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Dear Storyboard community:
This week I’m excited to share the Season Two premiere of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, featuring a name familiar to Storyboard readers: Pamela Colloff, the award-winning journalist for ProPublica, staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, and author of the new book, “Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast.”
Colloff’s longform stories have been featured frequently on Storyboard over the years — check out Paige Williams’s annotation of Colloff’s 2012 two-part series, “The Innocent Man” —and now “Catch the Devil,” published on Tuesday, is her first book. “One of the things that I realized writing a book is … you’re asking so much more of a reader,” she told me. “You’re asking so much more of their time and their attention. I tried to make this book both very rich and immersive, but also a quick read because I kept thinking of someone like me. I’ve got my job, I’ve got my book, I’ve got my kids, I’ve got a lot going on. It’s the same thing with a magazine story, but I’m trying to write every sentence so you can’t turn away.”
Read the full show notes for our episode here. And make sure to subscribe to Nieman Storyboard in your favorite podcast app for more episodes coming soon.
“I always imagine that other writers have it all figured out when they do anything, including sitting down to write a book. Of course, I had a lengthy book proposal, I had an outline that my book editor had approved, I had a game plan. As so often happens, it all looked good on paper, but there were years, really, of changing the structure, recalibrating what the storytelling was.”
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Links of note
- Every picture tells a story — and sometimes it’s not the whole story. Ellie Silverman at NOTUS tracked down the woman seen in this viral photo, who was surrounded by masked members of a white nationalist group while riding the D.C. Metro on July 4th. The photo ricocheted around the world, and she became a symbol of defiance, but the truth is more complicated. The woman who was attributed as “commuter” is named Bernita Bowlding. “They say that ‘We love you, we got you,’ but the reality is that this woman is homeless,” said her brother, Joseph Bowlding. “Are they willing to sacrifice and say, ‘Let’s help her get a place?’ Are they willing to do that?” (Hat-tip: Mark Kramer and Kelley Benham French.)
- Author Lincoln Michel continues his excellent Principles of Plotting series diving into the concepts of intersection and redirection in storytelling. “Intersection means that your various storylines come together in a satisfying way. By come together, I mean the storylines don’t merely get completed. They collide. They interact. They get entangled. Anyone can finish plot arcs and character arcs. The trick is having the various arcs work together to produce an even greater effect.”
- “Hey, you never know.” I loved this piece by the great George Saunders, offering advice to a reader asking if most successful artists come into this world with a natural gift, or whether it’s something anyone can do. “I’ve mentioned this here before but I always loved this slogan used by the New York State Lotto: ‘Hey, you never know.’ As someone who’s taught writing for many years, I don’t know a better mantra for anyone involved in the arts. Why do we need to know? To know if we’re approaching writing correctly? To know if we started too late (or too early)? To know who is going to make it or isn’t, to know if so-and-so ‘has it’ or doesn’t? The more we know — the more we insist on being sure — the more doors we close.”
Keep embracing the unknown, and keep sharing your stories,
Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
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