Sweat the Details Narrative writing grows from narrative reporting. The foundation of any narrative is the writer’s authoritative knowledge of what happened. Narrative reporting falls basically in two categories: observation of events you witness and reconstruction of events you were unable to witness. It’s best to be there If you are able to observe first-hand the stories you tell, your most important skills are observation and note-taking. Interviewing becomes a secondary skill. You want to be a spectator, not a character. You might do some interviews before the events and/or after, but as the story is unfolding, step back and become the proverbial fly on the wall. Watch for your own influence. In most situations where you are observing the story, ethics will require you to make your presence and your intentions known. Unfortunately, this knowledge can influence the events you observe. Watch for instances when the characters are performing for you. You need to either leave these out of the story or acknowledge the influence. When circumstances allow, try to observe long enough that the characters grow used to your presence and start acting naturally. Make audio recordings. Narrative requires dialogue, which usually requires recording. In addition, the audio will help you tell the story online. Make video recordings. This might be a photographer’s job, but sometimes you will need or want to shoot your own video. You can shoot video for your web site or simply to help your reporting. Be aware, though, that shooting video will interfere with taking effective notes. If you or a photographer shot video, watch the entire video, not just the highlight clips, so you can enhance your notes. Take notes as if you weren’t recording. Whether you record or not, your notes are essential to telling the story. Sometimes the equipment will fail. Sometimes the recording will be inaudible at the most important moment. Even if the recorder works perfectly, your notes will capture nuances of the events that the recorder can’t. Take notes on setting. Setting may be an important element of the story and you won’t always know as you’re gathering information how important it will be. Take extensive setting notes during idle times in the action and before and after the action. Note the weather (including changes as the action unfolds), the furnishings, the landscape, the wildlife, the artwork, the photographs, the brand names, the personal touches. You might want to ask questions in later interviews about the importance of some of the setting elements. Take notes on character. Get notes on the appearance, emotions, mannerisms, speech, movement and interactions of the characters. You will want to make the characters come alive for the reader later. You need to record more than just their words. Take sensory notes. You will want to transport your reader to this place and time. Use all your senses and get the sensory details into your notes. What do you see, hear, feel, even smell and taste. Get the details of shade (not just red, but blood-red or fire-engine-red or maroon), texture, fragrance, tone. Take notes on dialogue. You won’t be able to catch extensive dialogue in your notes, but be sure to capture the key exchanges. Echo the exchange silently to yourself as you quickly write it down verbatim. Reconstruct in interviews Some narratives tell stories that can only be reconstructed later. Learn the story by interviewing people who were there and by gathering records of the events. Some stories that make powerful narrative require special care in finding sources and arranging and conducting interviews. Setting is important. Try to interview the subject where the events took place. The setting will help jog the character’s memory. Ask who was where. Ask her to show you how she did something. Ask about weather. Ask who said what. Ask about the order of events. Repeat to make sure you have everything straight, and to further jog the memory. If you can’t revisit the exact setting, conduct the interview in her personal setting: home, office, workplace. Watch for elements of the setting that will reflect her personality and help tell her story. A long interview with multiple settings, when that’s possible, is best. Take notes on the setting and ask questions. Ask about awards or photographs you see. Ask if the character has relevant scrapbooks, photo albums, letters, etc. If she wants to show you irrelevant items, take a look at them, too, and ask questions about them. Take lots of notes about the setting. Take sensory notes. What are the sights, sounds and smells? Make the subject comfortable. In especially difficult situations, you might need to take extraordinary measures to make the subject comfortable: Allow him to decide after the interview whether to talk for publication, whether to allow use of name, etc. (Be sure editors approve in advance of these arrangements.) Often a traumatized person will want a friend, relative or counselor present at the interview for support. Comfort is more important than the personal setting. If the character would rather meet you, initially at least, in your office or a neutral setting, don’t press the matter. Take your time. Ask general questions first, about background, family, etc. Give the subject time to grow comfortable with you before you reach the difficult, personal story. When you get to the difficult part, don’t go right to the climax. Ask about the context, the events leading up to the critical moment. Interview in slow motion. Eric Nalder of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer offers this advice: “When people reach the important part of a story, slow them down so you can get it in technicolor. Ask where they were standing, what they were doing, what they were wearing, what was the temperature and what were the noises around them? Then switch to the present tense, and ask questions like: What are you doing now? What is your friend saying? You and the interview subject will then re-enter the scene and walk through it together. If this fails, tell them it is not working. ‘I'm trying, but I just can’t picture it yet. What did it feel like?’ This is how you get a story, not a bunch of facts.” This is most effective if you can interview the character at the site of an incident. Share control. Give the character as much control of the interview as possible. Let him go on at length about seemingly irrelevant material. Eventually, you might have to steer the interview toward the difficult topic, but give the character a chance to go there first. Ask open-ended questions that invite the subject to talk: “Tell me about that.” “What happened?” “How did you respond?” Ask specific questions as you have to, but start with general questions that give the character more control. Avoid insensitive insults. Don’t say you understand if you don’t or can’t. A well-meaning response like “I understand” or “I know what you mean” can appear insensitive, rather than sympathetic. A more effective and honest sympathetic response is, “I can’t imagine.” If you’re a man who’s never been abused or pregnant, you can’t understand the experience of a rape survivor or an abortion patient and you insult her if you say you can. It’s better to ask her to help you understand. Make a personal connection. The connection must be genuine. If you share an alma mater or hometown with the character you are interviewing, note it and make some small talk about it. If you see a photograph of children about the same age as your children, take note and share a chuckle or two about car seats or car insurance. The character will feel more comfortable talking to you if he feels a connection. If you don't have much in common, don’t fake the connection. Sometimes you have to make the personal connection just with genuine curiosity and empathy. “ Use anything to get the conversation going,” says writer Daniel P. Finney. “The kid is wearing a Yankee cap. Talk baseball. They’ve got a friendly dog, play with the dog a bit. Whatever. Give the source a chance to recognize you as a real person and not a member of the big, evil and scary news media. Those people are bad. But you as a person can be good.” Don’t hold back. In some cases, it may be appropriate to divulge something personal and a little uncomfortable about yourself. If you are asking the character to reveal intimate and perhaps painful personal detail, she might feel more comfortable doing that if you feel more like a person and less like an inquisitor. You must be careful in doing this. You don’t want to shift the focus from the character to you. You don’t want to belittle the character’s pain by seeming to say, “See, I’ve suffered, too.” You don’t want to set up a tit-for-tat: I’ve told you about my cancer, now you have to tell me about your AIDS. If it’s appropriate, though, some personal disclosure can help the subject feel more comfortable. I know a reporter with Tourette Syndrome. His neck twitches frequently. He usually explains this at the outset of an interview, because the twitch can be distracting. He says his candor about his own condition often helps break the ice with a source and leads to candid interviews. Finney says, “ In cases where I have covered tragedy, murders, drowning, etc., I, quite briefly, have related grief stories of my own life or talked about stories I have written in the past that deal with pain and sorrow. I don’t do it to make the source feel sorry for me. I do it to let them know that I’ve experienced this before, that I have feelings and will take their emotions into account as I write and report.” Where personal disclosures are concerned, you should err on the side of caution. But if it feels right, a personal disclosure can help. Don’t pretend you can be objective. You are not an object. You are a human. Your humanity is necessary to tell the personal story. Allow yourself to feel the emotional impact of the story you are hearing, or you will never be able to tell it. Robert Frost said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” Don’t let the emotion overwhelm you. While you can’t and shouldn’t be objective, you can and must be fair, balanced and thorough. Be watchful for something that doesn’t ring true. This may not mean your subject is lying. The mind blocks some traumatic situations from the memory and we all remember through the prism of our personal experiences. Get the full story as remembered by the subject. Then seek out people or documents that can bolster, contradict or expand. Remember your role. You are a storyteller, not a problem solver. You can and should empathize with the character. You can’t tell his story if you don’t. You also can’t tell the story if you get too close. You should avoid involvement with the character beyond the story you’re telling. Use your judgment about where the line is. In some cases, it may be appropriate to cry with a character (or impossible not to). In some cases, you might be able to give the character some information that is helpful. Don’t promise too much. Telling an intimate, difficult story to you may be therapeutic or cathartic for the subject. It also might cause nightmares. The publication of your story may bring the character help from the public, or may give the character some personal satisfaction. It also could bring the character harassment or disappointment. You don’t know what will come from the interview or the story, so don’t predict. Just tell the character you want to tell her story. Give the subject time to answer your questions. If you’re telling a difficult story, answers won’t come easily. You need to be comfortable with the silence while your subject struggles to answer. The character feels the urge to fill the awkward silence as much as you do. You want thoughtful answers. Be patient enough to get them. Learn plot details. Try to nail down the sequence of events. Ask characters to show you who was where when critical events happened. Have them walk you through the events if possible. Look for contradictions and inconsistencies in people’s accounts and see if you can resolve them. They may not mean anyone is lying, but may indicate the different ways people perceived an event, or they may show how confusing it was. Reconstruct dialogue. Ask people to reconstruct dialogue for you. “What did you say then? How did she respond?” You can’t do this for extensive passages. But for the key moment, most people will remember pretty accurately what they said and heard. Ask all parties to a conversation and any witnesses. If they agree (or essentially agree), you can recount the dialogue in your narrative. If not, you may need to note the conflict over what happened. Interview a second and a third time if you can. As you think about the interview afterward, you will think of questions you should have asked. Your subject will be thinking, too. Give him a chance to tell you the answers and anecdotes he remembers after the first interview. Interview others. Interview everyone who was present during the events you are recounting and people who would have been told about them while memories were fresh. Interview anyone who investigated the events. Minor characters may remember details the main character has forgotten. They may tell you some things the main character found too painful to discuss. They certainly will have a different perspective. You may need to re-interview the main character after you’ve talked to some other people. Try to resolve differences in recollections, but understand that memories will not always match up. Seek documentation Interviews are an important way to reconstruct events for narrative, but sometimes they can’t tell the whole story. And sometimes interviews steer you wrong – because sources lie, because of boasting or modesty, because of faulty memory. Seek documentation that can verify facts, refute false claims, resolve conflicts and supply details. Seek video recordings. More and more of life is captured on video. See if a television station covered the event. See if anyone shot a home video. Also, check the locations of key events to see if any security cameras are present. If so, see if you can watch the videos. Seek audio recordings. Audio recordings of 911 calls and public safety radio transmissions are public records in most jurisdictions. They can help you re-create dialogue of these events. Some public meetings are recorded as well. Run through the events of your story, considering whether any moments might have been recorded and see whether you can get copies of the recordings. Seek transcripts. If part of your narrative includes courtroom scenes, a court reporter’s transcript will allow you to reconstruct the dialogue. Check public records. Public records can provide helpful details, such as the price someone paid for a home or a floor plan of the house. They provide information about criminal cases and lawsuits. They tell you whether someone bothers to vote and whether they pay their taxes on time. Public records also can provide connections to other sources who can help you reconstruct events, such as defense lawyers, investigating officers and witnesses to crimes or accidents. Check private documents. A key question in each interview is to ask whether the character has any court records, diaries, videos, journals, letters, investigative reports, yearbooks, baby books, photo albums, medical records or financial papers relating to your story. These may confirm or contradict what the character has told you. They almost certainly will provide details she forgot or other sources you may want to interview. Don't ask for them in an accusatory fashion: Can you prove what you're saying? Tell the source you’re trying to tell the story as fully as possible and you know the documents might have further information. If the story is about the character’s conflict with others, tell her that documentation will add credibility to her story. Other resources
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