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In her 20 years traveling the world as a freelance writer, Rachel Louise Snyder has covered a hurricane in Honduras, a tsunami in Indonesia, and the forced sterilization of women in Tibet. But no experience abroad scarred her more than reporting on the hidden world of domestic violence in a solidly middle class Massachusetts suburb.

In “A Raised Hand: Can a new approach curb domestic homicide?”, published in The New Yorker on July 22, 2013, Snyder begins with the harrowing story of Dorothy Giunta-Cotter who “knew someday that her husband, William, would kill her.” The traditional methods for helping domestic violence victims didn’t protect Giunta-Cotter, who was killed in March 2002, just two days after her husband was released without bail on charges of assault and violating a protection order.

Snyder posits, in her New Yorker piece, that a relatively new and deceptively simple program called the Domestic Violence High Risk Team might have saved the woman’s life.

As often happens with the best stories, Snyder discovered the Amesbury, Massachusetts, program by accident. It was 2010 and she had recently returned from six years of living and reporting in Cambodia. Feeling adrift, she was visiting friends in the nearby coastal enclave of Newburyport, about an hour north of Boston. It just so happened that these friends, the godparents of her daughter, were the writer Andre Dubus and his wife. Andre’s sister, Suzanne Dubus, is a high profile advocate for victims of domestic violence and the chief executive officer of the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center, which was using this prevention method.

“I was standing in Andre’s driveway one day and Suzanne drove up,” recalls Snyder, who is now an associate professor of journalism and creative writing at American University. “She told me about this program and I was just stunned that domestic violence was a social ill that we could actually do something about. It seemed so unbelievable to me.”

Snyder spent the next month shadowing Suzanne Dubus and learning about the “Danger Assessment Tool,” which scores risk factors for domestic homicide with the aim of prevention. Compelled by what she found, she started researching the story immediately after that conversation.

As Snyder traveled the long road from idea to publication in The New Yorker, she came to understand how legal and ethical dilemmas deeply influence reporting on domestic violence. She had been pitching the magazine with other story ideas for more than a decade. Although none of her pitches had been accepted, she had developed a good relationship with the magazine’s executive editor, Dorothy Wickenden, who told her she thought this pitch had potential. Editor David Remnick turned it down at first, Snyder recalls, but she kept advocating. She felt domestic violence as a subject of journalistic inquiry had been ignored or underplayed for too long.

She recalls making this argument: “'I know everyone thinks this is a women’s story, but the fact is if women were killing their husbands in these same numbers this would be on the front page of every newspaper across the country.' And David Remnick turned around the very next day and assigned it to me. What we didn’t know was that it was going to take us the next two and half to three years to actually get it to print.”

(From the start, Snyder envisioned expanding the article into a book. “No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us” was released today, May 7, 2019.  A part of that book was adapted for an opinion piece, published this past weekend by The New York Times, in which Snyder argues that the legal system needs to take more responsibility for prosecuting domestic violence. Snyder also wrote a piece for The New Yorker in December 2015 titled "No Visible Bruises: Domestic Violence and Traumatic Brain Injury.")

As Snyder reported the 2013 New Yorker article, the first big setback came after she spent a year with a woman whose story she had envisioned as the narrative backbone of the piece. The woman ended up as a secondary character, identified by the pseudonym of Lisa Morrison. The problem: Morrison felt it was too dangerous for Snyder to interview her ex-husband. If he found out she had been talking to a reporter, Morrison feared he would find her and kill her. Snyder’s journalistic ethics, and a well-placed fear of lawsuits, precluded using Morrison’s side of the story without hearing the ex-husband’s version of events. But her humanity wouldn’t allow her to interview the ex-husband without Morrison’s permission.

She was stuck: “Once I lost the narrative, I didn’t know how I was going to tell the story.” She started exploring other options. She tried to tell the story through the viewpoint of men accused of abuse. She tried gathering dozens of police reports to stitch together a narrative, but she couldn’t find a throughline.

Snyder, who has an MFA in fiction, had initially resisted using Giunta-Cotter’s story as the lead anecdote and narrative thread because “if I kill off my main character immediately, what’s going to keep people reading?” She also felt the anecdote wasn’t truly representative of her piece, which essentially is a positive story about a program that works to prevent the kind of horrific death that Giunta-Cotter endured.

But by interviewing the police officer who had answered the call, Snyder was able to recreate the detailed circumstances of Giunta-Cotter’s death. She came to believe that starting with this scene would work because she was able to establish the stakes of domestic violence, and thus keep people reading.

Snyder underestimated one aspect of reporting the story: the toll it would take on her own emotional health. She had covered so many disasters around the world that she thought she was immune. “I didn’t have a self-care plan,” she says.

One day, soon after returning from a reporting trip where she sat in on a meeting to review the details of a domestic homicide, she had a breakdown. She was walking her dog, listening to Pearl Jam, when she fell to her knees and started crying. She called a therapist, who told her it was a textbook case of  “vicarious trauma,” a kind of secondary post-traumatic stress disorder that affects people who work with traumatized populations. To regain her equilibrium, she took almost a year off from reporting the story.

Snyder says that she has not been the direct victim of domestic violence. But after her article was published, she learned that her stepmother had been abused in a previous marriage. “There’s always resonance around these issues,” Snyder says.

The way Snyder sees it, the women’s movement brought “the battered woman” into the public eye in the 1970s and '80s, but journalists have dropped the ball on sustained coverage. Perhaps because it is viewed as a women’s issue, domestic violence hasn’t received as much journalistic attention as other social ills, such as homelessness and poverty, she says. The subject “needed to be explored from a 21^st century and feminist perspective,” she says.

In Snyder’s view, that means avoiding reporting on domestic homicides as isolated murders and starting to portray them as years-long narratives of abuse and intimidation that could have been stopped using some common-sense solutions.

The annotation:Storyboard’s questions are in red; Snyder's responses in blue. To read the story without annotations, click the ‘Hide all annotations’ button, which you will find just below the social media buttons in the top right-hand menu, or at the top of your mobile screen.

A Raised Hand

Can a new approach curb domestic violence?

Rachel Louise Snyder

The New Yorker ~ July 2013

Dorothy Giunta-Cotter knew that someday her husband, William, would kill her. [annotation q="Why did you decide to let the reader know Guinta-Cotter is dead rather than keep readers in suspense?" a="The simple answer is that her death changed everything. It changed everything in that community about how they categorized domestic violence. It changed what we thought was possible with domestic violence homicide. But I also wanted readers to know the stakes immediately. I know it’s risky to start with a death – deaths, hospital scenes, funerals… they’re often so cliché – but I wanted readers to have Dorothy in the back of their minds the whole time they read."] They met in 1982, when he was twenty and she was fifteen: a girl with brown eyes and cascading dark hair. Over the course of twenty years, he had kidnapped her, beaten her, and strangled her with a telephone cord. When she was pregnant with their second child, he pushed her down the stairs. After visits to the emergency room, he withheld her pain medicine and, at one point, forbade her to wear a neck brace.

Dorothy and William had two daughters, Kaitlyn and Kristen. Once, in a rage, William sat on Kristen’s chest until she couldn’t breathe; she was eleven. Another time, angered by what she was wearing, he hit her repeatedly in the head. That day, Dorothy took Kristen from their home, in Amesbury, Massachusetts, and drove to a shelter for victims of domestic violence in Maine. (Kaitlyn, who was seventeen, stayed behind in order to graduate from high school on schedule.) Dorothy feared that William knew the local network of domestic-violence shelters; in Maine, she felt, she would be safe.

There she filed a restraining order, telling the judge that her husband would kill her when he found her. But the judge denied the order, citing a lack of jurisdiction. So Dorothy returned with Kristen to Massachusetts, where she met Kelly Dunne who worked at the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center, a local domestic-violence agency. [annotation q="Why did you decide not to tell the story through Dunne’s eyes? In a way, she is the hero of the story. If not, why not?" a="Dunne is whip smart, but at the end of the day, the stakes aren’t hers. She orchestrates from behind a desk, which is dull in terms of writing a scene, but the real reason is that the life and death stakes are for victims like Dorothy. You just can’t compete with the emotional pull of that."] The center helped Dorothy file a restraining order and found a room for her and her daughters in a longer-term shelter. But Dorothy refused. She told the center’s lawyer, “If I’m going to die, I want to do it in my own house.”

Under the terms of the order, William was required to move out. The crisis center changed the locks and gave cell phones to Dorothy and her daughters. Ten days later, William violated the restraining order. He hid in the garage until Dorothy, who was on her way to a job interview at a local supermarket, came in. He grabbed her and put his hand over her mouth. “Stop screaming or I’ll shoot you,” he told her. Kaitlyn, hearing the struggle, ran downstairs to find her mother being held hostage by her father. “Her mouth was bleeding . . . and she appeared terrified,” Kaitlyn later wrote in an affidavit. “I . . . stood with my mom and dad to make sure nothing was going to happen.” After two and a half hours, William left; the next day, Dorothy went to the police station and filed a report with a detective named Robert Wile. She told Wile, “Every time I talk to him, he scares me.” [annotation q="What are the challenges of writing about the difficult subject of abused women in terms of attracting readers and keeping them engaged?" a="I’ve never met a single victim who thinks of herself as “the typical victim,” which is to say that any of us could be victims. So the key to me is making these people – women AND men – feel fully formed on the page. This is where my background in fiction is useful. We needed to see Dorothy move around, talk, interact. We needed to see her growing desperation. That’s what keeps readers, no matter the subject."]

Wile issued a warrant for Cotter’s arrest, and on March 21, 2002, William, accompanied by his lawyer, turned himself in at the Newburyport District Court. His previous record showed only a few traffic violations and bad checks. He had a steady job as a cable installer and coached a local youth sports team. The judge released him on five hundred dollars’ bail.

Five days later, William arrived at Dorothy’s house armed with pepper spray, handcuffs, ammunition belts, and a sawed-off shotgun. Kaitlyn was at a friend’s house; Kristen opened the front door. William pushed past her, broke down the door to Dorothy’s bedroom, and dragged her out. Kristen ran upstairs and called a neighbor, who called 911. The police arrived minutes later. When the dispatcher called Kristen back to confirm their arrival, William picked up the downstairs phone and told her to call off the police or “someone’s gonna get hurt real bad.” Outside, the police could hear Dorothy screaming. When Officer David Noyes kicked down the door, William shot Dorothy at close range; it was as if a grenade had gone off in her body, Noyes later said. Then William reloaded the gun and turned it on himself. Kristen had been hiding under her bed, the phone to her ear; the entire episode was captured by the 911 operator.

[annotation q="This is an amazingly detailed recounting of this case. How did you nail down all the information? Records? Interviews? Both? Did you try to talk to Dorothy’s family? What was their reaction to this graphic description of her death?" a="There was lots of paperwork on this, and people who’d been there — like police offer Noyes — described it to me in detail. The whole thing was captured on the 911 call, so we knew everyone’s location and the dialogue. I had Noyes draw the layout of Dorothy’s house for me: where she ran and where she went down. I do this all the time, have a subject draw a rendering of a scene I didn’t witness. Her family thought it was sensationalized. They weren’t happy and wrote a letter to The New Yorker. I understood what they meant, but, in fact, Noyes went into much more graphic detail that I left out. The New Yorker wrote back to them and they were OK with it in the end. It’s just never not going to be painful for these families."]

The Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center is situated in a secured red brick building in downtown Amesbury, an hour north of Boston. To insure the safety of clients and employees, no signs mark its presence. The waiting room provides toothbrushes, toys, secondhand clothes, self-help books, and boxes of Kleenex. Behind the reception desk is a large playroom. [annotation q="Writers are often confused about which details to include. I assume these come from your close observation. Can you explain how you came to include them? Were there other details you left out as irrelevant?" a="I look for what I call intellectual details, details that do more than sit on a page. What marks a space as individual? The crisis center is just like any other office; what makes it unique is the security, those items someone who’s fled in a panic might need (like toothbrushes, or clothes). These kinds of things aren’t what you’d have in a usual office. So those details help set the scene, sure, but they also have an emotional underpinning to them. I look for details that will do two things at once narratively."]

Kelly Dunne, who is forty-two, is the center’s chief operating officer. After graduating from college, in 1997, she became a volunteer at the center, working at the district court as an advocate for victims of domestic violence. On her first day, thinking that she might handle one or two cases in the divorce stage, she brought a book to occupy her in her spare time. When she arrived, five women were waiting to file restraining orders. One had spent the weekend locked in the basement; another had been kicked down the stairs. “I remember thinking, Are you kidding me?” Dunne said. “This is what’s going on in this town over the weekend?” [annotation q="This is such a great quote. How do you decide when to quote someone directly, rather than paraphrase?" a="I have a background in public radio, so my ear is trained for voice inflections to some degree, when someone yells, grows quiet, sobs, whatever. In this moment, Dunne was just aghast. And so I knew it was a good quote. I tend to try to underquote rather than overquote a source. Plus, Newburyport is this charming seaside New England town; domestic violence and homicide are not our primary references for it. Her quote underscores this."]

One in every four women is a victim of domestic physical violence at some point in her life, and the Justice Department estimates that three women and one man are killed by their partners every day. (Roughly eighty-five per cent of the victims of domestic violence are women.) Between 2000 and 2006, thirty-two hundred American soldiers were killed; during that period, domestic homicide in the United States claimed ten thousand six hundred lives. [annotation q="Context is key for numbers. How did you come by this comparison? What others did you consider?" a="I had a different figure that came from a researcher, and then when The New Yorker fact checker  went to fact check through the FBI’s homicide reports, she found the figure was wrong, that in fact the number was much higher. So the props go entirely to her for this. The New Yorker fact checkers are literary superheroes."] This figure is likely an underestimate, as it was pulled from the F.B.I.’s Supplementary Homicide Reports, which gather data from local police departments, where homicide reporting is voluntary.

Dunne attributes the prevalence of domestic violence, in part, to a deep cultural misunderstanding of how violence operates. We assume that victims incite abuse, or that if the situation at home was truly threatening they would leave. Restraining orders, when filed, are thought to keep perpetrators away. And, if a woman fails to show up in court to renew a restraining order, the assumption is that the problem has somehow been resolved. “We now know that it means exactly the opposite,” Dunne told me. [annotation q="Here, you sum up the problem so clearly and simply. What process do you use when coming up with the nut paragraphs for a major feature?" a="In this case, it was really that I was so ignorant and learning all this myself for the first time that I could just list my own assumptions and myths. I was the sort of the every-person reader. It’s much harder to do this now, because I know so much. But at the time, I literally had all these myths and assumptions up-ended by Dunne and Dubus, so I could just write about the ways in which I learned, the things that surprised me. I learned a trick from working on “This American Life,” that you should be able to fill in the blanks of this sentence: “The thing about XXXXX is XXXXX.” And I use that in everything I write now. It forms the basis of a nut graf for me. There’s the exterior organizing principle or subject of whatever the piece is about, but what is the internal voice of the piece grappling with?"]

In 2005, Dunne created the Domestic Violence High Risk Team, coordinating the efforts of her agency with those of local police departments, hospitals, state legislatures, and the courts to prevent domestic-violence homicide. The crisis center is funded by federal and state grants, private foundations, and fund-raising. Last autumn, the center received a four-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar grant from the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women, in Washington, D.C., to help the high-risk team adapt its model to several other communities around the country. Vice-President Joseph Biden has championed the high-risk program; in October of 2010, at an event to mark domestic-violence-awareness month, he said, “We need to replace what we have been doing, and replicate this kind of success.” The high-risk team’s methodology is simple: it strives to prevent domestic-violence homicide by predicting when it might happen.

After Giunta-Cotter’s murder, newspaper editorials skewered the local police and the judge who had released William on bail; Bill O’Reilly, on his Fox News show, called for the judge’s resignation. [annotation q="Reporters sometimes shy away from writing about cases where much is already known. How did the notoriety of the case affect your choice of this story and your reporting?" a="In this case, a lot of people had reported on Dorothy’s death, but not what came next, which is even more amazing — the advent of trying to predict domestic violence homicide. So I would probably shy away normally, too, but in this case it was the after story that mattered."] Suzanne Dubus, the chief executive officer of the crisis center, convened a meeting between the district attorney and members of the police department, including Detective Robert Wile, who had taken Dorothy’s final police report, in order to analyze why the standard response procedures had failed. [annotation q="Suzanne is the sister of a close friend of yours. What impact did this connection have on your reporting and writing? What advice would you give to journalists whose personal and professional lives overlap?" a="Yes, Suzanne is the sister of the writer Andre Dubus III, who has been a dear friend of mine for 25 years. The first thing I did was let my editor know how I’d come by the story and although I’d never met Suzanne, we decided to pull her role back a lot in the piece just to keep those aisles clear. I’m lucky because Suzanne comes from a family of writers and had zero problem letting Dunne take the lead — and the high risk team was really Dunne’s brainchild anyway. What I tell people is that you can use acquaintances to meet other people or find other sources, but people you know should never be a primary subject."] Everyone appeared to have done his or her job correctly. The only real digression from protocol came from Dorothy, when she refused to return to a shelter. “This was our ‘Oh, shit’ moment,” Dunne said. The team had no plan besides offering shelter. “Shelter was our plan.”

Since the nineteen-seventies, shelters have been viewed as the best protection for battered women, but they can be profoundly disruptive. Most shelters in Massachusetts are single-family homes in residential areas, where victims and their children are allotted a room and share kitchens, bathrooms, dining, and living rooms with five to seven other families. Historically, boys older than twelve and pets have not been allowed in shelters, and most contact with friends or family, including a victim’s employer, has been forbidden. Dunne says that shelters are often, in effect, a “ticket to welfare.” Staying in a shelter may mean quitting a job and removing children from school, or being unable to care for elderly parents, or missing a doctor’s appointment. Shelters have saved lives, Dunne said, but the burden of change falls on the victim, not the perpetrator.

In the past decade, shelters and clinical-treatment providers have tried to better accommodate the needs of abuse victims. Many now allow teen-age boys to stay with their mother, and families to bring their pets; others permit contact with friends, family, and employers. But most shelters remain chronically underfunded, and advocates like Dunne are criticized for speaking out against the shelter approach. “It’s not a popular opinion to be putting forth in the domestic-violence world,” she said. [annotation q="This story took years to report, write and edit. How much did the published story reflect the initial pitch?" a="Surprisingly, quite a lot. The primary narrative of Lisa Morrison changed, but otherwise all the high risk team stuff was in the initial pitch. I think I turned in a first draft at 9,000 words, and it ran at about 5,000. I wouldn’t pitch a place like The New Yorker unless I had a very solid sense of what the story was about, who I’d interview, where I expected it to go."]

In 2003, Dunne attended a conference on domestic violence in San Diego, where she heard a talk by Jacquelyn Campbell, who teaches at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing and is widely recognized as the country’s leading expert on domestic homicide. In the nineteen-eighties, for her doctoral dissertation, at the University of Rochester, Campbell interviewed two thousand victims of domestic abuse in Dayton, Detroit, and Rochester, and sifted through police homicide files, looking for patterns. She found that half the women killed by their partners had sought help from the police or the criminal-justice system at least once, and that the single biggest indicator for domestic homicide was a prior incidence of physical domestic violence. The risk of homicide unfolded on a timeline, spiking when a victim attempted to leave an abuser, or when there was a change in the situation at home—a pregnancy, a new job. The danger remained high for three months after a couple split, dipped slightly for the next nine, and dropped significantly after a year. Campbell identified twenty risk factors for homicide, which she used to develop what she called a Danger Assessment tool. Some risk factors were obvious: substance abuse, gun ownership, a record of violence. Others were more specific: forced sex, threats to kill, choking. The sole demographic factor

Campbell identified was chronic unemployment; poverty alone is not a risk factor. Campbell then devised a weighted scale based on the risk indicators. A score of eighteen or more represented extreme danger; fourteen to seventeen was severe; eight to thirteen indicated increased danger; and anything less than eight signified variable danger. In San Diego, as Dunne listened to Campbell speak she realized that Dorothy Giunta-Cotter would have scored an eighteen. [annotation q="Whom did you interview besides Dunne to recreate this series of events?" a="I spoke to Dunne, Dubus, and of course Campbell, but I also had written records. Dunne had taken copious notes, and Campbell has published widely on this. There are others in San Diego as well that I interviewed who didn’t wind up in the final piece."]

Dunne and Dubus began to outline how they might use Campbell’s work to predict which domestic-abuse cases were most likely to end in homicide. During the following year, Dunne and her staff met with police officers in Amesbury and Newburyport; district attorneys; probation and parole officers; batterers-intervention group counsellors; and hospital representatives in order to devise a program that would identify potentially lethal cases. Their first meeting, in 2002, revealed that each department had operated in isolation. Neither the judge nor the hospitals were aware of Dorothy Giunta-Cotter’s history of abuse. The police knew about the restraining order against William, but the judge and the prosecutor handling the hearing didn’t have access to his file, or to Dorothy’s affidavit, which chronicled the two decades of abuse. “It’s in the cracks that murders happen,” Dunne told me. Her goal was to identify high-risk cases and create a plan of action to keep victims safe and out of shelters; the crisis center would serve as the central point of communication. In early 2005, the Domestic Violence High Risk Team began accepting cases.

One morning last fall, Dunne met with three staff members from the crisis center: Sara Hammond, a case manager; Kate Johnson, the community-services coördinator; and Connie Martyn, an advocate and a counsellor. [annotation q="It looks like you were there for this meeting? How did you balance your need for detail and access with concerns about confidentiality?" a="I was listening in on a speaker phone, and then one by one I interviewed each of the three of the four folks in the room (Johnson, Martyn, and Dunne). I always, always overreport. But for this story, The New Yorker allowed me to check certain details with Dunne so that they wouldn’t compromise anyone. But before Dunne or anyone would talk to me about any particular case, they always, always have a written release from a victim — this is true even for the high risk team meetings. Remember, I reported on this story for just shy of three years; so I had lots and lots of choices in what to use."] The day before, Lisa Morrison had called. She had first come to the center several years earlier, when she was married to a man named Glenn. (These are not the couple’s real names, and the details of the case have been modified slightly in order to protect Lisa’s identity. She was frightened at the prospect of being quoted; the details that were included are common to many of the cases that Dunne and her colleagues see.) [annotation q="Can you walk us through the process of deciding to give Lisa anonymity?" a="Arduous! So, with The New Yorker’s permission (both attorney, head fact checker and my editor), I would read a detail to Dunne and she would tell me if she’d seen that detail in other cases, and then I could use it. This is some of the most careful writing I’ve ever done. Morrison’s story sounds specific on the page, but in fact… I purposely labored over everything. So, for example, we never learn her age; we never learn how many children she has, or how old they are, or where she lives or what her job is. Her ex is a vet, we learn, but I never refer to any particular conflict zone. So if you read her story, you’ll see that it’s both specific and sort of vague. I made them squishy (eg. “twisted her leg”), but in real life I had much more specific details."]

Over the years, Glenn had pushed Lisa repeatedly, once shoving her into a wall as their children watched; on another occasion, he twisted her leg as she tried to run away from him. After a tour with the military, he was given a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. Lisa considered a divorce, but she feared his response; he was an alcoholic and had begun monitoring her whereabouts. [annotation q="Did you interview Lisa at length or is most of this through Dunne?" a="Initially, it was all through Dunne. We wanted to see where the case would wind up as it went through court, and I didn’t want Morrison to have to stress about an article at the same time that she was worried about her own and her kids’ safety. But once her case went through the system — it took about nine months — I talked to her."] The crisis center provided her with an attorney and a clinical social worker, and, two years ago, helped negotiate an end to the marriage. Lisa got a full-time job and now had a boyfriend, whom I’ll call Thomas. She maintained a cordial relationship with Glenn, who had visitation rights with the children every other weekend. But Lisa and Thomas had decided to move in together, and when Lisa told Glenn he began calling her repeatedly. When she stopped answering, he left messages warning that he would take his own life, that everything would soon be over, that he didn’t know what he was capable of doing. He asked Lisa to send him recent pictures of the children, and told her to take good care of the family. One day, he left more than forty messages.

Although Morrison’s case hadn’t made the high-risk roster during her divorce, Dunne and her colleagues were now concerned. Lisa’s children were due to spend the upcoming weekend, unsupervised, with Glenn. Pickups and drop-offs are particularly dangerous times for victims and their children. Several years earlier, a victim and her abuser, who had been divorced for years, met for a routine child visitation, and the ex-husband locked the children in the car, then bashed their mother’s face into a wall as they watched. [annotation q="Devastating detail — where did it come from?" a="Yup. This is one that stays with me. It came from Dunne in a meeting."]

Dunne asked Johnson whether they had grounds to suspend Glenn’s visitation rights. They didn’t, and Johnson reminded her that Lisa felt that the children’s presence would help Glenn control his behavior. Dunne asked if an unmarked police car could be stationed in front of Glenn’s house, but he lived outside the team’s jurisdiction. She asked whether there were guns in the house; no one knew of any. Reviewing the couple’s history, the team noted that Glenn was supposed to be seeing a psychologist but had stopped. Dunne and Johnson conducted a risk assessment using Campbell’s research, and Lisa scored an eight. She wasn’t in the most hazardous bracket, but Dunne knew that situations can change rapidly.

Dunne said, “This is really provocative behavior on his part,” and again argued that the team should find a way to stop the visitation. But Lisa didn’t want to file a restraining order, fearing that it would exacerbate Glenn’s erratic behavior, and there was no other legal recourse. So, on Friday afternoon, Lisa dropped the children off at Glenn’s house. On Saturday, Glenn stopped taking Lisa’s calls.

Alarmed, Lisa drove to the police station and filed a restraining order. The police went to Glenn’s house to serve him with papers, and Lisa retrieved the children and went home. Later that weekend, Glenn sent Lisa several e-mails in which he alluded to an impending death. The e-mails were a violation of the restraining order, so the police arrested Glenn, and held him in custody, pending what in Massachusetts is called a “dangerousness hearing.”

The dangerousness hearing is one of the most effective tools available to the high-risk team. A standard hearing determines bail based largely on flight risk. With a dangerousness hearing, even defendants who have clean records can be held until trial if they are deemed to be a sufficient threat to their victims or to their community. At the time of William Cotter’s threats to Dorothy, the statute was seldom used in cases involving domestic violence. Although many states have some version of preventive detention, very few advocates are aware of it, Dunne said.

Historically, such statutes have been used in gang or drug cases, though Massachusetts has seen a marked increase in their application to domestic violence. Viktoria Kristiansson, a legal adviser for AEquitas, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that supports the prosecution of violent crimes against women, noted that a dangerousness hearing “automatically provides a different context for a judge to analyze the evidence.”

Nevertheless, advocates have to contend with the difficult legal issue of preventive detention. “The Constitution tends to frown upon punishing prospective behavior,” Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., the director of the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute, told me. Randy Gioia, the deputy chief counsel of the Massachusetts Public Defender Division, says that his office tries to fight dangerousness hearings because people who are held don’t benefit from the rights that someone accused of a crime would get at trial. He said, “Our system is set up to decide what happened as best it can; it’s not set up to decide what will happen in the future.”

Holding an abuser before trial provides victims with time to relocate, save some money, and seek counselling and perhaps find a job. Dunne told me, “We know that arrest, in and of itself, is protective. You’re trying to disrupt that escalating cycle of violence.” Before Dorothy Giunta-Cotter’s murder, Dunne said, the statute was employed “maybe five times in three years” at the local district court. She added, “Now we see an average of two a month.”

The day after Glenn’s arrest for violating his restraining order, he appeared at his dangerousness hearing. The judge ordered him held until his pretrial date the following month. Typically, offenders are held in jail, but because Glenn had a history of threatening suicide he was transferred to a psychiatric ward for evaluation. For Lisa, the team, and even Glenn, this offered the one crucial element that was impossible to adjudicate: time. [annotation q="What kind of conversations did you have with your editors about the need to protect Lisa versus the journalistic value of hearing Glenn’s side of the story?" a="That was really stressful. I went up to New York and spoke with David Remnick. I’d never met him in person. He was, shall we say, alarmed that I hadn’t interviewed Glenn, but he sat for an hour while my editor, Alan Burdick, and I went through the past 30 months of reporting, and the particular danger women like Morrison are in. I remember telling him that the difference between, say, covering a war and covering domestic violence is that when a war ends, the sides need to figure out together how to rebuild society and community. War, in fact, has an end date. With domestic violence cases like Morrison’s, there is no end date. It’s like she’ll be forever in that highly charged war zone. He really got this. He really listened."]

Dunne’s team, through the courts, often requires that, as a condition of probation, abusers attend forty weeks of specialized group counselling. In the past two decades, batterers-intervention groups have proliferated. The first, Emerge, a counselling and education center in Cambridge, was founded in 1977; there are now fifteen hundred nationwide.

David Adams, a co-founder of Emerge, told me that abusers seldom appear to be angry people, because they reserve their anger for the partner or the partner’s immediate family. “The average batterer is more likable than his victim, because domestic violence affects victims a lot more than it affects batterers,” he said. “Batterers don’t lose sleep like victims do. They don’t lose their jobs, they don’t lose their kids.” In contrast, “a lot of victims come across as messed up.”

Often, victims are substance abusers, or they live in extreme poverty. Many have suffered traumatic, abusive childhoods. These cases are the most difficult to prosecute, not least because the victims can be unreliable witnesses. “This is why batterers are so often able to fool the system,” Dunne told me. “They’re so charming, and the victim comes off as very negative.”

Batterers-intervention groups typically provide the court with information about an abuser’s compliance and willingness to change. They file a monthly report with probation officers and are in regular contact with victims about a batterer’s participation in the group. “We can be the eyes and ears of the court,” Adams said. “Victims are trying to make decisions about staying or leaving; if she’s hearing back from us that he’s still blaming her, that’s useful to know.”

In addition to preventing abuse and intimidation, intervention groups try to help an abuser recognize his own dangerous tendencies. One day, I had lunch with a man who had been ordered by the court to complete Adams’s program. He admitted that he had lied to his group the night before about drinking alcohol—a violation of his probation. Yet he told me that the program had helped him. “When you find yourself in a class like that, you can’t lie to yourself about the decisions you made,” he said. “My life has taken me to a point where I can’t tell myself I’m not that bad.” [annotation q="How did you feel having lunch with this guy? Did he ask you for anonymity?" a="Actually, he didn’t. His name was Chris. I was a little nervous, but I did safety planning. I drove my own rental car and met him there. I told my editor and my husband where we were eating. We sat at a table outside. I wasn’t really too nervous. It’s the guys who’ve killed that make me a little nervous, even if they’re in jail."]

A week after Lisa Morrison’s case came to Dunne’s office, the high-risk team gathered for its monthly meeting at the police headquarters in Newburyport. The meeting brings together Dunne and Johnson, from the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center; Wile and other police-department representatives from Amesbury, Merrimac, and Newburyport; parole and probation officers; an Essex County batterers-intervention group; and a nurse from the local hospital. The cases are referred largely by the crisis center or by one of the local police departments.

Fewer than five per cent of the cases from Dunne’s center make it onto the high-risk roster, but, once they do, a response strategy is put in place. Because each office has slightly different legal restrictions, one challenge is to maintain a client’s confidentiality. The district attorney’s office can share basic information about a case, such as a pending court date, but nothing more. Probation officers can suggest terms of supervision, which might include measures like drug and alcohol testing or psychiatric counselling, but they cannot disclose anything about an offender’s private life—a job, where he lives, the results of a drug test. Parole officers can provide information only about when an abuser is on or nearing parole. Dunne and the crisis center can discuss cases with the team only after getting written permission from the victims. [annotation q="How did you gain access to these  meetings? What kind of conditions were set in advance?" a="It took so many months! Dunne went to each office and asked their permission and their conditions. The hospital said under no circumstances could I quote their rep. Probation and parole said they wanted to know what quotes I’d use in advance. The police were like, “You can use anything we say at all, no conditions!” I had to keep track of who everyone was in every meeting. I tried to interview everyone separately, too, even if it was just on background. Too many young reporters rely on email to contact people, and phone to do interviews. Huge mistake. You’ll never bring your work to the next level if everything you do is by phone. I go in person whenever and wherever I can. I want them to see I’m not an enemy of the people."]

Dunne’s office now sees police reports on the cases that the center has accepted, and they are often chilling. In one report, a woman told officers that her husband “made threats to me in the past about killing me, putting me in the chest freezer, and then taking my body out onto his boat and chumming me into the ocean. He also stated that he could kill me and put my body in his septic tank.”

As team members went down the list of cases, they looked for changes that might indicate trouble: a victim’s attempt to leave, an abuser going off probation or parole, the violation of a restraining order, the loss of a job, an incendiary Facebook post. In one case, a man assaulted his partner on the way to his batterers-intervention meeting, and was arrested again. In another, a man who had tried to stab his wife with a fork and then threatened to kill her was arrested and held without bail; he had a history of violating restraining orders and probably would be monitored by G.P.S. upon his release from prison. (Domestic abusers violate restraining orders forty per cent of the time.) One team member noted that the G.P.S. was not likely to stop the man. Dunne said the crisis center would try to make sure that the charges weren’t dropped, and organize a plan of action when he was released, in eighteen months.

Team members reviewed their options in each case. Police officers can conduct extra drive-bys or home visits to check for signs of unusual behavior. In Massachusetts, as in most states, if the abuser has a gun it can be confiscated when a restraining order is issued. Time can be added to an abuser’s sentence by combining domestic-violence charges with other criminal charges, such as theft or the possession of illegal drugs. Visitation with children can be supervised or suspended, or the judge can refer cases to the crisis center’s attorney in order to craft visitations that take into account the individual risks.

The team also helps victims find transitional housing and free legal assistance. Team members work with clients to improve their safety; this can involve rehearsing emergency situations, erasing their profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and other social-media outlets, and even changing daily habits, such as where they shop or the route they take to work. In rare instances, the team places victims in a kind of state-sponsored identity-protection program, in which the residential address is kept secret and mail is delivered to a post-office box.

All but seventeen states have passed or introduced legislation to allow the use of G.P.S. in cases of domestic violence. If an offender enters certain “exclusion zones”—ranging in size from a few blocks to an entire township—an alert is sent to the local police and an arrest warrant is issued. “We contain the offender so the victim doesn’t have to be contained,” Dunne told me. [annotation q="The clarity of your prose in the article enhanced its power. How much of this style reflects your own voice, the subject matter or the editing and approach of The New Yorker?" a="Alan Burdick was an amazing editor. He did, as he called it, polish the piece, but the arc, the structure, the rhythm, that’s all me. The New Yorker is such a writer’s house; they actually care about what a comma does to the auditory quality of a sentence versus a semicolon. That’s my kind of geekdom, too. I love it."]

The Morrisons were the final case of the morning. Some troubling facts had emerged. Before Glenn entered the psychiatric ward, he had repeatedly called Lisa’s boyfriend, Thomas; one morning, he drove to Thomas’s house and parked his car out front, where he sat for hours. Moreover, Dunne and her team had learned from Lisa’s counsellor that Glenn had been released by the ward; strict confidentiality laws had barred the hospital from informing them or the court. But, by the time of his pretrial hearing, he had been readmitted and the case was extended to the following month. In the meantime, the police had begun stopping by Lisa’s house once or twice a day to walk around and make sure nothing was amiss. Dunne was frustrated by the gaps in the system, but by now nearly three months had passed and, statistically, at least, Lisa and her children were safer. “Think about where we were originally,” Dunne said. “What increases safety is you go from no containment options to all kinds of people having their eyes on this case regularly, so if there’s any escalation there’s an ability to react.”

Late last fall, just before his upcoming court date, Glenn broke his restraining order again and followed Lisa in her car. He was charged for the second time with violating an order. Finally, eight months after the first call came in to the crisis center, the court gave Glenn eighteen months’ probation and required him to attend psychiatric counseling. Visitations with the children could continue, but only under third-party supervision.

In the Morrison case, Dunne’s team managed to intervene while the situation was still in the misdemeanor phase. Without the high-risk team, Lisa told me, “I honestly don’t know if I would be where I am.” But she and Thomas feel uneasy much of the time: “We say to each other, ‘Always be on the lookout.’ ” Unlike other crimes, in domestic violence the abuser maintains a presence in the life of his victim, and remains a potential threat, especially when children are involved.

I spoke to a woman whose husband had abused her for years. At one point, he threatened to slit her throat with broken CDs. She is divorced now, lives in a secured, secret location, and has a lifetime restraining order against him; he is not allowed to enter the town limits. Finally, she feels safe enough to go jogging—but she would not speak on the record, fearing that he would somehow find her and retaliate. [annotation q="How did you convince victims to talk to you? How did you gain their trust?" a="Time, time, and more time. Also letting them know I understood the complexities of domestic violence. I wasn’t going to judge them for not leaving, or for going back. And I always put my recorder in front of them so they have control over stopping it to go off the record."] She said that “the only way to describe what happened to me is like part of me died. It was just about survival.”

In the decade before Dorothy Giunta-Cotter’s murder, in 2002, a domestic-violence-related death occurred nearly every year in Amesbury. Since the formation of the high-risk team, in 2005, Dunne has not had a single case end in homicide. [annotation q="As a woman who cares about this issue, and who has now written a book about it, how do you draw the line between journalism and advocacy?" a="I think that’s an easy one, actually. A lot of journalism is simply investigating where systems break down, what’s not working in society. That’s our responsibility as journalists. But we’re not policy makers. I can’t write or pass legislation. I can’t change the way a crisis center works. All I can do is tell stories to improve those systems and policies, or to hold leaders accountable."] “When I listen to the stories of the victims who have been involved with the high-risk team, there is no question that many of them would have been killed,” Mary Lauby, the executive director of Jane Doe Inc., a domestic-violence advocacy organization in Boston, told me. Of the offenders now monitored by G.P.S., not one has committed another act of domestic violence; nearly sixty per cent were held before trial using a dangerousness hearing. Dunne also notes that, of the hundred and six high-risk cases documented in the team’s most recent report, only eight women were forced to seek refuge in shelters. She estimated that, before the formation of the high-risk team, ninety per cent of similar cases would have resulted in the women’s going into shelters.

Dunne and Wile have trained more than five thousand people from thirty states, including three thousand in Massachusetts. Groups from California, Louisiana, Florida, Illinois, and more than a dozen other states have contacted them. Framingham, Massachusetts, was the first to replicate the high-risk team based on Dunne’s model. Mary Gianakis, the director of Voices Against Violence, a Framingham crisis center, and a lead member of the area’s high-risk team, told me that, previously, shelters were the primary resource available to victims. “Now we can say, ‘Look, we’re going to bring the full power of all these resources to keep you safe and monitor your partner,’ ” she told me. To Suzanne Dubus, the need to create a model in which victims are protected, rather than isolated, seems obvious. “Here’s the outrage,” she told me. “It’s really cheap to do what we’re doing. It’s a lot cheaper than murder investigations and prosecutions and jail time.”

[annotation q="In terms of structure, you circled back to Dorothy to end where you began. How did you decide what information to put at the beginning and what to hold until the end? " a="Actually, I wanted a different end, in a scene with Kelly Dunne in her office. I fought for it and lost. That scene now ends my book! But with Dorothy, what I wanted was the ripple effect of her death, how it rang like a bell through the police officers who were there that night, and into the advocates and judges and everyone else involved in her case, and eventually someday even me. So my focus was on what her death meant in terms of preventing other deaths, but also how those present that night went on living, but never forgetting her. And I end with her own voice, her own prediction, which is immeasurably haunting in the context because we know now she’ll be dead within days of having said this."]

In their training sessions, Wile and Dunne walk through the timeline of Dorothy and William Cotter’s relationship. The violence began within a year of their meeting; each time that Dorothy threatened or tried to leave, William increased the degree of abuse—what experts call “retribution violence.” In 1996, she married him, a fact that often baffles Dunne’s trainees. “It’s counterintuitive,” Dunne says. “He strangled her, held her hostage. Why would she ever marry him?” But, she adds, “William showed her he would never let her go. So she thinks if she marries him he’ll get less violent.” In its way, it was a rational response to a support system that offered her little means of escape; her final attempt to leave failed when her request for a restraining order in Maine was refused. “We give them this message that the system won’t protect them,” Dunne says.

One evening, I drove around Amesbury with Officer David Noyes, who had broken down Dorothy’s door on the night of the murder. In his cruiser, we passed open fields and low-income apartments near the baseball diamonds of Amesbury Town Park, lakeside mansions, and the Amesbury Golf and Country Club. Green Street, where the Cotters lived, is a single block of lower-middle-class homes built so close together that there is barely room for someone to squeeze between them.

Noyes parked in the small lot beside Dorothy’s old house. A tricycle was on the lawn next door. Noyes said that it was so quiet when he and his team first arrived that he walked around the driveway with the other officers trying to figure out if they had the right house. Then he heard Dorothy: “No, he’s gonna kill me!” Noyes ran up the front stairs, and he heard her struggling with the door lock and the sound of William hitting her several times. When Noyes broke in, Cotter fired, and Noyes was blinded for a moment—a sawed-off shotgun emits a dazzling muzzle flash. Then he saw Dorothy fall. “I had trouble sleeping for years after, ” he said. [annotation q="What made you decide to tell this part of the story from the police officer’s point of view?" a="Simple: he was there. He saw the muzzle flash; he saw her body fall. He could talk about that moment and how it haunted him."]

Dorothy was thirty-five years old. In the days before her death, she had told Detective Wile that if she and the girls moved to a shelter William would find them and kill them all. She attempted to avert the worse of two terrible outcomes: the loss of her daughters’ lives along with her own. “If I’m over there,” she told Wile, referring to her house, “there’s a better possibility that it’s just going to be me.” ♦

[annotation q="When did you realize that you had the seeds of a book on this topic?" a="Honestly? Right away. This piece covered the formation of the High Risk Team, but there was so much more I began to learn about domestic violence. I talked to my editor about this being a book the whole time I was working on this piece. It just took me a while to figure out how to tell that bigger story, how to structure the book. But I finally figured it out five or six years down the line."]

Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of the books “What We’ve Lost Is Nothing” and “Fugitive Denim.” She first contributed to the magazine in 2013. 

This article formed the basis of Snyder’s forthcoming book: "No Visible Bruises: How What We Don’t Know About Violence Call Kill Us" (Bloomsbury, May 7, 2019).

The post From a caress of love to a fist of fear appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

How many journalists regard the Watergate scandal as a love story? Peter Landesman does and that is, arguably, the key to his success as a screenwriter.

Landesman was sitting in a Chicago bar when he heard on the television news that Mark Felt, second-in-command at the FBI in the 1970s, had just outed himself in the July 2005 issue of Vanity Fair as Watergate’s Deep Throat.  Landesman remembers turning to the guy next to him and saying, “Who the f… is Mark Felt?” He resolved to make a movie about this Washington bureaucrat who changed the course of a nation: “I knew immediately it was a great story, someone that anonymous doing something that brings down the presidency.”

But he also knew he had to step away from the well-trodden ground of  “All the President’s Men.’’ He needed to find the emotional heart of the story, and he found it in Felt’s relationship with his wife.

The 2017 movie “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House” centers on the connection between Felt’s public actions and his relationship with his emotionally troubled wife. The film shows how Felt’s toxic home life and his anger at being passed over to be director of the FBI fueled an urgent need to bring down a corrupt presidency. “Journalism is about information,” says Landesman, who was a New York Times Magazine contributing writer before turning to screenwriting and directing. “Movies are about an emotional tether to the audience.”

Turning real-life events into screenplays requires an understanding of a simple truth: Film focuses on the “intimate world,’’ as opposed to the “public world’’ of journalism, in the words of Mark Harris, a distinguished professor in the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.

With a number of this year’s Oscar nominees and other critically acclaimed films based on real events, journalists may dream of transforming their work into feature films. But even those who have succeeded in Hollywood say writers steeped in the art of reporting must be ready to make adjustments—in everything from their conception of narrative to their understanding of the difference between nonfiction and cinematic truth.

Michael Maren, a foreign correspondent turned screenwriter, believes journalism is the perfect training ground for film, and cites some big names to prove it, from the late romantic comedy writer Nora Ephron to Mark Boal, who wrote “The Hurt Locker.” Citing essayist David Shields, Maren calls the film industry’s search for the next big true story “reality hunger.” Shields’ 2010 book by that name was a manifesto arguing for an artistic movement that obliterates the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. He argues that they are artificial in a world where fiction has become mundane and reality is more shocking.

Intellectual arguments aside, the screenwriter’s prerogative to focus on a narrow slice of truth, of course, can spark a real-world backlash. Steven Spielberg’s movie “The Post” chronicles the two weeks leading up to The Washington Post’s 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers, the secret documents that revealed how the government lied about the Vietnam War. But the narrative, written by first-time screenwriter Liz Hannah and “Spotlight” writer Josh Singer, revolves around the professional blossoming of Post publisher Katharine Graham, played by Meryl Streep. Although the movie focuses on The Washington Post, it was The New York Times that broke the Pentagon Papers story and won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

Borrowing a term from comedian Stephen Colbert, Landesman calls this artistic license “truthiness.” It’s unacceptable in journalism, but it can make a powerful movie.

Journalistic skills can both help and hinder the screenwriter. Both crafts require an understanding of the essence of a story, an ear for dialogue, and an ability to listen. But journalism’s reverence for information, context, and comprehensiveness can hamper the fast-paced plot needed to make a screenplay work. Exposition is a challenge, says Harris, an Academy-Award winning documentary filmmaker. Too much backstory slows the pace of a film and too little sows confusion. “Film is a medium that you experience in continuous time,” he says. “If you miss something, or if you’re confused, it gets in the way of experiencing the film.”

Letting action tell the story also can be difficult for a journalist: “People reveal themselves in action more compellingly than they do in dialogue.” Context and background that would take up paragraph after paragraph in a magazine piece might be condensed into a film montage. Real-life characters may be melded into a composite, and fictional scenes may be added to heighten the drama.

Two 2016 productions about football star and murder defendant O.J. Simpson highlight some of the differences between a journalistic and a fictional rendering based on the same real-life events. In the journalistic rendering, the documentary, “O.J.: Made in America,” the infamous car chase down Los Angeles freeways is shown as it happened, with aerial footage from news reports. In the fictional series “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” writers take viewers inside the white Bronco and construct dialogue between Simpson and his friend Al Cowlings, who was driving the car. Although some of that dialogue was based on police recordings, some of it was made up. Harrris calls this "the license to imagine things.”

Unlike a piece of journalism, which is usually static once it has been edited, a screenplay is a living document. Even if a producer loves a screenplay on paper, once shooting begins, a director will make changes on the fly, and then an editor will make more changes in the editing room. “It’s commonly said that a screenplay is written three times: the original shooting script is rewritten when you shoot and then again when you edit it,” Harris says.

Margot Lee Shetterly, author of the nonfiction bestseller, “Hidden Figures,” discovered the difference between writing movies and books when she became a story consultant for the hit film. In 2014, the first-time author landed both a book and a movie deal based on her 55-page proposal about the African-American women mathematicians who helped launched NASA’s space program. Producer Donna Gigliotti spotted the proposal’s potential and shepherded the film to Hollywood success. She hired Allison Schroeder to write the screenplay while Shetterly finished her book. The women had a good working relationship, but Shetterly says it was still difficult to accept the paring down of the real story for the movie. The book, which covers 1943 to 1969, is a deeply researched look at the lives and work of the African-American women employed as human “computers” at NASA. The movie focuses on a dramatic 18-month period beginning in 1961 that culminates in astronaut John Glenn’s launch into space.

“The book and the movie are apples and oranges,” says Shetterly. “When you’re writing nonfiction and you’re immersed in the facts, the documents, the oral history, you have to fall in love with what you’re doing. At first, it was very hard, the decision that the producer and the screenwriter made to cut it to that one period. But in retrospect, it was a critically brilliant decision.”

Schroeder, who with co-writer Theodore Melfi was nominated for an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay, wrote the first draft in three months, before Shetterly finished the book. Schroeder, whose grandparents worked for NASA, felt she had to earn Shetterly’s trust. Once the relationship was established, Shetterly shared source material with her and answered her detailed questions to help give Schroeder’s writing authenticity.

Still, many of the most powerful movie scenes were fictionalized. For example, the NASA official played by Kevin Costner takes a dramatic stand against segregation. He discovers that the mathematician Katherine Johnson, played by Taraji P. Henson, has been forced to walk far across NASA’s Langley Research Center campus to use a restroom for black employees. Horrified, Costner arrives with a crowbar and knocks down the “colored’’ sign in front of the bathroom door. In reality, the scene never happened and a dry memo from an official put an end to the “colored” bathrooms. In fact, Costner’s character is a composite of many mid-level managers.

“I think he was meant to represent pragmatic distracted people, who when presented with a human face, were able to open their eyes and to take action,” Shetterly says. “When their mission was imperiled, they said we don’t have time for racism.”

In another scene, Mary Jackson, played by Janelle Monáe, manages to convince a judge to let her take night classes at a white school so she could become a NASA engineer. Jackson walks into her first class to find she’s the only woman, as well as the only African-American. The teacher tells her the curriculum isn’t designed for her. This moment didn’t appear in Shetterly’s book. The screenwriter drew it from her own life. The Stanford graduate had just walked into an international economics tutorial while studying abroad as a graduate student when the professor told her,  “I don’t know how to teach a woman.”

In an effort to be true to the book, Schroeder submitted a first draft that started in the late 1950s. A rewrite focused on the drama of the early 1960s because it had a natural three-act structure around the Space Race: the Russians are beating the U.S.; NASA vows to catch up; John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit the earth.  But the hard-won respect and acceptance of the three African-American main characters drove the emotional arc. Gigliotti says she knew she had a winner when “people started weeping while reading the last 30 pages of the script.”

Almost every screenplay follows the three-act structure. It dates to the 4^th century B.C. when Aristotle’s Poetics described the dramatic arc: a beginning that sets up the plot, a middle when the plot reaches its climax, and an end, when the plot is resolved. In his classic book “Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting,’’ Syd Field updated the concept for film, calling it the set-up, the confrontation, and the resolution.

“I learned that most of the scripts that read well—meaning they featured lovely sentences, stylish and literate prose and beautiful dialogue – usually didn’t work,” wrote the late screenwriting guru. “While they might read like liquid honey flowing across the page, the overall feeling was that of reading a short story or a strong journalistic piece in a magazine like Vanity Fair or Esquire. But that’s not what makes a good screenplay.”

In Field’s format, two plot points or turning points connect the acts. The first turning point connects Act I to Act II; the second connects Act II to Act III. The building blocks of the three acts are individual scenes. A typical screenplay might contain 200 scenes in 100 to 120 pages. Each page is considered a minute of filming, and those minutes are important because they are directly tied to cost and the project’s bottom line.  Dialogue carries the scenes forward and, these days, it’s often fast-moving—no more than four lines per character. The days of the talking heads are gone. Action and setting are written out in detail, and background information is inferred—all while crisply advancing the plot.

The written version of the famous crop duster scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest’’ shows the art of describing a visual medium in words. In the scene, a low-flying plane chases Cary Grant’s character, Roger Thornhill, across a wide field. In most of the scene, Grant is alone and has no dialogue. Yet, screenwriter Ernest Lehman described every moment of the 9 minute and 45-second scene. It begins this way: “Thornhill is alone again. Almost immediately he HEARS the PLANE ENGINE BEING GUNNED TO A HIGHER SPEED. He glances off sharply, sees the plane veering off its parallel course and heading towards him. He stands there wide-eyed, rooted to the spot.”

This attention to cinematic detail is crucial. When adapting a book to a movie, Emerson College screenwriting professor Diane Lake first marks every scene in the book that feels visual. Lake wrote the screenplay for “Frida,” the 2002 biographical film about Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, based on a biography written by art historian Hayden Herrera. Her book was her “bible,” Lake says, as she tried to create a simple, human story about someone who had become an outsized folk hero. Kahlo’s life had almost too much drama for one movie. She was crippled by polio, almost died in a bus accident at 18, and endured a tempestuous relationship with her husband, the painter Diego Rivera, who slept with her sister. Lake needed to narrow the story’s focus, and she decided it was, above all, a love story: “It’s Frida and Diego, how they affect each other, how these two explosive personalities connect and grow together.”

Lake is not a journalist, but some of her research resembled reporting. Lake had never been to Mexico, other than a day trip to Tijuana, so the studio agreed to send her down to soak up the atmosphere. She visited Kahlo’s homes and schools so she could better imagine her life.

Screenwriters, like biographers, must find what Landesman calls “an emotional portal” into the main character. “What makes this person tick?’’ he says. “Once I identify that, everything I do as a screenwriter or a director, I do through the prism of that portal.”

For his 2015 “Concussion,” Landesman wanted to make a film about widespread brain injuries in National Football League players. A 2009 GQ magazine article, “Game Brain” by Jeanne Marie Laskas, inspired him. But he didn’t want to make a documentary so he needed to find a dramatic center for the film. He focused on the Nigerian doctor who in 2005 discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive degenerative disease, in an American football player. Actor Will Smith plays Dr. Bennet Omalu, an idiosyncratic outsider who follows the facts and challenges the NFL’s orthodoxy. “It was actually an immigrant story, not just being black in Pittsburgh, but being Nigerian. It both made him vulnerable and inoculated him,” Landesman says. “He was not swayed by the ‘American-ness’ of football, and was able to look at the danger.”

Discussions about the film became public because of hacked Sony Pictures’ emails released on WikiLeaks. “We need to know exactly what we can and can’t do and if this is a ‘true’ story or not,” Amy Pascal, then a Sony co-chairwoman, wrote in a July 2014 email. She urged caution when departing from the facts. Landesman says he agreed to some changes based on lawyers’ recommendations but didn’t compromise the essential truth of the movie—a process familiar to any journalist working on a tough story.

Screenwriting offers a special blend of art and commerce that can be both exhilarating and frustrating for journalists. Maren, the former foreign correspondent, took to screenwriting after freelance reporting assignments started paying less and less. He had spent much of his career chasing stories in war zones such as Somalia, Sudan, and Rwanda.  HBO optioned his first book, “The Road to Hell,” an investigation into foreign aid. The network paid him more than $100,000 for another project, which was also never made.  He found an agent and sold the options to several more screenplays. At that point, he was fed up. He started producing and directing his own scripts.

Still, Maren is optimistic about the prospects for journalists in the film industry. Reporters’ experiences can make a screenplay believable. “Whether you're covering the war in Afghanistan or your local school committee election, journalism puts you up close with real people in real situations at times of stress when big things are at stake,” he says. Journalists are used to asking, “What’s the story?” and then shaping messy real-life events into a structure. They are trained to have an ear for dialogue, which is one of the building blocks of a screenplay. And they are used to writing economically, another requirement for a screenplay.

Still, Maren warns that it’s difficult to turn one’s own journalistic writing into a screenplay. “I usually advise people don’t write the script for their own nonfiction,” he says. “You’ve got to basically take the book or story and smash it to bits and reassemble it in a three-act structure for the film.”

Lake, author of  “The Screenwriter’s Path,” agrees. A producer may ask a journalist to write a screenplay adaptation—usually while hiring someone else to write the real thing. In fact, even seasoned screenwriters may find that they are just one of a crowd of writers of the final script. When Lake was brought in to work on “Frida,” other writers had already submitted multiple scripts that were rejected. When she asked to look at these earlier drafts to avoid their mistakes, she was told to find her own vision. She did, and her screenplay won out. But the credits include the names of people who wrote earlier versions as well. “It’s just a different kind of art, because of the collaboration and the huge amounts of money,” she says.

For journalists used to the gratification of publication, the screenplay’s circuitous and often mysterious path to fruition may feel frustrating. In fact, often, success may feel far different than a page-one article or magazine cover story.

“Cash the check and enjoy it,” advises Maren, “because the movie will probably never get made.”

The post What Journalists Need to Know About Writing Screenplays appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

When Colin McNulty was developing a podcast about Oprah Winfrey, the producer for WBEZ Chicago found inspiration in an unlikely place: “House of Cards,” the Netflix series about a scheming Washington politician who eventually becomes president of the United States.

It’s not that Winfrey, the billionaire high priestess of “living your best life,” reminded him of the fictional Frank Underwood, the Netflix series’ villainous main character. But the structure of the series’ first three seasons, replete with cliffhangers and plot twists as Underwood rises from congressman to vice president to president, seemed a good template for a three-episode podcast chronicling Winfrey’s journey to the pinnacle of success.

“Making Oprah” begins with a dramatic moment as prologue: the demolition of her Chicago Harpo Studios in July 2016, five years after her show ended, to make way for a new McDonald’s corporate headquarters. The first episode, “No Strategy, No Plan, No Formula,” then circles back to tell the story of her beginnings as an African-American woman in television news and how she managed to wrangle her way into her first talk show. The episode ends on a dubious 1988 turning point: Winfrey drags on stage a wagon filled with 67 pounds of animal fat, which represents the weight she has lost. She shows off a svelte new body that didn’t last—a move that ended up haunting her.

The second episode, “Skinheads and Scented Candles,” chronicles her soul-searching after she realizes that a show featuring white supremacists gave a powerful platform to people whose ideas she abhorred.  She decides she must take responsibility for the influence her show exerts and  determines to find a new, more inspirational identity.

The final episode, “YOU GET A CAR!”, explores the consequences of unbridled success as the whole enterprise becomes more outrageous—with stunts like giving out free cars to everyone in the audience. Finally, Winfrey and her staff decide they risk becoming a parody of themselves, so they make the difficult decision to  end the program.

Joel Meyer, WBEZ executive producer for talk programming, says “Making Oprah” has been the station’s most successful podcast launch. “The story of how she kept evolving her show and how she tried to turn it into more than a talk show was really appealing to a lot of people,” Meyer says.

The surprising success of “Making Oprah,” on the heels of “Serial,” the 2014 “This American Life” podcast phenomenon, shows how America’s love of television binge-watching has reinvigorated a literary form, the serial narrative, with a history that dates to Dickens and Homer. Nonfiction serials have animated screens, radios, and even daily newspapers.

Long-form serials run counter to the super-short tweeting and microblogging trend. But it’s not the length that makes a serial enticing, it’s what Indiana University journalism professor Thomas French calls “the enforced waiting.” This “to be continued” approach draws in readers using the classic tools of storytelling craft that focus more on creating narrative tension than on conveying information.

Episodes of the first two seasons of “Serial” have been downloaded more than 250 million times, and it became the first podcast to win a Peabody Award. The “Serial” team’s newest podcast debuted to generally glowing reviews on March 28. “S-Town” is a seven-episode series about a possible murder in rural Alabama hosted by “This American Life” producer Brian Reed. Unlike the original two seasons of “Serial,” which were released weekly, “S-Town” listeners could download all seven episodes at once. Although “S-Town” is not a straightforward “true crime” story like the original “Serial,” its psychologically complex story struck a chord with listeners. In the first four days of its release, “S-Town” had been downloaded more than 10 million times—a record for a podcast, according to Serial Productions.

Although serial podcasts are popular to produce because they are a relatively inexpensive way to attract advertising dollars, the timeless draw of serial narrative permeates print and film as well. The documentary “OJ: Made in America,” created as an approximately 7½-hour movie for theaters but presented on ESPN as a five-part television serial, was rebroadcast on ABC and ESPN2; 41 million viewers tuned in to one of the 40 telecasts of the documentary between the June 11 premiere and July. Viewership grew even higher after it won an Academy Award in February. (Read a Storyboard interview with director Ezra Edelman here.)

Newspapers in search of readers also seem occasionally willing to invest the time needed—often a year or more—to produce deeply reported series that deliver subscriptions and pageviews. The New York Times’ 2013 five-part serial “Invisible Child” took Andrea Elliott more than a year to report and write. The Los Angeles Times’ 2016 “A Mystery in Six Parts,” called “Framed,” attracted 3 million unique pageviews and 50,000 subscribers to its newsletter.

Even book publishers, looking to reach a wider audience, have turned historical nonfiction into unconventional serial narratives: “March,” Georgia Congressman John Lewis’ story of his journey through the civil rights movement, is a New York Times bestselling three-volume graphic novel that is now being read in schools.

“A serial is not a form of information delivery,” says Roy Peter Clark, the Poynter Institute’s senior scholar and one of the nation’s most ardent nurturers of narrative journalism. “It’s a form of experience delivery. Whether it’s nonfiction or fiction, it’s the creation of a world.”

From Dickens to Netflix, a primary question drives good storytelling: What happens next? New York Times television critic James Poniewozik calls it “the suck, where you’re sucked into it, and you just want one more bite.” “Serial” captured this feeling in its first season when it sowed doubt about convicted murderer Adnan Syed with this question: Is he really guilty? The search for an answer, with reporter Sarah Koenig as a truth-seeking character in the narrative, unspooled over the course of 12 episodes and resulted in a new trial for Syed.

How does a journalist create a compelling world, and keep the reader asking for more? The tools are no different from nonfiction’s and fiction’s basics: inciting incident, narrative arc and scenes including dialogue that move the narrative forward. When translating journalism into serials, some subject matters seem a natural: true crime, life-and-death struggle, a compelling character triumphing over obstacles.

French, a Pulitzer Prize-winning practitioner of narrative storytelling, advocates finding an “engine” for a nonfiction narrative, “a question that drives the story that cannot be resolved in the cycle of one day and one night.” This question forms the story’s arc and can only be answered by continuing to read.

Of course, adding the constraints of journalism into the mix of creating a compelling story arc complicates the matter. For example, “Serial” may have been great storytelling, but it has been criticized for lax reporting and a tendency to sensationalize in service of the mystery narrative. Koenig fails to interview key players and inserts herself into scenes that seem to revolve around her own feelings and not reported facts.

“To do a serial well requires a tremendous amount of reporting,” says French, who is best known for the serial narratives he wrote for The St. Petersburg Times. “In a lot of journalism we are content to say, ‘Such and such happened, police said.’ When you do a serialized narrative, you have to actually find out what really happened.”

Both reported reconstruction—using documents, videos and other artifacts—and eyewitness observation can form the details of a narrative. But unlike fiction, where the writer is in complete control of the story, a journalist must come to terms with a story that may not be perfect. “Real life doesn’t unfold as seamlessly as fiction,” French says. “It’s a lot more complicated, and very often has no real ending. You have to make your peace with the unruliness of real life.”

The story behind a serial narrative doesn’t have to be new, but it does need to be told in a fresh way. When Los Angeles Times reporter Christopher Goffard decided to follow the bizarre story of a Southern California PTA mom’s harrowing experience with a false accusation, he knew he was taking on a sensational case that had already had its share of media attention. Still, “Framed,” published in September 2016, managed to keep readers on edge. The subhead teased at what was to come: “She was the PTA Mom Everyone Knew. Who Would Want to Harm Her?” An astute use of online tools also added freshness and transparency. Web designer Lily Mihalik incorporated document excerpts, and short audio and video clips of the main characters.

Clark argues that sometimes hyperlinks and other temptations of online publishing can sabotage a narrative because they take people out of the story. “Digital and multimedia versions of journalism have deemphasized the linear aspect of the reading experience,” he says. “With the hyperlink alone, you’re inviting people to stop moving forward and asking them to start moving sideways.” But in “Framed” the immediacy of being able hear the main characters’ voices and see the court documents seemed to add excitement and keep readers engaged. In a description of the series in a Facebook event with Goffard, readers called the serial “bonkers,” “highly addictive” and “juicier than a Mexican novella.”

Goffard first covered the story when it broke years earlier: A power couple, both attorneys, was charged with an unlikely revenge crime that sounded like tabloid fare. They were accused of planting 17 grams of marijuana, 11 Percocet and 29 Vicodin pills in the car of a volunteer director of an after-school program in Irvine, California. The wife pleaded guilty to a felony count of false imprisonment by fraud or deceit. A jury found the husband guilty of one count of false imprisonment by fraud or deceit. Goffard dug back into the story in early 2016 when he encountered the husband, sitting alone and looking defeated, at a courthouse where he was defending himself against the civil lawsuit the PTA mom had filed.

After discussing the encounter with his editors, Goffard decided it was a story worth telling again, this time in more depth: “Some people said, ‘That’s an old story. Hasn’t it been told?’ But it raised all kinds of interesting themes about the power dynamics of Southern California suburbia and the mysteries of self-destructive behavior and the nightmare of false accusation, and it really hadn’t been told.”

The story, 15,000 words long, was originally going to run into two parts, but Times editor-in-chief Davan Maharaj suggested breaking it up into smaller segments. Goffard found that it divided naturally into six chapters, with each one running from about 1,800 to 3,100 words. “What’s fun about six parts is the series builds momentum and word of mouth, especially on social media,” Goffard says.

He tried to end on cliffhangers, and the end of the first installment was a classic, a recreated conversation between the investigating police officer and the PTA Mom:

He had asked Kelli Peters:

If the drugs aren’t yours, how did they get in your car?

“I have an enemy,” she said.

Although it seems at first that the narrative tension will revolve around whether the PTA mom is guilty, it becomes clear very quickly that she’s not. “The question of whether she’s innocent is not the basis of the suspense here,” Goffard explains. “She’s obviously innocent. The question is, ‘Who set her up?’ When that gets answered, the question is, ‘Why?’ And then, ‘Will the law be able to do anything about it?’ And then, ‘Will the full truth ever come out?’”

Because this is real life and not fiction, the biggest questions of the series never really get answered: Why did a seemingly happy and well-to-do couple of lawyers target a do-gooder PTA mom in such a vicious way? Goffard admits he’s still baffled: “I don’t have any real answers to that one beyond what’s in the story.”

Serial narratives blossomed with the New Journalism of the 1970s, when writers like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese used literary techniques to tell nonfiction stories. In the 1990s, profitable newsrooms devoted money and time to reporters who produced what would come to be considered masterworks of the newspaper serial form. In 1991 at The St. Petersburg Times, French wrote a Livingston Award-winning serial,“South of Heaven,” using the chronological frame of one year in a south Florida high school to create narrative tension with this question: Who will drop out and who will graduate? He later was awarded the 1998 feature writing Pulitzer Prize for “Angels and Demons,” a St. Petersburg Times serial that chronicled the murder of an Ohio woman and her two teenage daughters as they vacationed in Tampa.

Mark Bowden also found inspiration in the New Journalism techniques, even though his editors were pleading with him to write so short that his stories wouldn’t jump to an inside page. Bowden, who began working at The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1979, discovered the power of “long” in the 1990s when he deconstructed a book he was working on and turned it into a 26-day newspaper serial about how a U.S. relief mission in Somalia ended in a firefight with high-tech helicopters.

Bowden had been working on the book on his own but couldn’t find a publisher. He negotiated a deal with his editors that he would chop it up into a newspaper serial. It took him about a year to get it into shape. He focused on the dramatic action of the events, and cut out most of the analysis, until it was about a third of the size of the original manuscript. Each day’s installment was about 25 newspaper inches, and he tried to write scenes because he knew scenes move a story forward. “If you can write a scene with character, that is the most fun to read,” says Bowden, who is now an author and a writer in residence at the University of Delaware.

This was the early days of newspaper’s online presence, and a visionary online editor, Jennifer Musser Metz, decided to present all of Bowden’s source material. He remembers bringing in shopping bags full of documents that were then posted online in a multimedia presentation. In an exhibit at the Newseum in Washington D.C., the online display is credited with being one of the earliest examples of its kind.  

It was a hit both in the paper and online. The series, called “Black Hawk Down,” became an Internet phenomenon. Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer turned it into a blockbuster film directed by Ridley Scott.

But most surprising, Bowden recalls, the head of circulation ventured into the foreign territory of the newsroom to shake his hand. “Do another one like this,” he said.

A serial doesn’t only answer the question: What happened next? Sometimes, it also explores a second, deeper question : How did it happen?

When producer Caroline Waterlow got a call from director Ezra Edelman asking if she wanted to work on a documentary about O.J. Simpson, she recalls saying, “Really? Do we need more about O.J.?” And she remembers his response: “It’s not just about O.J. — it’s about everything!”

Waterlow says she was convinced to sign on when Edelman described his vision for a documentary that used the prism of race to intertwine O.J.’s history and the city of Los Angeles’ history and explore how they culminated in that moment when O.J. was acquitted. The finished product was what French would call a “multi-thread” narrative, with O.J. and L.A. as the two main characters. It spans half a century and is told mostly in straight chronological order that braids together O.J.’s rise from a San Francisco housing project to star athlete, pitchman, and actor with the history of the L.A. Police Department’s fraught relationship with the city’s African-American citizens.

The team worked on the film for two years, conducted 72 interviews, shot 300 hours of original material and sifted through 500 hours of archival footage. The New York Times’ Poniewozik says one of the most memorable scenes is 1970s footage of a Hertz commercial in which O.J., the Heisman Trophy winner, is sprinting through an airport to get his rental car. In the background, “white validators” in the form of an elderly white woman and a group of young white Girls Scouts cheer him on. Poniewozik calls the film a “documentary essay” more than a classic “true crime” narrative.

“It’s telling this very familiar story and telling you, ‘This is why it mattered,’” he says. “Why did it matter that O.J. was a black celebrity, and why in the context of civil rights in America and popular culture?”

Waterlow says the film was not conceived as a serial and Edelman would have preferred that viewers only watch in a theater with an intermission or two. Its serialization resulted from the realities of television, but the chronological structure lent itself to natural chapter breaks, and producers didn’t have much trouble dividing it into five parts. Although each part didn’t end on a traditional cliffhanger, the questions asked were interesting enough to hook the audience. “The length was the whole point,” says Waterlow. “Ezra’s interest was in a large canvas. There was no point of doing another two-hour film because that had been done. We were told no one’s got time, but the reaction was really strong. People were hungry for this.”

The “Making Oprah” podcast capitalizes on Oprah’s fame and the genuine excitement of its host, WBEZ anchor Jenn White, an African-American woman who at one point in the podcast calls her mother just to tell her she is going to speak to Winfrey. Making the reporter part of the story works, McNulty says, because “it breaks up the authority, makes it a little more approachable, and makes the audience feel like they’re being let in on stuff.”

Roy Peter Clark calls this technique “broken narrative.” He likens it to one used by John McPhee’s classic “Coming Into the Country,” a nonfiction account of traveling through Alaska. In the book, the reader follows McPhee as he journeys down a river, until McPhee steps out of the flow to tell the reader how he got there. Podcasts like “Making Oprah” and “Serial” work despite the broken narrative, Clark says, because “the story is compelling enough that the audience wants to stick with it.”

In the current media environment, serials offer a break from 24/7 information overload by inviting an audience to slow down and savor a story. “That’s one thing that Netflix and podcasts have shown us,” says Poniewozik. “If people are enthusiastic about something, they will spend a lot of time with it.”

The post The making of binge-worthy serial narratives, from “S-Town” to “Framed” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Dale Russakoff spent 28 years as a reporter for The Washington Post before writing her first book, "The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools?" Russakoff, who took a buyout in 2008, was near the end of a long recuperation from esophageal cancer surgery in 2010 when she turned on the Oprah television show and saw Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announce a $100 million pledge to transform the crumbling schools of Newark, New Jersey “into a symbol of educational excellence for the whole nation.” It not only sparked her interest, but also her will to recover, because she wanted to report the story.

[caption id="attachment_122185" align="alignright" width="300"] Dale Russakoff[/caption]

She then immersed herself in Newark’s schools and politics to create a real-time account of how education reformers backed by both Democratic Mayor Cory Booker and Republican Governor Chris Christie tried but failed to turn Zuckerberg’s huge gift into real change for all students. In his New York Times review, writer Alex Kotlowitz observes, “A lesser reporter might have succumbed to the seduction of such intimate access to the rich and powerful, but Russakoff maintains a clear-eyed distance, her observations penetratingly honest and incisive to what she sees and what she hears.”

Russakoff started her journalism career at the Alabama Journal in Montgomery before moving to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and eventually the Post, where she worked first in D.C. and then in the New York bureau. She spoke by phone from her home in Montclair, New Jersey. Following is a condensed and edited version of our conversation:

How did you decide that Mark Zuckerberg’s gift to Newark schools would make a compelling book-length narrative?

I saw an item in the Newark Star-Ledger that this big gift from Mark Zuckerberg was going to be announced on the Oprah show, so I decided to watch it. I was completely riveted. I had recently had a really huge surgery, with radiation and chemo, and it took a really long time for me to get over the surgery. I didn’t feel like myself for the longest time. It was really when I started reporting this story that I began to feel like myself again.

For about nine months before I submitted a proposal, I researched education reform, got to know the principal players in the effort and talked to people in Newark. Every interview I did in Newark, I thought, ‘This will probably be an hour interview,’ and it would go for two hours and three hours, with people talking about this particular gift and what it seemed connected to, in their experience and in the history of Newark. I called up an agent I had been talking with on and off for more than 10 years, and I said, ‘I think I might have found my book.’

It was almost like a spiritual thing. When they say you were born to write this story, I felt that way. I’d been a reporter for 30 years and hadn’t found a book and I figured I wasn’t going to write one, and now, here was a story I couldn’t not write. It was about so many things I’d been exploring all my life – race, inequality, education, cities, politics, the power of government to make things better—or not. I had a vision of what this book could be and, I thought, 'How dare I not try it.'

How did you find a narrative voice that could rise above the very politicized debate about education in America?

Every story has its own voice and part of writing is figuring it out. If you’re living with the people in the story long enough, then you begin to hear the voice. I knew this story had to be told with a really strong feeling of history because there was so much history underlying what was going on.

Very early on it became so clear to me that the whole conversation about education nationally was so polarized that there was a huge hole in the middle of it where the children were. I was just hoping to be able to write something that was just so close to the ground and so eye-level that those kinds of arguments wouldn’t even be an issue anymore. I wanted to be present in the room when [Newark schools superintendent] Cami Anderson was having meetings with her staff. I wanted to find out from Cory Booker what he was thinking when he said we’re going to have all of these low-performing schools become high-performing schools. I wanted the most detailed, granular level about how would this work, and then I wanted to be in the classroom and see all this coming at me, see it coming at the children, at the teachers and in what ways it was affecting their experience. Were the great ambitions for changing education reaching the kids?

I thought that portraying the distance between the worlds of the people planning all these reforms—or the "transformational changes" as they called them—and the people experiencing them, would speak volumes.

How did you turn routine bureaucratic meetings and everyday classroom experiences into compelling narrative?

I spent so much more time in classrooms than I ever would have as a newspaper reporter. If you’ve been in a classroom for hundreds of days, you’ve seen so many things; it is really possible to pick those details out. You start seeing the teacher’s craft and are able to pick out details that, at first, have just gone by in a blur. I remember that scene where [teacher] Princess Williams was teaching letter sounds with a stuffed owl named Echo. I was watching her, and I started to appreciate the choreography going on: the way she had placed everything she needed right at her fingertips, so there wouldn’t be a moment when these kids had a chance to get distracted. I wouldn’t have noticed it the first day I was there.

As far as writing about the bureaucratic part of education and the jargon of reform, I had to work so hard on it, particularly on the chapter that recounts the history of reform efforts. I read as much as I could find, and I interviewed people who were part of those periods or who had written about it. When I first wrote that chapter, it was so dull and down-in-the-weeds that I just rewrote and rewrote it. It wasn’t like I wrote a first draft all the way through. I’d keep coming back to it.

What was it like to report a narrative in real-time?

At first, I thought I was going to be writing a book about a success story. They [Zuckerberg, Booker and Christie] sounded so sure of themselves. They said on Oprah that, in five years, they were going to turn around this district that was struggling. That sounded grandiose. But, with the money they had, and the political power they had, and the support they had, I thought that really dramatic things would happen. There was a moment when I did have a real panic when I wondered who would want to read about it if it didn’t succeed. It’s not news that a school district tries to get better and doesn’t.

At one point, I said to my editor, ‘I’m not going to have a hero. How do you write a book without a hero?’ She said you don’t need a hero but you need catalysts. And then I started thinking of this as a book about the big forces in play in all cities—and in cities where there is a struggle over education. I didn’t see it as the anatomy of a failure versus a success, I just thought how much more difficult this is than anybody was willing to talk about at the outset. They failed in the grand things they said they were going do when they were on Oprah. But that wasn’t realistic in the first place; that was a made-for-television promise. What I wanted to write was the real story: The charter schools expanded dramatically and they far out-perform the school district. But the district schools, which serve well over half of Newark children, including those with the highest needs, plunged into financial crisis, and their performance has actually gone down.

How did you know when the story was over?

I just kept knowing that it wasn’t over. I got the book contract in July 2011, and my editor thought I could do it in a year. It turned out they didn’t hire a schools superintendent until almost a year into it. So they said, "Okay, two years, but two years max." At two years, it was still barely under way. I knew I didn’t have an ending, and I didn’t have an arc. I took that summer of 2013 to write a detailed chronology of everything I had—all the characters and all the events, the top-down story and the bottom-up story. I actually paid a fabulous reporter whom I know to be an adviser. He read the chronology and just helped me see that I had three quarters of the story, and I had to go back and say I needed another year. The coming year was when the schools superintendent was going to propose a complete reconfiguration of the district. However that unspooled was going to be the end of the story.

The post Dale Russakoff: “How do you write a book without a hero?” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[caption id="attachment_121554" align="alignright" width="150"] Roger Lowenstein[/caption]

Roger Lowenstein is the author of six nonfiction books, including his latest, American’s Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve. A former Wall Street Journal reporter, he is known for his ability to turn complex financial events into readable stories. His other books range from a biography of Warren Buffett to several contemporary histories of financial crises and the stock market, including When Genius Failed, Origins of the Crash, While America Aged, and The End of Wall Street. Lowenstein’s work has also appeared in publications including Bloomberg, The New York Review of Books, Fortune and The New York Times Magazine.

His current book is his first work of historical nonfiction. He sat down in Boston with freelance writer Ricki Morell to speak about the joys and challenges of writing America’s Bank, which begins in 1858, around the time of the birth of Carter Glass, the Virginia politician who helped push through Congress the Federal Reserve Act and who later became co-author of the still-debated Glass-Steagall Act. It ends in December 1913 when President Woodrow Wilson signs the Federal Reserve Act into law.

Following is an edited and condensed version of their conversation:

Your research for this book took you to historical archives around the nation. How does working with primary source documents compare with interviewing live sources for information?

In the contemporary histories, you’d be dealing with interviews, and here you’re dealing with archives. You see your main sources writing over and over again, and you get a sense of their characters. You make judgments about what motivated them or what was weighing on them. So the archival material can fulfill the same purpose as the interview. I was surprised at how frequently people wrote letters, how much they wrote and how much of their feelings they revealed. For example, Carter Glass was a very suspicious—to the point of being paranoid—fellow. And that came out in every letter. He was always breathing fear and mistrust and wariness.

Obviously, you can’t interview Woodrow Wilson, and you can’t interview people who knew Woodrow Wilson, because no one is alive now. But you can hear Wilson’s contemporaneous feelings about the Federal Reserve bill through his letters. For example, legislative activity around the bill climaxed in the summer of 1913 in Washington, which was, before air-conditioning, a hot town in summer. Political spouses would leave, and so Wilson’s wife spent the summer in New Hampshire, and he’s writing to her, and you have access to his thoughts and feelings about the bill as he writes his wife. That’s the sort of material you wouldn’t have access to nowadays. But, of course, you also can’t interview Wilson’s aide who came in and said, “The President was angry and told us all to go to hell,” or whatever, so there are things you miss and things you get.

When you’re looking through difficult-to-access documents in official archives, what is your strategy to make sure you get the most information in the most efficient manner?

When I became a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, my editor said that when you’re sent off to some remote part of South America and you find your source, you’re not going to go back, so you’ve got to get it the first time. That’s true of archives as well. In many cases these are files that are off premises and you have to order them up. It’s a big deal to schedule the travel. Maybe if something really important came up, you’d go back. You can make copies, but it’s cumbersome. At some point, you have these files brought up, and there are thousands of letters. You’re only interested in a relative handful, and within the letters you’re only interested in certain parts. If you come back home with tens of thousands of pages, you haven’t advanced the cause any. So what I tended to do was take notes on my laptop and you take a lot of notes, but the notes are reduced in scale from the original. There were a few documents that I did make copies of, where I thought there were long sections that I might want verbatim quotes from or where the material was explosive enough—this mysterious trip to Jekyll Island where they’re not supposed to talk about it and one guy did, and he wrote about it. I thought I’d just take that home with me, in case anyone challenges me.

What was your biggest challenge in creating a narrative framework for the book?

It was a challenge where to start the narrative, and I’m not sure I made the right choice. There’s a lot of background. The background is interesting, but I’m not sure whether I started too early. To me, this was all fun stuff about counterfeit currencies, gold and silver wars, and monetary ferment in the United States in the 1880s and 1890s. As it was, it’s really all of Chapter One. It turns out that the Democratic Convention of 1896—which is famous because that’s where William Jennings Bryan gives his “Cross of Gold” speech [decrying the gold standard]—that turned out to be more useful for two reasons. One was that Carter Glass, who I knew would be a main figure in the book, went to that convention, and it was really a jumping off point for him in getting involved in this issue. And it turned out that Williams Jennings Bryan was a bigger factor in the legislation of the Fed than I realized, so it was very useful to have him as a bookend early.

The ending was clear. The ending was 1913. How much to zoom out in the beginning was a hard choice.

You’ve said that by the time you put the first word on the page you should know what the last page is going to look like. Can you elaborate on this, and on your other strategies for organizing and writing?

You always try to finish all the research first. You don’t want to be researching as you write. If I’m introducing a character, I want to have a fully formed idea of what the character is going to be. I knew that I wanted people, because people are interesting and banking’s hard. So I wanted the people to be as lively as I could make them. I knew that [New York financier] Paul Warburg would be a main character, and Carter Glass would be. I didn’t know how rich President Wilson would be. Since he’s so important at the end, I put more of him in the middle parts before he’s president. I didn’t realize how absolutely irrepressible and omnipresent Warburg was throughout this period, even when he’s sort of offstage, he’s rattling their cages all the time.

I always find it very useful not to jump ahead. I can’t overstress the extent to which that saps the tension. You’re visibly stepping outside the narrative. If the reader has suspended disbelief and pretended he’s in the real world, suddenly he sees the author’s voice because only the author can tell him what would happen later. He’s stepping out of the moment. It’s really a narrative killer. Even the devices where you say, “For so-and-so, it would be a momentous day.” You’re stepping out of the narrative, because you don’t know that it’s going to be a momentous day when you wake up.

How did you manage the tension between creating a compelling, readable drama and making sure you adhered to standards of journalistic accuracy and scholarly seriousness? Did you feel you had to simplify complex financial concepts for the general audience?  

I don’t like the word simplify; I prefer the word explain. Simplify to me suggests a watering down of the facts. My wife was my first reader, and she was particularly good about pointing out parts that were too complicated. She’d say, “You’re into this, but you don’t realize that the reader’s not living with it day-to-day, and it’s complicated stuff.”

There are also judgment calls about descriptions which go don’t to accuracy, but go to characterizations. I didn’t feel I was sacrificing accuracy to sustain narrative; I felt I was infusing it by characterization of what a person would have felt.

The trickier thing to balance is financial detail—how much detail do you put in, how much explanation, how many codicils down. That’s truly a balancing act because this is being published for a mass nonfiction audience, an educated audience but not an academic audience. Yet I wanted to be favorably received by the scholar as a serious book so that’s just a lot of decisions about what to keep in. In that case, I probably erred on the side of too much.

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