Behind the Writing: On Interviewing

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From Long Reads:

I am slightly embarrassed to admit that for a long time I thought of writing in its strictest, most cinematic sense: as the act of sitting before the proverbial blank screen and conjuring meaning word by word, occasionally pounding a fist on the desk for emphasis or stretching to pet the cat. In grad school, I took the maxim that She Who Wrote the Most Became the Best Writer very literally, churning out pages upon pages that yellowed and blew around my apartment. I remember sitting down with one of my advisors for a thesis meeting and expressing some frustration about how research or the logic puzzle of structuring was eating into my writing time. He looked at me a little like how everyone in the Amelia Bedelia books always looked at Amelia. “But that is writing,” he said. I was flummoxed. “It is?” That seemed like cheating. Writing in my mind was only a mystical, pure struggle of sentence-conjuring; everything else was superfluous, a stretch before the race.

As my career has advanced and I’ve published an actual book and written for various magazines and cobbled together a living as a freelancer, my notion of writing has finally expanded to encompass my professor’s definition. In nonfiction, I’ve come to see writing as the whole process of bringing a piece to life and all of its component parts: the interview preparation, the interviews themselves, the transcriptions, the reinterviews, the careful chiseling and combining and rearranging of all this material. Writing is the broad research and the winnowing of broad research into narrower channels and tangents; the notes scribbled in reporting; the random quotes encountered in poetry or everyday life; the highlighting and mapping and organizing; then, finally, the actual word-by-word construction of sentences into story, which is more akin to building a nest from a thousand disparate twigs than conjuring a vision straight from one’s genius literary brain. It is all, in summary, much more humbling than it seemed at the outset.

Last year, I embarked on a project of new depth and scope: a book which entails a great deal of research and interviewing, and whose backbone is reconstructed narrative. As I delved full-time into the work, I realized I was as interested in the particular skills and techniques required to get and shape the material as I was in the material itself. I had focused for so long on the importance of the meaning of the sentence that I hadn’t thought about the art behind the rest of nonfiction writing. Part of the goal of this column, then, is to shine a light on some of those aspects of writing — interviewing, research, structuring, and more — that could be defined as “craft” and are often hidden behind the actual prose.

. . . .

Lauren Markham spent two years reporting The Far Away Brothers, a beautiful, devastating nonfiction epic that follows twin brothers Ernesto and Raul Flores (not their real names: Markham used pseudonyms to protect their identities) from El Salvador as they embark on a perilous journey across Central America and Mexico to the United States, fight their way through immigration limbo, and struggle to build a new life for themselves so far from home. Markham described her interviewing process as “entering through the side door.” She gave an example from the powerful opening scene in her book: her main characters, the young Salvadoran twin brothers, are in a car en route to a court appointment in downtown San Francisco. They are late, and they are stressed: If they miss this court date they could ultimately be deported. They are driving around in circles with their older brother. First Markham got the information about the times, the streets, the weather, the basics of how they were feeling. But the details that give the scene the poignancy necessary to open a book about American immigration came through the side door: Long after her initial interviews for the car scene, she and the twins were chatting about something else when one mentioned casually that he’d always thought of the United States as a land of skyscrapers, these big beautiful buildings, but once he was here, he realized it wasn’t really like that. Markham asked him how he felt under the skyscrapers in San Francisco that morning, and out of that conversation arose this passage:

At seventeen, the twins have never been to a city before — unless you count San Salvador, which they’d been to only a few times to visit relatives, or Mexico City, where they were practically shackled to their coyote, hunkered down in the spectral underbelly of the pass-throughs. San Francisco looms like no other place they’ve ever seen. Raul used to picture these buildings in the quiet night back home, rising upward like ladders, like possibilities. But now that he’s under them, they’re just endless, indistinguishable boxes. They make him feel, as most things in the United States of America so far do, small and out of place.

Link to the rest at Long Reads