Many of Eli Saslow’s stories share one striking commonality: Characters are talking to each other, not to him.
In one story, an asylum seeker has a conversation with Border Patrol agents. In another, a mother gives her kids a back-to-school pep talk about how to survive a potential mass shooting. We see an assistant principal asking an absentee student where they’ve been, a security guard yelling at someone wielding a hatchet, and a Jan. 6 defendant pleading his case to his son.
The effect is that the reader is dropped into the emotion of those scenes, rather than simply imagining Saslow, a writer at large for The New York Times, conducting an interview.
“Really, I write stories that are almost entirely seen in dialogue,” he told The Sunday Long Read. “If there are quotes in the story, it’s two people talking to each other.”
To capture those intimate moments, Saslow tries to plan his reporting for when some notable action or movement might be happening in someone’s life. But being abundantly patient, he said, is also key.
“The first day we show up somewhere, people are nervous, understandably,” he said. “You’re kind of performing for each other, which is the way human interaction works. But once you’re there for the second day in a row, or the eighth day in a row, people relax.”
That type of exhaustive reporting and gripping storytelling has earned Saslow two Pulitzer Prizes: one for explanatory reporting in 2014, and one for feature writing in 2023. He has been a Pulitzer finalist several other times, and has won two George Polk Awards and a Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among many other honors. The New York Times has called him “simply one of the best writers in American journalism.”
As a writer for The Times, Saslow tackles big national issues and boils them down to individual human stories. His most recent piece delves into the many complexities of the current border crisis, all through the lens of one sprawling family ranch in Arizona. That story was one of The Sunday Long Read’s most-read pieces of the week in our Feb. 24 issue.
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Before joining The Times, Saslow was a longtime staff writer at The Washington Post. He has written three books and co-wrote the film “Four Good Days,” starring Glenn Close and Mila Kunis, which was based on an article Saslow wrote for The Post in 2016.
The following interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Can you tell me a little bit about your career evolution? Why did you want to get into journalism in the first place?
I always really loved talking to people. And, I think and hope, that I’ve always been pretty curious and empathetic, and always desired to know more about other people’s lives and experiences. My dad’s an English teacher and I definitely wasn’t going to do anything related to math — that was clear by my grades — so writing was always something I was interested in. Then in college I figured out, “Oh, you can go ask people questions, you can go follow them around, and you can learn about what they’re thinking and what they’re feeling.” That’s when I got really engaged in it.
In my early years doing journalism, I was often writing a lot of short, quick stories that were far from that. But I always knew that what I really wanted to do was to write intimate, detailed stories about people and their lives. So I just started pushing in that direction: first by doing those kinds of stories about high school sports, very simple narrative stories. You know, there’s a senior at this high school who’s tried out for the soccer team the last three years and every year he’s been cut. I’m gonna follow him through the tryouts, up until the moment when the sheet is put up on the wall and he figures out if he makes the team or not. It was about trying to find little creative ways to do small narrative stories.
Eventually those stories for The Post started to get better, and the sports editors encouraged me to do more of them. Then my job was just to write those more textured stories about high school sports, then to write those stories about sports in general, then about politics and campaigns. For the last, I don’t know, 12 years, my job has been what it is now, which is basically writing stories about how the big issues in the country impact people’s lives. It’s trying to take these big national issues and make them intimate and small.
With those stories, about big issues that you’re boiling down to their human components, how did you start convincing editors that these types of stories needed to be done?
When I was first writing about sports, I was writing, like, high school volleyball game stories at a very high volume. I liked high school volleyball, but nobody likes it that much. That was my whole job. I started to feel like, “Man, I’m not doing any of the stories that made me want to be a journalist.” The truth is, that’s what it’s like for most journalists. Especially in a hard industry when you’re just starting out, you’re not going to immediately get assigned things that you’re necessarily super into or passionate about.
But after a few years, I started to realize that I wasn’t going to do this job for very long if this is what it looked like. I sort of decided that every three months or so I was going to do one story for me, something on the side that I care about, that I’m curious about. When I was done with those stories, because I was still doing the other parts of my job, the editors were like, “Okay, this could use some work, but we’ll publish it.” And then after a few years of doing it, those stories got better. Then the editors said, “We like these, let’s make a little bit more time for you to do these kinds of stories.”
In those moments now when you’re embedding into someone’s life for a story, how do you strike the balance between wanting to have a casual relationship, but also making it clear that all of this could end up in the article?
I think from the jump, I’m explaining my job in a way that’s transparent, right? What I’m saying to people is not just, “Hey, I want to interview you about your work.” Instead, it’s: “The best way for me to write a story about this is for me to spend time with you, and for me to be there when you’re navigating these things. Because if I can make somebody understand, in some small way, what it’s like to be in your situation, that might impact the way they think about the world.” And that’s the only thing we can promise. We’re never paying people to participate. They’re never getting to see the stories before they run. So I think the best way to do justice is to be there and to document it. Sometimes achieving intimacy in stories is also about text messages, emails, Facebook posts — just archiving the way people tell their own stories, too.
For your most recent story about the Chiltons’ ranch in Arizona, were you thinking about the issue of immigration more broadly and then looking for an entry point into that? Or how did you first come across that story?
Mostly, I was thinking about just the sheer numbers, which often are the only thing in stories about immigration. You know, how many people are crossing and where? This story is so big and so hard to get your arms around, I thought that maybe the best way to tell it is by telling the story of one piece of land, one ranch where all these things are happening at the same time.
Then I’m going deep into the data, I’m talking to experts about where asylum seekers are coming across, where cartel traffic is coming across. That gets me to the Tucson sector, and I start figuring out who owns these grazing rights, who owns this land on the border. And then maybe I come up with a dozen names. I’m doing Google searches, I’m calling them and doing initial phone interviews with maybe half a dozen or more different ranchers on the border. All those conversations provide so much knowledge, information, and context to hopefully make my questions and observations sharper once I’m there. I also knew that for this story I wanted to reflect all of these complexities. And with Jim, both compassion and enforcement was definitely apparent in that first conversation.
How did you decide on the lede for this story — the idea of focusing on Jim as he’s about to head out to the rest of his property?
Structure in these kinds of stories is maybe the most important thing. That was a challenge in this story for sure. I started where I started because I knew that some of the first section needed to be an introduction to the land. It’s really hard for people who don’t live in that area to have a sense of just the vastness of these ranches, and how desolate the border really is. Having him heading out in his truck onto the land — this land that he knows so well, but now feels like he doesn’t know what he’s going to see every time — felt like a really natural way to orient the reader.
I also liked the fact that, rather than leading with him looking at a screen, which happens later in the story, you feel some of the risk, uncertainty and ominousness of him getting out in the truck by himself, to a place with no cell phone coverage and no idea what was going to happen. And then that opens up to the second section and a whole different element of what’s happening, which are the asylum seekers from all over the world.
Do you have a piece of narrative writing advice that you would give to a journalist who’s just starting out?
Patience would be the biggest one. It’s just trust, and people reveal themselves over time. Whether you have one day to do a story, or a week, or a month, it’s about investing as much of that time as possible into conversations and reporting, and ideally observing the people that you’re writing about. That’s where the heart of the job is. I would much rather be in a rush to write a story that I felt like I had a ton of reporting for, then to have a lot of time to write a story that I felt like I had underreported. I’ve done that, and it’s a terrible feeling.
So essentially you can’t have good writing that comes out of bad reporting?
I don’t think so. To me, that’s the kind of writing that feels almost like air guitar: You’re trying to play around and create something meaningful, but there’s no real core.
Compiled by Amanda Ulrich. Photos courtesy of Joanna Ceciliani and Jonathan McIntosh/Creative Commons via Flickr.
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