How Reporting Creates Change: A Conversation with Pamela Colloff
Pamela Colloff is an award-winning reporter at ProPublica and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. She recently spoke with Brendan O’Meara for the Creative Nonfiction podcast about why writing is and should be hard, dealing with self-doubt, and more. Check out a short sample of their conversation and be sure to read the full piece.Â
Brendan: What do you make of the fact that regardless of how skilled, experienced, and accomplished you become as a writer, it’s still really, really hard? And yet writers put together amazing work that creates change, and if not change, at least true art that makes meaning.
Pamela: Every assignment, at the beginning? I’m sure this is the one that reveals I’m a failure, that I don’t know what I’m doing. This is the one that’s going to break me. There are different stages. There’s the elation after finding a great idea, and then despair because no one’s going to talk to you, and then elation when people talk to you. Then there’s despair because you have this amazing material, but you have no idea how to write it. It’s this endless roller coaster. It’s funny to have been doing this for so long and still have so much self-doubt.