More how-to from nonfiction writer Lynn Vincent

The current issue of WORLD includes an interview with best-selling author (and former WORLD feature editor) Lynn Vincent. Here’s more from that Q&A that we didn’t have room for in the print magazine.

Many of your books involve your getting stories out of people who’ve gone through remarkable experiences. How do you probe and get details about what it was really like? Sensory details are what bring a story alive, and some people don’t really like that process, or don’t want to talk about their emotions. Gen. Jerry Boykin, for example. He was a special operations officer, one of the founding officers in Delta Force. He’s spent his whole life keeping everything he did a secret. So now he comes along and we’re going write a book. I would say, “Jerry, what happened?” He would tell me. Then I would say, “How did you feel about that?” He would say, “I just told you.” I’d say, “No, you told me what happened. You didn’t tell me how you felt.” He would at first actually get angry with me. He could snap my neck and make it look like an accident. But he got the hang of it. Recently he said working with me was like having two wives, two mothers, and two first sergeants.

What’s it like to cover something highly emotional, like the Columbine shootings? The more I open up and relate to the people that I’m writing about, the more powerful the story becomes. Stories really aren’t about events; they’re about people and how people change.

You spoke about the importance of narrative reversals in holding reader interest. What’s a good example of how that works? In the movie Jaws, the police chief starts out and everything’s fine, but they find pieces of a missing girl and the coroner says it looks like a shark attack. The chief says, “We’ll close the beaches,” and we swing back to the positive. The mayor doesn’t want to close the beaches because the town needs to make money on the Fourth of July. Along with rising action we need the reversals, so when I look at a story before I take it on, I make sure it has those things.

Jaws has a famous monologue by the crusty old captain about the sinking of the Indianapolis during World War II. That’s the title of the book you’re now writing. What’s it about? The Indianapolis was on a secret mission to deliver one-half of the atomic bomb eventually used on Hiroshima to a secret location in the South Pacific. On its way back from this mission, a Japanese submarine sunk it. Almost 1,200 men went into the water—300 died immediately and 883 stayed in the water for five days. The story of their ordeal is one of thirst and starvation, shark attacks, and eventual insanity. They started attacking each other. After five days they were rescued. The captain was court-martialed—out of all the captains in WWII, the only one ever court-martialed. Then came a 60-year fight to exonerate him.

What’s your timeline in writing this book, or others? It varies. The Sarah Palin book [Going Rogue] was done in four months, which was excruciating. This one is about 12 to 18 months, and then another nine to 12 months before publication. In 2016, the National Geographic Channel is mounting an expedition to search for and recover the Indianapolis, so I’d like to meet up with that timeline.

Did your journalism experience help in writing narrative nonfiction books? I learned so much working at WORLD about interviewing, verifying facts, research, and discerning what’s truth and what’s not truth.