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experienced Denver as a member of a secure, upper-middle-class family.
How do you know when the interviewing and reporting phase of the project is done, and you can
begin writing?
Either when the questions I set out with have been answered, or when I’ve reconciled myself to
never finding an answer to them. Hopefully, by then, I can also see the shape of the book or article.
Let’s talk about writing. Are you someone for whom reporting is easier than writing, or vice
versa?
The two are very separate for me, both in time and in concept. I almost never do anything more than
take notes while I’m doing my research and reporting. The real writing always comes after.
I love both parts, although for completely different reasons. I love the cloistered, cerebral,
introspective phase of actually committing my knowledge to paper. And I love the travel, adventure,
and excitement of gathering it. I think of them as two ends of a barbell.
Do you have a routine for writing?
My ideal day starts after a good night’s sleep. The first thing I do when I wake up is make sure to
spend enough time in bed to figure out what I’m going to write that day. A lot of my ideas take shape
before I get out of bed. It is murder for me to arrive at the computer without having thought the day
through. It is so frightening— true terror—to sit down in front of a blank screen with no forethought
about what I’m going to write. I avoid that situation like the plague.
After sitting in bed and thinking about what I’m going to write, I have breakfast. I like to have
breakfast by myself, and time to read the paper alone. Sometimes I’ll take a short walk. I might check
my e-mail in order to warm up my brain. Then I start writing.
How specific does your bed-inspired outline become?
It isn’t so much an outline as a list of the topics I want to touch on during that day’s writing. It is
usually a list of scenes, ideas, and characters. I occasionally put an arrow or an asterisk next to items
that are particularly important. But the weighting has already taken place in my head.
So your outline is more like a checklist?
Yes, a list of the specific parts that will be necessary in order to put together the whole.
You’ve told me about your notes, whether handwritten in little books, or the many sheets of
single-spaced notes you typed up after, say, a shift at Sing Sing. How voluminous do these notes
become, and how do you use them while writing?
In the case of Newjack, I had about five hundred single-spaced typed pages of notes. I spent a