Sarah Stillman: When everyone's focused on the conventional parts of w...

There’s no such thing as being totally ‘found’…the fun, I think, is in the searching.

Sarah Stillman

found fun thinking

There is space for a different kind of investigative reporting that's about immersion and obsessive attention to detail and deep listening.

Sarah Stillman

details space listening

What narrative journalism does is create a language or open up a space where someone can say, "Oh, this happened to me, too."

Sarah Stillman

journalism language

I think when I was doing my very first interviews, I probably brought a notepad and did ask people my first fifteen questions while sitting in a Starbucks or something horrible like that. And I found that, oftentimes, the most important thing at the very first interview is just establishing a personal connection and developing some sort of rapport so that I can go back to them again, and then maybe again, and maybe again after that.

Sarah Stillman

important people thinking

I try to come to my reporting as a real, whole person, not an automaton. And it's always one of the strange discomforts of the job, that you're in this very intense moment in someone's life - you're engaging with them nonstop - and then suddenly your piece is out and that's done. It always reminds me that the journalist's job isn't to be someone's friend, or their psychologist, or anything other than what we actually are. And at the end of the day, that can definitely seem like such a strange, extractive relationship.

Sarah Stillman

done real trying

It's been nice, actually, to keep in touch with a lot of the people and families that I've written about. Like with the kids I was just writing about from Guatemala, who survived being kidnapped and fleeing violence, it was nice to just sit down in their living room and play bingo with them, go to dinner with the family. And sometimes not thinking about it in such a mechanistic "I am now coming to report and get what I need" way, but just spending time, helps you see a more natural version of who they are too.

Sarah Stillman

nice writing kids

I tend to only be able to obsess about one thing at once, and become fully engaged in and only interested in that thing. But in the longer term, a lot of my stories also give birth to other stories.

Sarah Stillman

birth term giving

I try to come to my reporting as a real, whole person, not an automaton.

Sarah Stillman

real persons trying

For me, the part of reporting that's the most rewarding and energizing is just hearing directly from people whose voices haven't often been heard, or incorporated into mainstream media. That stuff is really, really gratifying, and so to realize that you could make a career of that part of it, that appealed to me.

Sarah Stillman

media voice careers

So much of our cultural representation of what an investigative journalist looks like, in movies and pop culture, is about this really testosterone-filled dude screaming, "Give me what you got!" I didn't see myself as someone who would be good at or comfortable with that.

Sarah Stillman

would-be giving culture

I feel like I partly came to writing through being in college during the start of the Iraq war, and knowing that those issues mattered lot to me, and wanting to go see for myself.

Sarah Stillman

college writing war

People are sometimes losing their homes before being convicted of a crime, or their cash or their cars.

Sarah Stillman

car home people

I tend to gravitate toward the "act two," or "act three," or "act four" stories - either things that are underreported, where we think we already know the common narrative, or things that are at the margins of an over-reported story, where we're all so focused in one direction that we're missing something crucial that's unfolding off to the side.

Sarah Stillman

one-direction two thinking

I think the daily challenge for a lot of beat reporters is, how do you get past the regurgitated sound bites of powerful people or evasion masters who are so used to this routine - the theatricality of press conferences and stage-managed interviews and teams of handlers?

Sarah Stillman

team powerful past

Often, my central challenge is figuring out how do I build trust, how do I acquaint people who've just endured some terrible event - losing their child to murder, say, or being sexually assaulted - with the bizarre and sometimes invasive nature of in-depth interviews that aren't just a quick list of ten questions?

Sarah Stillman

terrible-events children people

The tremendous challenge of narrative journalism about subjects that are underreported is, how do you make people care about something they think they already know about, or think they don't need to know about?

Sarah Stillman

challenges people thinking

One thing I've discovered is that I never think of something that didn't work out as just "something that didn't work out." I think so often with investigative work, things that initially look like failures wind up leading to your biggest stories.

Sarah Stillman

work-out wind thinking

I found it really astonishing that undocumented migrants were kidnapped so routinely, that it was such a commonplace part of the journey for people trying to reach the US, and that we hear almost nothing about it here.

Sarah Stillman

journey trying people

One thing I've discovered is that if you remain in contact with people, if you build longitudinal relationships, if you invest in sources who seem at first like they're uncomfortable or unwilling to talk, if you keep in touch with them, a year later that might yield something much more powerful.

Sarah Stillman

yield powerful years

Thinking through how you find that intersection between individual, compelling human narratives and structural, systemic injustices - that's the place that's most interesting to me as a reporter.

Sarah Stillman

narrative interesting thinking

When everyone's focused on the conventional parts of war - doing infantry imbeds or chasing IEDs - you look at the thing that seems not that interesting to people, like the circumstances of logistics workers cooking the troops' food or cleaning their latrines.