A journalism professor recently told me, in a complimentary way, that he thought my story was “underwritten,” and I was thrilled. When I first started writing, I was really enamored with Tom Wolfe’s baroque style and I wrote my undergraduate thesis about him. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve really come to appreciate more plain, stripped-down writing. When you’re working with material this good, your job is just to get out of the way—tell the story and don’t do anything too fancy.
Pamela Colloff's annotation of Part 2 of her seminal true crime story The Innocent Man is as packed with insight as the first episode was. The above is a sampler.
It is, as Colloff points out elsewhere, a story that could have been told in many ways, taken different paths. And that is one reason why Neiman Storyboard's 'annotations' series fascinates -- these liner notes from the author provide glimpses into the choices that open up, and why the writer decides to go down one route in preference to others; the discussions about what the writer chose to include, how much of it, and what she chose to leave out are equally revelatory.
Also interesting to me is the wild variance between what writers find easy, and difficult. Like:
"I always know how I’m going to end a story when I sit down to write. The end is pretty intuitive for me. Figuring out the beginning is hell."
Without any pretensions to Colloff's skill levels, it works the other way for me -- I know the beginning instinctively, but damned if I can see the end. I mean, I know 'where' it has to end, but the 'how' is always a bit foggy, unclear. So I start where I know I want to, and let the story kind of tell itself on page, see where it goes and at some point when it feels like the story is all talked out, I bail. Knowing exactly how something is going to end before you've even begun? Wow!
Here, for those who came in late, is a post with links to the original story; to Colloff's annotation of part 1; and to various other of her stories from the archives.
And here, just to round it off, is the link, repeated, to the annotation of Part 2
