I think it is a contract that you enter into right with a source, whether that source is 13 or 83. Why are they there if they don't want to talk? You mentioned all the interviews that don't make it in. Do you have a system for reducing all of that reporting down to the writing? Kind of. Sometimes I'll pull the interviews that are sort of, you know, the best, or that seem the most coherent. And then do you pull the ones that have the narrative and then build around them? Yeah.
Peggy Orenstein is a journalist and author. Her latest book is Unraveling.
“The challenge is… to not want to say, I need to know what the book is about. I need to have my chapters. I need to know what exactly I'm looking for. Because it's really scary to just go out and report and have trust that there's going to be interesting things and that if you just keep going, you're going to find them. So to not foreclose possibility and options and ideas is the biggest reporting challenge for those sorts of books for me.”
Show notes:
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