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point that the world is a much bigger, stranger place than we are told.
How much time do you like spending with your main subjects?
I stay with someone until I reach the burnout point. I work from early morning to late at night, seven
days a week. On any given day, at the point where the good conversations are over, I concoct an
excuse and check out. I’m often exhausted by then, and need a break.
Is writing more difficult and/or enjoyable for you than reporting?
I like them equally. Reporting has the great advantage of letting me be physically active and out in
the world. The disadvantage of reporting is I’m not actually producing anything yet. I have all this
anxiety, but I can’t really do anything with it. I never know if the material I’m getting is any good. I’m
always wondering whether this is finally the story that’s going to fail.
So writing has the huge advantage of finally producing something and seeing it all come together.
At its best, when the writing is really working, the pieces seem to fall out of the sky and into place.
What is your writing routine?
I take the notebooks I’ve used while reporting, the transcripts that are made from my interviews,
lots of other documents, and a stack of books—and read through them all. This part of the process can
take weeks. The notes and the transcripts are where the rich hunting is. I number each page in the
notebooks, so I can find the material easily once I start writing. The rest of the stuff I use more as
background, so I don’t go through it as carefully.
As I take notes on the notes, the structure of the piece begins to become apparent. I start scribbling
notes to myself about where each section will go.
Do you make an outline?
Yes, I go from scribbling notes to making an outline. The outlines get very, very detailed. But my
outlines don’t look like a classic outline.
What do they look like?
I start writing on sheets of standard 8 1 ⁄2 by 11 paper, and when I run out of space on a sheet I staple
another one to it and keep going. They grow into strange shapes. Sometimes they grow laterally,
sometimes they grow vertically. When I’m done I tack the whole thing up on the wall.
And what’s in these outlines?
The themes, facts, stories, and characters I’m going to use. The entries are indexed with the page
numbers of my notes. An entry in the outline might say, “Rinaldi, 9-1,” which would mean a story
about Rinaldi in notebook nine, page one. I constantly update the outline as I write. I also deviate