I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to get to the rich mulch of what’s really true in stories. I was press critic at the Los Angeles Times for a decade, have run think tanks on the media and written books about the responsibilities of nonfiction. In one, The Elements of Journalism, co-author Bill Kovach and I argue journalism and nonfiction generally must strive for more than mere facts and accuracy. Societies depend on what we call “functional truth,” which comes from “a sorting out process that takes place between the initial story and the interaction among the public, newsmakers and journalists” over time.
It isn’t easy to accomplish, getting beneath facts to functional truth. You have to have methods and processes that take you beyond your biases and hypothesis and open your mind to where the facts lead. If a writer of nonfiction finds at the end only what they were looking for when they started, they probably didn’t notice enough or learn much along the way. Telling the truth requires what I call “a cold eye.” “Journalism,” Bill and I write, “is an act of conscience.”
One of the best warnings about this came from one of my sources. Working on a book about the 1992 election, ABC correspondent Jim Wooten (himself an author), told me, “You’re going to meet a lot of people working on this book who you like and whose feelings you don’t want hurt. Remember: tell the truth.”
How one gets the truth out of people is something about which good nonfiction writers spend a lot of time thinking and around which they develop often highly personal methods. In his memoir on writing, John McPhee entitled his chapter on reporting, “Elicitation,” and it contains some gems. Talk to people while they are doing their jobs, not some other location—let alone by email. “I’d much rather watch people do what they do than talk to them across a desk.”
And don’t, McPhee admonishes, try to be stealthy or disappear into the woodwork. “Display your notebook as if it were a fishing license.” You can’t expect people to be honest with you if you are not honest with them.
Some writers use bumbling to unseal the truth. Homer Bigart of the New York Times, one of the great newspaper reporters of the 20th century (and mentor to Vietnam reporters like David Halberstam), had a stammer. And his stammering would become noticeably more pronounced when he knew someone was dissembling. He would claim not to understand, struggling painfully to get the words out, and ask them to explain again. In order to make things simpler for the idiot before them, they would then expose the gaps of logic and evidence in their earlier official jargon-filled answers. One of Bigart’s proteges has called his method his “portable ignorance.”
Other writers use silence—the way quiet George Smiley cleans his glasses with his tie or Inspector Maigret lights his pipe. “Silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it,” biographer Robert Caro writes in his memoir, “Working.” When waiting for a person he is interviewing to break silence and finally relinquish crucial information, Caro says he reminds himself not to speak by writing “‘SU’ (for “Shut Up!) in my notebook. If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks he would find a lot of ‘SUs’ there.”
Some research ahead of time. (Mike Wallace prepared 100 questions.) Others avoid preparation entirely so they can start where their audience does. (In the 1970s, a great radio reporter in New York used to start every interview with “why are we here?” and had spectacular results.)
Magazine writer Amanda Ripley advocates capturing the jagged complications in people’s ideas, not trying to simplify for clarity as writers are often taught. And she has some lovely ideas for how to get to learn that complexity. When someone has told her what they think, she will respond with something like, “let me see if I understand you” and then paraphrase it back to them. If she’s headed in the right direction, they usually open up with more. If she’s got it wrong, she can usually tell by their reaction, and she will add something like, “I think I’m missing something.” And they open up more.
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