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Episode 145—Investigative Reporter Scott Eden Talks Structure, Sprawl, and Picking Up the Phone
134 Plays6 years ago
"At what point are you taxing the reader?" asks Scott Eden, "knowing when the reader has had enough."
That’s Scott Eden, investigative reporter for ESPN the Magazine and THIS is The Creative Nonfiction Podcast.
Subscribe at iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher to get this delivered to your feed on every Friday. Follow me on Twitter @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod and follow the show on Instagram @cnfpod.
So Scott Eden is here. He’s an intrepid reporter and we got to dig deep into his process and deconstructed how he wrote his piece on the former NBA referee Tim Donaghy, who gambled on the games he reffed and essentially fixed games.
Thanks to Goucher College’s MFA in Nonfiction and Bay Path Unviersity’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction for making this show possible.
Be sure to head over to brendanomeara.com for show notes and to subscribe to my monthly newsletter. Sign up and get the next one on the first of the month. Once a month. No spam. Can’t beat it.
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Transcript
Thrill of Story Confirmation & Intro to Scott Eden
00:00:00
Speaker
You know that feeling when you bagged some serious information? When you've confirmed a juicy scene with a source, it might go a little something like this.
00:00:18
Speaker
That's Scott Eden, investigative reporter for ESPN The Magazine, and this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast.
Creative Nonfiction Promotions & Podcast Announcements
00:00:31
Speaker
Oh yeah, and now, a word from our first sponsor, who helps make this show possible.
00:00:38
Speaker
The Creative Nonfiction Podcast is sponsored by Goucher College's Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction. The Goucher MFA is a two year, low residency program. Online classes let you learn from anywhere while on campus residencies allow you to hone your craft with accomplishmenters who have paltry prizes and best selling books to their names.
00:00:58
Speaker
The program boasts a nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni, which has published 140 books and counting. You'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey. Visit goucher.edu slash nonfiction to start your journey now. Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published in Goucher's MFA in nonfiction.
00:01:26
Speaker
Alright, so this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I talk to badass writers, filmmakers, and producers about the art and craft of telling true stories. By the time this hits your ears, I'll be up in Portland at AWP, the monstrous writers' conference.
00:01:44
Speaker
hobnobbing, slinging back a few beers, bruh. Staying at some seedy hotel near the airport where Colson Whitehead, no doubt, is staying in the most posh place in Portland. He's the keynote, and I love Colson's work, no hate. Sorry, I'm a bit toasted off these poor man's mochas I've been making. You know, hot chocolate and coffee. We keep it classy here. Anyway.
00:02:08
Speaker
If you found that intro entertaining, there's myriad ways you can subscribe to the show. Head over to iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher to get this delivered to your feed every Friday. Follow me on Twitter at Brendan O'Mara and at cnfpod. And follow the show on Instagram at cnfpod.
00:02:27
Speaker
There's this thing called The Hundred Day Project, started by Lindsay Jean Thompson, starting this April 2nd. It's in the, I believe it's sixth year, and the idea is you do something creative every day for a hundred straight days.
00:02:42
Speaker
So I started a new podcast called Casualty of Words. See what I did there? And it's a sub five minute show that's a blog and pod form that gives you a creative shot in the arm. Part tactical, part motivational. I'd love if you checked it out. Casualty of words. Okay.
00:03:05
Speaker
Creative Nonfiction podcast is sponsored by Bay Path University, MFA in Creative Nonfiction. They help make the show possible. Discover your story.
Scott Eden's Background & Early Influences
00:03:15
Speaker
Bay Path University, founded in New England in 1897, is the first and only university to offer a no residency. Fully accredited MFA, focusing exclusively on creative nonfiction.
00:03:29
Speaker
Attend full-time or part-time from anywhere in the world. In the Bay Path MFA, you'll find small online classes and a dynamic and supportive community. You'll master the techniques of good writing from acclaimed authors and editors, learn about publishing and teaching through professional internships, and complete a master's thesis that will form the foundation for your memoir or collection of essays.
00:03:51
Speaker
Special elective courses include contemporary women's stories, travel and food writing, family histories, spiritual writing and optional, week-long summer residency in Ireland, with guest writers including Andre Devis III, Ann Hood, Mia Gallagher and others.
00:04:07
Speaker
Start dates in late August, January, and May. Find out more at baypath.edu slash MFA. So Scott Eden is here. He's an intrepid reporter. And we got to dig deep into his process.
00:04:22
Speaker
and deconstructed a bit how he wrote his piece for ESPN the magazine that just came out in March here on the former NBA referee Tim Donahue, who gambled on the games he reffed in and essentially fixed games. NBA denies that he fixed games, but Scott's piece reveals that there's, that's what went down. All right, here's Scott.
00:04:58
Speaker
Where are you from and where'd you grow up? Yeah, I grew up in western Pennsylvania. But the very northwestern corner, what I like to call the panhandle of Pennsylvania, that kind of little notch that sticks up. I grew up in Erie, PA, which is right on Lake Erie. So it's really the Great Lakes region. It's probably more in common with Cleveland and Buffalo and Milwaukee, even, than it does the rest of Pennsylvania, I think.
00:05:27
Speaker
But yeah, born and raised there. Yeah, there's a relatively new horse racing track, Prescile Downs, which is kind of in that area. Oh, that's right there. Yeah, Prescile itself is, you know, it's like a state park. The peninsula kind of shuts out in Lake Erie right there. That's like the big attraction of Erie, PA. Nice. And so you grow up there, you know, what were your parents up to?
00:05:54
Speaker
My father was kind of a self-employed entrepreneur. He had his own computer store, actually, kind of at the birth of the PC era, like back in the late 70s, early 80s. But he did a bunch of things. And then my mother was a school teacher, art teacher, and then became a stay-at-home mom. And it was just me and my sister. And my mother is from Erie, Pennsylvania also. My father's from Western New York.
00:06:16
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So all of our family is kind of in that area. Yeah, some brutal winters up that way for sure. Oh, yes. Lake Effect snow. Yeah. Just piling up. Oh, it's brutal. Yeah, when I spent a lot of time in upstate New York, like Saratoga Springs area, and often would drive across 90 through Western New York. Yeah, the thruway there is the Lake Effect snow is no joke for sure. It is not.
00:06:45
Speaker
white-out conditions. So when you were growing up, what kind of crew did you run with? Were you with the athletic crew? Were you with more the artistic crowd? Who were your people, so to speak? That's a good question.
Transition from Fiction to Nonfiction Writing
00:07:02
Speaker
I guess kind of a mixture. I myself was not a jock or an athlete at all. But a group that were the high achievers, I guess, to a degree.
00:07:14
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But, you know, we had a good time also.
00:07:18
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You know, when someone gets into this kind of career, oftentimes it's there's someone or even a book that you can point to that really kind of turn the world from black and white into color or even someone who recognized something in you and told you to keep going, gave you permission to pursue this kind of vocation. And maybe in high school and even into college, was there a particular mentor that kind of pushed you in the right direction?
00:07:48
Speaker
Yeah, I guess it didn't really happen until college. I went to Notre Dame. And I think I even got into Notre Dame just because I had kind of mediocre SAT scores. I think I got in just based on the essay portion of the application. But once I got there, if you're in the humanities, liberal arts, you had the
00:08:17
Speaker
in the required sort of English comp course. And my professor there, I think was the first real kind of, the first instructor, you know, professor to or, you know, mentor to kind of recognize maybe a little bit of writing talent. And then from there, you know, I majored in English. And really, I wanted to be a fiction writer to begin with. So I don't know, this is probably a,
00:08:45
Speaker
a reading habit that may have been a mistake, but I really got into metafiction and the whole postmodern writing that was kind of burgeoning in the 60s. All of a sudden, I started reading like John Barth's and Thomas Pynchon, these huge sprawling kind of experimental fiction. Donald Barth will make guys like that.
00:09:15
Speaker
And I really got into that and then mistakenly tried to emulate that stuff. I tried my hand, David Foster Wallace, all these kinds of writers. And so that really was where my mind was at through undergraduate years. I wanted to be a short story writer and a novelist.
00:09:34
Speaker
That was my dream. Yeah, and with writers of that nature, especially like a Wallace, their voice is like pyrotechnics. And it's like, I think it's – and I know I've fallen into this of trying to imitate that.
00:09:51
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the in the writer or artist artist ego is like when you write something you want it to be like noticeably your own your own stamp like you don't even need to read up like see the byline so to speak to know it's those guys writing and you almost want to be tied up in that you want to be recognizable recognizably different and original but you realize that you know trying to imitate that it's just you can't fly close to that Sun at all you know you got to kind of chart your own course
00:10:20
Speaker
Exactly. And then, you know, my tastes changed radically since then. Like I came to get through some of that stuff anymore. Yeah. As a reader, you know, so my tastes changed over time and the, the, the, the.
00:10:36
Speaker
The idea of writing fiction also, of course, was I dropped at some point realizing just not what I was good at. I feel like a lot of people I talked to on this show, they wanted to go into the fiction direction. And then for one reason or another, maybe they thought it was too difficult or they were just like, well, this actually didn't happen. It's not true in a verifiably true sense of the word.
00:11:00
Speaker
And there are just any other reasons. Like why did you eventually pivot from the fiction track to the more maybe journalism and true stories? Yeah, I mean I guess it wasn't such a clean break. It's not like I renounced fiction. Oh, I like one day woke up and said, you know, I'm not good at this. I might as well try journalism. But it didn't quite work like that. But my first job out of college was in journalism. I got a job
00:11:27
Speaker
at the Dow Jones News Service. This was the late 90s, so the internet hadn't yet grown into what it would become. So there actually were wire news services, like the original Associated Press back then, too. But it covered the financial markets. It was the same company as the Wall Street Journal. So I was covering the stock market.
00:11:53
Speaker
with no financial background at all. I think I took an economics class once as an undergrad. But it was still journalism, and it was in New York City, and so those were too great. It was kind of writing. But I caught the journalism bug there, as a beat reporter though, but still you had time
Structure and Inspiration in Writing
00:12:17
Speaker
to kind of develop ideas for future stories.
00:12:21
Speaker
and dig around, you know, and learn about this complex topic. And I kind of got really into it. And then simultaneously, that's when I kind of discovered, you know, the John McPhee's of the world and the, you know, Tom Wolf or Gay Talise or Hunter Thompson. You know, I had read that stuff a little bit in college, but really started to delve into
00:12:47
Speaker
literary nonfiction once I got a job as a reporter and caught that bug. What was the McPhee book you came across that all of a sudden you were like, oh, wow, this guy's doing something pretty special. I can't remember what story it was. It might have been Oranges, actually, this book about, you know, Oranges. Yeah. Yeah, I think it was that. And then I just and then I loved it so much. It was so strange. It was a strange book, right? Right. I mean, how can you
00:13:17
Speaker
create a page turner out of a subject like that, but he did. And so then I just read through him. I think I've read everything. And it started at the beginning, read through to the end of his oeuvre.
00:13:33
Speaker
Yeah, he's the guy that did it for me. That's the kind of journalism that really grabs me as a reader and also as a reporter. I'm not a hard news guy or anything like that. It just doesn't appeal to me personally, to my taste, just as a person and as a reporter. I'm just not that kind of person. But that kind of journalism that you can follow some kind of quirky character as he builds bark canoes
00:14:00
Speaker
in the deep woods of Maine. I'm like, oh, that's something I can hook onto. I really dig that. Right, character-based stuff. And then he's really an advocate, or I don't know if that's the right word, but he's just really good at structure and really kind of preaches that. And then, you know, I don't know, he's probably not a great guy for young writers to emulate either, to be honest. When he has his own style that is,
00:14:30
Speaker
You know, subtly comic, right? I think he's, you know, pretty hilarious writer. But he does structure really well. And that's the thing that you can really, I think, is a good thing for writers just starting out to try to really focus on is how the story is built, how the information on the spools is unspooled. And so, you know, there's this thing called the John McPhee Reader.
00:14:56
Speaker
where there's an introduction that was written by one of his Princeton colleagues that really gets into his method. That was very instructional, just that introduction to the John McPhee reader, which delved into how he went about, not just gathering material, but once you're home with all the material, you've got all your notes, then what do you do with them? And so I would go and actually read the books back again,
00:15:24
Speaker
break down how he went about unspooling the information in such a way that it's clear to the reader. And then also the story that you're delivering is a story. So you're compelling the reader to turn the page. And there's a kind of building that structure. So I mean, that's the essence of the whole enterprise. Right. And when you're just starting out, it's really hard to figure out
00:15:52
Speaker
you know, where to begin to do such a thing, especially if you're writing something that's, you know, the topic is complex.
00:15:59
Speaker
Yeah, you need a ton of information to begin with to even start to noodle with different kinds of structure. And then once you settle on it, of course, then it's like, OK, here's your wire frame. And then you can start building, putting meat on those bones at that point. But you've got to figure out what I like to kind of call going to the film. You're a quarterback just watching film. How are we deconstructing this defense here?
00:16:28
Speaker
And then suddenly, it's like you watch it enough and you read it enough with everything you've learned. And it's like, oh, you start to see the seams coming apart and be like, oh, that's how we did it. And of course, that's how you improve. So how is turning your eye towards structure like that improved the work you're doing? I mean, yeah, it's vital. And then, you know, you get better at it over time, for sure. When you test things out, I mean, the only way to learn how to write well is just to do it.
00:16:58
Speaker
So you just see what works, what doesn't. And then, you know, editors are there once you get in the position where you're publishing and you have an editor to work with. I mean, they help with that too. Yeah, it's just trial and error, basically figuring out what works and what doesn't. And then, you know, experimenting a little too to see how far you can reach. But then, you know, the structure should come from the material and grow, I think, organically out of the material rather than vice versa. Although McPhee is famous for
00:17:28
Speaker
coming up with the structure first and then the story second. There's a couple of books where he does exactly the opposite of that. But for most of my stories, I haven't done such formal kind of play, despite the metafictional background, which is, of course, all formal play. But for me, always the structures grow out of the material itself and the necessities of, like I said, how do you deliver information and in what order
00:17:56
Speaker
So that's clear and compelling. And as you came out of that metafictional background and initially being drawn to that and then slowly gravitating towards other writers and so forth, who were some of the writers that you began to gravitate towards and then how did you start to form your own voice, something that's comfortable that comes out of you onto your keyboard?
00:18:20
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know how that that's kind of mysterious to this day. But I guess McPhee and then I discovered the old New Yorker. So guys like Joe Mitchell, and AJ Liebling. I mean, I'm not the only one who's followed this path, for sure. But these are the kind of guys that I considered the masters and again, very difficult to emulate either any of these guys. I mean, but you know, nonetheless, you try, I guess that's how you start out is imitation. But that whole old New Yorker, you know, when
00:18:48
Speaker
you know, probably from World War II on, or even just before, as I just fell in love with all of that, all of those writers from that era, E.B. White and James Thurber and a guy named St. Clair McKellway. Some of these guys are just lost to time. And even even Liebling himself, all those books were out of print at one point, but it was just, I was kind of entranced with what they were doing and could do. Even John Hersey, you know, he wrote, he's a fiction writer, but also
00:19:18
Speaker
phenomenal journalist. So yeah, I just started reading through that. Also, the catching of the journalism bug was a combination of getting that first job and then this kind of reading. When you got that bug there as you're covering the stock exchange in New York, what's the next step for you as you start progressing?
00:19:45
Speaker
applied to and got a degree of no vocational value at all called the master's in fine arts in creative writing. I've got one of those two. Yeah. So I did that. I decided, yeah, I wanted to do it, but with a non-fictional focus. So I wound up going to Washington University in St. Louis.
00:20:06
Speaker
because they waived the tuition. They're kind of known for, you know, you don't have to pay for it. So I knew that it would be at no vocational value. So I didn't want to take out a lot of student loans to do it. So they were offered a generous package. So I went there and spent two years in St. Louis working with a couple of, and I worked with, you know, a couple of actual fiction writers mostly and was in the workshops with fiction writers. I was like the lone nonfiction
00:20:38
Speaker
student. All right, yeah, the token non-fiction writer. But it was good. Yeah. I don't know, I actually get thrown in with people like that. Yeah, it kind of teaches you how to, you know, you're bringing your non-fictional taste to that and then you start peeling off those fictional things, those skills that they have and applying it to your stuff and it's like, oh, it really makes your non-fiction kind of pop. Right, I mean, it's all the same. You know, it's still storytelling.
00:21:08
Speaker
They have raw material, too, I mean, coming from life as well as, you know, whatever emerges from your own imagination. But I mean, how much fiction is based on actual, you know, whether it's, you know, you know, Marlon James and a brief history of seven killings, you know, historical fiction, you know, basing it on on actual events.
00:21:34
Speaker
So, I mean, all of the Star Fictions autobiographical. So, I mean, it turns out that the act of creating the written thing is maybe not so different. Right. Were you itching to get back into newspapers or magazines after you were done with this program?
Shift to Investigative Reporting
00:21:58
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. I wanted to then try my hand at making the
00:22:04
Speaker
the long pieces that I had admired in all these guys. I wrote a pretty long, as like the thesis for the MFA program, a long article. Actually, it was book length. I mean, it was a full on book about a newspaper that was published in St. Louis in the African American community called the Evening Whirl. It was a crime newspaper. And it had this just kind of amazing history.
00:22:30
Speaker
It was founded in the 1930s by one guy and he kind of ran it all the way up until He got you know, just too old to run it You know through that ended into the 90s and it was like this kind of became famous You know in the in the country because it had this kind of style and he was covering, you know the crime That was going and it was a controversial mag, you know newspaper. He's an african-american Covering
00:22:58
Speaker
these subjects and crime and scandal in the African-American community of St. Louis and all the obvious controversies kind of surrounding that whole project of his. But that article wound up actually getting published in The Believer a few years later. But then right after St. Louis and the MFA school, I moved to Chicago and started writing for the Chicago Reader, which is the alternative news weekly of Chicago.
00:23:28
Speaker
They'd fallen on hard times, those kinds of newspapers, but they were, in their heyday, kind of a great breeding ground also for learning to write these kinds of stories. That was the reason I moved to Chicago, was to break in at the reader, actually. Oh, nice.
00:23:46
Speaker
Well, that's great. So when you're, when you're there at the reader, what kind of stories are you pursuing that really spark your taste and allow you to make a, take a deep dive on, on subjects? Yeah. I mean, at that point, I was, you know, emulating those, those guys, like Joe Mitchell or Liebling, especially their early career stuff when they're looking for, you know, urban characters and,
00:24:13
Speaker
just almost like strange people to profile who live in the city. And I was trying to do the same thing in Chicago. So, you know, I wrote about a bar owner who, you know, he was also an artist and he creates portraits of all his, all the regular customers who are kind of alcoholics. And there's a kind of,
00:24:38
Speaker
but they're beautiful, like colorful portraits that kind of are like cartoon Latusse Lautrex, and he's covered the bar walls with his portraits of all the regulars, and it's called the Old Town Ale House, and it's right next to Second City, and it used to be a hangout for all the famous comics that went through Second City, so it's kind of this renowned bar, but it's almost like a McSorley's, I guess, kind of story, but also about, you know, the kind of ravages of the drinking life
00:25:07
Speaker
So that's the kind of story that I was trying to find and did find. It's great that you can go into a place like that. It's just an everyday place to find everyday people and you find these really compelling narratives of every man or every woman that's just kind of hiding in plain sight. Yeah, and this bar proprietor, he led this amazing life.
00:25:33
Speaker
you know, kind of a dropout, but also a leftist radical in Berkeley, you know, in the sixties, you know, he hung out in like, you know, the, you know, San Francisco, you know, with all of these kind of late generate, late beat generation people. But he also was like a scratch golfer and he became a golf hustler like all over the country.
00:26:01
Speaker
And then I remember I actually, I played golf with him cause I wanted to make sure he wasn't bullshitting me and to see how good he was. And he was a scratch golfer. Um, but yeah, so it is amazing once you just walk in the door and start talking to people that you can find guys like that.
00:26:19
Speaker
Was that something you were always comfortable with doing the kind of, lack of a better term, the kind of cult calling sometimes you need to do to start pursuing a story, or is that a muscle you developed over time? Definitely the latter. I mean, I hated it at first. Just terrified of calling people. But I've gotten over that. But yeah, that is something that was learned, and it had to be. But it took years. I just remember not liking that at all.
00:26:49
Speaker
Yeah, was it something that you just – you got better at it just through repetition because that's kind of the nature of the beast? I think so. I think so, definitely, yeah. Would they have to think of a weird shyness almost, or I don't know what you call it, kind of a lack of self-confidence?
00:27:07
Speaker
Well, I think it's also, you almost feel like you're prying too much. You almost want to give people some distance in privacy, but at the same time, you kind of need to pry when you have to. So it is a funky balance, and it's pretty uncomfortable. It is. There's no way around. It's just uncomfortable. Yeah. And then also, you're asking the probing questions, the difficult questions.
00:27:35
Speaker
forcing people and yourself to kind of face up to whatever the problem is that you're trying to put down on the page because you can't have a compelling story unless you're getting at that stuff.
Investigative Process of NBA Scandal
00:27:54
Speaker
When you were at the reader, were you doing the kind of stories that you really wanted to do, or were you trying to, or did you kind of freelance a little on the side to write some things that were more satisfying for you? I mean, no. I mean, the reader was that. It was the freelancing. Yeah, yeah. And was doing the stories that I wanted to do, for sure. I mean, they weren't investigative at that point. They were more
00:28:23
Speaker
I don't know, slice of life type pieces. I mean, maybe the closest I got to investigation at that time was, um, a long profile of a, of a kind of like talent scout for college football recruiting. And this guy was like, you know, like the, it was named as Tom Lemming and he was the, he was Chicago based, but had become
00:28:51
Speaker
like the nations like most sought after, you know, a talent scout of high school football players. And he kind of had a controversial position. And that was probably the closest I got to anything investigative at the reader at that point. So I hadn't yet, I had learned that muscle either. You know, what did you find that as you were, as you were getting your reporter and writer legs underneath you, like what did you find that you struggled with early on that you slowly became, you know, better at through repetition?
00:29:21
Speaker
I mean, I guess structure to a degree also, like once you, when you're starting out and you've got these ambitions to do what your heroes are doing. And so you do go report the heck out of something and gather as much information as you can about a subject. Then you get back and you try to structure the thing, but then it can sprawl, right? It gets really,
00:29:48
Speaker
So I had a problem with sprawl, like the stories were just the drafts that I was turning in were just way too long. You know? Yeah. So I had to learn how to, and you know, maybe my editors are saying to themselves, if they're listening to this, that he, I still turn in drafts too long. So yeah, deciding, you know, at what point are you taxing the reader? You know, you really had, it's for me, that was something that I had to learn.
00:30:16
Speaker
over time, and maybe I still haven't quite mastered that, but I'm certainly better than I was when I first started out. I think, yeah, knowing when the readers had enough, it's time to move on. I mean, an important element of structure is to simply length. Like, how long are you dwelling on something? And then, you know, why? You know, there has to be a reason why you decide to dwell on something. So, I mean, a simple way also to think about structure is to simply length.
00:30:45
Speaker
of certain topics, like if you're digressing into a topic, why are you digressing there? Why does the reader need to know this now? And how much of that digression does the reader need? You know, you can't be just, you're going to throw it in there because you think it's entertaining or interesting. There has to be reasons. And there has to be, you know, if you're all of a sudden 300 words, 500 words in on this digression, there has to be a reason why you're
00:31:13
Speaker
you're developing that digression for such a long space. There has to be a thematic need, or simply the information is needed for the reader to understand X, Y, and Z that's coming down the road in the story. All those kinds of skills, again, can only be learned through doing. So at first, early on, when I was writing this stuff for the reader, I was kind of figuring that out, or as I went, and leaned on editors to kind of
00:31:43
Speaker
help me through that at first and have you gotten to a point where everything let's see everything you're everything you're saying is like it's a lot to think about and it's a lot to process as a writer as you're looking to write the the piece so is there a point in your generative phase where you just say
00:32:03
Speaker
you don't think about it, you just throw it all down and then it's in the rewrites where you're starting to ask these questions so that you don't get bogged down and sort of plugged up by these thematic things too early in a draft.
00:32:20
Speaker
I forget who said this, that they used a modified McPhee method for organizing the material. I did the same thing. Modified McPhee, I like it. You modify it to how your own brain works. Again, based on that introduction and that John McPhee reader and a couple other interviews that McPhee had given over the years. I used that method to organize the material. Then you break it down into topics, like your material down into topics and scenes.
00:32:49
Speaker
You know, and there's a couple other like journalistic, ours, Poetica I've read over the years
Challenges in Investigative Journalism
00:32:54
Speaker
that have been helpful. Like, um, you know, what is the, it's like James Stewart had a book I think called follow the story. I'm looking at my bookcase right now to get titles yet. And then also this kind of classic William Blundell, the art of feature art and craft of feature writing. He was an old Wall Street Journal editor.
00:33:15
Speaker
And The Wall Street Journal used to be famous for its page one feature stories and still is a little bit, but they used to have like a middle column feature story that was kind of not necessarily an investigative financial piece or a piece about a company. It was just like quirky sort of story. And then they were famous for their kind of newspaper style feature writing. And that was helpful. You know, have the organizational tactics that he kind of puts down in this book, which he wrote for Wall Street Journal writers, essentially.
00:33:47
Speaker
So those kinds of helped me try to figure out how to organize all this material. And then once you sit down to write, I think Calvin Trillin, another great New Yorker writer, says he does a vomit draft where he does just what you say. Just like, get it out. I don't care if it sucks. The sentences are horrible. They might even be sentence fragments half the time. Just get it all down there and then work it out in revision.
00:34:12
Speaker
So I mean, that's another tactic that I think is pretty useful. Once you've got all the material sitting there and broken down into whatever sections and topics that you want to hit, and you've got your lead idea, say, but the best method then is to vomit draft that thing for me and just to get it down.
00:34:35
Speaker
Hey, what is the meaning of this? Well, I want to say that this episode is also brought to you by my monthly newsletter. Oh yeah, that's right. On the first of the month, you can get a tasty bit of goodness sent right to your inbox. My reading recommendations for the month and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. Visit BrendanOmera.com. Once a month, no spam, can't beat it.
00:35:04
Speaker
Now back to the show. Yeah, it could be your, your lead is actually like a thousand words into your draft. You're like, Oh, that's really where this thing should start. Yeah, for sure. That has happened. Although I think I do tend to think about the story and its structure, but a lot before actually writing word one. So my leads tend to stay the leads.
00:35:33
Speaker
Because I really do think a lot about it beforehand before we're starting. But again, you know, the, the structure of the lead itself might change, you know, in revision because every lead has to have its own mini structure and every section, you know? Yeah. So keep narrowing it down.
00:35:54
Speaker
And when I was talking to Bronwyn Dickey a few episodes ago, she's been on the show a few times and sometimes we just have her on, we just bullshit. And she was saying, she loves hearing, I guess she read an interview or attended a talk of, I think it was Lawrence Wright who kind of opened up his backpack for the tools he uses when he goes on a reporting trip or something. He was just pulling out all this stuff that he uses to gather information.
Tools and Techniques in Reporting
00:36:22
Speaker
She loved that.
00:36:23
Speaker
And she's like, I love hearing how reporters, like what's in their bag as they go out on a trip. So it's something I've actually been experimenting with and asking guests of the show, you know, what they have on them as their things to gather all the information they need. So I might extend that to you, Scott, like what do you keep on you all the time so you can gather the information you need to write these big, these big pieces?
00:36:48
Speaker
I'm curious at what Lawrence Wright has in his backpack. I'm going to have to go listen to that now. Yeah, and this gets into the whole other aspect, which is the reporting phase, right? Once you journey off into the world to gather the stuff. But I guess I have a notepad, a bunch of them, a tape recorder, a digital tape recorder, pretty basic stuff. There's a certain kind of pen I like.
00:37:16
Speaker
And a certain kind of notebook that I like that I have kind of have to use. Um, what kind of notebook? It is a Rodea notepad and it is a kind of square. What are the dimensions? It has to be like, it fits right in your palm of your hand. That's kind of why I like it. Oh, nice. And it's not as long as a typical, you know, those were like really long reporters notebooks. Yeah. I don't like those because they don't rest in your hand quite, quite right. Um, yeah, but yeah.
00:37:44
Speaker
And a certain kind of pen, a ballpoint pen that writes fast and doesn't leak if it gets wet. I'm being really literal here. No, I love this. With the Refori stuff? No, this is great. The actual concrete tools that you use, it's great. Because then someone else might be like, you know what? I never even thought about having a notebook that actually kind of is more square shaped and fits in the palm of my hand. That could be a game changer for someone out there. I don't know. You know that long one? I mean, when you get to the bottom,
00:38:13
Speaker
You don't have any support for it. So yeah, come on. Can't use that long. And I like the graph paper in the Rodea for some reason, you know, sometimes if you need to sketch something, I don't know. Yeah. But then, you know, with the advent of smartphones, I mean, that thing has become a super reporting tool because I take way more pictures than I used to because it's so easy to take photos. So like, if I'm on a reporting journey somewhere,
00:38:43
Speaker
And I know I want to describe physically this place that I'm at. I wind up taking a lot of photos of that place. Um, and of the people I'm talking to, to remember what they're wearing and stuff, you know, that, that sort of thing, warning them, Hey, this is not for publication. Just, you know, can I snap a picture of you or, um, what else, you know, the digital recorder, I, I, I definitely, um, record more now than I used to.
00:39:14
Speaker
I don't know why. I just feel like, I guess the kinds of stories that I'm doing now are more dangerous. And I feel like a recorded version of the interview is more important now than it ever was. And I just think it's better too. I never mastered a shorthand. I have kind of my own personal shorthand that I guess I've developed over the years.
00:39:42
Speaker
And it's good enough in certain situations to carry me through. And of course, if it's a phone interview and I'm typing, that's really, you know, I can almost get it word for word, but I feel like it's still important to, in certain interviews, especially if it's like a primary, the primary main character of the interview. It has happened over time, but I just talk to way more people than I used to for a story. Like, especially I think that's just because these are investigative pieces that I've been doing more recently and
00:40:12
Speaker
In which case, you build the story with a mosaic of just people that you talk to, because there's not going to be any one source that's going to have it all. But you still have a main source. You still have a selection of kind of primary people that are the main informational kinds of... They might be the main characters, indeed, of the story.
00:40:39
Speaker
they just might be the the fonts, the informational fonts that you're really relying on, you know, there might be a half dozen of those. And so I would definitely tape record all of those main characters slash primary fonts of information type sources. But then, you know, I talked to so many people that it's just not possible to transcribe
00:41:03
Speaker
All, if I video, if I run video, but if I tape recorded every interview, it just wouldn't be possible to transcribe it all physically and actually make deadlines because I do like to transcribe every interview. Um, I do not like to farm that out, even though it sucks. No one likes transcribing. It's just takes forever. And it's the worst total drudgery, but, um, but I think it's necessary because you notice things that you didn't, that's another reason to record. Like you notice things, you know, in the,
00:41:31
Speaker
re-listening to the interview that you didn't, the first, you know, that you may not have, but I definitely missed, you know, while the interview was going on. And, you know, tones of voice are important, all that kind of stuff. Right. But so it's just not possible, like I said, to do it. So I typically then will, you know, just take notes for the, for like secondary type,
00:41:59
Speaker
you know, less important interview subjects. Yeah. You say you developed your own shorthand, but do you sometimes find that when you rely on just taking notes that your penmanship is illegible and then you can't remember, like you can't even read what you wrote down. You're like, shit, I just, I know something, I know something good is here, but I can't read it. So I can't use it. Yeah, that has happened. Although not, not that often, but yeah, that has happened. And yet another reason.
00:42:25
Speaker
to try to record as much as you can. Like I said, other times where it's not possible to record is if you're on an all-day reporting journey or more, where you're just kind of hanging out with the person. I guess you would wind up with hours upon hours of tape and then that would just be too much to get through.
00:42:49
Speaker
And so how did you then progress towards the more investigative pieces that you've been doing of late, and specifically a piece of the Tim Donaghy nature, something you spent, I think, what did you spend like two years on this piece? Yeah, the idea, the origin of the idea that it was brought to me in like March of 2017, I want to say.
00:43:15
Speaker
So yeah, it was almost two years from then to publication. How did I get there? I guess it was starting to write for ESPN, the magazine. And a little bit before that though, I had taken a job as a report at thestreet.com, which is an online publication that again covers the financial markets.
00:43:44
Speaker
and business news. But there I started to work on longer investigative pieces, including stock fraud. So that might have been really the first when I've kind of got a taste for the more exposing wrongdoing type stories and then marrying that with narrative. And then at ESPN, lo and behold,
00:44:11
Speaker
stories started to come my way about about the dark side of sports. And then, you know, there you go. You're all of a sudden doing investigative pieces for a for a for a magazine that will publish at length. So, yeah. So that's the first big one would have been the story about about Yasiel Puig, the Cuban baseball player who was smuggled out of Cuba and the end a story about the whole
00:44:41
Speaker
underground human smuggling pipeline that brought players out of Cuba and into the major leagues. That was probably the first big investigative piece that I did for ESPN. Yeah, I remember that piece. That was incredible. When you're dealing with murky underworlds of this nature, how do you stay buoyant and not get pulled down into that and dragged into the mud?
00:45:11
Speaker
I don't know if that's ever a danger. Do you mean like? I guess just maybe you're in your head space because you're spending a lot of time with, you know, in these sort of, sort of seedy underbelly worlds that it could be easy to just be like, I don't know, just, it could, I could see, I could see my brain, I could see myself getting pulled into like dark places because of it. So I wonder if that's maybe something you experience or if you do how you process it.
00:45:41
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there can be a fatigue if all of a sudden you find yourself hanging around unsavory worlds and having to constantly think about it and deal with it. There can be a kind of fatigue, I think. And yeah, at the end of stories, sometimes I just, you know, I don't want to have to deal with that subject for a long time. I feel like I'm thinking at the end of the process of some of these stories. But I don't know, sometimes
00:46:10
Speaker
You know, the stories are so compelling that you, you remain interested in getting it right and telling it compellingly. So that, that keeps you going. I mean, and yeah, there's a process of discovery too. That's always fun. I think the reporting process is generally speaking, uh, a good experience because I get to, I'm out there trying to satisfying my own curiosity about this stuff and trying to piece together what happened or verifying stuff that people have told me.
00:46:38
Speaker
And that puzzle, that game is interesting, right? You hear a story, someone tells you, but then you got to go verify it. And so how do you do that? What kind of people, what kind of documents, what kind of other people might know this same thing that can corroborate and it becomes a kind of investigative puzzle to solve.
00:47:02
Speaker
I imagine that feels really good, too. Like, say you've got something that's really juicy, and then you go to corroborate it, and then you get multiple people saying, oh, yes, this happened. It did happen. It did happen. You're like, oh, yes, that's got to be the juice, right? I mean, there are times where I'm fist pumping on the phone when I've got the guy nailing it for me, the crucial bit that needs corroboration, like leaping to my feet on the phone.
00:47:28
Speaker
in various ridiculous poses. But yeah, that's the best.
00:47:34
Speaker
And what I was talking with Evan Ratliff a couple weeks ago about his book, The Mastermind, which was this, you know, titanic piece of reporting, multi years, tons of sources, anonymous, some, you know, you name it, it's kind of like, it's a mosaic of stuff. It's very similar to the work you're doing. And we were talking about just attribution agreements and working your way through that, you know, people who
00:48:01
Speaker
want to be resistant to being on the record, but he's trying to get them on the record because it means more to have a name attached to something. So what's your experience as an investigative reporter trying to navigate those waters of trying to get the name, but maybe we can say you're an unidentified source, but it means more with your name attached to it. How do you process that?
00:48:29
Speaker
Sure. So I guess the first, you know, you go in just like, look, look, this is all, let this be all on background at first. Yeah. Just, but just, I just want to hear what you've got to say. Right. Like, let's say I'm approaching a source who's got, who may know something that's really important or can corroborate something that's really important, but who I suspect might not want their name attached to it. Not want to be quoted by name.
00:48:52
Speaker
You know, but at first I'll just say, you know, I just want the information. I just want to know what you know. Um, so let's just keep it all on background. And then do you just have a notebook out at this point? Like you're not even bothering recording or do you record? Um, that depends. That depends. Uh, sometimes I'll, I'll be recording. Okay. Sometimes not. It depends if it's face to face or not, um, or over the phone. Um,
00:49:20
Speaker
But at first, I just want the information just, please, let's just have a discussion here. I let the person know, obviously, what I'm working on and what I'm trying to find. Another technique, too, though, I found useful, even though this can add to the amount of material that eventually you'll need to go through. And it depends, too, on the kind of source you're talking to. But let's say the Donaghy story, which really was a big mosaic of different people.
00:49:50
Speaker
who intersected with the Donahue scandal in one way or another. It could be a referee who was a co-worker of Donahue's or it could be an underground gambler who was a bookie in the Caribbean who took bets on Donahue. I'm coming at these people with a specific question in mind. I want to talk about something really specific with them, but on the other hand, I don't know what they know yet.
00:50:18
Speaker
they may know a bunch of other stuff that's really important to the story. So you don't want to just blaze in there asking them only what the question that you want answered. And, and it's important too that they've, their own story intersects with Donnie's story, right? So at first, a good way to approach is I thought, I think that I've found over, over time that this is useful. It's like, just tell the person to tell me their story, like from start to finish. I want to hear, you know,
00:50:44
Speaker
how your life intersected with this subject that I'm working on and start wherever you think the beginning is and just narrate your story for me as it pertains to what were, for instance, Tim Dunney. And then they start at the beginning and they start talking and talking and narrating their way through it. And then all of a sudden you learn up things that you, you know, all of a sudden this new bit of information blooms up that becomes super important that you didn't even know of it to ask.
00:51:13
Speaker
Yeah, it's an unknown unknown or whatever the phrase is. Yeah. But that does add exponentially to the amount of material because if you talk to 100 people and you do that with 75 of them, you've got a lot of material to work through at the end of the day. But I still think it's kind of necessary to do that. And then yes, back to your question about attribution. I mean, again, starting off with just to me, you know, this is
00:51:40
Speaker
I guess it's pretty standard investigative reporting procedure. But yeah, starting off on background, don't worry about it. Just tell me what's going on. Tell me what you know. And then try to, over time, develop a relationship with that person, especially if they turn into someone who's really crucial to the story. You do want to develop a relationship and not just be like, you know, totally exploitative and like, I just need your information, you know, kind of a transactional relationship. You do have to build trust with the person.
00:52:10
Speaker
And at that point, yeah, try to convince them to go on the record. Try to convince everyone to. Often you can't. And there are very good reasons why the person wouldn't want to go on the record. And so it is what it is at that point. And so then you're getting all this information on the story. You're talking to dozens upon dozens of people. How do you start to corral all this information and organize it so you can then start to conceive of structuring a story at this point?
00:52:41
Speaker
I mean, yeah, I guess it's transcribing everything, whether it's handwritten notes or the recordings. And then you start, you know, you group it by source or, or even types of sources. So like for instance, I would have, I had it in the Donohue piece, I had a gigantic sort of word doc, but that was all my interviews with on and off the record with refs. And so, so that's all referee material, you know, it's kind of there, but then you, anyway, you just transcribe everything. And then this, I guess gets back to the modified McPhee method.
00:53:11
Speaker
You transcribe everything and then you read through it, read through the entire, um, note stock. And that, that includes not just your own interviews, by the way, it's like all the documents you've amassed over time. Cause it, you know, there won't be, it won't be simply interviews with human sources. There'll be all kinds of other stuff that you've gathered, you know, whether it's a cash of FOIA document, you know, like the FBI FOIA file that we,
00:53:41
Speaker
retreat, we obtained on the Donohue case, or court documents, you know? Yep. Thousands of court documents on that one. And same with the Yasio Puig story. There was a huge amount of just going into Pacer, you know, the online platform for accessing federal court documents. So you read through all of that, and then you start
00:54:08
Speaker
in your brain, I guess starts percolating possible ways to begin.
Compelling Elements of the Donaghy Story
00:54:13
Speaker
And then the information that is really necessary to the reader and then you'll have to, there's, you know, there's, there's expository segments of a story where you have to explain stuff, explanatory passages, and then there's scenes that you want to have because you're building a narrative at the same time. And then when possible, you want to wed those two things, you know,
00:54:34
Speaker
And, you know, there's also this process of zooming in and zooming out. That's another way to think about structure, like where you zoom in onto a scene where people are actually acting and behaving and doing things. And then you zoom out to explain something. You know, it is, I guess it's the in scene versus expository passages and the, or sections of a story, you know, whole sections will be just pure explanation.
00:54:59
Speaker
And other sections will be the drama, the actual plot that you've got, where people are engaged in actions. And then you set scenes as much as you can, as cinematically as you can, with dialogue and description, physical description of people and the place that they're at.
00:55:22
Speaker
And certain things like that will pop out while you're reading through the notes. Like, holy crap, this is very insane here talking about something that's just obvious that that will be a scene in the story. Because it's like a crisis point or a friction point, as they call it, where you know that they're working through a problem that is crucial to the narrative. So that's going to be a scene. But in order to have that scene make sense to the reader, they're going to have to
00:55:47
Speaker
the reader will need to know this batch of information so that this scene pops and is meaningful. They'll need to know about this character's, a bit of this character's biography in order for the scene to make sense or to be meaningful in the way that you want it to be meaningful. So that information needs to come before that scene. And so all those things become almost like a math problem that you've got to work out as you, and maybe this is happening as you're reading through the material.
00:56:14
Speaker
And, you know, I will, I will literally like take notes on a yellow legal pad, um, that are kind of like structure and theme thematic notes that will help them guide me to, um, when I go back again to the material to kind of, you know, um, cut and paste from the actual transcripts and put them into like baskets. Here's all the material pertaining to this, this scene. You know, I got the, you know, there's three people involved. I've interviewed two of them.
00:56:42
Speaker
So here's the bits from the one interview, and here's the bits from the other interview, and then you put it into a separate file or a basket that you can go back to when you're actually writing the story. So that takes a long time, too. Yeah, geez. And so how did this story find its way to your desk? It was 2017 when the idea came to me by a couple of editors at ESPN, because it was the 10th year anniversary.
00:57:12
Speaker
I mean, that's it. It was as simple as that. Here's the, it's the 10th year anniversary of this big scandal. We don't think that the full story has been told. You know, go, go to see if there's anything there. You start reporting it. And if there is nothing there, you.
00:57:28
Speaker
Like there's a moment where you can kill it, like say, nope, I'm, I don't think there's a story here or I don't think it's worth my time. So yeah, I think there's like a built in sort of kill kind of like a shot clock trigger. Something like that. Yeah. Like where you, you, okay, I'm not going to go forward with it. Cause I don't think it's there. Yeah. So with something like this, yes. Like I gave myself a few months if I didn't think it was right or the people weren't talking to me and people will always talk. So I kind of never worried about that. But, but you know, maybe.
00:57:56
Speaker
just for whatever reason, it's just not compelling enough. After a few months of looking into it, I felt like, no, there's something there. And then you keep going.
Reflections on Sports Betting & Work Conclusion
00:58:06
Speaker
And then you have, you know, you have also this is typical investigative procedure for stories like this. You know, you have a you have like a holy grail thing that you you think is out there for your game. Like this is like the big get for this story.
00:58:22
Speaker
And then, but yeah, what if that doesn't pan out? What if that turns out not to be true? Then there's like a, you gotta have like a plan B for maybe a shorter, smaller piece. You know, it's slightly less compelling. If you, if there's information that points toward the big get, the Holy Grail, you go after it. But for some reasons that sometimes, you know, it might not be because the thing is, it's not true to think the Holy Grail that you're looking for. It might just be because, you know, the,
00:58:50
Speaker
the sort that maybe the sources don't want to talk that are necessary to do it. Um, then you have to have a different kind of story. If you can't get like the, you know, the Holy Grail, like I said, at what point did you realize you had enough to, to write the kind of piece that ultimately ended up being published? That's a good question. I think it's when I started to realize that there are people out there who had heard
00:59:19
Speaker
Donahue confessed to them that he had fixed the games. And then finding more of them. Eventually finding essentially four people who said that they had experienced this kind of confession. I guess that's when I realized, wow, that's kind of the holy grail. Absent him confessing it himself publicly. That's really how you're going to kind of
00:59:50
Speaker
the most compelling evidence that he did fix is going to be that. And the story, by the way, is about, for readers or listeners who don't know, this story is about an NBA referee who was accused and was convicted of betting on his own games in 2007, but never admitted to it, has in fact vehemently denied that he actually fixed those games that he bet on. And the NBA and the FBI both couldn't find evidence
01:00:20
Speaker
that he had fixed the games either. So the kind of official storyline from 2007 on has been that this was not an example of match fixing in an American professional sport, even though, you know, there was ample sort of evidence to suggest otherwise. You must have been the NBA's best friend when they, when they, when they got word that you were digging around into this story again. Oh yeah. Just like they were, I could hear, I could almost hear the eye rolls over the phone.
01:00:49
Speaker
when I first spoke to people. Yeah, I mean, that is just an episode they want to put behind them, obviously. Yeah. Just want to bury that thing, and they tried. They tried to bury it. But, I mean, another thing that gave that story energy wasn't merely sort of solving some mysteries that had surrounded the story forever, since it came to light.
01:01:17
Speaker
Also that there's kind of a news peg, and that is that there was this Supreme Court ruling last year that essentially opens the door for legalized sports betting in the United States, which there hasn't been since the early 20th century. Once there's legalized sports betting, the amount that will be bet on sports will increase exponentially. And does that incentivize sports fixing?
01:01:46
Speaker
In the United States, the leagues have long sort of said, hey, we're immune to this kind of match-fixing that plagues, say, like soccer in Europe. They've long maintained that they're immune to it. And a kind of Donahue wasn't an example of that, like, hey, here was a betting scandal, but it wasn't even match-fixing. It was kind of the official storyline. So this, again, this kind of news peg also gave energy to us as we were pursuing the Donahue piece.
01:02:14
Speaker
Yeah, it's an incredible piece. For anybody who's done any bit of reporting of any kind, you read it and you're like, wow, just the titanic amount of rigor and tenacity it must have taken Scott to go through and gather this information. As I was reading the story, I was just equally amazed at just the reporting you were able to do. Job well done, man. I can't commend you enough on it.
01:02:44
Speaker
Thank you very much. Really appreciate that. Of course. Yeah, and I want to be mindful of your time. And so I'd love to maybe ask one more thing of you. Where can people find you online to get more familiar with your work if they're not already familiar with it? Oh, I've got one of those websites. ScottEden.net with a little bio on there and links to all the stories that I've done.
01:03:14
Speaker
really since the reader days, all the biggest stories I've done. So yeah, if you can check out that there. And then there was a book I wrote. I wrote a book once actually called Touchdown Jesus, which is about Notre Dame football and Notre Dame football fanatics.
01:03:30
Speaker
Fantastic. Awesome. Yeah. So maybe next time you have a big piece out, we're going to have you back on the show. There's a ton of things I always like to dig into with people. We've only kind of scratched the surface. So maybe next time you're willing and able, we can have you back on and dig into some more of this stuff. Sounds good to me. I hope there's a big one sometime maybe later this year. Fantastic. Just started something that might be
01:03:59
Speaker
might turn into something interesting. Cool. Fantastic. Well, I'll take that tease and run with it. So I can't wait to hear more about it when closer to pub date. Me too. All right. Fantastic. Thanks so much for the time, Scott. And we'll be in touch. All right, Brendan. That was good, right? I think so.
01:04:22
Speaker
And thanks to Scott and thanks to Goucher College's MFA Nonfiction and Bay Path University's MFA and Creative Nonfiction for making this show possible. Be sure to head over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to subscribe to my monthly newsletter. Sign up and get that very next one on the first of the month. Once a month, no spam. Can't beat that.
01:04:46
Speaker
Keep the conversation going on Twitter at Brendan O'Mara and at cnfpod on Instagram at cnfpod and on Facebook too. I'd love to hear from you. Let's keep it going, baby. Link up the show in your favorite social platforms and leave a review on iTunes if you've got the time. I deeply appreciate it. You know what? That's gonna do it, cnfers. This interview got me thinking, if you can do interview, see ya.