On 'Pivotal Moments'
Interviewing for meaning
Once upon a time in a newsroom long ago, an editor gave me a copy of “Story,” by Robert Mckee. If I really wanted to learn how to write narrative nonfiction, my editor told me, I should study the book. At 468 pages, “Story” is all about screenwriting, and it includes a series of nearly impossible to decipher charts, like this one:
I had no desire to write a screenplay. I just wanted to get better at journalism. Specifically the kind of feature writing that this particular editor, who would become one of my greatest mentors, practiced when he published stories like this one. (*Note: The online version cuts off the last part of his story, so message me if you want to read its ending).
At first, I could not really understand how these intricate and, at times, overly scientific screenwriting rules of McKee’s translated to journalism. He wrote some sentences that would never make it through a newspaper edit, like: “MEANING: A revolution in values from positive to negative or negative to positive with or without irony—a value swing at maximum charge that’s absolute and irreversible.” Huh?
But I did study the pages. While not everything in the book translates to nonfiction, over time I discovered lessons that could be adapted for literary journalism. (*Here is a good Longform podcast episode interview with McKee).
In multimedia classes, we often discuss how the building blocks of stories in documentaries, fictional films or shows, novels, essays, podcasts, memoir, and longform writing can mirror one another.
One of those lessons, for me, came down to considering how screenwriters think about characters vs. how journalists can better interview their subjects for meaning.
True character, McKee wrote, “is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure—the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature.”
We know narratives are propelled forward when the people in the stories want something, face a crossroads, confront tension, have to overcome a problem. In nonfiction, these real-life plot points are also essential.
But narrative journalism also requires interviewing a person to draw out deeper themes and aspects of the human condition. This involves delving into aspects of a person’s life story that go well beyond the modern-day sequence of events.
Often, we start interviewing people focusing on the story we’ve been assigned to report right now, which is timely, and telling, and on a deadline. But we might forget to zero in on how much a person’s past matters when it comes to the overall meaning, even if most of their backstory will likely not make it into the final piece.
McKee asks screenwriters to consider, too, aspects of their characters that may not make it into the final film cut. Their values, what they see as good or evil, right or wrong, what they believe is worth living for, what they would give their lives for: “What are the biographies of my characters? From the day they were born to the opening scene, how has life shaped them?”
Pivotal Moments & the Chronological Lifeline
In nonfiction writing, I have long thought of inquiries into a subject’s backstory as part of the process of interviewing for “pivotal moments.” Each of our lives are made up of multitudes of these kind of moments, memories lodged in our psyches because they played a role in making us who we are.
Most memories of our daily lives, we do not retain. The drive to work. What we ate for breakfast. What we said to the barista. But moments that contain meaning can stick with us forever. The day you found out about the divorce. The time you fought back against the bully. The moment you decided to take a risk. I tend to think of these as points and peaks on a person’s “chronological lifeline.”
When I share this as an exercise with students, I even visualize a subject’s chronological lifeline looking something like an EKG, with high and low moments—major turning points—and smaller instances, which can also hold major meaning.
As journalists, we tune into a few of these fine points, and figure out which ones might become story anecdotes. Which ones intersect with and ultimately convey a piece’s overall theme?
We can identify story theme in nonfiction by paying attention to the existential questions and human condition feelings that arise in the reporting.
To do this, we ask follow up questions about specific pivotal moments. This process can reveal more about who a person has become, and how they arrived here, at this moment in time, which compelled us to write about them in the first place.
Follow Up Questions
So in interviews, I often prefer to begin at the beginning. Perhaps, life before you were even born. Your parents, and how they met. Your house. What did it look like? Your school? Your neighborhood? Your bedroom? I spent a lot of time asking about memories of a bedroom for this love story, because its items, and what happened to them, told a deeper story about a relationship, loss, survival, and coming of age.
Who inspired you? What were your grandparents like? In this story, memories and voices of the main subject’s ancestors had everything to do with why this person made a dangerous choice to run into a wildfire, instead of away from it.
I go through events chronologically, and usually fairly quickly (considering you are covering the terrain of an entire life) in a first-round interview, listening for any potential pivotal moments that could hold rich connotation. Anecdotes of inner transformation. I might ask follow ups in the first interview, and perhaps more in later interviews. What were you like in elementary school? High school? Can you walk me through when this event happened to you? How did it affect or change you?
If I am writing a magazine-length piece, I might walk away from a first chronological lifeline interview with a few pivotal moments that fit nicely into a 5,000-word story, and help us understand the person’s core, or hopefully connect to them on the page.
If I am writing a longer and more involved story, or a book, I might spend months or years going back and asking more follow up questions about specific pivotal moments, especially delving into details that turn these memories into scenes: What did you do in that moment? Action. What happened next? Sequencing. What did you think? Interiority. What did the person say to you? Dialogue. How did you react or reply? Turning point. What do you remember about where you were, what did the room look like, smell like? How did the weather feel? What you were wearing? What did you pack in your bag? Scene setting.
Archival Material
In this New Yorker story about the prominent memory researcher, Elizabeth Loftus, journalist Rachel Aviv pulls pivotal moments from interviews, but also by gaining access to her subject’s childhood journals.
The pivotal moments that Aviv emphasizes tell a nuanced tale about a woman who became famous for research into false memories, how the mind can fill in the blanks and construct its own narratives, and how her work, which has helped free innocent people from prison, has also become central in cases of defendants accused of sexual assault.
This particular pivotal moment below, about the death of Loftus’s mother, also mimics the very nature of memory that Loftus has devoted her life to studying—how it can add or omit details. And it offers insight into the depths of the person herself, and how she has survived grief:
Within a week of her mother’s death, Loftus’s journal had returned to its usual jaunty tone. “I’m a happy teenager!” she wrote in December. “It’s sort of sad to leave this year behind—it was such a wonderful year for me.” But, on some pages of her journal, she used a paper clip to attach scraps of paper, where she shared private thoughts that she called “removable truths.” She could pull them out if anyone ever demanded to read her journals. In one “removable truth,” she blamed herself for her mother’s suffering. “She would be watching T.V. and ask me to come sit by her,” she wrote. “ ‘I’m busy now,’ was my usual reply.” She labelled the memory, written in elegant cursive, “My Greatest Regret.
Turning the Questions on Yourself
Memoirists, too, must conduct a version of this pivotal moment excavation—but on their own lives, which in many ways can be even more difficult.
Recently, Shelby Grad, the deputy managing editor of the Los Angeles Times spoke to my students about the five-year process of writing and revising his own memoir, which he is still finishing. The manuscript confronts body and weight issues, among other sensitive issues. He talked of how his first drafts involved a chronicle of many events. But then he had to go back into the pages, drill down deeper, and make these pivotal moments more specific. Turn them into mini-narratives within the larger book narrative, each containing lessons and emotional value, beyond chronology.
This, Grad said, required treating himself like a journalist, turning that three-dimensional scrutiny inward, becoming intensely self-introspective, thinking about reconstructing meaningful scenes with vivid details.
In early drafts: “There were massive redactions,” he said. “Let's face it, all of us tell ourselves stories about our lives that are not quite true. They're survival and coping skills.”
Once Grad finally got to the depths of those uncomfortable places, once he wrestled with what he wanted to say—what was true versus what he had always told himself—he could better convey in anecdotes these moments that lifted him up, or knocked him down, or made him face loneliness, or helped him understand love.