“I try to give readers a sense of the movement and the liveliness of a place through the people. People are the environment.”

Danielle is a U.S. journalist who covers Central America. She works part-time at The New Yorker, writes for various U.S. and Central American outlets and sits on the editorial board of the Honduran outlet Contracorriente. She lived in El Salvador for more than a decade, is originally from Iowa and had the great fortune of growing up with Amanda Aldinger.

How would you describe your writing style?

Published journalism, which is most of what I do, is deeply collaborative. There should be seven different bylines at the end of the pieces I work on. It should not be just me because there are various layers of editing and fact-checking, not to mention the raw material that the article is built from, which comes from sources.

Published writing often resembles film or music that way. So many people are involved in these articles, and by the time it comes out on the other end, it’s not something I could have ever written on my own.

When you're building a story, what's your first step?

I often write as I'm doing the research. My worst-case scenario is that I have a mound of completed research on one side of the table and a totally blank page on the other. That's paralysis-inducing, at least for me, and so it’s much easier if I'm writing little bits, which is the writing that tends to happen in my head as I run, or on the subway, on my iPhone.

If I've just done an interview or two and have the voices in my head while heading to another appointment, that’s a very fertile time. The liminal space is great for my subconscious brain, which is on in the background, processing and chewing on what I just heard. The highlights rise to the surface and produce a few sentences that may never end up in the piece, but start the crystallization of what comes later.

“It’s easy to forget you live in a specific iteration of the universe, but when you write, you have to remember that.”

When crafting stories about Central America, and El Salvador specifically, what’s your biggest challenge?

Recognizing how I live in, and write for, very different realities. I have to make sure I'm explaining myself to the readership the piece is for. There’s an old David Foster Wallace joke about the fish in the water that comes to mind. It’s easy to forget you live in a specific iteration of the universe, but when you write, you have to remember that.

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?”
David Foster Wallace

For instance, editors will remind me that something I’m referring to isn’t common knowledge to either a U.S. audience or a Central American audience. That's a challenge with journalistic writing: You want it to be useful and approachable, but not to dumb it down too much, or it will end up not really contributing to existing knowledge. It won’t tell the reader anything new. So it’s this delicate dance.

What environment do you enjoy depicting via words?

Just as you were asking this question, I was trying to imagine what it would be like to describe something as nature writers do. The myriad ways to describe a landscape, and how I should try it sometime. I would appreciate that excuse to pay closer attention to the individual parts that make up the natural world.

But, I feel pretty wedded to people. So when I’m talking to people, I’m observing how and where they live. Documenting the geographical setting where a story takes place is part of building an article. You're in various spaces, gathering little bits of color and material, then sewing it all together as the backdrop for the person you’re interviewing.

Watching a protest down the middle of a street, observing workers culling fruit in rural farming communities, seeing who’s coming out of a sparse government building … I’m looking for the action that helps bring the story alive, that communicates why it matters. I try to give readers a sense of the movement and the liveliness of a place through the people. People are the environment.

Is there a media cliche you wish would go away?

One thing that irks me is title writing in the age of the Internet. The clickbait mandate has infiltrated everything, even in many earnest and in-depth publications. I get frustrated when the provocation or both-sidesism affects me, too. There are plenty of times when I read just the headline, and that influences what I think the article is about, which then affects my perception of the topic at hand – and ultimately of the world.

Clickbait headlines can be so much more combative than the actual layering and unspooling of the information that’s going on inside the article. That said, writers usually don't write their own headlines, and they are actually quite difficult to write. I’ve never written a good one! It’s tricky to be compelling and brief and nuanced all at the same time.

An alma mater called and asked you to come back and teach a summer seminar on any subject you choose. What would it be?

I have a longstanding love of this Latin American nonfiction literary form called Crónica (the Chronicle.) It’s a true story, an article or a book, woven in a way that’s narrative, character-led, engrossing and complex like a novel. It can look quite similar to long-form journalism in the U.S. and draws from many of the same descriptive tools.

As a creative writing genre it can at times toe the line between fact and fiction, but crónicas that are specifically journalistic have to be entirely factual. Like, if there’s a paragraph of the internal monologue of a main character, that’s because that person actually recounted that to the journalist.

It takes a bunch of time to report these pieces, to gather all of that detail, but it makes for such great stories, not least because, as the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. And for me, reading a crónica about a topic makes me feel like I understand it in a deeper way than if I had read a classic news article about the same topic, and it leaves me feeling more connected to the people around me, versus the alienated feeling that can come after a depressing news article when you’re left feeling like, “wtf, people?”

It's a literary form that came out of really remarkable histories of struggle and rich artistic and literary traditions in Latin America, and paid witness to incredible moments. I would love to teach a class as an excuse to learn more about it and spend more time kind of thinking about it. It’s just a beautiful way to tell a story.

Danielle Mackey