The first question Paige Williams had for author Jon Franklin was, "So, were you in the operating room during the surgery or some sort of viewing gallery?" Franklin, a former NASW board member, answers that question and others about his classic 1979 story about a brain surgeon and his patient's operating room death: “It wasn’t until four or five hours passed that I thought, 'Well, wait a minute, it’s a better story because she died,'” Franklin says.
Narratives
From Nieman Storyboard, an interview with David Grann about his New Yorker portrait of William Morgan, "an American ne’er-do-well who drifted from vocation to vocation (including fire-eater) before finding his way to Cuba," becoming a hero of the Revolution, then, 19 months later, an accused traitor facing a firing squad. Grann discusses how he reconstructed events from 50 years ago via documents and interviews with Morgan's contemporaries.
Where's the line between fiction and non-fiction? It's been blurred by Mike Daisey’s Apple story on This American Life, John D’Agata’s book "The Lifespan of a Fact," and a Washington Post review of humorist David Sedaris’ essays. On Nieman Storyboard, Paige Williams reviews the rules and the recent move toward greater transparency in the reporting: "Now that trust is fluid, it must be guarded and earned and re-earned, even if you are a god," Williams writes.
When The Double Helix came out in 1968, science books were dull and books by scientists doubly so, Weiner writes in Columbia Journalism Review. The story made this one different, Weiner says. The best science books "will be filled with scenes, and stories ... What’s more, the story will be personal, emotional, even confessional. And it will involve the highest stakes. Watson intends to explain how he scaled the heights, and how he earned contempt along the way."
The 2011 Nobel Prize winners in physics invited dozens of unsung colleagues to Stockholm, and Science staff writer Yudhijit Bhattacharjee tells The Open Notebook how he wrote their story: "I was just lucky to be talking to scientists who were themselves pretty good storytellers — and because the event was such a once-in-a-lifetime event for them, their memory of it was very strong. As it was pretty recent, it was fresh on their minds."
Kevin Sack faced that exact problem when he wrote “60 Lives, 30 Kidneys, All Linked” for the New York Times in February. Nieman Storyboard discusses how he solved it by focusing his story on the chain of kidney transplants that brought his characters together. Also, Sack talks about his story's other challenges, from getting HIPAA permissions for each patient to reconstructing each step in the 30-transplant chain.
Luke Dittrich's Esquire story about two dozen strangers trapped in a convenience store cooler is a National Magazine Award finalist, and Dittrich talked to Nieman Storyboard about finding the dispersed survivors and writing their story: "I was drawn to the cooler because it’s so tightly focused," Dittrich said. "It’s a very tight space with a bunch of people crammed inside, in the dark. I liked the idea of simplifying it as much as possible."
Chris Jones's Esquire story about the night Terry Thompson turned his menagerie loose is a "Notable Narratives" pick on Nieman Storyboard. Exotic animals roamed as police tracked them down: "Jones doesn’t waste words telling readers how to feel about what happens. Instead, he sticks with the momentum of events on the ground, delivering the unforgettable image of a tiger lit by headlights stripped down to its 'disrobed spine' by a bullet."