Little more than a decade ago, America
woke up to a disaster. The unthinkable had happened 20 miles above them. Space
shuttle Columbia, a symbol of spaceflight, of American technology and
engineering prowess was on its way back to Earth after spending 16 days in the
orbit with a crew of seven and it did not survive the ride.
What remained were 83,900 pieces of this
1.8 billion spacecraft spread over seven states of North America. Architects of
the American space program, the scientists at NASA, were now under intense scrutiny
and the subject of a 6-month long investigation. In the aftermath of the
accident, nearly 5,500 people scoured through the lakes, bushes and trees in an
area the size of Connecticut to piece together the story behind the crash. It
was one of the biggest jigsaw puzzles of all time and it was being assembled
even as newer pieces were being found - all under relentless a media
glare.
From the ashes of this wreckage, there
emerged a truth and a story about discovery of that truth. This quest
transformed the people who were involved in it. One among them was Lee - Robert Lee
Hotz, a seasoned reporter and writer, who brought to life the story behind the
tragedy that was Columbia. It was a story that had been in headlines for six
months that had been intensely followed and yet poorly understood. It was story
that had been reported ad nauseam and
yet could not be ignored (even by the Pulitzer board as Lee was awarded his
second of three Pulitzers for this story).
I was one of the fifty writers and
scientists listening with rapt attention to Lee's narrative at the Santa Fe science-writing
workshop in May this year. We were there to learn from the masters about the
craft of writing and reporting and learn.
Lee’s involvement in this story began
when his editor at LA Times walked up to him and asked him to step back from the
everyday reporting of the Columbia crash and to follow the development of the
investigation itself. Despite being a reporter, he was to walk away from a breaking
news story and to follow its development from behind the scenes. His task was to take the public
behind the scenes of the investigation and trace the story to its end. The task at hand was unusual because he was to report on
something that had already been reported - hundreds of times in the very least.
He was left with the “cold embers of a twice-told story” and he had to present
it with a completely new perspective. And so he set about finding his story,
his narrative. He set up electronic trip wires and followed the story as it
unfolded in hundreds of places over thousands of news clippings. Lee says of
the investigation, “As a matter of forensic engineering, the investigation into
the accident that killed the seven crew members aboard the space shuttle
Columbia was the most extensive scientific inquest in history.”
At the workshop, we witnessed the birth
of this story from a tale of destruction. Just as the wreckage of Columbia was
pieced together, we learnt of the art and skill behind piecing together a
narrative – one word at a time. There were many lessons in store for all of us.
They are the simplest of reporting lessons and yet many a time, it is with the
simple, that the errors begin.
1) Begin
at the beginning - you cannot write what you have not reported:
While that may seem fairly obvious,
reporting is also the stage where most errors are made.
Lee mentions something that the great
writers always seem to do: pay meticulous attention to sensory detail. “To
sights, sounds, smells, textures, colors. To people and their personal detail,
to photos on their desk, to their dress, their appearance, their hobbies. They
are all revealing pieces of the mosaic of human character.” Latch on to sensory
detail that can later provide literary nuggets for your readers to get a
perspective, a window into your story.
2) Shed
your preconceptions – they blind you from your sources:
The human ability to expect, anticipate
and generalize makes us evolutionarily successful but it also leads one to
approach most stories with an expectation of what we hope to find. This is
fatal to a reporter who needs to listen carefully to the story that his sources
and evidences are trying hard to tell him. Needless to say, one needs to be
able to approach a story without any preconceived notions or prejudices.
3) Look
people in the eye and give your curiosity a free reign - wander:
“Deadlines, pressures and the sprint for
money, quote and a hard lead, can often make one very blinded and focused.”
But this is when one must trust their
instincts and explore.
“Hang up the phone and get out of the
office. Talk to people directly. I knocked on doors in nine cities, from
Huntsville to Boston. It was time consuming, lonely, expensive, and yet always
revealing. The further I went from managed news events, the more I learned.” He
says candidly, “go away from you comfort zone and open yourself up to people”.
One needs to wander into blind alleys and sometimes one of them will give you a
story. It was one such blind alley-like digression that brought Lee to Chauncy
Birdtail, a part-time firefighter from Montana who took up the job of hunting
for Columbia’s parts in order to pay off a fine of 900$ for drunken driving. Chauncy Birdtail is a character whose
presence lends a lot of color and depth to the story. This is one striking
advice in today’s internet and technology driven world where we tend to do most
of our research from blogs, books and websites. It is for this very reason that
I find Lee’s advice to “hang out in the lab, look people in the eye, knock on
doors, meet people”, very important and worth remembering.
4) Organize
as you go – there is never going to be “the” moment to set everything aside and
organize:
Organization of the reported material is
critical in any story, more so in a story that was covered by more than 20,000
news stories and involved 130 interviews with accident investigators,
scientists and NASA employees across the United States. Lee also burrowed his
way through government reports and public hearing transcripts spanning the
quarter-century of the space program. Of these reports, Lee says, “the best
stories are hidden in the fine print of any government report that most people
don’t read”. To organize and digest all this information pouring in from all
sides, Lee built a searchable computer database, which was religiously updated
every single day. What he also did was to update the story every day with
ideas, questions, impressions, problems, so that “one never loses track of what
one doesn’t know”.
Thankfully for rest of us, technology has
come along further in the past decade and there are softwares like Ask Sam (for
windows), Devonthink (for mac) and scrivener (for mac again) that let you do
something similar (and perhaps more) without having to build a database on your
own.
Not so surprisingly, Lee also had 10
yellow legal pads of hand written interview notes that he had indexed by topic.
And in these went his impressions, thoughts and possible follow-ups after every
interview.
5) History matters – dig deeper that you think
you need:
As a scientist by training, I couldn’t
have agreed more with Lee, when he said, “In every story, history matters,
context matters.” - because they do. As digging deeper into story of Columbia
revealed to Lee - the accident was two decades in the making. The conditions
for the fatal flight were set by the political and economic decisions that
shaped the original flawed design of the shuttle spacecraft. In fact, contrary
to what he expected in the beginning, his story is not about the shuttle or its
victims. This becomes the narrative arc of the story, the very spine that keeps
it standing through the many explorations.
6) Persist
– and the sources shall oblige:
This is a word that journalists and
scientists both best understand. It is no surprise then that science writing
sometimes demands just that. Lee says, “Many shuttle officials never talked
directly to me or anyone else in press. The head of the investigating
commission never spoke to me despite repeated requests for an interview over
three months. Yet many people inside the space agency and the investigation did
talk to me at length. All of them had to be courted.” And that is where dogged
persistence comes into play.
7) Find
a guide – he will show you the way:
“Find a guide. A person who can blaze the
path for you through the sidelines of the story”, says Lee. You need someone to
show you the territory because you are mostly an outsider, unaccustomed to the
terrain. Find a guide. Some one, whose perspective can orient you and your
investigation. An anonymous source became Lee’s guide for the Columbia story
and helped him determine the questions that needed to be asked.
8) How
to piece it all together – shaping the outline:
Even though reporting a story seems like
the most daunting part of a story, it does not end there. The writer’s job only
begins now with the piecing together of these fragments into a cogent whole. Of
this particular story, Lee says, he faced the same problem as NASA’s
investigative team.
To piece together Columbia’s thousands of
scattered pieces and circuit components into a meaningful and revealing whole,
NASA did their reconstruction by laying out every one of their 83,900 shuttle
parts onto the silhouette of the space craft; Lee did his outlining of the
story in MS word. He reveals to us that he drafted the story by first defining
rough chapter outlines and then making bins within the outline. Each bin
contained relevant facts, quotes and the source information as footnotes. (This
way, when re-organized, the bins carried their sources with them making it easy
for him to avoid plagiarizing and for the fact checkers.)
Doing this surely was an arduous task as
one needs to burrow through a story to find every relevant factoid and to
provide a context for it all. His outline was a gigantic 27,000 words long
monograph at the end of which he was still searching for his story. He says
with all honesty, “this is when you find out what you have” – the story that
you pitched or something that totally caught you by surprise. And then begins the real process of writing
the story.
9) Don’t
begin, just start – “there is no such thing as a writer’s block”
Many people I know struggle to get that
perfect first sentence, before they can move on to the second. They then try
and perfect the second sentence before moving onto the third. This makes the whole process of writing a
rather painful and stuttered process. Lee says, “Don’t do that. Don’t begin;
just start. Write one chunk after another. Try to be as hard and as sharp as
you can. You can always trim back but you can’t trim what you haven’t put in.”
In the instance of the Columbia story,
everything was public and available and the beginning was unclear. And so he
did what makes most sense – “When in doubt, write in a chronological order.”
10) “If you like it, kill it”
Even as the first draft of the story is
sculpted into words, one is left with the most painful process of it all -
chiseling the story for a smooth but sharp finish. Editing a draft is a painful
process and Lee did six rounds of revision before he could show the story to
anyone but himself. And this process was guided by something that the raspy
voiced, Ed Berlin, his former editor told him:
“You like it.
It’s really beautiful.
Kill it.”
This according to Lee is great advice
because we, as men and women with words, get too attached to our own words and
phrases; often times at the expense of clarity and brevity.
11) Find
the narrative arc and find a good editor:
Having written six drafts of his story,
Lee then took the outline of his story to an editor - someone whose advice can
be trusted but ignored when needed. This is something that we all often
struggle with – finding that trained eye to locate the rips, tears and knots in
the fabric of the story. Most people turn to friends, family members, mentors,
or former editors. Luckily for Lee, L Myer, a Pulitzer winning editor and a
former white house correspondent was willing to help.
At this point, despite having written the
outline of the story, Lee was searching for the narrative arc.
Myer found it for him.
Lee’s outline for the story began with
the re-entry of the shuttle.
“One Columbia crew member didn't wear a space
helmet, so smooth was the descent.
Too elated to bother,
or perhaps too confident, three of them did not put on their orange
pressure-suit gloves.
On the flight deck,
shuttle commander Rick Husband, 45, chugged down three plastic flagons of
saline solution to keep from getting lightheaded, a common side effect of
reentry. It tasted slightly like seawater.
Pilot William McCool,
41, pored over a pre-landing checklist. Crew members Kalpana Chawla, 41, and
Laurel Clark, 41, sitting behind him, watched raptly as superheated gases
licked across the cabin windows.
Seated back in the
mid-deck area, Michael Anderson, 43, David Brown, 46, and Ilan Ramon, 48, could
not see what lay ahead.
The seven men and
women were plunging out of orbit into the atmosphere over the South Pacific on
the last leg of a journey that 22 years of repetition had turned into a NASA
routine.
For 16 days, they had
circled Earth. Now they could return.”
But after Myer, Lee’s investigative story
began with James Hillock who uses pencils and a mail room balance to find out
just how little it takes to bring down a space shuttle. His former lede with
the crew-members entering the air space and being engulfed by a fire ball was
no longer relevant to the narrative arc. The story was not about the accident
or its victims. The story, as Lee now realized was about an agency cloaked in
complacency and unwittingly waiting for an accident to happen.
He had finally found his narrative arc.
He now needed to edit the story. Myer
says to Lee of his editing process: “Indeed on the first day of the editing, I
read through the piece, mark the weakest part and then remove. On the second
day, I read through the piece and remove the weakest part. On the third day, I
read through the piece and remove the weakest part and so on. I do this, until
the stuff that is left really slaps you in the face. Hope this helps.”
12) Write.
Re-write. Re-write. Re-written. Re-writing.
With the story in place, the last task at
hand is to find the best words to build the most compelling picture. This was a
task that Lee did in close collaboration with his editor. They first divided
the story into chapters to arrive at a global narrative arc. Each chapter was
then sculpted, word-by-word, line-by-line to achieve a tone of forensic
terseness and brevity. Together, they went through thirty-two drafts spending
late nights and early mornings working on this six-part, 13,000 word,
nail-biter of a story. The multipartite editing process helped them make every
word and every sentence carry the story. There was nothing superfluous, nothing
unnecessary.
Every one of the six parts was a story in
itself and a part of the bigger whole. They removed fuzzy generalizations,
analogies, adverbs and adjectives to give this investigation its forensic tone
and import. They relied heavily on verbs, as every great writer has already
confessed. Their gas guns belched, their parts shattered, scattered and their subjects
dared, discovered, radioed, twirled and teetered.
13) Like
all journeys, stories have a destination.
“Write your ending with the same care as
the lede. If possible, write the beginning with the end in mind.” The end of
every story - like the end of every journey - should be a destination.
The Tragic tale of Columbia and its crew
comes back a full circle in Lee’s story as it ends by outlining the last
minutes of the shuttle’s re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere and the echo of
that disaster that reverberated for months on end.
“A
mystery can transform those who pursue it. The people involved in the Columbia
inquest may never be free of it. Memories have a life of their own. Regrets
linger.
Should
they start to fade, there will be reminders.
Just a
few weeks ago near Chireno, Texas, a farmer feeding his cattle discovered a
jagged piece of alloy about the size of a fountain pen jammed in a bale of hay.
He took
it to the county sheriff, who duly sent it by overnight express to NASA.
It was
another piece of Columbia.
They
turn up about once a week.”
These are lessons that are simple enough (to forget) and that is precisely why they need to be remembered and actively
followed.
