The differences between the received wisdom, the standard version of events, and the facts on the ground may be subtle or they may be stark, even profound.

I remember surfing in Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, even Madeira, when local fishermen had never seen a surfboard before, and refused to believe that we could ride a wave on one.

It's so much harder than it looks - to conjure a fictional world that some passing wolf of skepticism can't just blow down in one breath.

Speaking generally, I think it's useful to acknowledge explicitly the power imbalance between a journalist and the protagonists in a story about poor people, even to make that imbalance part of the story - and to redress it, narratively, where you can.

The differences between the received wisdom, the standard version of events, and the facts on the ground may be subtle or they may be stark, even profound.

Even wars, big conflicts that have drawn a lot of news coverage, sometimes seem to me to have a center that hasn't been described, that might yet be glimpsed if approached from some odd angle.

I'm trying to find out what's actually true, which is nearly always something, if not a world of things, that you can't read in books.