{"id":703,"date":"2011-02-02T20:41:19","date_gmt":"2011-02-02T20:41:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2011\/02\/02\/times-david-von-drehle-on-narrating-tragedy-and-the-evolution-of-his-tucson-story\/"},"modified":"2024-03-04T18:54:34","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T18:54:34","slug":"times-david-von-drehle-on-narrating-tragedy-and-the-evolution-of-his-tucson-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2011\/02\/02\/times-david-von-drehle-on-narrating-tragedy-and-the-evolution-of-his-tucson-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Time&#039;s David Von Drehle on narrating tragedy and the evolution of his Tucson story"},"content":{"rendered":"    \n    <div class=\"  core-block\">\n        <div class=\"block block--core block--core-html mb-5   max-w-screen-full mx-auto\">\n            <em>Yesterday, we posted <a href=\"http:\/\/niemanstoryboard.us\/2011\/02\/01\/february-editors-roundtable-time-magazine-takes-on-the-tucson-shootings\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">our first Editors\u2019\u00a0Roundtable<\/a>, in which a group of word wizards did their magic on a piece of narrative nonfiction. Our debut story for consideration was <\/em><em>\u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.time.com\/time\/nation\/article\/0,8599,2042197,00.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Real Lesson of the Tucson Tragedy<\/a>,\u201d written<\/em><em> by Time magazine Editor-at-large David Von Drehle. <\/em><em>While the prospect of having a group of editors poke around in a story might unsettle some writers, Von Drehle was curious to see what they would say and eager to talk with us about his piece. I interviewed him last week, before the editors\u2019 comments had posted. What follows is a transcript of our talk, lightly edited for clarity.<\/em><br \/><br \/><strong>Can you talk about how you got assigned this story and what reporting, if any, you did for it?<\/strong><br \/><br \/>The shooting was on Saturday morning, and I would guess within an hour or so, I got a call or an e-mail \u2013\u00a0I think it must have been a call from Michael [Duffy]. He\u2019s in Washington, and I live and work in the Kansas City area. He didn\u2019t know what the story would be then, but he was pretty sure it would become big and important. He wanted me to be paying attention and getting myself ready to write.<br \/><br \/><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-8119\" src=\"http:\/\/niemanstoryboard.us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/VonDrehle-D2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"158\" height=\"210\" \/>By that Saturday night, I think he was pretty sure it would become the cover of the magazine. So that first day I was looking at that. And of course there was this enormous political firestorm among what I call \u201cthe cabal\u201d in the article.<br \/><br \/>My reaction to that, the idea that this was a politically motivated act, was pretty extreme skepticism, just because I tend to believe in the Occam\u2019s razor approach to events. The thing that happens most often is probably going to be the thing that happens again.<span style=\"color: #3366ff\"> <\/span>Usually these kinds of mass shootings are products of mental illness rather than political motivation, and so I guess I spent a lot of Saturday going against the flow of where folks thought the story was going. Really that whole weekend was mostly spent just trying to sort out in my own mind what had happened, what it meant, and what was significant about it.<br \/><br \/>I did not go to Tucson. We did immediately send several people down there. My job in those first days was to figure out what had happened and what it really meant, what the takeaway should be. That was not an easy process. That was where being on a weekly deadline instead of a daily deadline was an advantage. I grew up in the newspaper business \u2013 I\u2019ve only been in magazines for about four years. I definitely felt the advantage of not having to write my piece the first day.<!--more--><br \/><br \/><strong>You didn&#8217;t end up with a traditional news feature that says, \u201cHere\u2019s what happened.\u201d But it\u2019s also not a traditional narrative where you just build it from the inside out. It has a unique style. At what point did the story acquire that style?<\/strong><br \/><br \/>This was a really interesting case in this ongoing figuring-out process that we\u2019re doing at Time, trying to get clear in our own minds and for our readers \u201cWhat is the function of a news magazine today?\u201d Is it a digest of the past week\u2019s news? Well, yes, it is a little bit a briefing. Is it a place for the tick-tock, the behind the scenes, the fly-on-the-wall stuff that was the meat and potatoes of Time and Newsweek for many years? Yes, a little bit of that, too \u2013 there still is some room for that. But where we really can bring value is in a story like this, where we can put the news and the meaning in a big frame with a new kind of angle, a new way of looking at it, and bring that all together in one place.<br \/><br \/>That was what I had in mind. That\u2019s what I wanted to do. I knew it was not just going to be a tick-tock, though it needed to have\u00a0some of that: \u201cHere\u2019s our sense of what happened there.\u201d\u00a0And it was not just going to be an analytical piece, but that it would have analysis in it. And that it would need to have a takeaway, where people would leave with an understanding of \u201cWhat does this say about the times we live in and the meaning of life?\u201d<br \/><br \/>That\u2019s a big throwaway line, but one of my favorite editors that I\u2019ve learned so much from over the years, Gene Weingarten, always taught us that really every good story should somehow be about the meaning of life. So I sort of tossed that off, but when you try to turn that into a real story, you are kind of\u00a0 smashing several different genres, several different well-known styles, all into one. That\u2019s kind of the challenge, the trick of it.<br \/><br \/><strong>As part of that, you talk directly to the reader, using lines like \u201cgo ahead and cry.\u201d That kind of second-person address can be a little dangerous. Can you talk about it as a srategy?<\/strong><br \/><br \/>A couple of people have asked about this piece, \u201cHow long did it take you to write it?\u201d One answer is that it took from Saturday morning to Wednesday night. But as far as the actual typing of words, the composing of sentences, it was really Tuesday before I started getting words on the screen. So it took all day Tuesday and then Wednesday morning finishing up the draft.<br \/><br \/>This theme emerged of \u201cWhat is normal in America now, and why is our discourse distorting reality so much?\u201d As I realized that was the theme, and that was what we were going to talk about, part of that was to speak to our readers. Time has a very broad cross-section of ordinary middle America, and the piece needed to enlist them in this idea that there is a normal American discourse that goes on where people are able to disagree civilly and are able to participate in a political process that is vigorous but not overheated and not violent.<br \/><br \/>As the writer, I was aware that people who buy our magazine and read it are basically \u2013\u00a0that\u2019s them. They\u2019re interested enough in events, but they\u2019re not out on the political blogs 24\/7. Most of them are not lighting up comment boards. So I decided that the way to kind of say to the readers, \u201cI\u2019m talking about you. You, my audience, are evidence of the case I\u2019m trying to make,\u201d was to come out from behind the curtain in a couple of places and speak directly to them.<br \/><br \/>I\u2019m the father of a 9-year-old girl, and so the story of Christina Green spoke to me in some very emotional, powerful ways. That moment seemed like one where it just seemed right to momentarily erase the screen between the writer and the audience and say, \u201cLook, of course I know what you\u2019re feeling. You know what I\u2019m feeling. Anybody would feel that way.\u201d<br \/><br \/>Still, you\u2019re right. It\u2019s dangerous. It\u2019s not a technique you would want to use all the time, but it seemed to me to underline the theme of the piece. That\u2019s what you\u2019re always trying to do as a writer: to get your sentences and structure to match your idea. It seemed to reinforce rather than distract from the theme. I actually wrote \u201cGo ahead and shed a tear.\u201d It was Duffy who made it, \u201cGo ahead and cry,\u201d which is so much better. In that vein of giving credit where it\u2019s due to editors, he didn\u2019t change much in the story, but he did change that, which made it a lot better.<br \/><br \/><strong>What other edits did he make?<\/strong><br \/><br \/>A few word changes. One paragraph was taken out, because it was biographical stuff about Loughner that was duplicated in another story in the package, but otherwise, no. A word here and there. That cry line was the biggest change.<br \/><br \/>If I recall correctly, in the lede, I said, \u201cSo much of the story is ugly and twisted that it\u2019s best to start with something beautiful and good.\u201d I had said that \u201cSo much is ugly and twisted that I want to start with something beautiful and good.\u201d\u00a0Duffy rightly suggested that since that was the only use of the first person, \u201cLet\u2019s take the first person out of the lede.\u201d He was absolutely right about that, too. He\u2019s an outstanding line editor.<br \/><br \/><strong> Does he edit most of your work?<\/strong><br \/><br \/>Yes. It changes if I\u2019m moving into a different specialty. Mike runs the Washington bureau and is an assistant managing editor. So he runs my life, controls my schedule and edits the newsy stuff. But if I go off to do a science piece or a financial piece, I might end up being edited by someone else.<br \/><br \/><strong>What exactly do you do at Time? <\/strong><br \/><br \/>My title is editor-at-large. I don\u2019t edit anything, so I don\u2019t know why it\u2019s editor instead of writer. \u00a0I am very much at large. Because of my background and Time\u2019s appetite, probably about half of my time is spent on political stuff, broadly defined. Otherwise, I have always thought of myself as a generalist. So of the stories I\u2019m working on right now, one is about neuroscience, one about history, one about monetary policy.<br \/><br \/><strong>You were fed material for this piece. Do you usually do your own reporting?<\/strong><br \/><br \/>I like to do all my own reporting. The Time tradition until just a few years ago was that there were people who reported and people who wrote, and they were two different things. Reporters would send files to New York, and then the writers in New York would write the stories.<br \/><br \/>For a variety of reasons, not least the very high cost of doing things that way, they\u2019ve gone more and more in the direction of having people who report and write their own stories. And that\u2019s part of the reason that I ended up at Time, because I like and can do both pieces of that puzzle.<br \/><br \/>In my newspaper career, being an anchor writer on a big breaking story was one of the skill sets that I developed and liked. So when we have a breaking news story, when we\u2019ve got to pull in stuff from a number of places and people, I like doing that and know how to do it.<br \/><br \/>The reason I\u2019m a journalist is that I have a short attention span, so variety is what I love. A long story this week, something 300 words next week, monetary policy, then going next to education, next to sports.<br \/><br \/><strong>Is there anything else you want to say about the piece?<\/strong><br \/><br \/>I\u2019ve been pleased and a bit surprised. It did strike a chord. We got more mail on it than Time\u2019s gotten on anything in years, so that\u2019s intriguing to me. I think I did manage to put into words something that a lot of people were starting to feel. I wasn\u2019t sure when I hit the done button what the reaction was going to be.<br \/><br \/>I\u2019m <em>never <\/em>sure what the reaction is going to be, but after more than 30 years in the business, I know that sometimes it\u2019ll be something that I like but it\u2019s going to disappear without a ripple, because nobody else is going to care about it. There are other things that I think are completely benign and they set off a big firestorm because there\u2019s something in there that I didn\u2019t even realize was going to trip people up. This one I didn\u2019t really know what to expect, and so I was surprised and pleased that a lot of people found it worthwhile.<br \/><br \/>I really had in mind lessons that I had learned from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/story\/story.php?storyId=4719124\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Gene Miller<\/a> at The Miami Herald and then underlined for me by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/opinion\/columns\/mcgrorymary\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Mary McGrory<\/a> at The Washington Post. Mary had the greatest line. She did this extraordinary work on the Kennedy assassination, and John Kennedy had been a friend of hers.<br \/><br \/>The line went something like \u201cIn the face of great emotion, write short sentences.\u201d That\u2019s a rule that\u2019s served me well. Sentences get longer and longer when you\u2019re working fast, when you\u2019re working with a powerful story. The best thing you can do to get hold of what you\u2019re doing, to get it under control, is to shorten your sentences.<br \/><br \/><em>In a later e-mail exchange, Von Drehle added a coda to an earlier answer:<\/em><br \/><br \/>I didn\u2019t quite close the loop on a point I wanted to make. I started to say that people have asked how long the piece took to write, and that one way of answering that is to say I started Tuesday morning and finished Wednesday morning. But the main thing I\u2019ve learned about writing is that you can\u2019t have good writing without good thinking, and so the process of thinking through the piece, getting the idea clear in your head, is as much a part of the writing as the actual typing (or should I say keyboarding). Thinking may look to the outside world like sitting around, or cooking dinner, or driving to pick up the dry cleaning, or working out on the elliptical. But all those things may be part of the writing process if your brain is in gear.\n        <\/div>\n    <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, we posted our first Editors\u2019\u00a0Roundtable, in which a group of word wizards did their magic on a piece of narrative nonfiction. Our debut story for consideration was \u201cThe Real Lesson of the Tucson Tragedy,\u201d written by Time magazine Editor-at-large David Von Drehle. While the prospect of having a group of editors poke around in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[24],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays-on-craft","authors-andrea-pitzer"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Time&#039;s David Von Drehle on narrating tragedy and the evolution of his Tucson story - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2011\/02\/02\/times-david-von-drehle-on-narrating-tragedy-and-the-evolution-of-his-tucson-story\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Time&#039;s David Von Drehle on narrating tragedy and the evolution of his Tucson story - Nieman Storyboard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Yesterday, we posted our first Editors\u2019\u00a0Roundtable, in which a group of word wizards did their magic on a piece of narrative nonfiction. 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