Chapter 112: Reporting Keeps You Young

I came home from a reporting trip the other day and immediately started driving everyone nuts. 

This began with my wife. I had been away for eight days. I landed at dawn, raced to the front of the immigration line, hurried past the slowpokes to the taxis, delighted in landing a driver who knew how to beat the inbound traffic, walked in the door at 6:50, slept for maybe a half hour, woke up and started to talk. And talk. And talk. 

Mind you my wife and I had spoken every day when I was away – thank you, thank you, WhatsApp – so it was not as if she hadn’t already had a running commentary on every interview I’d conducted and scene I’d witnessed. At length.

But now I could not shut up and before too long my wife, a wonderful journalist and a patient soul, finally felt compelled to say, gently, “let’s take a pause”

A few hours later I was talking with a journalist friend who midway through my disquisition on all I’d seen and heard and experienced and thought, reminded me how his mother used to stop his father from rambling on by placing her hand on his forehead. Consider this a hand to the forehead, he said, over the phone, thousands of miles away.

And with that I stopped myself, feeling the sort of embarrassment you feel upon discovering your fly is open.

But my God I was spinning.

My reporting trip had taken me to Israel where I raced from interview to interview, and in between read all I could on my phone, sitting at the bars of very loud restaurants where all around me patrons, chefs and servers alike all felt compelled to sing along to whatever music was playing and waving their hands in the air. Me? I was in the reporting zone. I was in heaven.

It had not begun this way.

I recognize that I devote a lot of this newsletter to writing – how to lessen the anxiety, seize command, deceive your internal critic, write like you believe in yourself. I default to the word “writer.” And while that may feel to some as a shorthand for reporter/writer/journalist, I fear the implication is that what matters above all is the final product, what the world sees and hopefully reads. Even as I invoke the maxim that reporting fuels narrative nonfiction – just an imagination fuels the best fiction – I remind myself that in our line of work we focus so much of our emotional energy on what is, in essence, how we look rather than who we are.

And who we are, first and always, are reporters. Even as I have spent the better part of the past three years researching my book (emphasis mine) it took a reporting trip – the first I had taken in a long, long time – to remind me how thrilling, frightening, humbling and profoundly satisfying it is to immerse yourself in one task for a concentrated period of time: finding out things you did not know. 

Reporting almost always begins with an anxiety akin to wondering if someone will go to the big school dance with you: will they call me back? My students worry about this all the time. But I am here to remind every young journalist who thinks it’s just them that that fear of rejection never goes away. Never. 

Bear in mind that there is something about journalism that attracts people who were not cool in high school, and who carry the scars. It makes sense, then, to assume that strangers – especially strangers whose knowledge is something you need to tap – will surely say no. Everyone else did when it mattered so why should it stop now?

I certainly felt that way before my trip. I compiled a list of people I wanted to talk with. I emailed them. I waited. I emailed again. I waited. I called. Sometimes I got no answer at all. 

I was doomed. 

The trip was doomed. 

A Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent friend once told me how on a reporting trip to Beirut he so despaired of anyone ever calling him back that he ended laying in a fetal position on his hotel room bed terrified his editor would call and say, where’s the story? This from someone who had been shot at. Often.

Lazy journalists do not worry about this. Lazy journalists figure they can write around the holes. That is a lie lazy journalists tell themselves, even as people tell them their story was pretty good. There is no getting around the fear that you will not get the story fully and in all its complexity. That fear is a gift. It makes you call and call and email again. You won’t go to the dance with me? Fine. I’ll ask until I find someone who will.

When I was very new to this work I attended a convention hosted by the long-ago media magazine, MORE. Among the speakers was the late David Halberstam, a reporter of legend. I remember him saying in his sonorous voice - which is perhaps why it stayed with me – that if you conduct a long interview and maybe a second you are pretty much done for the day because the intellectual and emotional energy expended in questioning, cajoling, pushing, prodding and listening very carefully over several hours is exhausting. 

This is not limited to adversarial interviews. In fact, it can often be more difficult drawing out someone you like, and perhaps admire and whom it would be counterproductive to bully. 

It is draining to maintain the illusion - sorry, but yes - that you are simply having a conversation even as you move that person back and forth, getting them to speak in anecdotes and reply to your interminable, “how so’s?” Add to that the need to be thinking a question or two ahead, listening for the opening that might just take you someplace revealing. 

The verb wise editors use when they come across a fact or insight or image in a story is “earned.” As in, by dint of your reporting you earned that one. It is a deeply satisfying experience, let alone a compliment to hear. Earned suggests effort and its reward. 

Writing well pleases us. When we succeed at capturing a moment, distilling an idea, transporting a reader with authority and lyricism, we feel a deep, if too often fleeting sense of satisfaction and pride.

But it’s in the reporting where we find the thrills, when we see or hear or experience something altogether new – and sometimes with the knowledge that no one has ever seen things quite that way before.

I have never come home from a day’s writing yammering away at such length and detail that my wife has had to raise a hand and say, please stop. More likely I said nothing more than: the writing went pretty well.

But the reporting?

Don’t get me started. I might never stop.

* * *

We’ll be off next week. Blame it on a very dumb slip and fall trying to escape a downpour that resulted in a fractured elbow. Surgery awaits. But back very soon. File this one under a head smacking DUH.