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What was the genesis of this piece?
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Well, when the piece started, I was covering transportation for the Times, and because that beat tended to be a bit too bureaucratic for my liking, I was always looking for ways to write narratives, particularly narratives that had nothing to do with buses, trains, cars or the people riding in them. So I went on a search. I hunted everywhere but on my beat. I wanted to write a story about boxing, since I had been fascinated by the sport. I was searching for a boy boxer to write about. I was visiting gyms in Los Angeles, taking notes, when I found Seniesa and her father, completely by chance.
For a fair amount of time, I figured this would be a good Metro story, sort of a sketch or profile with a scene or two. I figured it would be maybe 2,000 words long. I was wrong on that score, obviously.
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Please describe your reporting process. How much is reconstruction and how much were you present for? What sort of research did you do?
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The reporting consisted mainly of two-and-a-half years of hanging out with my subjects. That sounds like a long time. It is a long time. But through almost all of it, I was also covering a beat. I did well over 100 stories about transportation and covered one of the longest transit strikes in Los Angeles history during that time.
I would work my beat by day, and then, when possible, I would go to the gym or to Seniesa's house at night. And there were a good number of weekends when I followed Seniesa and her father to tournaments throughout Los Angeles.
For a long time, I had no real idea where the story was going. I was just collecting string. But the more string I collected, the more the themes started making themselves clear: redemption, a little kid's incredible belief in herself, how a father and daughter were working to save themselves by sharing a dream. It was fairly organic. I kept trying to carve out time to start writing but because of my beat duties, this proved difficult. The distraction turned out to be a great thing. The story just kept developing in a nice, dramatic arc. The more I waited, the better it got. The slow-cook method.
The story leans on scenes that I was present for. It has a fairly significant first-person element. I'm in the story as a witness. And I'm in the story because, as it turned out, I ended up being involved on occasion, including a brawl where a gang-banger ended up throwing a chair at me.
There are also moments when I step out of scenes and let readers in on what I was thinking. A real goal in the writing was to rely on action to show readers what was going on. That good old show-don't-tell principle. But it was nice to step out of the narrative just a quarter step at times, use the first person and philosophize a bit.
I relied on reconstruction for big chunks of the first chapter. This is a part of the story that backtracks into Joe's history and Seniesa's early life. Reconstructions are difficult, of course. I relied on the same techniques any good reporter would rely on. I tried as hard as possible to find multiple sources for confirmation. I relied on court documents and probation reports to back me up whenever possible. I went back to the locations where scenes took place to get a sense of them.
I tried something a bit different with the reconstruction, too. Where I had reconstructed dialogue—dialogue that I didn't hear but that I had based on the recollections of my sources—I used italics instead of quotes. The thought here was that even if I had three of four people telling me that something was said 15 years ago, or even 5 years ago, memories are less than perfect. The use of italics is an attempt to signify this. It's being dead-on honest with the reader. The italics indicate that my interviewees tell me this particular bit of dialogue was spoken, and I believe them, but I can't verify that the words were said exactly like this. Something extra happens when you do this—and it's quite nice. You give quotation marks more power. Now when I used quotation marks, they stood out because readers knew the words were absolutely as I heard them—with my ears at the time, and/or later on my recorder.
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What challenges did you encounter during the reporting process?
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The biggest challenge was just getting the subjects in the story to trust me. Here I was, asking a family to pretty much open up their lives to me and let me in on a history that was raw and painful. And I was dealing with folks who tend to be fairly wary of outsiders. I had to get past that distrust, of course, for the story to work.
I earned their trust and maintained it by being a constant presence, by not getting in the way, by being friendly, open and honest. In a way, this was easy. I just had to be myself. But it was also hard. It took a lot of persistence and a lot of time—a long, long time in the case of Seniesa. She was shy, in that special way that kids can be shy. She was more than a bit hardened because of the things she had seen growing up. And in the rough kid culture that is her world in East L.A., you don't talk much to strangers. Even when she did open up, her emotions and thoughts came out in small pieces. I had to remind myself to be really patient. But one of my goals from the start was to bring readers into the world of a kid. This motivated me. It made the patience come a bit easier.
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Please describe your process of structuring and writing the piece.
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I followed a very detailed process developed over many years by my editor, Rick Meyer. This involved the painstaking organization of all of my notes and a highly detailed outline. It took over a month to do. Before I wrote the first word of the first draft, I knew with great certainty what was ahead. I knew the beginning, middle and end of each chapter and each scene. I've always been someone to work by the seat of my pants, using notes that are sometimes scattered all over the place. Often, I have no idea how my stories are going to end until I get there. I found Rick's process to be painful, but also tremendously helpful and liberating. I'm now a big fan of the outline. I'm also trying to be more organized. Trying.
In terms of structure, the story is pretty straightforward. I begin with Seniesa's first foray into boxing, go into an introductory section and then backtrack, to establish Joe's rough past and their history together. Once the reader has a sense of where Joe and Seniesa come from, the story picks up in real time. From that point, in Chapter Two, it's pretty much a straight chronology.
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What sort of reaction did you get to the story? Emails? Phone calls? Response from other media?
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The response has been tremendous. So far I've had over 100 contacts from readers—e-mails, phone calls, letters. This is a huge number in Los Angeles, where a solid A-1 feature often brings about five phone calls and an e-mail or two. Also, the story has had a good run on our Web site, or so I'm told by the Web folks here.
The response has been really encouraging. I find it fantastic that so many people carved out time to read all five parts. People say the story shocked them, that it made them laugh, made them cry and everything in between. What I've enjoyed most are the readers who have told me that the story brought them into a world that they knew nothing about. That in reading about this new world, they found themselves engrossed. That response has made me want to keep writing stories like this.
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Please include any other comments you think would be interesting to fellow reporters, editors and students of narrative.
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No matter what some of the naysayers of narrative believe, there is a huge part of our readership that thirsts for plain old good stories. Short ones and long ones like this. I've always felt that. And I believe it now more than ever. There's a truth contained in narrative that regular newspaper articles just can't quite get at. They can't capture the complexity, the drama, the shades of gray. Of course, in this case, I'm preaching to the choir. But let's keep standing up for these kinds of stories.
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