Thinking through how you find that intersection between individual, compelling human narratives and structural, systemic injustices - that's the place that's most interesting to me as a reporter.

I try to come to my reporting as a real, whole person, not an automaton.

Often, my central challenge is figuring out how do I build trust, how do I acquaint people who've just endured some terrible event - losing their child to murder, say, or being sexually assaulted - with the bizarre and sometimes invasive nature of in-depth interviews that aren't just a quick list of ten questions?

I think the daily challenge for a lot of beat reporters is, how do you get past the regurgitated sound bites of powerful people or evasion masters who are so used to this routine - the theatricality of press conferences and stage-managed interviews and teams of handlers?

What narrative journalism does is create a language or open up a space where someone can say, "Oh, this happened to me, too."

Workers are actually being starved on the largest military base in Baghdad, and women are being raped with impunity - and because it doesn't fit into a Hollywood context it's not going to fly.

The tremendous challenge of narrative journalism about subjects that are underreported is, how do you make people care about something they think they already know about, or think they don't need to know about?