Students have often asked me: what’s the best way to see narrative journalists “putting it all together?”— that is, how do leading reporters move from (1) getting a story idea, to (2) deciding on the legwork they need to do, to (3) actually writing a story?

In truth, thought, if you think of that as a three-part series of decisions – story idea, legwork, and text – you’ll quickly discover it’s rarely that neat or orderly. Reporters often get ideas while they are doing legwork, and often when they write something up, they go back and do more. Think about your own writing, I often say: sometimes you don’t know what your paper is “about” until you start writing it.

Even so, students often say it’s easy to figure out one step or another in a reporter’s craft–its the whole process that’s hard to grasp. Sometimes, as Pascal Sigg recently reminded me, you can learn about how reporters get story ideas from their online interviews, or reflections on their career as a whole. There is still wonderful material available on the recently-lapsed Longform, which has a good index of all the writers on their site. But seeing how a reporter puts the parts together in their own mind, gives them coherence and organic connection – which is in many ways the goal of Reading Narrative Journalism itself – that can be a challenge to figure out just from the text itself.

For that reason, I often say that one of the best ways is to start with annotations. In narrative journalism circles, annotations are usually thought of as “notes” that editors (like professors!) put in the margin of something a reporter has written. But for some time now, sites like the Nieman Storyboard have changed that up, instead using “annotation” to mean offering a journalist a chance to look dig back into one of their own reports. So, what the journalist does is annotate their text itself: they go back, and insert comments on what they were thinking or deciding to do at different junctures of making up the report. Sometimes, there’s a Q & A embedded, as well with an editor another writer. It can really be eye-opening.

You can find the Annotation Tuesday home page of the Storyboard site here, and here are some instructive annotations they offer:

• Susan Orlean  (Profiling)
• John Mooallem  (Wildfire)
• Rachel Aviv  (Christian Boarding Schools)
• Andrea Pitzer (environment)

One last tip: you might want to take a look at the William Finnegan talk available (via YouTube) on this site. In that talk—which Finnegan actually gave to a group of students—the reporter looks back on one of his stories – and, in fact, one that I have often started a narrative journalism course with myself. It’s a New Yorker piece called “Doubt,“ in which Finnegan tells the story of serving on a jury in a criminal case and then, when it was over, going out and investigating it as a reporter would. In the YouTube selection on this site, Finnegan now goes back and verbally unpacks the dramatic choices that he made in writing up that story.

Enjoy!