The '9 Structure' & Interviewing for Narrative
A longform conversation with Kim Cross, a journalist and narrative teacher
Posting a little early this week. I trust you don’t need me to remind you to please get out and vote tomorrow. But just in case…
This weekend I will be at the National Association of Science Writers conference, on a panel: “Building Your Story’s Structure.” I’ll be posting some of my discussion points for it. But today I’m starting with one of the most common narrative structures: I know of it as “The 9,” a term coined by one of my former editors.
A similar discussion about story structure came up in my recent conversation with Kim Cross, who talked to me about narrative interviewing, revision, and working with editors you trust. You can read our full Q&A below.
Cross just published “The Alchemists,” for Bicycling magazine, retracing the journeys of women in Afghanistan who were forbidden to ride bikes. Kim spent three years interviewing her story subjects, on and off. She reconstructed their stories in powerful detail, as they recounted escaping Afghanistan as the Taliban returned to power.
A full-time freelance writer, Cross is also a teacher of narrative nonfiction. In our conversations we have a shared language. We get into the nitty gritty details of craft and reporting, and it’s pretty obvious we are both teachers.
But First, What is “The 9?”
Here is how my former editor, Richard E. Meyer, first explained this concept to me:
“It’s a structure. You lay out the story chronologically in a timeline. Then you pick the most interesting stuff, the cliffhanger part of the story. Hopefully it’s no more than a third of the way down the timeline. You write that first. That’s the intro.”
Meyer continued:
“Imagine you’ve got the straight stick going down. A third of the way down the stick, you’ve pulled that cliffhanger part out and set it aside. You draw a loop from the place you pulled it out to where it is now. Then, you have to go clear back to beginning of story and write chronologically to the point where you pulled out the cliffhanger. Now you’ve got a loop. You’ve drawn a 9.”
Writing is always about learning from other writers, and building upon those lessons. Meyer first got the idea to call it “the 9” after reading the William L. Howarth’s introduction to the John McPhee Reader.
In the book, Howarth describes McPhee’s structure process like this:
The action begins in medias res and continues without flashbacks or helpful exposition for several pages. When readers finally hit a backward loop, they already have a subliminal sense of who-what-where, and fulfilling this expectancy becomes McPhee’s primary challenge in planning the rest of his story.”
I’ve used the 9 structure in many stories. A few examples here, here and here.
In our interview about her new feature story, Cross, a New York Times best-selling author and journalist known for meticulously reported narrative nonfiction, described to me her own version of the 9 structure.
Cross also has bylines in the New York Times, Nieman Storyboard, Outside, Garden & Gun, CNN.com, ESPN.com, and USA Today. Her work has been recognized in “Best of” lists by the the New York Times, the Columbia Journalism Review, The Sunday Longread, Longform, Apple News Audio, and Best American Sports Writing. She teaches Feature Writing for Harvard Extension School.
Here’s our conversation:
How did you get into this story?
The process took three years. But not because it took three years of work. It’s just because of all the things that were happening concurrently. My editor, Leah Flickinger, came to me as women were being evacuated. This is in August of 2021, as we’re watching on TV. Afghanistan is falling to the Taliban. Leah said: “You know, there are all these women being evacuated from Afghanistan. People from the outside are helping. It’s chaos. I feel like we need to report something about this, especially women.”
We knew that women were deleting their social media accounts and burning their records of being an athlete, because they were worried about the Taliban hunting them down as infidels. When Leah came to me, I told her: “I’m working on this book. I can’t take any other big story on. She said: “This is your kind of story. It’s a Kim Cross story.”
You work your whole career for an editor to say that. You don’t just say no. Leah is an editor that I trust, and I’ve been working with her for many years on some of my best and most complicated features. When I saw what the story was about—not just cycling, but women’s rights, and looking at the bicycle as a vehicle for the emancipation of women, I thought: I can’t not write this.
I knew of one woman who had spent years on the ground in Afghanistan, deeply involved in the cycling world, Shannon Galpin. She was a catalyst to the grassroots revolution that was going on in Afghanistan, where women were starting to ride bikes in a culture where women were forbidden to ride bikes. Other girls saw them and wanted to learn, so they started teaching them. Ten girls were sharing one or two bikes.
Cycling, by nature, was done on streets, in full view of men in public. The religious leaders in the community felt like these girls were being so brazen and proud, and so they started speaking out and saying: “It’s okay to throw rocks at these girls, because what they’re doing is obscene.”
So when they were harassed, the women would stop and talk to the religious leaders. Really, it’s more than just a sport. If girls who are walking an hour to get to class could ride a bike, they could get there faster, and maybe more girls would go to school. Women on bikes could get to more jobs farther away from their home. This is a means of freedom of transportation. So the religious leaders never really totally got on board and cheered them on or anything. But they stopped complaining about it. These girls and women created the first co-ed cycling club and team in the country. Then they put on their first co-ed cycling race. They made men their allies and recruited them. It was this incredible thing, and now it was all crumbling overnight because of the Taliban’s return to power. They were taking away all of these rights and threatening the women with death.
I found two characters who were at the center of this grassroots revolution, and I realized that, for me, the more interesting part of the story wasn't how they got evacuated, but it was about what they built, and what was about to be lost. So the first version of the story was a braided narrative, where I went back and forth between scenes of the evacuation and flashbacks, and it didn’t quite work. It was too confusing. There were too many characters, and it was hard to tell them apart. The second draft was more focused on the evacuation. But we lost some scenes, and we lost some of the historical stuff. I had to put it on hold at some point, because I had to write my book. When my book was finally done, I came back to it, and I had actual brain power to put into it.
I went back to an in medias res beginning, where it starts with the last ride before the evacuation, then rewinds to the beginning of the movement and takes you through the movement. Then part two of the story is when you know that freedom starts to crumble, and the women have to be evacuated. The overall theme is about the echoes of what has been lost.
That approach you just mentioned about the structure, that’s something that one of my mentors would call “the 9 structure.” So it sounds like you began in this moment before then circled back to “how did we get here?”
Yes. If you imagine the narrative arc, you begin the story with a scene just before the climax. You end the scene in or right before the All-is-Lost moment, before you see the outcome. Then you rewind to the beginning of the narrative arc and show the reader how we got here. That structure stretches the rubber band of tension. Tension is the engine that powers a narrative.
Was that your original opening?
Yes. The opening scene never changed. It evolved over time and revision. It got longer, and then it got shorter, and then it got longer again. But it was always the same pivotal moment. The subsequent sequence of scenes changed a lot. First, it was a braided narrative, and then it was focused on the evacuation, with really brief flashbacks to the cycling revolution. As time passed and the evacuation became old news, the heart of the story emerged: How young women convinced their culture to change and built a solid legacy, and how that legacy was destroyed by the Taliban, but shouldn’t be forgotten.
It was very readable and compelling, and it had twists and turns, and then when you get to certain parts, you’re on the edge of your seat. So when it comes to interviewing for narrative, maybe you could tell us a little bit about how you think about that.
Great question. Here’s how I think of interviewing for narrative: At first, you’re standing in this giant warehouse in the dark, and you’re looking for something. You have a flashlight and you can turn the beam so that it’s really diffuse and wide, but it doesn’t reach very far. You have to walk around the room and swing the beam around a lot. You are scanning this big warehouse, vaguely aware of what you’re looking for, only knowing that when you see it, you’ll know it. You’re painting the room with light. Then you see something that might be the thing you’re looking for. So you get closer, and you adjust the beam so it’s really focused and narrow, and you can see the details. The story starts to take shape.
So in the beginning, your questions are like the beam. They’re very broad. And you do a lot of listening to figure out: What happened? What is the big event? How did it all go down? Then who are the characters in this event, through which I can tell the story?
What were the challenges of applying your interview techniques to this story?
When I interviewed Reihana and Zakia, one of the challenges was that they were actually in the middle of evacuating. I talked to Reihana and her family by Zoom right after they got out of Afghanistan and landed at a safe house. They didn't know how long they would be there, if they were safe, where they would go next, how long it would take. There was a lot of uncertainty. All I could do is really look backward, and ask: “What just happened? What happened before that?”
Reihana was younger, and she spoke good English, and I interviewed her and her mother and sister in a Zoom room. Reihana and her mother were in Pakistan. Zakia was in Germany. Reihana was translating for her mom and her sister. I got a lot from that. Then at some point, I had to interview Zahra, who is super smart, but she's learning Swedish in Sweden, and her English was not quite as good. I knew that her English was good enough to communicate, but not good enough to articulate the level of thought she was capable of. She's a scholar. She's really smart, and I didn’t want her language barrier to make her look less smart than she was. So then I asked Bicycling to help hire a translator.
The translator is on the east coast. I’m in Idaho. So just getting everyone in the same room at the same time with the time differences was a challenge. I'm asking her questions, and then the translator is translating, and I'm trying to get it as close as possible, but I'm also nervous, because I want not only quotes, but dialogue of what was said in the moment. So I actually relied heavily on things that were written years ago, that quoted them in a moment closer to the time of when some events happened. I would take some of those quotes and bring them back to the women and ask: “Does this reflect what you remember saying in the moment?” We would check it like that.
In addition to just interviewing, one of the hardest things about narrative interviewing is when you are starting to try to reconstruct a scene. First it starts with what happened, and then you have to figure out the sequence. What happened before that? What happened after that? I think about it as pivotal moments. And defining moments. These are the terms I use. Pivotal moments are when something happens that changes what happens next. Defining moments are a more internal moment, an “aha moment.” And that changes the character’s understanding of the situation, and that understanding influences what the character decides to do next.
So I look for those. Then I start trying to sequence pivotal moments and defining moments in a timeline. I start looking for cause and effect. Sometimes cause and effect isn't immediate. Sometimes there are five events, and the first event triggers the fifth one. So I’m looking for these patterns, and these relationships between people and events. I’m also looking for point of view. Whose head are we in when we see this scene? Meanwhile, what scene is playing out in another location? And how do these scenes and events relate to each other? It’s like this puzzle.
When I am interviewing for scene, that’s where it starts looking almost like a court transcript of a lawyer examining a witness on the stand. Where they're like: “How many steps was it before you turned the doorknob? Did the door open inward or outward? What was the first thing you saw after you opened the door? Was it dark? Was it light? How did you know that?” There’s a lot of interrupting.
For this, I leaned on photographs. The girls had photographs and videos on their phones, and they sent me a ton of videos through WhatsApp. Some were taken while they were evacuating. So I could see what the sky looked like. I could see how the people were in the streets. That was really useful.
I also used Google Earth. I looked at the route of Reihana’s last ride, in the opening scene. I wanted to know: “What road was it?” She told me the road, and I zoomed in as close Google Earth would go, and I looked at the landscape. I could see the road went through a canyon. She had a photo of her on that day, so I could describe what she was wearing, and what her smile looked like, and her lipstick. In the background, I could see the canyon had crumbling walls, and people were gathering behind her in the streets. She couldn’t see the Buddhas from where she was riding, but they were essentially behind her, in Bamyan, and I used them as a way of orienting the reader in geography.
The lipstick and the Buddhas, those moments that become part of the scenes—and the lipstick you close the story with too. “Book-ending” is what I often call it. Calling back those moments and images, which also hold thematic resonance.
It’s also a telling detail. She always wore red lipstick, and that says something about a woman whose culture requires her to cover her hair, her skin, her body. The Buddhas become metaphors. There’s a male and a female Buddha. There's two of them. They were destroyed by the Taliban, and now there are these twin voids. Everywhere you go in Bamyan, you can see these voids that are just constant reminders of what was lost, what was destroyed. So I wanted that to set the theme for the bigger story: This is a story about what’s been lost. There are Zakia- and Zahra-shaped voids in Afghanistan.
When the story came out, did they get a chance to see it?
With the permission of my editor—and this is something I've been doing for years with very good results, but also something that used to be a fireable offense—I read my stories to the people I am writing about. I'm very careful about avoiding emailing a draft, because that can get forwarded. But I got on Zoom with the translator. I put the text on share-screen. I realized that if you're not fluent, it helps to both hear it and see the text. I had a translator there so Zahra could ask questions. And there were moments where Zahra would say: “Hey, just a minute.” Then she talked to the translator, and the translator would explain her clarification.
That's when I felt more confidence about the nuances. Errors of nuance are one of the dangers of narrative. You’re using your vocabulary as a writer to convey the emotional experience of someone who's not a writer, who doesn't have the same vocabulary. So you lean on your words, but your words may or may not accurately convey what they’re trying to say. So I feel like it is my responsibility to go back and say: “This is how I described your experience. Do my words feel true to you?”
I don’t just want to know if the facts are accurate, but does this feel true? Does it make you cringe at all? Does it make you feel like, “Well, that’s not exactly right. That’s too simple.” That helps them understand how I’ve interpreted their story and what’s about to go into the world. I think it makes them a lot more comfortable. It’s like my fact checking of my own assumptions and my own inferences from what they have said or implied.
I love that, and I have also done that. Also that’s a technique in trauma-informed journalism. These are traumatic events for them, and they’re sharing these experiences with you. So you always want to make sure, especially with people who haven’t been in the public eye, that you're handling that situation with care.
Before I published What Stands in a Storm, a book about a horrific tornado outbreak, I had a reading with three grieving families who trusted me to tell their stories. Each family had their own reading. It was so important. I think it closes the loop of trust that begins with them trusting you to tell the story of one of the worst days of their lives. I feel like it is the right way to do it, for me, and if an editor doesn't allow me to do that, I reconsider working for that publication. Fact checking is not enough. There are things that a fact check will not catch, and those things are nuance and context.
You wouldn’t want to do that for a politician. You wouldn't want to do that for everyone, but for an everyday person who doesn't understand how this works, or the impact that this could have on them? I feel it’s important.
It’s extra time, but it seems like you then go into the publishing process knowing that it's okay, you feel pretty confident that you're not surprising anybody with what you've said, especially people who’ve spent this much time and have been through so much with you or in their lives too. How has it been going, now that the story is out?
I’m glad it ran now, because I think it would have been lost a little bit in the news that was coming out at the time. I think that the long arc doesn’t have a happy ending. If I had written it a year ago, it would have had a happier ending. Starting a few years later, they’re really homesick, and they realize, we can wear whatever we want, but we’re not that free. We should be in Afghanistan, and we hope we can go back there one day. I think that is a truer ending than it would have been if written earlier.
I’m often pushing back against happy endings, because I feel like life is messier and more complicated. So I like that, ending on what it is. But then, of course, it also is a piece of advice that waiting can be to your advantage in this kind of work, because the story is still unfolding.
I do think that no story ending is ever truly “the end.” But I feel like it has a bigger frame, a more meaningful frame around it. Sometimes a story doesn’t allow itself to be written until it’s ready, and for whatever reason, it doesn’t feel like it’s in your control. You can push it and try to force it, but when you force things, it doesn’t usually work out well. I mean, yes, there are deadlines, and we have to respect the deadline.
But I was really grateful that my editor didn’t push me to finish this before I felt I was ready, and before the story felt ready itself. That’s one thing that I have to say about working with this editor over time. It’s something I’ve always wanted in my career. Leah and I have worked together for many years, and we’ve had some really tough stories that we’ve had to dance together through. This is one of them. But I always felt like she listened to me and heard me, and also pushed me in directions that I needed to be pushed, but not too hard, not too forcefully. It made the story better.
*For more of Cross’s tips and lessons on “interviewing for narrative,” please read her excellent series for the Nieman Storyboard:
Spotlight on the Art of the Narrative Interview
Part I: Pre-interviewing for a successful pitch
Part II: Finding the story’s arc
Love this tip. I am going to pass it on to my nonfiction students.