Nieman Storyboard’s Annotation Tuesday! looks under the hood of great writing

I don’t know how I’ve missed this, but Niemanstoryboard.org has a feature called Annotation Tuesday! in which one writer interviews another about some recent or famous piece, and the questions and answers are interspersed throughout the story itself.

It’s like the audio commentary track on the DVD of a movie. I’ll wait here while you go ask your grandparents what DVDs were.

I was pointed to Annotation Tuesday!—which, alas, is not a weekly feature—by a tweet pointing to the latest one, Justin Heckert and “Lost in the Waves” by Matt Tullis. “Lost in the Waves” was a story Heckert published in Men’s Journal in 2009.

The name Justin Heckert jumped out at me because his his profile of comedian Kyle Kinane for Grantland had just been cited in this week’s Sunday Long Reads by ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr.

I love the format of Annotation Tuesday! It usually starts with a short Q&A, and then we get into the piece. You can hide the annotations if you want to see the piece in its native form first. Otherwise they interrupt the text, the questioner’s queries highlighted in one color, the writer’s answers in another. The questions might be about the writing, the reporting, the editing, even the conception and pitching of the article. I’ve only read a few Annotation Tuesday! pieces, but I have yet to read one and not learn something.

Most of them aren’t about sports, of course, but here’s one in which Elon Green interviews Roger Angell about “Down the Drain,” his famous 1975 New Yorker piece about Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Steve Blass, who had suddenly lost the ability to throw strikes.

With all the talk last week about Marshawn Lynch not talking to the media and how sportswriters reacted to that, you might find another annotation by Green interesting: Gay Talese and “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”

“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” was published in Esquire in 1966, and it is widely considered among the greatest magazine pieces ever written. It is, in the words of an editor’s note on the linked reprint, “a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism—a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction.”

It’s relevant to the Marshawn Lynch story because it’s a shining example of what a writer can do with a reticent subject. Sinatra never spoke to Talese.