between mission and joy — was echoed by seven accomplished writers who use longform narratives to cover sensitive social issues. They described situations in which they experience flow, where they encounter difficulties and how they overcome them, and ultimately, how journalism has led them to live fulfilled lives.

When talking about flow, journalists sometimes even used the word itself or the expression “being in the zone.” Often, it comes in the form of intense concentration.

Lane DeGregory is a long-time feature writer who started writing daily news stories in the Virginian-Pilot. Now at the Tampa Bay Times, her series “The Girl in the Window,” about a feral child who had been raised in a closet, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Her subjects are often people living on the fringes of society. DeGregory says her work occupies her mind even when she’s not literally working. “It’s a blessing and a curse that I can’t turn it off,” she says.

For example, in the middle of a reporting project, she might take time to see a baseball game with her husband. But all she can think about is how to end her story and whether she needs to call one of her sources for one more interview. Or her teenage sons might talk to her about a football game or a band concert, and she realizes that she hasn’t been listening to them but instead has been thinking about a story. She says she shuts people around her off sometimes, without meaning to.

Harmon, a New York Times reporter who uses longform narratives to illuminate how technology affects people’s lives, also talks about being absorbed by stories. She says she doesn’t necessarily lose track of time when work is going well, but rather she wants “to be doing it all the time. I feel like I have something important to say.”

Reporting +/- writing = joy

Most writers in this study take delight in one or both of two separate parts of their work: reporting and writing.

Longform narrative writing often requires the journalist to spend long stretches of time with his or her subjects. So it’s not surprising that most writers said they love being able to inhabit other people’s worlds in order to tell their stories.

Anne Hull of the Washington Post points out that narrative is a very specific type of reporting that might seem boring to journalists who are used to a different rhythm — for example, reporters churning out the grind of daily news. Her reporting method is both more luxurious and more demanding than dailies require. “You’re watching hours and hours of nothing happen. And you just have to be prepared for when that moment happens,” she says.

In 1998, Hull spent several months documenting the journey of a group of Mexican women employed as crab pickers in North Carolina. Part of her reporting involved hours of just watching them pick crabs. Hull, who writes about the “non-majority class” — she’s written extensively about immigrants, gay youth in the Bible Belt, and war veterans recovering in substandard medical facilities — chooses these subjects because she loves reporting in these “niche” environments.

“I just have always felt at home in that world,” she says.

Harmon, who writes science-heavy stories, says that though she likes the challenge of deciphering the science, she gets most enjoyment from being part of other people’s lives and acting as a “fly on the wall.”

Jones talks specifically about a certain part of reporting: discovering “nuggets,” special moments or details that will play an important part in the story. One of them happened when he was reporting “The Things that Carried Him,” the story of a dead soldier’s journey from Iraq back to the United States: The soldier’s mother told him how her other son tried to put a ring on the soldier’s finger, only to discover that the glove was stuffed with cotton because the finger was missing.

And when Jones was reporting a story about a zoo-animal massacre, in Zanesville, Ohio, a local sheriff described how a piece of fur on a tiger’s back fell off as it was shot, revealing its spine. Jones gets excited about such moments because he believes they’ll make the story memorable to readers. Such discoveries, horrible as they are, also are pleasurable, he says. “I think a great story has to have those scenes or those moments that really catch in people,” he says.

When the journalists move beyond the reporting to talk about writing, their experiences with flow become more fickle: Sometimes, words seem to flow; everything just pours out and falls into place. Other times, it’s a struggle.

The nights when it goes well are like being on drugs, Jones says. “I live for those.” He tries to summon that mood by listening to music; he’ll choose a track for every story and play it on repeat (a technique GQ’s Michael Paterniti has also described). When he was writing the Zanesville massacre story, he was listening to “East Hastings,” by Godspeed You Black Emperor; while writing a profile of the late movie critic Roger Ebert, he listened to “Little Motel,” by Modest Mouse.

Other writers have other rituals to help them get “in the zone.” DeGregory starts writing only after she has taken a shower, done laundry, washed the dishes and put her house in order. All this time, she’s thinking about the story, but she’s doing all these little tasks instead of staring at a blank screen. It helps her clear her mind and be more focused when she actually starts working.

Another prerequisite of flow goes back to thorough reporting. Jones says he tries to report a story to the point when he can just tell it, when he knows it “back to front.” Harmon says: “The fun writing comes from when you finally reach the point where you feel like you are authoritative. You can answer any question, you’ve done all the research.”

Purpose as a condition of flow

Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi and Damon, who wrote the book on good work, discovered that journalists tend to produce quality work when they are pursuing a moral mission.

All seven award-winning journalists reinforced that finding. They believe they are serving readers by helping them connect emotionally to characters in their stories, and thus become aware of larger social issues or human conditions.

Harmon sees it as a matter of public service to inform people about the science that impacts their lives in a way that is emotionally gripping. Earlier in her career, she was doing straightforward news and features about science developments for the Times. In 2000, she was part of the paper’s wide-ranging project “How Race is Lived in America,” which won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, and wrote her first longform narrative story, about two business partners of different races in the dot-com boom era. She discovered the power of narrative, and now she tries to address three levels in every story she writes: the science, the individual story of a character, and the bigger story of the social conflict.

Hull has always been interested in people at the outer edges of society. The daughter of an inner-city schoolteacher, she followed an unusual career path, dropping out of college after her freshman year and working various jobs at the St. Petersburg Times (now The Tampa Bay Times) before becoming a reporter. She says her purpose is simply to peel back the curtain on a world readers don’t usually see, without scolding them or pointing a finger at flawed social policies. She just wants to get readers in touch with how other people live.

For Tom Hallman Jr., of The Oregonian, stories of trauma, illness and race came naturally from a decade of covering the police beat as a young reporter. He carved a role for longform narrative at the newspaper and ultimately won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for his series “The Boy Behind the Mask,” which described a disfigured teenager’s quest to undergo surgery to improve his appearance.

“The police beat had such a drama, such characters, such a lingo, and the way we were writing it was sterile,” he says. When he started incorporating scenes into his stories, he got positive reactions from readers, so he kept at it. He realized this type of writing got readers more involved with the story and the characters.

DeGregory, who likes writing about “people in the shadows,” especially women, says she sometimes hopes her stories will bring positive changes to the people in them. Other times, she hopes policymakers will regard an issue differently. But with many stories, she just wants people to reflect on their own lives or slightly change their perspective on something.

She gives the example of a story about a 99-year-old man who still goes to work at a fish factory every day. “Nothing happened in that story. There was nothing at stake, there was no movement, but everybody was talking about that story,” she says. She posits that people reacted because they could relate to this man and found meaning in his story.

Stories that have emotion make people stop, think and feel, Hallman says. “In that moment, I take this stranger and this stranger, and I bring them together,” he says. “And that’s the goal, to make them connect and feel something, or read something and be changed, even if it’s for a minute.”

He gives the example of a story he wrote, about a black maid who moved to Portland from a sharecropping farm in the South. She cleaned homes for 55 years and raised five children. They became accomplished professionals, including an attorney, a teacher, a businessman and a nurse. A story like that can change someone who has never gotten to know a black person and might be a “borderline racist,” he says.

“When they start (reading the story) they think, ‘Oh, I don’t want to read another story about an African-American. I’ll bet they’ll be complaining about something,’ ” Hallman says. “And by the time they get to the end of the story they’re weeping. And they have been in the presence of grace, and courage, and wisdom. And it changes their life.”

Sometimes, the writer’s aim is to help people see beyond the headlines they read in newspapers or see on TV and understand how major events impact people’s lives.

David Finkel, now an editor at the Washington Post, has pursued longform narrative journalism since he started his career at the St. Petersburg Times. In 2006, he won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for a piece about American efforts to expand democracy in Yemen. In 2012, he won a MacArthur “genius” grant, becoming one of 16 journalists to have had that distinction.

He considers “the crucial work of (his) writing time” to be the book The Good Soldiers, which he wrote after spending eight months embedded with a U.S. battalion in Iraq. He says he wanted readers to have specific people in mind whenever they heard something about Iraq or any other war or read a headline about another roadside bomb exploding in Afghanistan. “I wanted them to walk away with a fuller understanding of what was going on,” he says. “And I don’t mean just in terms of a war, but in terms of the transformation of these young, eager men into the men they became by the time this was over with.”

Overcoming difficulties

In each writer’s life, flow, joy, satisfaction and other positives have alternated with periods of struggle, which varied from deadline stress to deep depression. Like marathon runners in training, the writers have learned to put their feet down step after step: when it feels great, and when it feels awful.

Harmon constantly feels a time pressure, “like editors are breathing down my neck: ‘What exactly are you spending all of this time on?’”

Hull refers to the “new angst” reporters have about exposing the people they write about to merciless online comments. “It’s so mean and ugly, and I almost feel bad for the people I’m going to put through that,” she says.

DeGregory still feels a concern she had when she entered this profession: that she’s not worthy to tell people’s stories. That makes her nervous, sometimes to the point of being sick to her stomach, whenever she embarks on reporting a story. “That’s a huge responsibility, to get someone to open up to you and trust you to tell a story about them to thousands of strangers,” she says. “Am I good enough to do this? Gosh, they gave me this amazing access or insight. I don’t know if I’m magician enough to pull off this trick.”

DeGregory overcomes the concerns by trying to be empathetic with her subjects. When she was younger, she used to build her stories around what other people would say about them. Now she tries to know her subjects well, and “inhabit their minds,” before she lets others weigh in.

Hull says she’s had periods of “extreme struggle,” the most recent last year. “It’s hard to describe. You’re just hitting the wrong chords, and everything you try doesn’t quite work out, and it’s really depressing.” She worked through and beyond those feelings by talking to other journalist friends, whom she calls her “little tribe.”

But Hull says she has never wanted to quit journalism, no matter how difficult the roadblock. “I never not wanted to work. I just wanted to beat it.”

Jones suffered from depression after he finished the story about the soldier killed in Iraq. He suspects that it happened, in part, because he had ended a long-term project and didn’t know what was next. Another reason, he says, was that he had been immersed for months, mind and heart, in a tragic subject.

Getting fully involved is a “deal” you need to make to be able to tell powerful stories, he says. He doesn’t believe in objectivity. “I don’t try to maintain distance; I think that’s a shitty way to treat people,” he says. “If you’re asking them to open up to you, I don’t see how you return that favor by being a wall.”

Family

While all the journalists believe in the value of the work they do, they also talk about the price they pay to do it: long hours, brutal deadlines, the emotional toll of witnessing grief and tragedy, and the impact on their personal lives.

The married writers say they are grateful to spouses for picking up the slack in raising children. Both Jones and Finkel said they weren’t very present as husbands and fathers while they were working on their soldier stories. They feel bad about it and see it as a sacrifice that came with the process.

The women, especially, expressed mixed feelings about their work’s impact on their family life. DeGregory said that while her editor, a man, brings his lunch that his wife had packed with him to work every day, she usually has “a carrot” in her fridge. She doesn’t get to cook for her teenage boys as she would want, and ends up writing late at night, after she drives them to after-school activities.

Harmon, who says she hasn’t been as present of a mother for her 9-year-old daughter as she would have wanted, recalls instances when she would tuck her daughter in and write by her bedside while waiting for her to fall asleep. She says her husband has picked up the slack in raising the child.

“On the other hand, she sees me doing something that I love to do and that I think is important, and that gets a lot of reactions and hopefully makes a difference in the world,” Harmon says. “So I like to think that I am actually being a good parent (in) that I’m modeling that for her.”

Similarly, DeGregory believes her sons are more aware of the world because they’ve had the opportunity to travel with her on stories and be exposed to people and situations ranging from a group of sex offenders living under a bridge in Miami to an art gallery dedicated to foster children.

Hallman was an exception in this regard. He says he’s always put his job in perspective. He usually starts work at 7:30 a.m. and tries to leave the newsroom at 4 p.m. He spends the rest of the time with his family and doing things that “renew (his) spirit,” such as dancing, riding his motorcycle or listening to music. He found that allowing himself that space was essential for his writing. “If you don’t have the balance, you start to become jaded with the world, and you can’t see stories in the world if you look at it as jaded,” he says. “If you’re sitting in the newsroom 12 hours a day, you have nothing left to give the world.”

What journalism has offered them

Of all the journalists included in this analysis, Finkel has probably risked the most, physically and emotionally. In the eight months he spent in Iraq, he was exposed to many of the dangers the soldiers faced, including mortars, rockets and roadside bombs.

He says he doesn’t know if he would have embarked on the assignment had he known what was waiting for him. But once he was there, he focused on his responsibilities as a reporter.

“I wasn’t prepared for it, and it was hard. It was physically frightening,” he says. “But at the same time I was guided by the thought that this is a consequential war in my lifetime and for whatever reason, I’ve been given a good seat to observe it and to write about it, to add to the archives of the war. So don’t complain, don’t screw it up. Just go do the work.”

He felt an immense responsibility to tell the story of how a group of young men were changed after being sent to war. While doing that, he wanted to make sure he wasn’t telling his own story but rather accurately capturing the soldiers’ experiences and emotions. To achieve that, he did a lot of “staying and staying and staying.” He says, “Underneath everything I felt fortunate to be there. If I’m going to be a journalist and I’m going to be a storyteller, well, this is the great story, so shut up and tell it.”

The same kind of gratitude for being able to tell stories was expressed by all seven journalists.

This is ultimately why they go through the difficult parts, and what gives them the sense of purpose necessary to experience flow. The stories they’ve told and the experiences they’ve had along the way added up to fulfilled lives.

At its best, journalism doesn’t feel like work—to Jones, it feels like stealing money, because you’re paid to go meet interesting people and watch amazing things. Finkel feels very lucky to have traveled to five continents, to have seen people “at their very best and their very worst and their very middling, trying to figure life out,” and to have lived a life that’s engaged. “It’s pretty damn luxurious to be able to live a life that feels full of being able to consider things, think through things, see things, ask questions, see life unfolding, … go pretty much where I’ve wanted to go and stay as long as I can and figure stories out and then tell stories,” he says. “I mean, that seems like a pretty good deal.”

Or, as Csikszentmihalyi would say, a sense of participation in determining the content of life, which comes as close to happiness as anything else.

Simina Mistreanu just got her masters in journalism from the University of Missouri. She grew up in Romania and worked as a journalist there for five years before coming to the United States, in August 2011, on a Fulbright scholarship. She is now a resident at The Oregonian and is working on a year-long project writing stories about Roma. She loves Portland, especially for its zippy Argentine tango scene.

Coming Thursday, Part 2: interviews with DeGregory and Finkel; Friday, Part 3: interviews with Hallman and Jones; Tuesday, Part 4: interviews with Harmon and Hull.

*Lane DeGregory of the Tampa Bay Times; David Finkel, of the Washington Post; Tom Hallman Jr., of The Oregonian; Amy Harmon, of the New York Times; Anne Hull, of the Washington Post; Chris Jones, of Esquire; Paige Williams, who most recently has written for The New Yorker (Disclosure: Williams edits Storyboard. She spoke with the author before Banaszynski, Mistreanu's adviser, offered the material for publication, and doesn’t appear in the edited version of this text.) 

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