How to Toggle

Pivoting between scenes, rules, reflection & research in narrative

Welcome to 2025? I wrote this post before the fires erupted in Southern California, and while my area is safe for now, it is surreal to see flames continue to spread into neighborhoods where friends and so many others live. I hope everyone is okay. Some of these wind gusts feel like they could crack window glass.

How quickly it all can turn. I came out of a whirlwind holiday stretch with family visiting from around the country. We hosted a New Year’s Eve get-together involving TikTok dances that will never be posted publicly. It was fun and chaotic, and ever since I have been cleaning, organizing, and purging stuff. Something about having a tidy space helps me feel psychologically centered when sitting down to start my own writing process—and there will be a lot of writing to do this year.

Notes on Ethics & Breaking Rules

Over the holidays, I managed to make my way through a handful of longform podcasts and books, including Radiotopia’s “Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative,” a five-part series that begins with radio producer Jess Shane embarking on an experiment to tell stories that are not extractive, after questioning the ethics of the documentary storytelling she has long practiced.

The first episode begins with Shane revisiting an audio piece that launched her own career—a profile of a teen gymnast, a story that received much praise. But it turned out the main subject, whom Shane followed and interviewed for months, hated it. Shane interviews the gymnast years later in an awkward encounter, which reminded me of Brian Reed’s sit-down conversation for the opening episode of “Question Everything,” in which he speaks to a blunt critic of the choices and ethics in his wildly popular podcast, S-Town.

In “Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative,” Shane breaks journalistic rules. She pays her subjects $20 per hour, commits to letting them steer the storytelling, and brings them into the editing process. She also becomes emotionally involved with one subject, helping her with housing issues, and telling her at one point: “I love you too.”

This particular episode reminded me of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s piece, “Trina and Trina,” first published in The Village Voice and reprinted in this not-so-new but still classic collection, in which LeBlanc becomes entangled with a teenager who is addicted to drugs and engaged in prostitution. LeBlanc wants to both help and write about her. (“Trina and Trina” is required reading in an introductory ethics class for all students in the Literary Journalism Program at UC Irvine, where I teach, and it always leads to intense discussion.)

I am glad more nonfiction storytellers are interrogating long-held reporting practices, and I welcome the rewriting and rethinking of rules. But Shane’s attempt to be less exploitative does indeed get messy, as she casts people who want to share their stories in a podcast, which was going to be centered on Shane’s journey all along.

It is within that dichotomy—the journalist as the subjective storyteller, and the real-life subject as part of the journalist’s “take” on the story—where there will always be inherent ethical tension. As NPR national correspondent Sandhya Dirks writes: “This is the knife’s edge of all narratives, to walk the thin line between taking a story and telling one.”

A Craft Lesson: The Art of the Toggle

Over the break, I also sped through Sebastian Junger’s latest book, “In My Time of Dying,” in which he covers his own near-death experience.

Years ago, in one of the first college classes I ever taught, I assigned students to read Junger’s “The Perfect Storm.” What resonated with me most in his 1997 narrative reconstruction—about the crew aboard the Andrea Gail ship facing a monster hurricane—is how Junger toggled between the interiority of his subjects (who realized they were going to die), and his own journalistic explorations, research and interviews about storms, sailing, drowning.

One moment we are inside the mind of a sailor, though Junger is careful to use the language of speculation (maybe, probably, whatever is known for sure) for details he cannot know or fact-check to recreate Billy’s thoughts and experiences:

Maybe the currents and the storm winds push Billy farther west than he realizes, and he gets into the shallows around Sable. Maybe he has turned down sea on purpose to keep water out of the wheelhouse, or to save fuel. Or maybe their steering’s gone and, like the Eishin Maru, they’re just careening westward on the weather. Whatever it is, one thing is known for sure. Around midnight on October 28th—when the storm is at its height off Sable Island—something catastrophic happens aboard the Andrea Gail.

In the next moments, we are deep inside reported essay elements—the science and psychology of what it feels like to drown.

The instinct not to breathe underwater is so strong that it overcomes the agony of running out of air. No matter how desperate the drowning person is, he doesn’t inhale until he’s on the verge of losing consciousness. At that point there’s so much carbon dioxide in the blood, and so little oxygen, that chemical sensors in the brain trigger an involuntary breath whether he’s underwater or not. This is called the “break point”; laboratory experiments have shown the break point to come after 87 seconds.

To really examine this full structural toggle here, check out The Perfect Storm, pages 134-146.

This method of alternating between scene and exposition, or interiority and research, is defined in Mark Kramer’s “Breakable Rules for Literary Journalists,” #7: “Literary journalists write from a disengaged and mobile stance, from which they tell stories and also turn and address readers directly.”

This mobile stance is a kind of narrative superpower, special to the form of literary journalism and reported essays.

As Kramer puts it:

When the literary journalist digresses and then returns to narrative, the author’s real-world knowledge juxtaposes with story. This mobile stance is an amazing device, full of power.

Which brings me back to Junger’s In My Time of Dying. Now, reporting his own memoir, Junger reconstructs his near-death experience, using a style reminiscent of The Perfect Storm. Here he is on a hospital bed, and we are there too, practically inside of Junger’s memories of mind and body:

I heard Dr. Kohler tell a nurse to take me to radiology “as fast as possible without actually running,” and then hallways started going by and double doors started opening. By then I’d fully transitioned to end-stage hemorrhagic shock and my body was shaking convulsively on the gurney, its last attempt to stay alive. I felt myself getting lifted from the gurney onto a CT scanner—the “donut,” as it’s known—and could feel my body rattling against the shuttle board. I was very cold and in extraordinary pain. A nurse put a heated blanket on my body, which felt incredible, and led me through some breathing exercises.

Then in the following scenes the camera pivots and pulls out to the doctors, also weaving in a journalistic account of the medical procedures put into play to try to save Junger’s life:

The CT scan revealed a huge pool of blood in my abdomen and active bleeding around the pancreas. The doctors had a crucial choice. They could stabilize me with a transfusion and repair the rupture in the interventional radiology suite, where doctors use a fluoroscope to guide a catheter through your venous system, or they could open up my abdomen in surgery and try to find the rupture before I bled out. You must be “hemodynamically stable” to go to the IR suite, because if you code in IR, they have to rush you back into surgery to save your life. There, they can intubate you, transfuse you, defibrillate you, or split your chest open to massage your heart. But once the doctors open you up, they’re elbow-deep in your abdomen and there is no going back.

Junger toggles between his own physical and psychological experiences, the POVs of doctors and nurses, and the technical and scientific elements throughout the book (these particular cited sections are found on pages 30-37).

Like with his storytelling about the ship crew, this literary approach—now turned toward his personal story—is powerful because Junger has reported and interviewed the doctors and medical team. He has done the research to support the context and details behind choices made by others in the room, which he could never have fully known as he was medicated, in and out of consciousness, and seemingly somewhere else entirely, encountering his dead father.

For me, this key literary technique separates traditional memoir—in which scenes can be rendered solely from one’s memory (and imagination), from reported essays—in which facts are checkable, and the stance of the writer, mobile.

This reported style also goes beyond traditional memoir’s alternating point of view—the in-the-moment younger narrator (inside and experiencing the scenes), and the older, wiser narrator (reflecting upon the scenes). The mobile stance allows for journalistic digression, a different kind of narrator’s voice, and, if executed carefully, one that can be layered, poetic, and brilliant.

The Mobile Stance & the Human Condition

Speaking of brilliant, in recent years I have read Hanif Abdurraqib’s nonfiction books out of sequential release order, starting with Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (published in 2019); followed by They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (published in 2017), then moving on to There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (published in 2024), and over the holidays, I finished A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance (published in 2021).

Abdurraqib is my favorite writer in America right now, not just for all the literary reasons everyone else cites. I recognize in his work the era in which I also came of age, its familiar reference points, and the cadence of spoken word. And I know the Midwest he writes about. I was born in a town not so distant from the place his work embodies. His Midwest is not the Corn Belt “flyover country” spotlighted for vice presidential contenders whom voters “want to have a beer with.” Abdurraqib’s Midwest—rich with culture, and rife with contradictions—reminds me of my own.

And while Abdurraqib’s books center on research-based explorations and commentary on music, performance, basketball, and art, his work also leans heavily on the mobile stance, plunging us into memories and existential contemplations on death, race, love, loss, history, and home. He plays his cards cleverly, connecting seemingly disparate strands through declarative sentences, solidifying his themes.

What I appreciate most of all, and wish more journalism would aim for, is how his writing taps into the discomfort and wonder of the human experience, holding you there, before pulling you somewhere else just as thought-provoking.

So I leave you with one of his many examples of the literary pivot, this dance between scene, memory, context, history, and reflection on the human condition, from Abdurraqib’s “A Little Devil in America.”

From the chapter: “It Is Safe to Say I Have Lost Many Games of Spades,” which begins on page 161. We are inside of a scene, a card game that Abdurraqib is playing with friends:

One of the last hands of the game, a game he spent not talking much, but hiding behind his low hat and his always immaculate beard. In the few seconds after skimming my hand and realizing that it was, once again, entirely worthless to the cause, I watched Jerriod spread his cards real wide, the smile across his face matching their width. And in the silence of the van, without speaking, Jerriod takes out his cellphone, turns the camera on, and snaps a photo of the cards before him. After a split second of confusion, he shrugs and mumbles, “This hand so good that if I didn’t take a picture, wouldn’t nobody believe it.”

Then, Abdurraqib employs the mobile stance, pulling out to tell us about the history of spades, and use of the symbol in war:

American troops believed that the Vietnamese feared the symbolism of the spade, that they thought it signaled death and ill fortune. So the military had the United States Playing Card Company send them crates of just aces of spades and nothing else, so that soldiers could scatter them throughout the jungles and villages of Vietnam before and after raids. The dead bodies of Vietnamese were covered in aces of spades. Lands—entire fields pillaged and burned down to the dirt—were littered with the card. Power, as always, misused in the wrong hands.

From a scene of love, to a history of exploitation, pivoting back to a reflection on love.

I do remember someone I love falling asleep with their face on the table, among the pile of scattered cards. And I do remember the moment when they woke, there was a single card stuck to the edge of their forehead. I never looked to see, but I told myself whatever card it was, it had to be the lucky one. House rules.