Episode 549: Writing Early, Interview Prep, and 'Reward' Scenes with Pulitzer Prize—Winner Mark Johnson

“What I tend to do is, if I write this really difficult explanatory section that is going through a lot of technical information and trying to boil it down, once I'm finished with that, then I get to write this other scene that I really want to write. I think of it as dessert. If I finish my broccoli, I get my ice cream sundae,” says Mark Johnson, author of The Family Plan for The Atavist Magazine.

Hey there CNFers, it’s the creative nonfiction podcast … it’s that Atavistian time of the month and we have a wonderful story written and reported by Mark Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, for his story "The Family Plan: When a little girl in Iowa was diagnosed with a rare incurable disease, her parents and their community came together to help her. They wound up making medical history.”

I tell you, this podcast nearly didn’t happen. There was an audio glitch that didn’t recorded more than half of the audio portion, but since I record video now to chop and put on social media, I was able to drag the video file into iMovie, decouple the audio from the video, and export the audio. Saved the day. Scary stuff.

First we’re going to hear from EIC Seyward Darby about why some Atavist pitches are thin and what to do about them and what it was about Mark’s story that made it so easy to just slip in and edit the damn thing from the jump.

Mark Johnson, who, as far as I can tell, has little to no internet presence. He might be on LinkedIn. Mark won this little award you might have heard of called the Pulitzer Prize. You hear of this thing? New to me, is it a big deal?

He spent 22 years at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and most recently he was at The Washington Post, but was unfortunately part of its recent mass layoffs. His first novel, Though the Earth Gives Way, came out in 2022.

In this conversation, we talk about:

• Interview stage fright
• Interview prep
• Is it ever OK for a reporter to want to be liked?
• Things that didn’t work
• Obsession
• The stories we wake up with in our heads
• Writing early in the process
• “Reward” scenes and what they are
• The great advice he received from the journalist Rick Bragg
• Hidden beauties
• And why these kinds of stories still matter to him

As always, you can support the show by visiting patreon.com/cnfpod and subscribe to Pitch Club on Substack.