Ninjaessays

Ninjaessays Susan Orlean must write her story through from the beginning to end, her first draft nearly her last draft. Jeanne Marie Laska will write a middle section, then the end, then the beginning â€" then she’ll move them all around. Richard Ben Cramer will sometimes write for days before he finally sees the story he wants to write. As for me, I never know where my story is going until the lead and foreshadowing sections are written. Then I briefly outline and jot down ideas or images I’ll want to come back around on before the end of the story. Whatever you feel when you are going through this ritual â€" sadness, joy, a bittersweet blending of both, anger, affection, disgust, whatever â€" try to get that feeling in your story. Finally, before you start writing, try to take time to find a work of fiction or artful nonfiction that helps you get in the right frame of mind for writing your story. You must also look for ideas and tone-setting scenes that you will later pull like threads through your story. In Jon Franklin’s piece on the brain surgeon, he repeats the exact time and the constant “pop, pop, pop” of the heart monitor. In intimate interviewing, it’s often important not to ask a question only once and let it go at that but to ask the same questions over and over in different ways at different times. You will be writing your story, not just quoting your subjects, and to fill out the depth of their attitudes and beliefs you must go back again and again. But where the tape recorder really makes its mark is in the creation of scenes. Certainly, events are happening too fast to accurately capture idiosyncrasies of speech and dialect. You also can dictate the details and events of a scene into your tape recorder much faster than you can make notes. I couldn’t have said the detective knocked on the door nine times or that he waited five seconds before he knocked again. Events are happening too fast to write it all down, even to take it all in. For “true Detective,” I read mystery novels, which made me recognize the gritty, tactile feel I wanted my story to evoke. For “When Daddy Comes Home,” I read Doris Lessing’s novel “A Good Neighbor,” one of the few books that eloquently describes the horror and perilous dignity of old age. For “The Shape of Her Dreaming,” I re-read Alan Lightman’s “Einstein’s Dreams,” which so beautifully captures the precise yet dreamy sensation I hoped to capture in my story. This is separate from a story moving through time, as in a day or a week in the life of someone. While collecting details, always try to keep these two later writing needs in mind. But unlike anthropologists, journalists usually use real names in their stories. You often don’t even need permission from The Powers That Be. Or if you’re a reporter, you can go report and write the story. You will feel that closeness when you accomplish it. And once felt, you’ll want to feel it again and again. The first ethical rule of intimate journalism is to be completely honest with your subjects about what kind of story you are writing. But the final rule is still never to write a story that omits information to protect a subject if that information would alter a reader’s basic interpretation of the published story. Sometimes, that can mean changing the focus of an article or even killing a story. This gives a story a beginning, a middle and an end. But these notions I kept to myself in the newsroom, where they would have been viewed as weird or “highfalutin’,” even subversive. Keep out tangential quotes and characters that lend only traditional authority. Usually, be aware of moving your story through time through your scenes â€" and, as Mark Kramer has written, tell the rest of your story as digression. Sadly, that’s where the magic ends and the craft again takes over. David Finkel elaborately indexes his notes and then tacks all the pages up on the wall over his desk. But however you do it you have to write your story â€" get in the flow of it. Don’t stop and spend half an hour digging out a fact or a quote when you are on a roll. Keep writing, trying to find the rhythm of your story. If you have borrowed your subject’s photo album, take a few minutes to study the pictures. If you have collected private letters, read them â€" and examine the handwriting, the twirling flourishes or the staid block lettering.