This is a writing sample by “nycghostwriter,” AKA Barbara Finkelstein. It is “How do you see what you can’t see,” a blog post published in slightly different form on the IBM Researcher platform on September 9, 2019. You can get professional ghostwriting services from a published blogger. Email me or fill out the short form on my contact page.
The recovering drug abuser I interviewed for Connections, a monthly newsletter I produced for a Bronx medical center, lived in a therapeutic community on Randall’s Island. The medical center provided the health care services for the community, so the “positive results” I was asked to write about were a foregone conclusion. I like the idea of making my own observations first and then coming up with an ending. But if you are anything like me, and you like to eat and sleep in a warm place, you will write what your company wants its employees and customers to hear. I am not noble.
The truth is that the facility where I interviewed “Jimmy” was orderly and clean. The residents and staff were respectful to each other and to me — the only white-skinned person on the premises. Best of all, nobody was strung out. “I wouldn’t mind living here,” I thought, only half flippantly.
Jimmy was a Vietnam veteran, a slightly built man in his early forties. After he finished his tour of duty, he went home to Florida, got married and had a daughter. In short order, though, his life unravelled. Jimmy started abusing crack cocaine — the opioid of the 1990s. He moved to New York and became estranged from his family. His daughter’s refusal to speak to him was a constant provocation to his soul.
I was rapt when he told me a dream he had shortly before he came to Randall’s Island.
“I knew that if I didn’t break my addiction, I was going to end up homeless and dead under a bridge,” he said. “I experienced an apotheosis –” Yes, Jimmy’s word. His linguistic sophistication roped me in, and when he told me he woke from his dream, resurrected, with arms outstretched like Jesus Christ on the cross, I was already thinking of who would play Jimmy in the movie.
Suddenly, we were interrupted by one of the therapeutic community supervisors, a short, heavy-set no-nonsense personality. She clapped her hands together and said, “That’s enough now.”
The supervisor’s abrupt intervention brought me up sharp. It told me she had heard Jimmy’s spiel many times, and she had seen many white-skinned reporters, like me, fall for his storytelling charm. I was embarrassed by my naïveté. Had Jimmy manipulated me into loving his story just as he had once manipulated family and friends into giving him money for drugs? Was I a sucker for a good story or was I easy to get over on because I was white?
With three little impatient words, the supervisor broke the spell that Jimmy’s mesmerizing tale cast over me and threw into doubt my own professionalism: How could I have overlooked the fact that my relationship to drugs — I hate them — probably colored my view of Jimmy? Being blind to everything that played into his drug addiction did not make me a fair-minded or objective reporter. It made me a clueless reporter.
I would like to say that I wised up and never let another Jimmy play me. But I have met up with a number of Jimmies over the years, including:
- A Costa Rican immigrant who told me a fascinating story about his harrowing passage from Mexico to California. A half-dozen women who had hired him as their handyman spared me the humiliation of publishing his story: They independently verified that he stole jewelry, silver, gold and cash from them.
- An ex-convict who spent thirty-plus years in prison for a crime she did not commit. Or so she said. I believe her, I think, but the Final Cut editor I hired to help me edit my film about her said her story was full of holes.
Every writer has to ask, “How do you know if your informant’s information is reliable?”
How do you see what you cannot see?
For one, you have to acknowledge that you do not know what has gone on in the life of your interviewee before you sat down across from him. Jimmy was an African-American Vietnam vet with a life derailed by drugs. I am the daughter of Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors. I am not even sure how or why this matters. But it does.
Science has actually come up with a good way for writers to double-check the information people give them. It’s called peer review. A board of subject matter experts scrutinizes your work for quality of research and adherence to editorial standards. With another set of eyes, you can either proceed with your story or ditch it before you discredit yourself or your employer.
Peer reviewers are legitimate critics of your work. They are to you what that stout supervisor on Randall’s Island was to me: A reality check.
You can read this post on Brook’s Blog, a project of IBM Research.
