Investigative Writing Quotes

The great thing for me, now, is that writing has become more and more interesting. Not just as a craft but as a way into things that are not described. It's a thing of discovering. That's when writing is really working. You're on the trail of something, and you don't quite know what it is.

But I don't really write to honor the past. I write to investigate, to try to figure out what happened and why it happened, knowing I'll never really know. I think all the writers that I admire have this same desire, the desire to bring order out of chaos.

I'm somewhere between a gumshoe and a journalist. A writer, not a symbol.

A good journalist is not the one that writes what people say, but the one that writes what he is supposed to write.

I really write to find out what I know about something and what is to be known about something.

I was drawn to journalism as a young guy because I felt like there was some purpose to it, not always but sometimes.

I want to be the greatest investigative reporter of my generation.

I think that a great newspaper is one that puts a real premium on digging to get the story behind the story.

Serious journalism need not be solemn.

I tried to steer the student newspaper toward more pertinent information instead of the usual gossip and bull.

As soon as you sit down to write about something you are pressing your nose deeper into the sewer of facts.

Journalism can go right up to the door of the room in which the decisions are made. A novel can go inside the room - and inside the character's heads.

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. The writer's job is to turn the unspeakable into words - not just into any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues.

We like long-form narrative journalism, and we feel there aren't enough high-profile outlets in Canada running the kind of stories we want to showcase - long, meaty, thoughtful, investigative.

I start each of my scripts by going on a journey of painstaking research and discovery, much as I do a piece of long-lead journalism.

In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.

I'm not doing Pulitzer Prize work where I'm unearthing major negative stories about the UFC or some big controversies. It's just kind of day-to-day fodder.

I remember doing 'The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy,' and I'd been reporting that story for a long time; I had a lot of good facts, but I had no story. I didn't know what the story was.