Everyone’s Got A Story

How I learned the art of getting people to tell me their stories

That first night in Willows, that summer, I stayed with Tim Crewes. I still didn’t have a place of my own. Tim was pushing me to stay in town, maybe at the motel run by the only other Indians in town. I was thinking of exploring Chico, the bigger school town about 40 minutes away.

After dinner of stir-fry with grilled onion and peppers, he showed me to the room for the night. The bed was right across the corner, from the front room. The house was a large farmhouse, located in the middle of a large, empty field, accessible only by a dirt road. And while a mile from the next closest building, it was a big change from the suburban sprawl of the Bay Area.

The room was lined by books, tons and tons of books. I picked up one that caught my eye. The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst. Maybe this was a way to marry my desire to see the world with my need for a job (and a chance to write).

I was deep in plans for my future life, when Tim came in with a shotgun: “You know to use one of these?” he asked. I shook my head, wide-eyed. I’d never so much as held a gun before, let alone fired one.

He held it up against his shoulder and to the window, “Nothing to it. Point and shoot, really.” He reassured me.
Then with a twinkle in his eye, he circled the corner: “We’ve had prowlers recently. If you see anything, shoot first, ask last questions later.”

That night went by quiet, but I learned later that there had been prowlers indeed. Someone had poisoned Tim’s dog a year before. Left him to die in the driveway, after eating a steak that had something laced in it. It was a message from someone. Tim thought it might be the case he was investigating at the time.

Tim had done this massive story a couple years back about dirty cops, who planted weapons on suspects. There was this dummy gun they used all the time. Somehow, from someone on the inside, Tim got the list.

He started writing, and new stuff came out. So he kept continuing. By the time he was done, he’d unearthed a trail of shit going all the way up to the deputy sheriff.

There was a trial over it, and the lawyer defending the cops demanded to know Tim’s source. They subpoenaed him, as a witness, but Tim kept his mouth shut. They threatened him with contempt, but still he kept his mouth shut. The judge wanted the truth and they threw him in jail, but still he kept his mouth shut.

National media got wind of it, and the stories started hiting the wires. A lonely local journalist standing up against the angry machine of local politics. A little flame of truth in a world of darkness.

There was hell to pay for this kind of reporting, but Tim was determined to teach me anyway. And I was determined to learn.

It starts with the belief that there’s always a story.

Behind every shuttered store, broken window, rusted fence, behind every person and every human thing – there’s always a story. Things didn’t just materialize by themselves. They were put there by a person, for a reason, with a story.

The first story Tim had me write was about a fence. Two neighbors haggling over who should pay to erect a fence. One said something about the other’s dog. The other said something about peaches.
It was a white, boring, neighborly corner-blocking—that’s what I thought. The obvious truth.

I brought it back to Tim. He looked at me after he read it, his eyes torn twinkling the way they did when he was about to let me in on “the secret.” “So you didn’t get to the affair?” It turned out one person’s ex had had a little thing with the neighbor, and that’s when the whole thing started. Neither of them told me, but the fence was about much more than noise and dogs. It had a real story behind it, a truth.

You see, people are complicated creatures. They think they’re simple. And to look at them, the way they look at the world makes perfect sense. It seems like the only way to look at it.
But put two of them next to each other and it sparks fly.
There’s drama, always drama, because all of a sudden, all that stuff that looked so simple to one and the other suddenly didn’t look that simple anymore. Suddenly there were all those other motivations at play. They’d always been there, right under the conscious level – those powerful, subliminal motivations, which suddenly come to life as soon as another person is involved.

Tim taught me that it is this, this penchant for drama, that shaped the world. To really understand why it is the way it is – why Willows, CA appeared when it did, why I-5 runs the way it does, notoriously, bypassing San Francisco, why California calls them freeways, not highways – you have to get to the people behind it, understand who they are, and see how their specific personalities, their dramas, shaped every one of these things.

The high school football team changed its coach. That sounds boring – a detail – but that’s because you don’t know the coach. You need to know how he’s been a coach his whole life, how people call him “Coach” at the coffee store or the market, how this gave him a sense of respect and position in his community, how that gave him confidence to raise his children, because he’s Coach after all. Now you step into that man’s shoes, you begin to tell me what this little administrative change meant. How it knocks down a man that old, and then you ask him why. You ask him with the tape recorder on. And you’ll hear a story. A story of small-town rivals, a political feud on the school, a new man in town who casts shade on the team’s lackluster performance, a sex scandal. I’ll be damned if there’s not some kind of story behind it all.

The shop down the street shut down? There’s construction on the road outside your house? Someone got fired, or someone got hired or some decision got made, really any decision by any human being at all. Find the people involved, get them to tell you what’s really going on, get them to expose their soul, to bring you into the hall of their emotions, and you will enter a whole world of stories behind the most mundane of objects.

Tim taught me to see the stories, to know that they were real, to exist, and to figure out how to get people to tell me. Hollywood has often fed the reporter into some kind of brilliant detective, but the truth – as it is with most things – is much more mundane.

With that little bit of truth – that the story is out there – the rest is all grunt work. Talk to 100 people, and maybe someone will open up to you. Keep asking the same question over for a different answer. Go through reams of documents to maybe find the one line you can drop in a conversation.

Finding the story is the game, and the board you play on is the mind of the person you’re talking to. Two things are for certain. This is a story. And they do want to tell you. It’s just this thing about human beings. They’re terrible at keeping things to themselves, even if they have a story – especially about themselves. They want to share it. They crave that moment where they feel that someone else understands, when all the stuff they’ve been living in silence can finally be understood by another human being.

The job of a journalist is to play on this desire. Is it manipulative? Yes. But a journalist is already someone who believes the truth is more important than the person. It is the fundamental tradeoff that reporters make, that they have to make, if they’re going to be good at their job.

The thing that stood between a journalist and the story is the small problem that the person who has it doesn’t really trust you. Sure, they want to spill the beans, but not to a complete stranger, not to someone they don’t want to be judged by, someone that they don’t even know.

There’s two ways around this. The first is to gain their trust.
This takes a long time. There’s just no way to speed it up.
Short of saving someone’s life, and even that will only take you so far. But sometimes the long game is worth it.

This is called sourcing – or as regular people would call it, developing a long-term, trusted relationship with someone who’s comfortable sharing their stories with you. This is what real reporters do. They get to know the people in their sphere of coverage, and those people get to know them. Bit by bit, call by call, coffee by coffee, drink by drink. That’s how the trust grows.

But sometimes you don’t have time for that. Or maybe the person who has the story you need isn’t someone you know. There’s another option to trigger the bean spilling. Trust depends on them willingly opening the hatch. But there’s a way to open the lock yourself.

That’s by gathering enough clues and hints about what the story is, that you can project the sense that you already know enough that they might as well give you their version of the story anyway, before you cobble together your own. The art to this approach is that it only takes a couple of the right pieces dropped at the right times into conversation, with a knowing way about you, to trigger the lock.You don’t actually need to know all that much. You just need to know how to use it.

There was a city councilman in Willows, who sat on the committee that approved real estate deals that the city was involved in. For a small county spot, those deals were very lucrative – in the hundreds of thousands if not millions. Of course, it was entirely illegal and unethical for a member of that committee to be involved in any real estate deals themselves, where they owned the lot or the buildings that the city was buying. And of course, people being people, that didn’t stop them.

Tim got a tip that this councilperson was crooked. Apparently, he’d been making a tidy profit selling land he owned to the city, through the influence he exercised on that little commission. It was a good way to line your pockets with taxpayers’ money.
And he’d been doing it for years.

The thing was, none of the land he’d sold was in his name. It was all hidden behind a complex web of corporations and trusts, and finding out who was behind all of them was nearly impossible. The direct investigation through the deeds had turned up nothing.

So I decided to investigate the man. Someone like this, with the power and authority that comes from such a position, in such a place, who’d been running a scam this successful and this hidden for this long, really has to think very highly of himself. He’s been outsmarting a whole bunch of people for a long time – people who everyone else thinks are much smarter than him, like the DA and the local newspaper. He’s been doing it all in secrecy. No one knows how smart he is. And he so desperately wanted them to. I could just sense it, in his smile and his arrogance, when I met him.

I started digging into the man. And what I’d found is that he made a big show of being a common guy, with a small plumbing company on the side, helping the city by doing his civil duty to serve on the council. He had to stand for his county committee position in each election, and each time he filled out a form that said he owned almost nothing, barring the truck he used for work. By the paperwork, he really just was an Everyman.

But there was a whole bunch of other people he had lived and filed with his name and address on it too. Trust after trust after trust. It was unclear what these trusts did – they weren’t directly connected to the land deals he’d approved – but at least I had something, some kind of hard evidence that this guy was hiding a lot more than he let on.

I called him and told him I wanted to talk about his election filings. That wasn’t the smartest way to enter the conversation, but he didn’t care. He wanted to talk. He wanted to know what I had. So I told him. I laid out his election filing, and all the trusts I’d found him involved with. He tensed and braced, he made excuses, denied it, deflected the blame. In fact, he kept talking. Talking about all the great work he’s done for the community. How no one gives him the respect he deserves. How he’s much smarter than people think he is.

I played into his hands. I told him I actually thought he was quite smart. He was so smart that he didn’t even outright own the driveway he parked his truck on every night.

“You got me there,” he said, before rattling off how he’d parked the house in a trust in his kid’s name, so they didn’t have to pay property taxes.

“Huh,” I said. “How does an everyday plumber figure out how to do something like that?” That’s when his defense system whirled in, and he realized what he was doing. He stopped and quickly got off the phone.

I was still green. I wasn’t experienced as a journalist. As I got further in my career, I’d learn how to drag that conversation on longer, rather than jump at the first gotcha that came my way.

But it was enough to write a story about an elected official who had lied about what he owned on his official election filing. I didn’t need to go any further. The crooked real estate deals –  people could figure that out for themselves. I had just booked my first big fish.

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