Last year, rather than starting with exploring a topic, as journalists tend to do, Ruby Cramer set out on a reporting journey thinking instead about an emotion: anger.
Ruby is an enterprise reporter at The Washington Post, who finds feature ideas off the news. She began talking to her editors about exploring a “coarsening” she noticed happening within communities and between people. There was a palpable sense of fury taking hold of the country, preventing some individuals from seeing each other’s humanity at all.
These instincts led her to a small town divided by an immigration crisis, to the living room of a man who made a threat against a politician, to a father who had been the victim of a hate crime, to a woman struggling to hold on to her own empathy for her neighbors, to a class for drivers who succumbed to road rage (where she dug into societal triggers that landed them there).
Ruby’s stories are immersive and kaleidoscopic. We see people affected by the same event, sitting in the same classroom, living in the same town. Yet each is experiencing it differently, depending on their point of view, values, and moments in their lives that have shaped how they interpret the world. Ruby focuses her literary camera lens inside of the auto shop, on the airport floor, inside the traffic cop’s car, on the living room sofa.
“The idea of immersion implies leaving home—or at least spending significant amounts of time outside it—engaged in daily exposure to your subjects and the problems they face,” writes Ted Conover, who emphasizes empathy in reporting in his book Immersion A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep. “This is no drive-by. I did more than get a quote. I lingered and I listened. I got to know them as multidimensional.”
When Ruby talked to me recently about starting this kind of reporting, she admitted: “I thought I knew what immersive journalism meant. I really did not know.” Her editor, the Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative writer David Finkel, took her through a “crash course.” Ruby was generous enough to share some of the lessons she has learned with you.
On my campus, the anthology The Art of Fact is required reading for a history and ethics class on literary journalism. In it, editor Kevin Kerrane describes a passage from What it Takes: The Way to the White House, known as one of the “finest books about American politics ever written.” Its author, Richard Ben Cramer, died in 2013.
Kerrane wrote of the journalist’s style of reporting on politicians: “He focused on each man’s childhood dreams, the origins of his gigantic self-confidence, and his tireless (and often shameless) political drive…To tell these stories, Cramer wrote in the voice of an insider—slangy, exclamatory, and freely associative–as if the narrator were within each candidate’s inner circle. At times the voice is even within the candidate’s mind.”
Richard Ben Cramer was keenly attuned to the psychology and humanity of the people he wrote about. “These days, it is unheard of for reporters to get close enough to their subjects to understand them the way Cramer understood his,” wrote Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker.
Yet Richard had a daughter, who grew up quietly paying attention to her father’s passion for narrative writing. That little girl was Ruby Cramer.
Ruby would not realize until after her father died that she, too, would be pulled toward practicing the kind of nonfiction that her father’s reporting and writing exemplified. Storytelling about real people, places and events that, as Ruby said, holds the “emotional power to connect people.” She, too, would learn to get close enough to understand her subjects on a deeply intimate level. To listen, and to witness, Ruby told me, feels like “a gift.”
I hope you enjoy our Q&A, which has been edited for length and clarity.
You have a uniquely special narrative background. I did not know until after I had been reading your work for several years that your father is Richard Ben Cramer, someone whose writing I remember admiring as a model for narrative writing.
He was one of the best narrative writers of his generation, no question. I grew up watching him work on his pieces and writing books. I saw the agony and the joy of the process. That certainly shaped my understanding of what it means to be in journalism. Writing, reporting, and crafting a narrative with a beginning, middle and end. I got to watch and learn before I even knew I wanted to be a journalist.
Was there any moment for you when it clicked, and you knew this is also what you wanted to do?
I just couldn't resist it at some point. I was so enamored by the idea of this job. What I was reading. The work I saw my dad do. I realized it has so much emotional power to connect people, build understanding and empathy, and open your eyes to other people and worlds. So, I thought maybe I could try it. See if it goes anywhere.
Can you talk about your trajectory, and when you decided to pursue this path?
I worked on the student newspaper in college, but I was an English major. I was more focused on learning about good storytelling by reading fiction. I still do that to this day. One of the best ways to learn how to put together a story, and how to write well, is by reading a great short story, or a great novel. At the same time, I was trying out the student paper, and I was green. It was a good place to start learning.
By the time I was out of college, I started in journalism as a fact checker at CBS Evening News, which was the greatest possible entry-level job into journalism. As basic as: I'm going to pick up the phone and call the Bureau of Labor Statistics and ask them if they can help me fact-check the jobs report that came out this month. It involved breaking down the fundamentals. The perfect entry point into understanding reporting.
We would all be in this tiny room in the back of the newsroom. As the scripts for the evening news came in, we would print them out and highlight every fact in the script. Every highlighted fact had to be checked. If we couldn't figure out how to check it, we would have to consult with the producer and the correspondent to understand their sourcing and methodology.
How do you then start finding your way into the kind of writing that you're doing now?
I started cold-calling different writers that I liked, asking if they needed research assistance. Somehow that worked. I ended up working as a research assistant for Michael Hastings, who has unfortunately, since passed away, but he was a magazine writer at Rolling Stone. He had just taken a job to work at this crazy new place called Buzzfeed News, back when we had a newsroom. After working with him for a few months, he brought me over there with him, and I was eager to do that, because it's a startup. There were opportunities for younger people. Eventually, you work your way up and you build more confidence and ambition.
I stayed at BuzzFeed, and for nine years, and I was covering campaigns mostly. I started writing more longform, political profiles mostly. I was originally hired at The Washington Post to do political profiles. After a couple years, I started working with David Finkel, who does immersive narrative enterprise work. I thought I knew what immersive journalism meant. I really did not know. He took me through a crash course.
I know Finkel has written a lot of narratives and books, but one of my favorite pieces he wrote is “Exodus: One Woman’s Choice” a stunning narrative about woman’s choice between her father or the man she loved. It sounds like you were already leaning into feature writing, and you have that foundation from your dad's work. Did you realize you were working toward a similar genre of nonfiction?
Unfortunately, I feel like I am just a reader of my dad’s writing, honestly. I'm just out here trying to figure it out. I feel like he primed me to appreciate it more. But I still struggle with elements of this kind of storytelling. It's difficult. I really wish it came naturally to me.
It's not natural for the very best of writers. What are a few tips that you've learned along the way working, also working with your editor?
First, I’ve learned the fundamentals of what it means to do an immersive narrative. It starts with the reporting. Obviously, you can rely a little bit on reconstruction of events that may have happened in your main character's past, but really the heart of the story that you're telling is whatever you're observing as it's unfolding in front of you. And that requires you to spend as much time as possible with the person you're writing about.
There's a reason you're interested in the person. Maybe the person is not inherently newsworthy, but they represent something newsworthy. Maybe they're struggling as a result of a policy change, or dealing with what is happening in the country. You are with them as that experience is unfolding. That's the primary story you're telling. You don't leave until your story has a beginning, a middle and an end. That's when the reporting is done.
It took me a long time to understand in practice. There's no perfect world where the story just clicks into place. It takes a lot of patience and time. I'm lucky to work at a place that affords that kind of time.
With immersion, you don't know where or when the story is going to end. You're looking for those pivotal moments along the way. When you wrote “The Shelter in the Storm,” you have one subject, Kevin, who is the main throughline, but you are also telling this story from different points of view. At one point, we're on the floor with the girl in the airport, and I'm imagining you were on the floor, too.
Yes, it requires such a leap of faith by the people you're writing about. What happens when Kevin, the guy who ran the auto shop in the town where this migrant shelter was about to open, asks me one day after a week of me hanging around: “Ruby, what's this story going to be about?” or “Where are you going with all this?” I have to tell him honestly: “I don't know.”
You can do your best to explain: This is such an interesting moment in this town. This is unfolding. You're at the center of it. I just want to stick around and understand your point of view and see what happens, if you will let me experience that with you. But things come up and people get used to you being around. Then you have to keep reminding them of why you're still around. So they don't get irritated and impatient, but also so they don't feel misled. So they don't start thinking: “Ruby's my new best friend.”
It's weird, but it's also kind of wonderful, because you're listening to somebody, and that's a gift. I'm constantly wrestling with that myself, how to manage that and do it in the most honest, forthcoming way possible.
I also love the ending scene of “Shelter and the Storm.” The rain. It is subtle and poignant. Did you know that was your ending? You're going to wait for this moment, you're building toward it, and then what happened when it rained?
I knew that the ending could be the day the shelter opened, or the morning after the shelter opened. Eventually, there was a protest planned. So, we were kind of thinking the ending could occur in this time period. When the protest happens, suddenly there is this huge downpour, and everyone flees. I got back in the car, and I drove around. I tried to piece together where everybody went, because I had all these different characters, and I wanted to know what they were doing at that moment.
I also called my editor, almost in despair. I told him this big protest that was supposed to happen never got even off the ground. The rain happened. Everybody left. And he said: “What do you mean? Everybody left?” I described the scene. This is just what happens when you have a brilliant editor. He stopped me and said: “That is your ending.” I immediately got it.
I appreciated it because you're leaving it open. It's not a tidy bow at the end. This doesn't wrap it all up. Then, there is the metaphor of the rain and the silence in a town that has been so noisy. How do you think about and plan your structure? Also for “Ripples of Hate” or “The Threat.”
You need some sense of where you're starting and where you are working toward, where it's all leading. That helps you with tone. I try to make outlines. I'll basically go through all my notes after my reporting is done, and I'll dump them in this master document. I'll order everything chronologically—my tape recordings, photos, screenshots. From that document, I'll just start to say: “What are my elements?” And I'll pull them into the bare bones of the structure. Usually by that point, I know a little bit about what's going to happen in the different sections. I try to get on the same page with my editor about it. Once we're both on board with the idea for the structure, then the difficult part begins.
When you reported “The Threat,” for example, I'm interested in the human aspect, reporting about people who have made mistakes.
For the whole year, I was trying to write about anger in America. That was sort of the organizing principle. I was searching for clips of people who had threatened politicians, because that's just happening more. I had written in the past about a politician who was threatened, and it turned her life upside down. But I had never written about the other side of it.
I found the case of this guy, Joe, who had threatened Marjorie Taylor Greene. He pled guilty, served time in prison, and was already out. So, he was on the other side of this. He's available, he's at home somewhere, not waiting for trial or in prison. Then, I saw that Marjorie Taylor Greene had effectively counter-sued him. So, there was another side to the story. Her argument in court was: You made me so scared that you required me to build a $60,000 security fence around my house in Georgia.
Marjorie Taylor Greene gets threats all at the time. What was so special about this one? I was curious, so I emailed the public defender who was representing Joe, and she immediately responded. She told me right away that Joe is someone who struggles with severe mental illness, and that was what was going on with him when he made this threat. I thought: Okay, well, that's an important part of this piece. I asked if she would be willing to reach out to him and see if he would have an off-the-record conversation with me, and that's how it all started. I think Joe, because he is open about his mental illness, had an interest in sharing his story. He was one of those people that we all encounter in journalism, who feel they can make a difference by sharing their story – that maybe someone can connect to it.
In this piece, there are scenes you are reconstructing, but then you're also witnessing his life. How did you navigate your starting and ending point? He's in his living room in the present day. Not in the tension moment of “the threat.”
That was tough. Going back to the discussion of “what is immersion,” you are there as something is unfolding. So, I was there with Joe. He was perfectly lovely. We were just sitting in his apartment for hours, and he asked: “What's supposed to happen next?” And I said: “Nothing. Just do whatever you would normally do.” And he told me: “I don't do anything.” I said: “Okay, then we're going to sit here and do nothing.” The immersion part of the story was just truly sitting there while he went about his day.
How long did you do that? For hours?
He was chatty, so he wanted to talk the whole time. It is hard to disappear into the background. It took time to get him comfortable, to where he could be a little silent around me, or go about his business as if I weren't there. I wasn't there for consecutive weeks. I would go for like three days at a time, one week, come back for a few days. But it was just a lot of hours, sitting in his apartment.
Your stories are kaleidoscopic in nature. You had me feeling an interesting kind of way toward Marjorie Taylor Greene. I'm feeling for everybody in your stories. You are not afraid to take us into viewpoints we might not agree with.
I really like doing that. I feel, especially with a long story, it's nice to surprise the reader with a new perspective a third or two-thirds of the way through. It’s a way of turning the story upside down for a second, and shaking things up, then turning it back right side up, and going back to the perspective that you began with. Maybe you come back to the end of the story with a deepened or complicated emotion. With that Marjorie Taylor Green section, I felt the same way. There was a moment in my interview with her where she said, “nobody should be threatened.” There's no argument with that.
Do you feel like that's a goal of your writing, too? A kind of nuance that you're trying to bring to it?
I feel grateful that I get to do these projects that are 4,000 words, yeah, so I have time to do it. Nuance, fairness, stories that are humane.
Also with your piece, “Ripples of Hate,” again, you're looking at it through these different points of view, like the innocent woman who was doxxed.
My biggest wish for that piece was to get the final perspective of the woman who was charged in the case. I tried so hard, but it wasn't in her legal interests at that point to talk to me. The hate crime case that occurred on the playground still isn't even settled. Obviously, that incident is an important moment in the piece. But really I wanted to look at everything that comes after that. These ripples. This aftermath. Following this one moment between two strangers on a playground and seeing where it went.
How did you find that story?
I saw the hate crime posters that went up saying, “Have you seen this woman?” I saw them all over my neighborhood.
How do you go about finding a story? It sounds like you're paying attention all the time, tuning in to the world around you.
I feel like sometimes it's impossible to find the perfect story. What my editor says to me is “it has to be the right person, in the right place, at the right time.” If you find all three of those elements, you've got a story you can write. But finding those three things can be one of the most impossible tasks. In journalism, how do you find the right person, in the right place, at the right time to tell a certain story?
If I want to tell a story about the impact of the Trump immigration deportation policy, who is the right person, in the right place, at the right time? You have an unfolding crisis in front of you. You have to find the one person who is going through something right now that helps illuminate that crisis. It's difficult, and it takes a lot of legwork, and also patience, and a little bit of luck.
On top of that, even if you find the right person, in the right place, at the right time, that still doesn't mean that they're going to agree to have a reporter write about them. Not everybody wants to be in The New York Times or The Washington Post or even in the student newspaper. Some people just don't want their name in print.
It's harder now too with skepticism of the media and journalists.
It's dangerous out there. “Ripples of Hate” involved interviewing a woman who got doxxed and harassed for weeks for something she didn't even do. Every time someone agrees to have their story told in a newspaper, I feel like: Wow, it's a gift. It's a miracle.
Are you thinking visually, too, as you're going into reporting, like, what are my scenes?
I was drawn to the auto shop and Kevin because I knew there would be constant conversation. I had just finished writing about Joe, where it was silent. Just the two of us sitting on the couch, listening to music. Joe was lovely, but it was such a solitary story. He was living a solitary life. Kevin was the opposite of that. There would be all this talking, which meant dialogue. I am looking for a place or environment that will have action, and a propulsive quality that will help me tell a story.
Last year, I also wrote about a woman in Arizona at the end of the election, who was struggling to hold onto her compassion. She was a family support coordinator in a rural, somewhat impoverished area of Arizona. She drives around every day checking on her clients. I knew she would be involved in day-to-day activities that would have her out in this conservative community, and she would be bumping up against the supporters who put Trump in office again, which just drove her crazy. So, I knew that there would not just be action, but also she'd be face-to-face with interactions or emotions she was struggling with.
You need movement, some tension happening that you can follow and track, leading to an outcome.
Let’s say your students are looking for their character. It helps if you know that maybe the person has a deadline or an event they are working toward. Like even days to figure out whether they can get their visa renewed. You then have an automatic structure. A seven-day structure. Or if something is happening in a 24-hour period, that can be your structure.
With these stories, you started with a theme: anger. You have already infused a feeling, or a theme, into the story ideas. Why anger?
It was a bit unusual, because it's intangible. It's just an emotion that animates a lot of what went on in the country last year. We landed on that idea after working on the “Ripples of Hate” story about the hate crime in Brooklyn. Everyone in it had this lack of understanding about one another. It feels like this happens all the time now. People were seeing one another with less empathy than before. We talked about how American life feels like it's coarsening. Eventually, we simplified it into this notion of: “Why is America so angry?” The simpler it got, the easier it became to generate ideas.
I remember years ago hearing Chip Scanlan ask: Can you boil down your story to one word? That word would not be a topic, but a thematic word. You were already starting at that point.
I feel like now, especially, it's hard to wrap your arms around what is a story? It's just so chaotic, with everything going on. It’s all happening so fast. It can be hard to step back and try to understand what are those words you want to drive the stories that you're telling? I haven't quite figured it out yet this year.
I was actually just going to ask, what are you thinking about this year, if last year was about anger?
I have lots of thoughts. When Trump was sworn in, I was like: Well, we could do this. We should do this. We should do that. For weeks, I was frantic. Eventually I was just told, wisely, to take a step back. I'm still trying to figure it out.
I wonder, circling back to the beginning of our conversation, what do you think you would be talking to your father about if he was here today?
I would be excited to talk to him about my stories as they're happening. I wish I could call him for advice. Just to ask him for advice in those moments when I just had the worst reporting day, and everything is going sideways. Those times when I feel like: I don't know why I'm here. I don't know what the story is. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't think this is going to work out. When I’ve lost sight. I wish I could call him on those days. And I wish I could also ask him: What do you think about this structure? I can't quite figure it out. That would be nice.
I also think he'd be a bit freaked out by what's happened to the industry. He worked at the Baltimore Sun earlier in his career. He passed away in 2013, so it was the beginning of all these massive changes to what it means to work at a newspaper. I think he'd be sad.
Yes, everything has changed so much.
I know, but the nice thing is the fundamentals haven't changed yet. That's reassuring, and pretty remarkable. What makes a story great? Those elements have been the same through his generation, through mine, through ours.
I actually have an enduring hope about the future of journalism and the future of narrative, longform storytelling. It makes people feel. It's transportive. At its best, these are great stories you want to read. So, in my mind, it's the same as great fiction. You feel moved, or you see something differently. All those elements make it worth it. There's investigative journalism, which is accountability-driven, and necessary. Then, there's also this kind of narrative journalism that builds understanding between people, and that is just as necessary.
I always enjoy your reporting, Erika. Thank you.