EDITOR’S NOTE: The final post in our series on narrative interviewing explores how a reporter focuses in on the cinematic details that create compelling scenes. Previous posts outlined the difference between reporting for news and for narrative, the pre-interviewing needed to find a character and make a successful story pitch, the interview that outlines a story arc and sequencing scenes to build a structure.
The last major phase of interviewing for narrative usually occurs just before (or precisely when) I’m ready to sit down and write. My story is solid. I know my central character and the arc of the story’s journey. I’ve identified pivotal moments and structure in mind. Now I need to fill in those scenes with detail and movement. I’ve chosen the pivotal moments worthy of cinematic scenes.
Before we talk about interviewing for scenes, though, we have to talk about structure, because structure informs which pivotal moments should be developed into scenes.
“Story structure” is one of those abstract terms that I struggled for years to articulate to my students, some of whom had trouble grasping it as something other than a formula. I finally settled on my own definition: A deliberate sequence of revelation. Another way to think of it: What you let the reader know — and when.
Not all writers believe in creating an outline before sitting down to write. I don’t like the term outline, because it triggers traumatic memories of Roman numeral outlines wrung out of us in middle school. I prefer the idea of a story map. It might look like a flow chart, a paper-napkin sketch or a screenwriter’s storyboard, which contains a sequence of drawings, usually with dialogue and a bit of stage direction, representing different shots and camera angles.
Here’s Gay Talese’s story map for “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” one of the most famous profiles in the history of feature writing:
I can’t speak to Talese’s use of color coding or geometry, but clearly this is a deliberate blueprint that speaks to how the author’s mind works. (He famously cut shirtboards into quarters and rounded the corners so they’d fit in his pocket for note-taking. He also used them for story outlines.)
It helps some of my students to think of a narrative as a necklace strung with scenes, summary and exposition. Scenes capture a specific moment in time when something pivotal happens in a story; time is often running at a normal pace, and the use of imagery, action and dialogue let the story play out in the reader’s mind like a movie. Summary compresses time and transitions the reader from scene to scene, often connoting cause and effect. Exposition is like a narrative pause button, a brief diversion from the story to explain something the reader must know to fully understand the meaning of the scene they just saw or the scene that’s about to happen.
The art of the narrative interview
Introduction: News interviews vs story interviews
Phase I: Pre-interviewing for the pitch
Phase II: Interviewing for story arc
Phase III: Interviewing for sequence
Phase IV: Interviewing for scene
The more you can stay in scene, the more the story immerses the reader, like a movie or a great novel. Summary allows you to speed things up to get to the next great scene; it often includes some backstory — prior events or key context. And exposition reveals why it matters and what it means; these are often the lovely literary pearls that get underlined and quoted or made into memes.
In my classes and workshops, I have students write a bullet-point version of each scene on an individual 3×5 notecard. They might also make a notecard for something technical that needs to be explained (exposition) or a bit of summary or backstory. I first ask them to place the notecards on the floor in chronological order. After snapping a photo to record this sequence, I ask them to pick a scene that’s not the first one, but has particular drama, tension or meaning. Then I ask them to reorder the notecards, prioritizing the most pivotal moments and considering others as possible flashbacks. This often reveals a new structure that they had previously never considered.
Here’s how one of my book proposals began:
Filling in scenic details
The way my brain works, I need to reach this point before going back to the character (for the Nth time) to do what I call “interviewing for scene.”
At this phase of the process, the questions get very granular. I start interrupting and saying, Wait. Let’s back up. Do you mean…? As the character is speaking, I’m constantly pressing for more specificity. More detail. The more concrete the detail, the more crisp the image in the reader’s mind.
Here’s a bit of an interview transcript for “In Light of All Darkness,” where I’m trying to get a play-by-play from an FBI agent, the Evidence Response Team member who lifted a partial palm print from Polly Klaas’s bunkbed frame using the then-brand-new technology of fluorescent powder and Alternate Light Source (forensic light).
Q: So you’re dusting Polly’s bed frame with fluorescent powder. In one interview, you said “orange.” In another you said “red.”
A: They call it REDWOP, but it’s a fluorescent orange.
Q: Because REDWOP is “powder” spelled backwards, right?
A: Yes.
Q: So you scanned the whole room with the (forensic) light before you put on any powder?
A: I would have done an overall scan of the room. Then I would have gone to the target I was looking at, which was the bed.
Q: Why was that the target?
A: That was an object that was doable. And it was within arm’s reach of the suspect. Proximity. So I went close to the floor and I did test patterns with different powders.
Q: Are you talking about the bottom of the bed frame?
A: Down by the floor, at the bottom, where I knew the suspect could not have touched.
Q: By “bottom” do you mean the horizontal piece of wood along the mattress? Or the vertical leg of the bed frame?
A: It was on the vertical leg.
Q: And were you wearing goggles?
A: I was.
Q: So you first would have turned off the lights, right?
A: Yes.
Q: Would you have closed the door?
A: Correct. I needed as much total darkness as I could get. The darker the room, the better the light fluoresces.
I later realized that it looks a lot like the trial transcripts I was reading, in which a trial lawyer is examining a witness on the stand. In a way, the lawyer and the reporter have a similar objective: elicit a narrative with such crisp detail that a jury member, or reader, can imagine it vividly.
As the character is speaking, I’m trying to see what they are seeing on the silver screen of memory. My friend and fellow narrative journalist Bronwen Dickey likes to say, “Pretend I’m a GoPro.” I like to see not only what the character is seeing in that moment, but also understand what they’re thinking about it. I hunt for internal dialogue.
Q: What was it about REDWOP that worked better? Could you describe what the green looked like, and what you were not seeing that you wanted to see?
A: With the green, there was not enough reflective material on the bed. It did not define for my eyes any fingerprints at all.
Q: So then what did the REDWOP look like?
A: I could see a palm print. I could see fingerprints. I could see residue from the black powder used by the police department. I could see smudges. My difficulty was that the palm print I saw was over a round disc, which was plastic. Normally, powder will adhere to plastic but not to wood.
Q: Is there a word that pops into your head when you’re like, “That’s it!”
A: I would normally just say, “Oh my!”
I’m constantly pressing for more specificity — for telling details and concrete imagery low on the Ladder of Abstraction. Evidence, you say? What kind of evidence? Fingerprints? Which hand? Which finger? Was it a loop, an arch, or a whorl?
Some people are more visually inclined than others. Some have better vocabularies or ways of describing a scene. I ask my story characters if they have photos, videos, text messages or other visual aids. If we flip through a photo album, I’ll point to certain objects, hoping to unearth a telling detail. (A “telling detail” is something that reveals character, yields insight or advances the narrative; it’s more than a bit of scenery.) If I need to take the reader inside a house that no longer exists, I’ll ask them to draw me a floor plan.
As the scene starts to come together in my mind, I’ll plumb it for meaning and try to see it through a particular Point of View. (The best definition of POV came from my son when he was in fifth grade: “It means, ‘Whose head are you in?’”). I try to write a scene through the Point of View of only one character in that scene to avoid what I think of as “head hopping.”) To do that, I need to get inside that character’s head. Some of my favorite questions for doing so are:
What did that look like?
How so?
What do you mean?
How did that feel?
Why do you think that is?
Fact-checking as a final interview
The last phase of my narrative interviewing process is calling up the character and reading them scenes I’ve written in their particular point of view. This is my way of fact-checking all the assumptions and interpretations involved in using my vocabulary to describe someone else’s experience. Did the language I chose accurately represent what they saw and felt and thought?
I know I’ve done my job if they find it not only accurate, but true.
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Kim Cross is a journalist, historian and author of three nonfiction books, including “In Light of All Darkness.” She teaches feature writing for Harvard Extension School’s master’s degree program in journalism and is a founding instructor of the Hemingway Center’s Sawtooth Writing Retreat.
