Larry Bird versus Magic Johnson. March 26, 1979. The NCAA Men’s National Championship was the final college game for the two rising basketball stars, and everyone in the country watched. The rivalry narrative built up over days leading up to the game, and it was quite a compelling one. 

In reality, the men hardly knew each other, only meeting once before the game and barely speaking to one another. Author and journalist Keith O’Brien called this a “disingenuous narrative” and set out to tell the story in a different way: starting with the Boston Celtics legend’s origin story from high school to early college.

“When you change that perspective, what you get is a really, completely different story,” O’Brien said. “And maybe more important than that, you get a completely different cast of characters.”

O’Brien, an award-winning author and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone, spoke at Boston University’s Power of Narrative conference in March about his bestselling book “Heartland” and shared lessons from his reporting process about the importance of showing up.

1. Investing in the story

At first, O’Brien tried to reach Bird through his agent. It was no surprise, though, that Bird did not want to participate; he is a notoriously private person, rarely doing interviews or projects unless he has some control over it. But — as Patrick Radden Keefe pointed out in his keynote earlier that day — access to the person centered in your story shouldn’t make or break the narrative.

O’Brien didn’t necessarily need Bird’s participation for the story. He wanted to tell a “compelling human narrative.” Perhaps Bird would have told a completely different story about those early years than the people around him that shaped his future career. To get those outside voices, he collected phone numbers and started calling around. 

In the first few rounds, nobody answered him.

“I need to invest in the story,” O’Brien said. “If people aren’t calling me back, maybe what I need to do is just go to French Lick. And so that’s what I did: bought a plane ticket, got a rental car and booked a room at the Best Western on the edge of town. And then before I left with those numbers and those addresses that I knew were right, I reached out again … and it was then that people started getting back in touch with me.”

He interviewed Bird’s childhood best friends, mentors, and family friends, meeting them everywhere from the local McDonald’s to people’s kitchens. O’Brien’s decision to travel to French Lick was pivotal for his story, gaining the trust and respect from residents who wouldn’t otherwise bother to return his phone calls.

2. Interviewing every witness to a scene

Reporting on scenes that you didn't witness firsthand can require a lot of research and specific type of reporting and interviewing. O’Brien makes it a point to talk to every person who was in the scene he wants to write about. If he knows that five people were in the room, he will speak to every person who was there, even if they don’t ultimately end up in the story.

Since he reported on events between 1973 and 1979, he understood memories can erode over time or someone could have a clear memory of events that never happened. That is precisely why he talks to every witness: to get the fullest sense of the truth in the commonalities.

“If you talk to all five people, you're going to get different details, different memories, and somewhere in the overlap of those memories, you know the truth likely resides,” he said.

For this story, he had to track down witnesses and relied on relationships he already built in town to access those people. In one instance, he was trying to track down one of the owners of a bar that Bird’s father, Joey Bird, frequented in the 1970s. The bar was long gone, but the owner could often be found in the town’s American Legion Bar.

O’Brien stepped into the bar on a weekday afternoon and 40 pairs of eyes turned to him straight away. He had to introduce himself and his intentions immediately.

“There was no slow rolling this: sit down quietly at the bar, order a drink, start to mingle. Between the door and the bar, I’m almost defensively saying who I am and why I’m here,” he said. “Within a couple minutes, everybody wanted to talk to me.”

The person O’Brien wanted to reach was not there, but he got in touch with him through the phone behind the bar and interviewed him right then and there.

3. Searching physical records

One of the important figures in Bird’s life that O’Brien identified was his father. Joey Bird was a well-known person in town but struggled a lot; a few months after his son graduated high school, he took his own life. 

O’Brien heard that his long battle with drinking came as a result of his time in the military during World War II and the Korean War. But he had to verify the claims himself. It took months to find the eldest Bird’s military records, and O’Brien said he learned a lot about Joey and Larry Bird in these records that he likely couldn’t find anywhere else.

He learned that Joey Bird enlisted in the Navy for World War II at 17 years old with a seventh grade education. He was a messman who likely didn’t go into battle and got in trouble for going AWOL during basic training and drinking on a ship. But he did see fighting a few years later in Korea, where he was an Army soldier and engaged in combat during one of the bloodiest battles of the conflict.

“Joey Bird has seen things and maybe done things that would shape him later,” O’Brien said. “I’ve learned something about my subject from these records. I’ve learned something that I think my subject himself might not even know about his own father. All of this is informative to my narrative.”

Once O’Brien was in French Lick, he stopped at the public library frequently, going through town records, yearbooks, and newspaper clippings. O’Brien said there are records in libraries that can’t be found anywhere else — not through interviews and not online. In the French Lick library, there was an entire section dedicated to Larry Bird. 

The library’s records went as far back as when Joey Bird was growing up and in the war. He was looking for letters or notes soldiers often submitted at the time. Just when O’Brien’s patience was waning after looking in the archives for hours upon hours, he finally found something in March 1951.

“This wasn't a note in a little notes column, it was on the front page, and it was a first person account that Joey Bird had written back to home about that winter in Korea. I mean, an incredible thing, right?” he said. “Libraries are critical to the work that we do.”

4. Risking time and resources for important material

O’Brien had embedded himself in the small town of French Lick (population: 2,000), interviewing multiple people every day and becoming a regular at the American Legion Bar. But there was one person he still couldn’t get a hold of who was essential for the story: Bird’s high school coach, Jim Jones.

Jones coached most young basketball players in town during the ’60s and ’70s. He taught Bird how to hold a basketball and shoot layups. He would come to Bird’s home to wake him up and take him to practice before school. “Were it not for Jim Jones, Larry Bird … might not have become the person he became,” O’Brien said.

In the weeks he was in French Lick, he could not get a hold of Jones. He thought about taking a gamble during the final days of his trip: Should he drive to Jones’s home an hour outside of French Lick and risk losing time if he didn’t answer? O’Brien believed Jones was so crucial for the story, he decided to make the drive.

He pulled into Jones’s driveway, prepared with a handwritten note card in case no one was home, and was relieved when he saw cars in the driveway. He knocked on the door and his wife answered. After a few moments, Jones came to the door and wordlessly let O’Brien through.

They talked for the next three hours in Jones’s kitchen about Larry Bird and the 1970s. When O’Brien thought they were finishing up, Jones showed him a custom Larry Bird championship-style ring and a letter from Bird to Jones, thanking him for all he’d done.

“I knew two things for certain,” O’Brien said. “First was, I had this story, whether Larry Bird was talking to me or not. I had it. And number two, I knew that I was not a stranger in this place anymore. I belonged here.”

***
Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment.

The post Finding the narrative in small-town libraries and bars: How Keith O’Brien told the origin story of Larry Bird appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

The 28th Power of Narrative conference returned to Boston University on March 27 and 28. Journalists, authors, podcast producers, and filmmakers came to the second floor of the George Sherman Union to share the lessons they’ve learned from their work. 

We've already shared a few notes from this year's conference, including Nieman Storyboard editor Mark Armstrong's Power of Narrative conversation with “London Falling” author and New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe. Now, here are six more takeaways from a weekend full of inspiration and education: 

1. Find the narrative, don't build it: Ken Burns

Ken Burns, whose latest PBS documentary series was 2025's “The American Revolution,” created a history of the colonies before, during, and after gaining independence from the British — fitting it all into six episodes, or 12 hours. 

Burns said the material often spoke for itself. The desire to seek out the truth is central to his work, but he’s often dealing with “grades of imperfection” since there is no such thing as objectivity, he said. But the story will tell you if it’s important to include.

“The greatest thing I love to hear is what I left out,” he said. “Bring it on … I know exactly the thing, I made a decision to leave that out. We’re not an encyclopedia.”

What also tends to speak for itself is the narrative. Burns gives an example of a mother named Rebecca Tanner of the Mohegan tribe from Connecticut who lost five sons fighting for the Patriot cause. There were many women, children, and enslaved people that fought on either side of the conflict. It's Burns's job to collect those lost or hidden stories.

“You find [narratives]. You never tried to build it. It’s there, and it’s inherent,” he said.

Burns acknowledged that current times are fraught, divided, and unpredictable. But so were the times during the Revolution, Civil War, and Vietnam War. He said there are “features of right now that are hugely terrifying and ought to be talked about.”

While Burns feels confident in telling these complex historical narratives, he said it took decades to get to that point. He realized that he knew how to do the work, even if something goes awry. And he leans into the unknown, working out the problem and coming out the other side having learned something.

“You have to first know that you have something to say, and that has to do with an incredible amount of introspection about what you want and who you are and what your capabilities are,” he said. 

2. Telling someone's story without a ‘perfect interview’: Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio and Jazmin Aguilera, The Boston Globe

The detention of Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk in March 2025 was one of the earliest moments in Trump's second term that the nation witnessed increased aggression by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers on the streets across the country.

The Boston Globe followed the story since Öztürk's arrest and detainment, publishing dozens of articles. Behind the scenes, Globe team members including senior audio producer Jazmin Aguilera and immigration reporter Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio worked to bring Öztürk’s story even closer to readers and listeners, creating the two-part podcast series, “Rümeysa Öztürk: An American Story.”

The central question the team sought to answer was, “Why had the Trump administration chosen Rümeysa to arrest?”

“We very quickly started learning that she wasn’t a protester or an activist that you would usually think of using those words on campus. She’s a very quiet, soft-spoken student. She loves children, she was simply passionate about the rights of children,” McDonnell Nieto del Rio said. “We wondered how the Trump administration had even found her, and those were answers we didn’t think we were going to get directly from officials, and so we had to figure out basically other ways to do that.”

McDonnell Nieto del Rio saw that professors were suing the Trump administration over an ideological deportation policy, and she started attending hearings in Boston. She saw ICE agents take the stand to testify, and she learned that they had most likely discovered Öztürk through a website that doxed protesters.

The team then went on to acquire hundreds of pages of court documents and hours of video footage to tell a bigger story. It also helped add context to Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown, a story that was “touching everyone,” McDonnell Nieto del Rio said.

One challenge for the team: how to tell a great narrative without a “perfect interview” with the central character. They were able to get written answers from Öztürk during the reporting process, but it wasn’t quite what they expected. They largely turned to other characters around Öztürk, such as her lawyer, a woman who was detained with her in Louisiana, and even the man who got the viral video footage of Öztürk being taken off the street by ICE officers.

“We all think the dream is to have the perfect interview with the person at the center of the piece. But I think there are a lot of other ways to go about these stories too,” McDonnell Nieto del Rio said. “And what's great about having restrictions on a story is that it forces you to be creative and find workarounds, and sometimes you'll get things from those workarounds that you wouldn't have already gotten.”

3. Look beyond the headlines for the hidden stories: The New Yorker's Sarah Stillman

The first story New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman ever reported was during her senior year in college. She saw a Fox News report while at the gym with the headline “Body Found in Lake Is Not Missing Fla. Girl,” about the 2005 search  for the missing 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford.

When Stillman saw the report, she wondered about the woman whose body was found in the lake. She went back to her dorm room and called the sheriff’s office in Florida and asked for the woman’s name, revealed to be Donna Cooke. Once she got it, she did a background check on her and found her last known address. Stillman traveled to Florida and learned about Cooke’s story — about her prostitution charges, and being brought on as a confidential informant for police, which led to her death. Stillman later wrote about confidential informants for The New Yorker, 2012's “The Throwaways.”

“One of my very first reporting experiences then became the story, not just of telling who Donna was, but also of telling how she wound up there, which had to do a lot with current U.S. drug enforcement policies around how we use confidential informants,” Stillman said. “It’s been incredibly guiding to me as a journalist, learning to watch news headlines and seeing where is something not adding up for me.”

Stillman also learned that the best stories come from learning one’s strengths. After joining The New Yorker, she went to cover Iraq and Afghanistan during the Iraq war. She didn’t know the nuanced history of the Middle East and certainly didn’t know the language, but she sought out stories using her background.

Stillman, whose family included labor workers, always thought about how labor fit into a bigger story. Through that lens, she reported on thousands of international workers being sent to Iraq to do menial jobs on military bases. She spoke with hundreds of these workers and found they had been sent to the bases under false pretenses and also found cases of sexual assault.

“So much of what I think is the most compelling kind of narrative journalism is thinking about, ‘Where are people encountering black holes, whether it’s policy or whether it’s of the existing narratives?’” Stillman said. “How do we create narratives that push back on that and actually fill in the blanks and ask for accountability?”

4. Showing the true humanity of a bombing victim: Rhana Natour and Seyward Darby, The Atavist Magazine

Over 1,000 children in Gaza lost a limb in the first two months of the war. That statistic stuck with freelance journalist Rhana Natour as she considered covering a conflict that has produced the largest number of child amputees in history. Natour spoke with photojournalist Eman Mohammed and learned that some organizations had been helping young children from Gaza come to the U.S.

She said finding stories from the Israel-Hamas war proved difficult, as international journalists could not access the region directly. But children were “coming to us” and could shed light on the war and their experience. Natour's National Magazine Award-winning story, “Coming to America,” featuring photos by Mohammed, was published in The Atavist Magazine in July 2024. It tells the story of a 14-year-old girl named Layan Albaz who lost her legs in an Israeli airstrike that also killed many of her family members. 

Natour learned she needed to equip herself with the right reporting tools to handle the story with sensitivity. She understood she was talking to a child that had gone through significant trauma in the last month. She consulted experts in childhood trauma ahead of speaking with Layan and other children. She also had Mohammed, who’s fluent in Arabic and has a deep understanding of Middle Eastern culture, to translate for Natour.

Some of these practices included “asking them frequently if you want to take a break, or the way that you approach a child,” Natour said. “The underlying suggestion is … that child doesn't want to feel obligated to tell you anything. You don't want to exhaust them through the interview process. You don’t want to do harm.”

But before Natour met Layan, she was described as “angry,” “moody,” “furious,” and “mean.” She wasn’t the sad and gracious “perfect victim” that Natour may have expected. Natour leaned heavily into writing about that anger.

“If in a story you come up against an obstacle, don't think of it as something, ‘Oh gosh, I need to somehow tuck this under the narrative.’ Maybe it’s actually part of the narrative. Maybe it makes for a richer story,” said Seyward Darby, Natour's editor on the story and editor in chief of The Atavist. “She is trying to assert agency. She's trying to process trauma. She is trying to regain a sense of control in her life. She’s furious that so many people and institutions failed her. So maybe her anger is part of the story. Maybe it is the story.”

5. Building a literary toolbox: Jabari Asim

Jabari Asim, a professor at Emerson College who has published 23 books including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essays, and children’s books, likes to visualize his audience before beginning a project. He thinks of three different readers: himself (and his appetite for something he’s interested in or hasn’t seen anywhere else), someone who isn’t attracted to the subject matter at first but would read something that is well written, and someone who is adversarial to the topic he writes about.

Asim, who was previously an editor at The Washington Post and editor in chief at the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis, also visualizes the finished product. “I see the book on the shelf. I see the spine. I see my name. I see the title. I see the color scheme. So I convinced myself that on some level, somewhere, my book already exists, and now it’s just a matter of working backwards.”

He's a big believer in the “ass to chair” theory of writing — and letting every idea spill onto the pages of the notebook with little distraction. He also encouraged finding a routine or habit that unlocks a creative flow state, whether it’s a regimented routine like that of Haruki Murakami or just some good beer and pizza. Either way, “Consistency is the operating principle. Find what works for you and stick to it.”

Asim keeps a “commonplace book” that contains profound phrases, observations or ideas that convey an element of style or prose that informs his own work. The book reminds him that he is entering into a collective discussion, and his ideas may only add onto what has already been expressed, keeping him grounded. The quotes in his book include the likes of Toni Morrison, Mary Oliver, Robert Frost, Andrei Tarkovsky, and many others.

Asim said he creates rough outlines, and it evolves as he goes through multiple drafts. After having a comprehensive outline, he can shuffle parts around and jump from place to place when writing (he said this is an antidote to writer’s block for him). In his drafts, he often highlights a “golden paragraph” that showcases everything he was trying to achieve and compares that paragraph to the rest of his paragraphs to see how he can strengthen the others.

Cleanliness, precision, ease and force are Asim’s four elements for writing. For cleanliness, “Don’t give [publishers] a chance to dismiss you easily. Get rid of all typos, grammatical errors and misspellings.” For precision, quoting E. B. White, “omit needless words.” For ease, “Never let your readers see you sweat. Successful writing tends to be a fingerprints-free exercise.” For force, “Your conclusion presents the final opportunity to close the sale, to gather your narrative momentum and drive home the full eloquence and fury of your prose.”

6. Becoming less of a stranger in a small town: Keith O’Brien

Keith O’Brien, an award-winning author and journalist whose work has appeared in New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone, wanted to dig into the early years of Boston Celtics legend Larry Bird. But Bird is a notoriously private person, rarely doing interviews or projects unless he has some control over it. So it came as no surprise when Bird couldn’t be reached for O’Brien’s recently published book, “Heartland,” covering his high school career in his hometown of French Lick, Indiana.

O’Brien didn’t necessarily need Bird’s participation for the story. He wanted to tell a “compelling human narrative.” Perhaps Bird would have told a completely different story about those early years than the people around him that shaped his future career. To get those outside voices, he collected phone numbers and started calling around. Nobody answered him.

“I need to invest in the story,” O’Brien said. “If people aren’t calling me back, maybe what I need to do is just go to French Lick. And so that’s what I did: bought a plane ticket, got a rental car and booked a room at the Best Western on the edge of town. And then before I left with those numbers and those addresses that I knew were right, I reached out again … and it was then that people started getting back in touch with me.”

One of the important figures in Bird’s life that O’Brien identified was his father Joey Bird. He was a well-known person in town but struggled a lot; a few months after his son graduated high school, he took his own life. Since neither of the Birds could — or would — speak to him, O’Brien learned about Joey Bird through military records, newspaper clippings in the public library, and at the local bar in town.

O’Brien could feel that he was out of place, especially at the bar where he had to immediately introduce himself and his intentions. But he quickly started to acquaint himself with Bird’s high school friends, college teammates, and mentors. There was one person he still couldn’t get a hold of who was essential for the story: Bird’s high school coach, Jim Jones.

In a last-ditch effort, O’Brien decided to drive to Jones’s home an hour outside of French Lick. He knocked on the door and his wife answered. After a few moments, Jones came to the door and wordlessly let O’Brien through. They talked for the next three hours in Jones’s kitchen, where Jones showed O’Brien a custom Larry Bird championship-style ring and a letter from Bird to Jones, thanking him for all he’d done.

“I knew two things for certain,” O’Brien said. “First was, I had this story, whether Larry Bird was talking to me or not. I had it. And number two, I knew that I was not a stranger in this place anymore. I belonged here.”

***

Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment.

The post Look beyond the headlines — and five other lessons for journalists from Power of Narrative 2026 appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

When Patrick Radden Keefe finds a story, he doesn't let go. He talks to every person until there’s no one left to talk to. He looks for documents and evidence to verify claims. He spends enormous amounts of time on story structure.

But, he admits, he’s somewhat of “a dilettante”: while he wants to know everything there is to know about a topic, he also wants the ability to walk away from it once the work is done.

“The best is when you sort of write your 10,000 words and then you say, ‘That's all I'm ever going to have to say on this subject ever again,’” Keefe said at Boston University’s Power of Narrative conference on March 28. “There have been four times in 20 years where I've gotten to the end of a piece and thought, ‘I'm not ready to move on.’”

That fourth time is the story of 19-year-old Zac Brettler, who led a secret double life in London before plunging to his death from an apartment balcony into the River Thames in 2019. Keefe wrote about Brettler's mysterious death, and his family's investigation into what happened, for a 2024 New Yorker story, and he has now expanded it into a book, “London Falling,” published on April 7. 

Keefe, the author of bestsellers including “Rogues,” “Empire of Pain,” and “Say Nothing,” discussed his process with Nieman Storyboard editor Mark Armstrong at the 28th annual conference. Here are four takeaways for journalists: 

1. Meeting your subjects with no strings attached

Keefe learned about Brettler while talking to a stranger — something he often does. At the time, he was working on the television adaptation of his bestseller “Say Nothing” in London, and the person (a friend of the director) told him about Brettler's family.

He went home that evening and tried Googling everything the man told him — but nothing came up. He later learned the family was intentionally trying to maintain their privacy and not speak to the press during the investigation.

When Keefe contacted Zac's parents, Matthew and Rachelle, he suggested a meeting in a local cafe with “no commitment in either direction.” This way they didn’t have to prepare for a formal interview, and Keefe could decide whether he’d want to follow the story further.

“Our initial conversation … I didn't even take out a notebook. I wasn't recording it,” he said. “It was entirely just conversation.”

Over the next two hours, the Brettler family told their story. They didn’t have an official agreement after that chat, but they were “inching towards one” and had another meeting a week later.

People who experience profound loss and trauma, Keefe said, are often willing to share their story with those who want to listen. He said it was a privilege to do this work and have people open up to him about the worst days of their lives.

“I think it felt good for them to talk about it,” he said. “I think it feels good for anybody to tell their story, particularly if it’s a story that they've, for one reason or another, kept a little bit locked away.”

2. Access can be overrated

Keefe had full access to the Brettlers for this story, and he admits that they were key in making the book happen. But there were other key figures who would not speak to him, and access to central people shouldn’t make or break a story.

“Just because people don't want to play ball doesn't mean you shouldn't write the story,” he said. “Sometimes you should write the story.” Keefe recalled his 2018 New Yorker profile of “Apprentice” producer Mark Burnett, who wouldn't speak to Keefe for the story. (Burnett's ex-wives, however, did speak to him.)

For this story, Akbar Shamji, one of the men who was with Zac Brettler the night he died, didn’t grant Keefe an interview or a meeting but did email him quite a bit. Communication ceased after Keefe and The New Yorker sent Shamji over 230 fact-checking inquiries.

Because of this, Keefe had to lean more on the Brettlers and the materials he could get from them. But, he wanted to make sure they were all in. In their second meeting, he prefaced that they could not back out of the process if they were to go on the record. As he puts it, “the train is leaving the station.”

“[It’s] one thing that I'm trying to kind of get better at over the years, or that I've made more of a point of with each passing year, is just being very transparent with people on the front end of any kind of reportorial engagement, in part because I've seen where things can go wrong,” he said.

3. Deciding if a story should be an article, a book, or both

Keefe said he uncovered a lot from his conversations with the Brettlers, but only so much can go into a 15,000-word piece for The New Yorker.

One example he gave was Zac Brettler’s grandfather, Hugo Gryn. He had survived Auschwitz during World War II and, once he landed in London, he became a well-known BBC broadcaster and a beloved rabbi. Keefe noted that Gryn was a famous figure in London, but he wasn’t mentioned in his initial New Yorker story.

“This was one of the things that made me feel as though there probably was a book here — that there was this deeper history I've always been interested in, the way any of us are formed by our family lineage, the way families come to new places,” he said.

He felt each piece had a thematically different purpose: the article told the story of Zac Brettler while the book told the story of decades of family history that led to who Zac was.

Keefe also said he often feels torn about the right time to publish. The New Yorker will be publishing a new story from Keefe soon that he had been working on since 2020 and felt it was finally the right time.

“I love the process of going from knowing nothing about something to feeling pretty smart to feeling as though I've earned the right to weigh in on something, and it's usually a good sign if I feel like I can summon the confidence, honestly, to write,” he said. “That's a kind of helpful inflection point, and I certainly wouldn't publish before getting that point.”

4. How much to share with sources before publication?

A rule of thumb for many newsrooms is to not allow sources to read pieces before publication, and Keefe generally follows that same rule. But the Brettlers were an exception.

Because the material was deeply personal for the family — history, secrets, and inner thoughts — it didn’t feel right to Keefe to have reviewers read the book before they did. So it made sense for him to send three early copies of the book to Zac Brettler’s mom, dad, and brother.

“Those were stressful days for me,” he said.

He felt it was necessary to give an advance copy to the Brettlers to prepare them for the “weird” experience ahead of them. In tandem with being transparent at the beginning, he wanted to be clear about the feeling they might get when they see someone in public reading about their intimate family details.

“I'm a little bit like a vampire, because if you invite me in, I'm going to do what I do,” Keefe said. “There were some things that I think they, in the beginning, never imagined would end up in the book that ended up in the book, because if you set me free in your family history, I'm going to dig around a little bit.”

***

Read more: Nieman Storyboard's Patrick Radden Keefe reading list

***
Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment.

The post Four lessons for journalists from Patrick Radden Keefe’s latest book, ‘London Falling’ appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

There are many ways to tell a true story, and there's never just one path to finding the right idea or characters to bring those stories to life. 

Once a journalist finds that perfect idea, can they build trust with their subjects to make it happen? “A huge part of my job is demonstrating … that I want to understand their story as well as I can, and that I’m willing to take as much time as necessary to do that,” Washington Post reporter Peter Jamison told Nieman Storyboard in 2023.

From the Storyboard archives, here are seven journalists discussing how they found their story ideas and main characters — and how their subjects trusted them to tell those stories with care and empathy: 

1. Showing up for the story: Sarah Schweitzer of the Boston Globe on ‘The life and times of Strider Wolf’ (2016)

Sarah Schweitzer had written stories about young children before, but never as young as five years old. The child, Strider Wolf from New Hampshire, was on the edge of death three years before Schweitzer met him.

When he was two years old, Strider was severely beaten by his mother’s boyfriend, badly tearing his intestines that left a hole in his stomach. He underwent three surgeries in four days and spent three weeks laying in a hospital bed in Maine.

Schweitzer met Wolf when he was staying with his grandparents in Maine, who were between homes and struggling to keep up with the young boy and his even younger brother at their older age. The story is one of triumph over debilitating trauma and unfortunate circumstances.

This is how Schweitzer found the family:

When I’m looking for a story, I’m sort of casting about, so in this instance, court records were one thing I was looking through. I found the New Hampshire Supreme Court opinion rejecting an appeal by Strider’s abuser, his mother’s boyfriend, and I was pretty struck by it. The opinion was lengthy, it was heartbreaking, and I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened since with Strider. I tracked the family down to Oxford, Maine, but I couldn’t find a phone number so I called the local police. The chief told me he was looking for the family, too. It turned out the family had been evicted that week and child welfare workers wanted to make sure Strider and his brother were okay. He said he’d let the family know I was looking for them, and Lanette called me a few days later and agreed to a visit. Looking back, it does feel random, but I find stories often come about from some combination of luck and showing up, and those two things came together here.

2. Building trust with your subject: Christopher Solomon and ‘The Detective of Northern Oddities’ (2017)

Journalist Christopher Solomon learned about veterinary pathologist Kathy Burek while reporting on a story for the Scientific American. He sent her an email, but she never returned the message.

After forgetting about Burek and that email for a few years, Solomon heard her name again when National Geographic reporter Craig Welch had dinner with Burek and other scientists while doing his own story. Solomon knew he wanted to revisit her and her profession: studying aquatic animals after they die.

Solomon’s story starts off with Burek surveying dead otters and showcasing her offbeat and twisted humor. It wasn’t an easy path to get her to open up to him, though. Burek not only failed to follow up on Soloman’s email, but passed up press interviews for years:

It actually took Burek some time to warm up to me. As often happens with scientists, she had had some bad experiences with reporters in the past; as a result, she’d kept a very low profile in the media for years, almost never appearing in the news. She wasn’t keen to have a story done about her. At the same time, and as with many scientists, she wanted people to pay attention to what is going on up there. She had a message to get out. 

A couple of months after they first made contact and they had rapport built, Solomon asked if he could shadow her for a few weeks.

Once I got to know Burek, she turned out to be an amazing person: warm, smart, funny, passionate about her work, quirky and extremely quotable. Basically a writer’s dream. This is often the way it works, isn’t it? Once we knock down the initial barriers between reporter and subject, some fun and meaningful stuff can happen.

3. Following up in the comments: A revealing profile of a family that defied their faith’s edict on home schooling (2023)

Washington Post reporter Peter Jamison wrote a profile on Dan Cox, a lawyer-turned-politician from Maryland leading a movement among Christians toward home school education. Out of the several hundred comments the article received, one stood out to Jamison: someone claiming to have first-hand knowledge of Cox’s home-schooling network.

Jamison reached out to the commenter through the email they used to register with the Post and shortly got a response back from a man named Aaron Beall. He and his wife, Christina, grew up in a home school environment that demonized public education — yet at the time, three of their four children went to public school.

In a two-hour conversation with the parents in a conference room, Jamison learned that the pair were very bright yet did not pursue higher educational opportunities because of their upbringing. Seemingly, they did not want the same for their children.

Here’s what Jamison said about that initial connection with the Bealls:

A huge part of my job is demonstrating to people like Aaron and Christina that I want to understand their story as well as I can and that I’m willing to take as much time as necessary to do that. I like to think that by putting in the work — showing up for those early mornings when school starts, or nights when there are family events on campus; attending a child’s musical on the weekend; sitting and talking for as long as they are willing to talk — I’m “anteing up,” so to speak, showing that I’m committed to the process.

4. ‘Always looking for ideas’: Chris Jones and ‘The Things That Carried Him’ (2015)

Chris Jones said he felt “beyond driven” to write longer stories with complex themes five years into his career with Esquire. That drive led to him to write the longest piece of his career — a 17,000-word story about a soldier who died while serving in Iraq in 2007. 

It started out with reading around different publications, with Jones specifically reading a story from CNN about life at an operating base in Baghdad. One scene about a dead soldier being carried back to the base stood out to him. Then it led to a question: How does a soldier’s body actually get back home?

I’m always looking for ideas, and part of being a magazine writer is constantly looking for stories. And you know, the ideas are often the hardest part. You give a great writer a bad idea, and they’re not going to do anything with it. And you give a good idea to a mediocre writer, and they’re still going to come up with a pretty good story. The idea is so essential.

The story further required permissions from the family of the person he wanted to write about, and from the U.S. military. He felt like it would be difficult to get those two yeses, especially with the military. As it turned out, “like the pitch, it was an incredibly simple process.”

5. Finding the extraordinary: Jesse Katz goes ‘Inside the San Quentin Marathon’ (2016)

Jesse Katz said he felt like a fish out of water when he first started covering crime for the Los Angeles Times in the ’90s. He said the beat made him “develop a lot of skills and tactics, but also a lot of empathy and awareness.”

That came in handy during a visit to California’s oldest prison, San Quentin, some 20 years later. He visited the prison for another story but also learned that the prisoners hold a marathon race once a year. They made a course throughout the facility’s confined space, requiring 105 laps to make 26.2 miles.

I was quite taken by the vibe of the place, the medieval atmospherics there and the juxtaposition of this moldering castle right on this high-end, top-dollar, bayfront property. My eyes opened to San Quentin at that point. Then, when I heard they did a marathon there, it kind of blew my mind. There’s just something about the tension of trying to create distance in a place that is so confined.

While Katz talked to the prisoners and the guards, he regarded the San Quentin marathon course as its own character:

I was really intrigued with the course itself. I was very determined to document each twist and turn and explain the terrain that it navigated. I felt like the course was kind of central to everything — to the tension between freedom and confinement. Without that confinement, there was no zany course, and without the zany course, there was a lot less of a story.

6. Waiting for the right time: Eli Saslow and one Newtown family (2013)

For the Washington Post, Eli Saslow went to Newtown, Conn., shortly after the devastating Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in 2012. He wrote three daily stories in his time there, and most of the parents, understandably, did not want to engage.

Saslow spoke with his Post editor weeks after gun control legislation failed to pass in Congress. They wanted to write about a family advocating for something to change, and how attempts to try have not come to fruition. The timing was ideal, with the shooting still felt around the community but “enough time had passed that you could begin to see it fading in these small and brutal ways.”

Saslow spent days watching TV interviews of the families affected by the tragedy. He particularly took note of a “60 Minutes” program talking with 10 parents. He wanted to find someone active in gun legislation and with other children. After reaching out to a few people, he eventually landed on the Bardens, whose 7-year-old son Daniel died in Sandy Hook:

I explained what I wanted to do. I think it is always best to be pretty upfront about what you are asking for — the amount of time you want to be with them, the kind of story you are hoping to do, etc. They took a little while to think about it. They asked me to send them some other stories I had written. They talked with a PR person who had been advising the families, and then the PR person talked to me. Probably about a week after I called, they said they were up for it, and I flew to Newtown a few days later. Then, in terms of gaining access into their lives, it was mostly a matter of sticking around. I spent probably 12 or 14 hours with them each day when I was there. I sat next to them on the train to Delaware. I went to eat with them. I was there when they woke up in the morning. I stayed at a hotel nearby but spent almost all of my time at their house. Sometimes I was asking questions, but much of the time I was just there, trying my best to fade into their days.

7. Profiling people close to you: A reporter explores the laws and emotional impact of helping her father die (2022)

Esmé E. Deprez took her narrative storytelling skills at Bloomberg Businessweek and applied it to a subject she never thought she would explore: her father, Ron, and his final years battling ALS.

Her 5,000-word profile grappled with not only the relationship with her father while his health declined, but also about the state of medical aid in dying in the United States. In his state of Maine, Ron was one of the first people to take a life-ending drug, only available to those of sound mind with less than six months to live.

She saw the opportunity to write about her father as a way to memorialize him, and a conversation with a senior editor at Bloomberg to follow her along this reporting journey solidified it for her.

Interestingly, she didn’t tell her father that she would be writing this story — and it tore her up inside. She was afraid he would be angry, partly because he kept the severity of his condition away from most people he knew. But she said this after reflecting more:

Ultimately I convinced myself that a bigger part of him would be proud of me — proud that I confronted his death and my grief about it in a very head-on way. I also thought about how he was a policy guy at heart, having devoted his life and career as a public health epidemiologist and consultant to developing and advancing health reforms in his backyard of rural Maine and as far away as West Africa. I think he’d be happy that his story could illuminate the real-world impact of a government policy of growing significance and help shape the way people see and feel about it.

***
Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment.

The post Getting the story: How 7 writers found their idea and main characters appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

A journalist can ask their subject hundreds of questions and get a great chunk of the story. But it’s when the reporter listens in on an unprompted conversation — whether it’s with a friend or a stranger, small talk or a heavy heart-to-heart — that’s when the subject can reveal themselves in new ways unknown to the reporter.

People engage in dialogue with one another every day. Dialogue is in the books we pick off our shelves that reveal a character’s personality and flaws. The same can be said for countless narrative works, and are extremely effective when getting to know the subject.

From the Nieman Storyboard annotation archives, here are five pieces that use dialogue in a variety of ways, and what its authors say about it: 

1. Catching a natural conversation at the scene: Jeanne Marie Laskas and ‘Guns ’R Us’ (2015)

Jeanne Marie Laskas, a correspondent for GQ, was thinking about the shooting in Tucson, Ariz., that critically injured U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords and killed six others, and she wondered who decides to sell or not to sell guns to certain people. Her editor encouraged her to get behind the counter of a gun store.

Laskas did just that, starting with simple exchanges between clerk and customer, then leading into the bigger issue of gun violence in America.

Laskas starts out with this dialogue between two young men and a woman with a sparkly purse, looking at AK-47s in an Arizona gun shop:

"You have to admit this is pretty badass," the one man was saying. He had a carbine shorty perched on his hip, Stallone-style.

"I don't know," the woman said. "To me, it looks mean."

"It's supposed to look mean."

"They should make it in pink," she said. "Wouldn't that be cute?"

"You're shitting me."

"They should make it in Hello Kitty!" she said. "I would totally buy it if it was Hello Kitty."

"Sweet holy crap," the other man said. "That would be the worst possible death. Can you imagine? Shot dead by a Hello Kitty semiauto."

Here’s why Laskas wanted to start with this conversation:

It is just a glimpse of a moment. I’m writing about a shopping experience, and here is a glimpse of the shopper. Probably 15 of them happened, but here is a funny one. The idea would be to provide a quick moment. It’s not loaded, to use a pun here, but I don’t have a point. This is not a polemic. Almost trying to show that.

2. A ‘fly on the wall’ approach: Susan Orlean and the American man, age 10 (2014)

Susan Orlean believed that profiling the average person was more interesting than profiling a celebrity. Taking that thought, the New Yorker staff writer set out to follow a not-at-all famous 10-year-old boy for Esquire.

She followed Colin Duffy at school, at play dates, and at family dinners, again and again and again. The experiences Orlean had with him and the commentary she gives in the story give the reader a thorough glimpse into the life and mindset of a young boy.

A perfect example is this moment between Colin and his best friend Japeth:

The girls in Colin's class at school are named Cortnerd, Terror, Spacey, Lizard, Maggot, and Diarrhea. "They do have other names, but that's what we call them," Colin told me. "The girls aren't very popular."

"They are about as popular as a piece of dirt," Japeth said. "Or, you know that couch in the classroom? That couch is more popular than any girl. A thousand times more." They talked for a minute about one of the girls in their class, a tall blonde with cheerleader genetic material, who they allowed was not quite as gross as some of the other girls. Japeth said that a chubby, awkward boy in their class was boasting that this girl liked him. "No way," Colin said. "She would never like him. I mean, not that he's so ... I don't know. I don't hate him because he's fat, anyway. I hate him because he's nasty."

"Well, she doesn't like him," Japeth said. "She's been really mean to me lately, so I'm pretty sure she likes me."

"Girls are different," Colin said. He hopped up and down on the balls of his feet, wrinkling his nose. "Girls are stupid and weird."

"I have a lot of girlfriends, about six or so," Japeth said, turning contemplative. "I don't exactly remember their names, though."

Orlean said she does not tend to record conversations, so here’s how she got it:

I scribbled madly. They chattered to each other enough that I could catch up with my notes while they tracked off onto something less interesting. I definitely paid the price for not using a tape recorder, but I was with them for so much time that the tapes would have been ridiculously long, and I would argue that a tape recorder would have made them more self-conscious. Somehow, a pad and pen just doesn't intrude the way an electronic gizmo does. I also know I listen more attentively when I'm the one and only recording device, and at the end of the day, that's the single most important thing I can do. If I'm not really engaged and paying attention, it's not going to work. If I don't get every line of dialogue, I'll manage with what I have. If I haven't really paid attention, I can't write a good piece.

3. The use of both external and internal dialogue: How film class led to fighting wildfires which led to finding a home which led to a memoir (2015)

Sarah Berns went to study film at Wesleyan University, but when she wanted to make her senior thesis film, she had to get money fast. Always enamored with the West, she went to Washington state to be a smokejumper, a firefighter who parachutes from planes onto remote fires.

She ended up writing about her experience for Outside magazine in her piece “Finding Home in the West — by Smokejumping,” largely centered on how she fought to prove herself as an equal in a field dominated by men.

Here is a piece of dialogue that’s external as well as internal, detailing how her axe cut her leg after fighting a fire in Oregon:

I looked down at my now-red leather boot and wondered: retardant or blood? I yanked the ax from my leather boot and felt an enormous volume of liquid rushing out: definitely blood.

I hobbled off the fire and hiked to the nearest road (which wasn’t near) to catch a ride into the town of John Day and argue with a nurse.

“No, you cannot cut off my boot.”

I explained that it would take weeks to break in another boot. But what I was really thinking was: I’m not going to let this accident take me out of my own competition.

The nurse and I had reached a stalemate when the rappel base manager arrived. I was mortified to see him. I am not that weak, clumsy girl. Not me, not today. I turned to him.

“Will you pull off my boot?”

Berns explains why she chose to include internal dialogue, a device she uses throughout the piece: 

I am constantly rehashing events and conversation in my own head, so writing this way feels totally natural to me. The internal dialogue is my true voice – it’s the way I talk, negotiate and process with myself. My inner voice is often at odds with what I’m doing physically or saying aloud. This is the way I navigate the world.

4. Using dialogue as a literary tool: Navigating ethics, culture and safety to immerse in immigration and Covid (2020)

Immigration reporter Hannah Dreier has reported on violence in many countries in the past. But her coverage of a woman from Colombia living in a shared home in New Jersey while her tourist visa expired was “by far the most anxious reporting experience I’ve ever had.”

For The Washington Post, Dreier went to New Jersey to meet Tatiana Angulo and cover her story in the 24 hours before her visa expired — during the first month of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dreier documents a conversation between Angulo and her friend Yesenia Sarria while they collected white rocks on the waterfront and confided in each other:

Tatiana wondered aloud if she would have been better off returning to Colombia, where at least she could visit her children, prompting Yesenia to reassure her that she was doing the right thing by staying. Yesenia reminded her how amazed she’d been when Tatiana managed to get a visa.

“That’s not an easy thing, to get to the U.S.,” Yesenia said. “You have to try, because you’ve been given everything. Everyone in Colombia wants the American Dream.”

They looked up and down the empty beach. Tatiana remembered how scared she had been when she first came.

“People always said there was lots of drug addiction here,” she said. 

 “And crazy people, like in the movies,” Yesenia said.

“But then you get here and it’s just normal. Beautiful,” Tatiana said.

Dreier said this when asked about her dialogue choices:

I liked that the friend was talking about the American Dream, because it would have felt too cheesy to insert that phrase into the story in my own words, but felt OK coming up organically in this conversation between two immigrants. [Post editor David] Finkel once told me that the most affecting parts of quotations are often the throwaway words people put at the beginning and end of sentences, so I was listening for that, too. Like the “beautiful” at the end of this one.

5. Including the reporter in the dialogue: Embedded war reporting with courage and common sense (2023)

Luke Mogelson has covered wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and, more recently, Ukraine. He has reported on the war from infantry units and combat zones, and stressed how important it is for him to see the war firsthand and through the lens of its most critical players.

In his story for the The New Yorker, he chronicled the war through the eyes of a team of soldiers.

Mogelson introduces one of the main characters, 37-year-old “Doc” from the United States, in a scene where they were at an outdoor restaurant in Kyiv. He includes this brief moment:

Toward the end of our meal, an older man in a leather fedora approached our table. “International Legion?” he asked, in accented English. I pointed at Doc; the man extended his hand and told him, “I just wanted to say thank you.”

Doc scrutinized his glass, embarrassed. After the man left, I remarked that such recognition must feel good. “It feels weird,” Doc replied.

Mogelson inserted himself in this exchange, and here’s why he thought it was necessary:

It’s much better if characters talk with one another than if they talk to the journalist. Of course, that’s not always possible, and in this case, because we were alone, I had to nudge Doc to get him to articulate what he was feeling. So, yes, I said, “That must feel good.” By not quoting myself, I hoped to emphasize Doc’s words rather than mine. For whatever reason, putting words in quotes makes the person who spoke them a more specific identity, and I don’t want to be that in the text — I want to be a cipher or a foil.

***
Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment.

The post The art of dialogue: 5 conversations from great narrative stories appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Characters are at the center of every story you read. Whether it’s a romance novel or a history book, the reader takes the journey alongside a character they find deeply relatable, completely deplorable, or somewhere in between.

A well-crafted character is complex and multi-faceted. They have gone through unique experiences or have a strong voice that makes you want to learn more about them. For journalists, finding those characters is one thing, but presenting them to an audience is another.

From the Nieman Storyboard annotation archives, here are six journalists sharing how they introduced the characters from some of their most acclaimed pieces: 

1. The main character, in their element: Michael J. Mooney and ‘The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever’ (2015)

Mooney was having a conversation with his editor at D Magazine, who slightly misremembered a story from the local paper about a bowler who almost had a perfect score. The story stuck with Mooney for a while until he called the bowling alley and found Bill Fong.

Fong's goal was to score a perfect series: three consecutive perfect games, 900 points. Mooney took readers through the night of the game that brought Fong so close to his goal. Mooney had watched him bowl more than 100 times, and he believed the best way to start the story would be simply describing how Fong felt while preparing to bowl: 

When Bill Fong approaches the lane, 15-pound bowling ball in hand, he tries not to breathe. He tries not to think about not breathing. He wants his body to perform a series of complex movements that his muscles themselves have memorized. In short, he wants to become a robot.

Here’s how Mooney described his opening:

On a really, really basic level, the entire story is about him throwing a bowling ball. So why not start with the way he throws a bowling ball? … It felt like it was kind of part of his personality. That’s the way we’re going to help build this, help people understand this character — by looking at the way he does the thing he loves doing.

2. Reliving a moment of heartbreak and desperation: ESPN's Sarah Spain and ‘Runs in the Family’ (2018)

Spain chronicled the story of football star Deland McCullough and his mentor, Sherman Smith. McCullough, who was adopted as a baby, never knew either of his biological parents until he started digging and found a truth too stunning to believe.

Spain's story doesn't open with Sherman meeting McCullough — which happened when he was in high school — or even when McCullough found his calling in football. Instead, Spain takes the reader back to when McCullough was born, in a moment described by his biological mother: 

Carol Briggs placed her newborn son on the bed and removed all of his clothes. She tried to find herself in his face, searching his mouth, his nose, his eyes. "Not yet," she thought. She saw only his father. She looked him up and down, making a mental note of each of his 10 tiny toes, chubby legs, puffy belly and two little arms reaching up at her. "In my mind," Briggs says, "that was probably going to be the last time I ever saw him."

Spain didn’t expect the story to start the way it did, but this is how she explained her choice:

When I was talking to Carol … that line stood out to me because it was going to be the last time she was going to see her baby. What really helped guide me (in writing the piece) is that it is mostly chronological; that’s the way you let the story tell itself. You meet the baby and this mother, then you meet who the baby became all these years later. Then we shift back to telling the story in order again. I thought that was really effective because you got to where the story is going to lead and then you have to fill in the pieces the same way Deland did.

3. The main character, at work and at home: Jose A. Del Real on ‘A Mother's Charge’ (2022) 

For a Washington Post series called “Masculinity in America,” Del Real found his main character at a restaurant in Wyoming. In “A Mother's Charge,” we meet a 23-year-old server named Sarah, who is a single mother of a 5-year-old boy and struggling with questions about how to raise him right.

She had abusive partners in the past, including the father of her child. She told Del Real that she wished there was a story out there sharing what mothers of young boys have to go through in the age of toxic masculinity.

Del Real opens the story at the restaurant where he first met her: 

The waitress knows to be chatty and cheerful. She makes $3 per hour and lives on tips, so she smiles as she walks through the restaurant, especially at the men, who seem to expect it most. Her hair is long and curly; her clothes are tight. A lip ring and several tattoos hint at some irreverence but mostly they draw attention to her age, 23 years old.

She introduces herself by her first name, Sarah, and for all anyone here knows or cares, these facts mark the beginning and the end of her story.

But at home, after she puts her 5-year-old son to sleep, she sometimes starts to cry and can’t stop. She cries because the man she was building a life with betrayed her trust and abused her body. Because she should have left him but she stayed. Because of all that happened next.

Del Real explained why he opened the story this way:

I made a few quick judgments here. I wanted to start the piece in March and end it in June, to give the narrative space to unfold in a longer arc. I knew that Sarah’s abrupt decision to quit her waitress job and leave the ranch would be a pivotal moment in this story, even before I sat down to write. And lastly, the vulnerabilities and compromises inherent to tipped service work overlap nicely with the broader themes in the piece … Starting at the restaurant was a way to set up a lot of those tensions right away. I also really liked the idea of readers first meeting Sarah there, which was where I first met her.

4. Finding the story in moments of silence: Samantha Schmidt on a transgender teen who is denied her full identity (2021)

Also for the Post, Samantha Schmidt set out to profile a transgender teen during a time when transgender rights were — and still are — under attack. 

The physical restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic made reporting difficult. Schmidt was worried that she couldn’t capture the story she was imagining because she wasn’t able to witness scenes with Chloe Clark in person. In the Zoom classes Schmidt attended with Clark, very little dialogue took place, another worry of hers. 

But Schmidt found that “the silence was the story.” She worked around it by getting in Clark’s head as much as possible, and building off the opening scene where Clark sits in a personal finance Zoom class to do a presentation.

Schmidt wrote that Clark dreaded times where she would “have to listen to the part of herself that bothered her most, the part that still didn’t match how the transgender girl felt inside.”

Chloe Clark lay in her bed, wrapped in a blanket, as she logged in to the virtual personal finance class on her laptop.

The 15-year-old watched as each of her high school classmates joined the class, their names popping onto the Microsoft Teams screen one by one while the teacher took attendance. As always, the students’ cameras were all turned off, and once again, Chloe was reduced to the name on her screen — and the sound of her voice.

The teenage girl remained muted.

Schmidt told Storyboard: 

When I reconnected with Chloe’s mother after many months, it was one of the first things that came up as we talked about the challenges of remote learning for Chloe. I remember mentioning it to my editor [Lynda Robinson] in a phone call, and I knew Chloe’s voice was going to be an important aspect of the piece. But a few days later Lynda called me and suggested the idea of building the story around it. I was immediately drawn to the narrow simplicity of it, but also the symbolism it carried. It really captured the way so many trans kids have lacked a voice in these political debates about their bodies and their decisions.

5. Revealing character in small moments: Elizabeth Weil on the man accused in the Ghost Ship warehouse fire (2019)

Elizabeth Weil was a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine when she pitched the idea of profiling Max Harris, one of two men on trial for the 2016 fire that tore through the Ghost Ship, an abandoned warehouse-turned-artist collective in Oakland, Calif. Thirty-six people died. (Harris was later acquitted.)

Weil visited Harris in jail 10 to 12 times, going without a pen and paper the first few times. She wanted Harris to feel comfortable sharing small details about different events. One such event was the first scene in the story, when Harris described picking up bugs around the courtyard: 

Once a week, Max Harris is allowed to leave his 6-by-12-foot cell to go outside. The first thing he does, before the other inmates arrive in the small cement yard in Santa Rita Jail, is run around and yell, “Safari!” as he picks up all the bugs — the furry moths with leopard spots, the grasshoppers in jade armor. He wants to move them out of harm’s way before other men in red-and-white-striped jumpsuits start playing basketball. Sometimes he’ll find a honey bee in distress, lost and spinning in a circle, and he’ll give it a little water, or water mixed with apple jelly, if he can find a half-eaten packet. “It nourishes it,” he says. Or, he’ll see a moth with cobweb stuck on its antenna, and he’ll calmly, lovingly remove it. Each life is precious. Each life is beautiful. Harris, a vegetarian since age 14, believes this to his core. To Harris, even a fruit fly pirouetting in his cell is a miracle. “It’s like a dog,” he told me. “A little Labrador or something. It’s different, but it’s still this little shard of life. It’s still this spark of divinity in this moving work of art.”

Weil captured details as small as what Harris named the spider he found — but that she hadn’t asked about it the first time: 

I often have a laundry list of specific details I fish for near the end: What were you wearing? What was the room like? At the start of reporting, you can’t know what scenes you’re going to use, so you can’t ask everything. But once a piece is near closing, you know exactly what material you’re using so (to me, at least) it makes sense to go back.

6. From the character's POV: Thomas Curwen on a surgeon racing to save a life during ‘L.A.'s shooting season’ (2017)

Thomas Curwen worked for the Los Angeles Times for more than four decades, reporting and writing many award-winning stories, from covering a bear attack in Montana (for which he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist), to following eight residents of a homeless encampment. 

In 2013, he noticed the increasing number of front-page stories about gun violence and how many of them focused on the shooter and their victims. He sought out a different angle, following a trauma surgeon through an operation on a teenager.

The story opens with this scene: 

From the entry wound — the size of a nickel — Dr. Brant Putnam guesses that the bullet is a .45, but it's what he can't see that worries him most.

The boy, a teenager most likely, lies naked on Bed 2 in a trauma bay at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. His brown skin, slick with sweat, is ashen.

"What's your name?" a resident asks as half a dozen doctors and nurses circle him.

The boy can't answer.

The reader is already inside of the doctor’s head without meeting him. This is what Curwen said of his choice:

I am [a] great advocate for telling a story as close to the point of view of the protagonist as possible. This story is Dr. Putnam’s story, and I wanted to establish [that] from the very beginning. All that we’re seeing and experiencing comes from his perspective. Technically, this makes attributions more invisible and creates a more immediate, less intrusive reading experience.

***
Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment.

The post Meet the main characters: How six writers introduce their subjects to the reader appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

A writer has a great idea they want to explore. They’ve done the research, the interviews, and possibly some writing. But what about the vivid scenes that readers remember the most?

Scenes are essential for any great narrative. Seasoned writers have different methods of how to report and write them — but all of them involve careful planning, presence, interviewing, and detail-gathering.

From the Nieman Storyboard archives, here are eight acclaimed journalists sharing their techniques on reporting and writing their most memorable scenes.

Reporting and writing scenes: The foundational building block of stories (Lauren Kessler)

In the second installment of a four-part series on narrative, Lauren Kessler — author of 15 books and educator at the University of Washington — delves into her 2007 piece for the Los Angeles Times, “The End in Two Acts.” She recounts using three different methods to report scenes from the lives of two terminally ill men.

Whether it's witnessing a moment directly, or meticulously asking the right questions to recreate a scene, a journalist needs to have every detail at their disposal, even when it isn’t all used. Kessler elaborates:

“Scenes are most often a mix of description (describing the setting, the character or characters), narration (the telling of what happens) and exposition (explaining what might be necessary to help readers understand). The trick — and of course, it is not a trick — is to choose and use just what is needed to paint a picture and pull readers into the moment. Too little and the picture is fuzzy or incomplete or, worse, confusing. Too much and the reader is overwhelmed, not knowing where to look, what to pay attention to or, worse, bored.”

The art of the narrative interview: Filling in scenic details (Kim Cross)

Kim Cross, a New York Times bestselling author, Nieman Storyboard contributor, and editor-at-large for the Sunday Long Read, is obsessed with story structure and cinematic scenes. One way she gets them is through in-depth interviews.

Interviewing for scene comes near the end of her process. She explains:

“At this phase of the process, the questions get very granular. I start interrupting and saying, Wait. Let’s back up. Do you mean…? As the character is speaking, I’m constantly pressing for more specificity. More detail. The more concrete the detail, the more crisp the image in the reader’s mind.”

Cross wants to get into the mind of her subject and try to see what they see in a certain moment. She wants their internal dialogue. She coaxes out strong details. She asks them to provide photos or draw something from memory. She wants to see a scene just as vividly as her subject did.

‘Life is too short to write something boring.’ A conversation with Los Angeles native and magazine journalist Mary Melton

Mary Melton is an award-winning writer and editor who in 2009 profiled famed architecture photographer Julius Shulman for Los Angeles magazine. She took a unique approach chronicling Shulman in 36 exposures, or snapshots — an ode to the subject’s illustrious photography career.

Melton shares how she organized this story and other longform stories she wrote:

“For larger pieces I strictly abide by the index-card method. After I’m done reporting I start jotting down every scene I’ve got, every description I have, every person I’ve interviewed, every point I want to make, onto a series of cards and lay them out on the floor. Which pieces support one another? What’s the right rhythm of long and short? How does the puzzle fit together? I move them around a lot during the planning process until they feel right and then go at the writing. It makes it so much more manageable. So it’s not an outline, per se, but a moveable feast of vignettes that together need to make a meal.”

Reporting Differently: How to come back with a notebook full of narrative (Mark Kramer)

Mark Kramer — co-editor of the Nieman Foundation book, “Telling True Stories” — gave advice in his 2005 piece on how to craft a compelling narrative, from idea to final draft. He focuses on “sensory reporting” to make the scene come to life:

“Sight, sound, smell, touch and taste will, if you record details of these things, allow you to set strong scenes. The biggest basic mistake that beginning narrative writers, and even fairly accomplished writers, make is setting scenes too casually. You have to set a scene so the reader gets a feeling of volume, space, dimension and has sensory experience there. You don’t need to report on measurements and details in the detail that would be required if you were writing for Scene Diorama magazine. Nobody is interested in building a diorama of the scenes, but everybody wants to know what it feels like to be there.”

Six writing tips for crafting scenes (Laurie Hertzel)

Former Minnesota Star Tribune book editor Laurie Hertzel compiled snippets from several narratives to illustrate a well-crafted scene. But she noted that, while we can “write with a camera angle,” journalists have something in their toolbox that TV and movie directors don’t: summary. 

“It’s useful to know the structural difference, so you can decide if something is worthy of a scene or if it can be dispatched in summary. A shorthand way to look at the difference between scene and summary is to think of the difference between ‘showing’ and ‘telling.’ You tell in summary. You show in scene.”

Summaries are shorter than scenes but can be effective to tell the reader background information that they need to know but don’t need to read about in detail. Hertzel cautioned narrative writers to look over their work to see if their stories are primarily summary or scene. It’s good to have a mix of both.

“Your job is to figure out when to use one device and when to use the other. In narrative, you’ll work primarily in scene. But you still have to be judicious. One thing I tell writers is, ‘Think of stepping stones rather than a sidewalk. The reader will follow you. You don’t have to show them every step of the way.’”

Jon Franklin and ‘Mrs. Kelly’s Monster’

In this conversation and annotation, Jon Franklin tells Paige Williams how he reported and wrote his 1978 narrative for the Baltimore Evening Sun, about a brain surgeon's operation on a 57-year-old woman with an aneurysm. The story won the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, and Franklin authored one of the essential books on narrative, “Writing for Story.” 

Franklin only spent about 40 minutes with the woman, who described the aneurysm as a  “monster.” It becomes its own character in the story. Here’s what Franklin said about that choice:

“Anthropomorphizing things—we do it. It’s a human trait. It’s not necessarily a super idea, but we believe in agencies. If there’s a lightning bolt, somebody must have thrown it, which is where you get Thor. When a tree falls, the tree god knocked it down. It’s very deep in our mind … The fact is, we take life personally. You might as well not deny it. And when you deny it, I think we get a skewed picture of what the world was like. And in that respect journalism is guilty as charged—the definition of news is what happens in front of the reporter.”

Reporting and writing historical narrative: Author Adam Hochschild on accessible prose, scene/setting, character, and plot 

What if you weren’t at the place of a scene you want to include in your story — or weren’t even born before it happened? Adam Hochschild gives an example of how he was able to reconstruct scenes from the antislavery movement that occurred more than 250 years ago, in his 2005 book, “Bury the Chains.”

Specifically, he talks about the formation of the first antislavery committee in London on May 22, 1787, which happened in a Quaker bookstore and printing shop in a small courtyard called George Yard. He wanted to “evoke this moment, time and place, and trying to describe what the scene was like.” Here’s what he did:

“We know what happened at the meeting, because we have minutes that were taken, but we don’t have a description of the scene. However, there are building blocks that you can use to put together a scene like that. I spent a lot of time scanning newspapers of the time. I began to see advertisements for other businesses in George Yard. There was a pub there. I saw an ad from a fellow who gave dancing and fencing lessons. These were some of the things that took place right in this little courtyard where the printing shop was. I could not find a description of this particular printing shop, but there is a vast amount of material on what 18th-century British printing shops looked like – and also a great many paintings and drawings. I spent some time studying books on the history of printing.”

A writer’s essay: Seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary (Walt Harrington) 

Walt Harrington, the beloved writing coach and former reporter for The Washington Post Magazine, offers advice on gathering dialogue, embedding yourself in the subject’s life, and recording the “interior monologue” of the subject to best describe how they feel in certain moments.

At the heart of any scene or reporting, Harrington reminds us of the ultimate goal:

“Always being aware that no matter how artful our stories may be, how specific they are to the lives of our subjects, they are primarily meant to enlighten, caution, criticize or inspire, and always resonate, in the lives of readers. The eternal verities of love, hate, fear, ambition, dedication, compassion are still our bread and butter. Always remember: Scene, detail and narrative bring a story to life, while theme and meaning imbue it with a soul.”

***
Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment.

The post From index cards to interviews: Eight journalists on reporting and writing scenes appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Line Vaaben was recruited to the Denmark-based news outlet Politiken in 2021 to carve out a first-of-its-kind position. With no name for it, Vaaben created a title that perfectly encapsulated the storytelling she wished to produce: existential editor.

She and a team of four reporters and an intern formed the existential desk to tell stories about humans, for humans. “It’s a real privilege to be able to go out into the world with curiosity and get to ask questions to other human beings and find out what it’s all about,” Vaaben said. 

Vaaben, a 2025 Nieman Fellow and Storyboard contributor, spoke at this year’s Power of Narrative conference at Boston University about the types of stories Politiken’s existential desk produces. I followed up with her afterward to discuss one of Vaaben’s stories from 2024, about patients in a palliative care unit: “There is a moment of silence. Then he whispers: ‘Remember to say goodbye to everyone.’”

Vaaben highlighted six themes the existential desk looks for in its stories:

• Stages of life: These represent the common, pivotal experiences millions of people go through, such as menopause, divorce, aging, and death. Vaaben highlighted a story about a man who suffered from a chronic pulmonary disease and wished to go through self-assisted suicide — a practice that is illegal in Denmark.
• Relationships: This tackles romantic, parental, and social relationships and the tensions within those dynamics. An existential reporter who explored the theme of love wrote about age-gap relationships, heartbreak, and finding love later in life.
• Experiences: Vaaben said following people through experiences like life-changing events, burnout and emotional fatigue, and extraordinary longevity can bring out the most humanity in their stories.
• Abstract concepts: These stories have included topics such as femicide, fear of war, and the loneliness epidemic. In particular, Vaaben pointed to a summer series Politiken published about family secrets, in which people submitted stories about things they keep concealed from their loved ones. Vaaben also highlighted an article she wrote that followed a pig from its birth to its slaughter — and then to her Christmas dinner table.
• Historical perspectives: These stories look back at long-ago events and anchor them to something in the present day. Examples include interviews with the families of fallen soldiers and women who had abortions in the 1950s and '60s when the procedure was legalized in Denmark. Vaaben also revisited a tragic Gothenburg fire and spoke with the same sources she talked to 25 years earlier.
• Revisiting stories: Vaaben emphasized the importance of revisiting stories, to make space for reflection on the past and also allow reporters to reconnect with their subjects. One example that fits this theme is Politiken’s coverage of nurses experiencing long COVID. 

Vaaben said her desk’s success comes from blending narrative storytelling, human interest, and newsworthiness. In her 2024 story for Politiken, Vaaben and photographer Jacob Ehrbahn spent 10 days at a palliative care unit that treats terminally ill patients, focusing on the lives of three people: René, Niels, and Liv.

Here's how the story opens:

René Damgaard, 67 years old, lies in a hospital bed in the Palliative Care Unit at Hvidovre Hospital. It’s the first evening of May, and the window is open, letting mild air and the sound of a blackbird singing into room 14.

“This is the kind of weather you love the most. When you usually stand and fish at the sandbank,” says his niece, 53-year-old Mette Damgaard. She is leaning over the bed, her face very close to his. She has been sitting like this for a long time. 

René Damgaard has his eyes closed, and his mouth is slightly open. The evening light falls across his gaunt face, and he looks as though he is sleeping. He is not, but he is dying.

“I will take care of you,” Mette whispers.

He nods. She strokes his hand and squeezes it.

“You can let go now, René.”

There is a moment of silence. Then he whispers:

“Remember to say goodbye to everyone from me.”

“I will, René. I promise.”

Vaaben told me how she reported and wrote the story. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

How long did you spend with each of the three patients highlighted in the story? What did your first interactions with them look like?

The first couple of days in the unit, we were just trailing the doctors and nurses during their morning rounds. They were our icebreakers, simply asking — when entering — whether it was OK to bring us along. Gradually, they got to know us, and we started slipping in on our own.

René, Niels, and Liv were all open to having us around, but it took a lot of time to get close. In the beginning, I didn’t ask many questions. I just spent time in the room listening and observing. People who are dying are often very tired and spend much of their time sleeping. So, the pace was incredibly slow, and I just had to be very patient.

Over the course of two weeks, I think I spent a couple of days with each patient in total — though it’s hard to say, since we were there all the time — from early morning until late at night. And on a couple of occasions, we were on call, and rushed back at 2 a.m. because someone was dying. It depended on whether the patients were sleeping, had visitors, or were interacting with doctors and nurses.

We were respectful of their privacy, but the better we got to know them, the more natural it became to spend time in their rooms without any obvious reason. But it was very valuable to me, since I got to witness small, intimate moments — because they almost forgot I was there.

The progression of René’s time at the hospital and the details of his life grabbed me throughout the entire piece. Why did you choose to focus on him for most of the story?

Obviously, we gathered a lot of stories and scenes and met many patients and families who never made it into the published version. Choosing was the hardest part when I sat down to write. But I knew already while I was reporting that René was an obvious choice for the main character.
Not only because we witnessed his entire path in the unit — from his arrival to [his death] — but also because he was very open to having us around. And his niece, Mette, was an incredible person who immediately understood the importance of the story.

When he died and the doctor paid his respects and everyone was crying, I remember thinking: This doesn’t feel like work. I felt like I was bearing witness to an important human experience. I truly felt lucky and honored.

Throughout this piece — and in your other work as well — you include dialogue during highly emotional scenes. How do you achieve being “a fly on the wall” in these moments?

I think it’s very important to think of reporting and interviewing as two separate tools if possible. When I report, I just tag along with my notebook. I don’t ask questions unless it’s strictly necessary. Then, later, I do interviews and ask all the things I’m curious about.

Becoming invisible is something I’ve cultivated for years. In this case, I spent most of those weeks sitting on the floor, hunched over my notebook. Whenever I entered the rooms and had introduced myself, I would settle on the floor with my back to the wall in a corner and just register the smells, the sounds, the light — and of course dialogue and actions. Very quickly, people seemed to forget I was there.

I then did interviews during quiet moments — like when patients were sleeping, I would talk to doctors and families. And I often interviewed the patients while they were having dinner.

How did you gain access to this unit? Were patients aware beforehand that you would be reporting?

It took a long time — many months from when I first approached the hospital until we were allowed to begin reporting. We had numerous meetings with the people in charge. We even visited once just to say hello to the staff and get a tour, without taking notes or photos.

But once everything was settled, it was surprisingly easy, mainly thanks to the staff, who introduced us to the patients by saying: “We have visitors from Politiken writing a story about the unit. Would you mind if they came in and listened to our conversation?”

Obviously some patients said no. But many welcomed us, and then everyone — staff, patients, and families — had to sign a consent form to participate. Not immediately, but before we left the unit. I’d never had to do that before, but I was grateful later, when some of them passed away, knowing that the legal aspects were covered.

We also followed up thoroughly with families before publishing — almost three months after reporting — so they knew when and where their loved ones would appear in print and online.

Since the topic of assisted dying is so controversial in Denmark, how was the piece initially received by readers?

Out of nearly 21,000 articles published on our website last year, this one had the longest average reading time: 5 minutes and 10 seconds. That’s remarkable compared to the 43 seconds people typically spend on an article on our site.

The story was also widely shared, and I received many emails from readers — both those who support and those who oppose assisted dying, as well as from healthcare professionals who appreciated how we portrayed their work.

I think it struck a chord in the public debate, where many people want the right to die because they fear those last weeks and days. The article helped de-mystify the experience, without glorifying it.

Has there been any other legislation related to assisted dying since it was published?

In January 2025, the Committee for a More Dignified Death, appointed by the government, recommended that terminally ill patients with limited time remaining be given the option to end their lives using medication prescribed by a physician.

Now, the Secretary of Health and the government must decide whether to propose a bill. This might happen in the coming fall — and we’ll be covering it, of course.

***

Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment. She graduated from Boston University in 2025 with a degree in Journalism and Business Administration.

The post How to tell stories about life and death (and everything in between) appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.