Journalist Kim Cross on reconstructed narratives and the women who led a cycling revolution in Afghanistan

I do think about momentum and pacing a lot in my writing, and I think that just like cycling, you don't want to just go one speed. It depends on the terrain. You have to sometimes push really hard and then take a recovery interval. And with narrative, I think that if you are just going all out, full speed, you can really tire the reader.

And so I try to build in little breaks for maybe a moment of exposition to catch your breath after a dramatic scene. And I think that the result is the reader is pulled through the story. 

[“The Alchemists”] was a story not just about cycling, but about women's rights and about women helping other women. So there was this constellation of women outside of Afghanistan who were working together to try to make it possible for these women in Afghanistan to get out safely. I started reporting it, and I have to admit I couldn't fit the Taliban and [Cross's book project on] a child kidnapping and murder in my brain at the same time. When I wrote the story, it just wasn't good enough. … I knew that when I turned it in, and we ended up letting it sit for a while. And I felt enormously guilty about this.

I felt like I was letting my editor down and I was letting the women down who had helped me. It sat for about two years. In that time, the story sort of changed. Initially, it had been focused on the evacuation, and then after the evacuation kind of became old news, then it called for a total rewrite and a refocusing on what was lost when these women had to leave their country.

And it was this legacy that they had built. They, as teenage girls, had convinced their culture to change its mind about the fact that women were not allowed to ride bicycles. And they did it in a really lovely way, not by opposing the culture, but by recruiting men as their allies and having conversations and saying, you know, it's not just about a sport, it's actually this vehicle for emancipation. 

I call it a reconstructed narrative, where you have to reconstruct scenes that, as a reporter, you are not able to witness. Often it starts with this sequence that I call interviewing for narrative — I did a piece about this for Storyboard because I wanted to break it down for my writing students. 

You have to first identify your character, and once you identify the character, you have to then ask really open-ended questions to understand, well, what happened? What were the main beats of the story? … How did it affect you? How did it begin? How did it go? How did it end? And then I tighten it down and start working on a timeline.

I think about pivotal moments and defining moments. … I think of a pivotal moment as a moment when something happens, usually externally to the character that changes what happens next. There's a cause-and-effect relationship between that pivotal moment and something they choose to do next or something that happens to them next.

A defining moment is more internal. It's like an a-ha moment when the character realizes something, and that realization causes them to change the course of action. So I try to identify those and then I start structuring them into a timeline because I think that even though the story doesn't need to be sequenced in chronological order, I need a timeline so I can refer to flashbacks in an accurate way, and I then start building into that timeline external events to the narrative that might give the reader some sense of time and place.

In reporting, [I focus on] radical acts of empathy and not just listening really hard to someone who you might disagree with, with the intention of understanding and not arguing. I've learned to try to interrogate what I think I know about something and [ask myself]: How do I know what I think I know? How might someone else think they know something completely different, and how can both be kind of true? There's so much that has to do with point of view and context.

That has helped me write scenes with [a] stronger point of view and … seeing the actual world, the story world, through the eyes of a character. And not just feeling what they feel, but looking at it with the logic that they look at it with. So I think that fact-checking my own assumptions has led to wonderful discoveries. Where, “Oh, I thought I knew that,” but then it has opened doors to worlds upon worlds. I think patience is something that we don't always give enough credit to, or for, in that again, sometimes people are not ready and sometimes the story is not ready. You have to respect that and back away and give it some space and some time to marinate. I think that that's really hard, especially when you're in the hustle, and that's why having multiple things going on at once is so important.