When to read and when to call

TL;DR Read for facts, talk for meaning

Hello! It’s me! Despite apparent evidence to the contrary, I did not fall down a sinkhole or run away to live under an assumed name in a foreign country. I just got buried by an avalanche of life chaos that put me out of commission for a while. Fortunately, things are on the up and up, folks, and I’m so happy to be back!

I’m also thrilled to share this post with you. It’s about when in the research process to self-educate through reading and when to pick up the phone and call someone. But first, a little explanation:

All research—for a news story, a feature, or a book—usually starts with reading. A self-guided crash course helps you choose a subject and hone the angle. It fills in background and context, and gives you enough knowledge to ask good questions when you finally get around to interviews. So my dilemma is not whether to read or to call, but when—exactly—to toggle from one phase of research to the other.

For some, this isn’t an issue. When I first posed the question to this audience late last year, baseball writer Rob Neyer said, “I've just done everything in order. Read, call, call, read, read, read... but probably because I had an outline that I stuck to, just to stay on track.” Oh, how I envy Rob his organization!

Perhaps because I knew next to nothing about grass when I started this project, or perhaps because my book has a painfully expansive scope, my research process has been somewhat meandering. More braided river than swift-flowing channel. So I’ve found the question of when to read and when to call especially hard to navigate.

My natural inclination is to read and then read some more, digging into ever more specialized texts to fill the holes in my research. But that has drawbacks. It can be hard to find material that covers just the right aspect of your subject with the just right level of technicality—AND that is up to date (look out for a future post on how to reconstruct a history of thought). When you do, it takes time to read carefully and take good notes (i.e. to “go slow to go fast”). And after all that, you (or at least, I) often still have questions.

That’s when I wonder, should I just phone a friend?

To sort this out, I decided to phone some actual friends: Rosanna Xia, an ace environmental reporter at the Los Angeles Times and author of a new book about the Golden State’s reckoning with sea-level rise, California Against the Sea, and Michelle Nijhuis, a veteran magazine writer and editor and author of Beloved Beasts, a sweeping, heartening history of the conservation movement.

Here are their smart tips for deciding when to hit the books and when to pick up the phone.

When to read

To find facts and figures

Beyond reading for basic understanding, Rosanna keeps an eye out for important facts and figures that are better gleaned from a written report than from putting a source on the spot and hoping they have a good memory. If possible, she likes to consult government reports because they usually contain a concise summary of the topic as well as key numbers you’ll likely need for a story or a book.

To find sources

Rosanna also reads to figure out who to call. Back when she was on the earthquake beat, she often turned to a USGS seismologist named Lucy Jones, whose scientific bona fides and plainspoken manner made her something of a local celebrity. “Whenever I start a new beat, a new story, a new issue, I’m always like, ‘who is the Lucy Jones of blank issue?’” Rosanna says.

To find them, she pays particular attention to the reference section of papers and books, searching for the names that just keep popping up. “It’s this crazy true crime map of who the OG person is on an issue,” she says. (After Rosanna has identified potential sources and made first contact, she usually asks them for a reading list and plows through it before an interview.)

To cultivate authority

Rosanna is a self-described masochist who sometimes reads multiple books while researching a single newspaper story, and her approach was no different for California Against the Sea. For instance, she read three whole books on the history of salt for a section on the salt ponds in San Francisco Bay, which she distilled into two “robust” paragraphs in her final book.

Such a high ratio of reading effort to word count is often impossible, but Rosanna has found it can pay off. “You know when people say, ‘Oh, you write with such authority!’ Well, that authority comes from reading three books and then turning it into 2 paragraphs,” she jokes. (And, for the record, she did not need to consult with a salt historian.)

When you can’t call

Michelle also did more reading than usual for her book, but for a different reason: “my book is predominantly a history, and most of my central characters are dead,” she says. Reading things by and about them was the best way to bring them to life. She didn’t have much choice.

When I asked how she avoided getting lost in tomes of written work—the frothing braided river—Michelle (like Rob) wisely advised having some sort of a plan from the start. Chasing down intriguing anecdotes and obscure backstories is like catnip for writers (see salt). “But having a general path in mind can protect you from, say, learning absolutely everything about someone who ends up playing no role in your book,” Michelle says.

When to call

To clarify understanding

Still, Michelle did pick up the phone while writing Beloved Beasts. Early on, when she was mapping out the arc of her book—"the ‘big story’ of the modern conservation movement,” as she puts it—she spoke to several historians. Aldo Leopold's biographer was especially helpful, she says. Other times, she would call up experts when reading alone left her unsure about something. “But I didn't regularly turn to them for colorful quotes or anecdotes as I might for a magazine article,” she says. “I wanted to keep the focus on the historical characters.”

To build relationships

For Rosanna, conversations with sources tend to be open-ended and ongoing, not always focused on specific questions, because good sourcing is fundamental to beat reporting. “What does sourcing mean? It means going out to coffee with sources every couple weeks and literally just shooting the shit for an hour,” she says. It’s asking, “what are you working on in your world and what’s interesting to you and, like, how are you doing?”

In her mind, writing a book is akin to developing a beat, which means it involves cultivating long-term relationships with sources, even if you don’t know exactly what each one will yield. The results can be exciting. “You end up being the person that talks to everyone and then you connect the dots for all these people who aren’t necessarily talking to each other on a day to day basis,” Rosanna says. “That’s truly one of the joys of being a beat reporter. You build a community out of your reporting.”

To make meaning

At the end of the day, there is also just a limit to what you can learn from books, Rosanna says. “Our job as journalists and authors and writers is to help people make meaning out of the science, and to make meaning out of the data, and to make meaning out of the facts,” she says. “The reading that you do is the first step of fact gathering.” But then what? For her, the rest comes from talking to people who live and breathe her subject.

This made me think of something else Michelle told me—that she tracked down primary sources whenever possible. That’s because she found that her characters were often misquoted in secondary sources. But it also struck me that reading her characters’ words in their original context was a way for Michelle to connect with her dead sources the way Rosanna connects with living ones. She could study their writing to figure out what they were working on and thinking about. How they were doing.

Perhaps, instead of dividing research up by process—reading versus calling—it makes as much or more sense to break it down by goal. The first objective of research is just to figure out what happened. Then, we have to figure out what it all means.