What pleases you about the way your story turned out? Are there any ways you feel it fell short of your orignal goal?

My goal was to so thoroughly understand Joey Coyle's story that I could tell it with the intimacy and directness of fiction, and Iím happy with the way it turned out.

How did your story develop, both in your initial thinking about it and in the revision process? What happened in the writing that you didnít expect would happen?

I was one of many reporters who worked on the story of the missing Purolator money during the frantic week Joey Coyle was on the run. The tale and its central character captivated Philadelphians. When I set out in the aftermath to piece the whole thing together, I saw the story as just a hilarious romp, with Coyle as a bumbling, lovably roguish Everyman.

I soon leamed that Joey was a hopeless meth addict, and that the story, which had heretofore been strictly light-hearted, was colored from beginning to end by his addiction. At least one editor at the Inquirer wondered if I should just drop it at that point, since it wasnít the story we had all thought it was. But I came to see that the whole thing was about addiction. The money was just a slapstick symbol for Joeyís true craving. I realized, as I sat down to write, that the story of Joey Coyle was a parable of addiction, of how hopeless and empty it is to assume success and happiness can be scooped up off the street or administered through a needle.

If you write in other genres, how does your experience writing in creative nonfiction depend on or depart from your other wnting?

I started out with the ambition of writing creative nonfiction, inspired by writers like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and many others. My whole journalism career, including my two books, has been devoted to becoming a better reporter and writer, and Iíve been tackling more and more ambitious projects as Iíve gone along. I have now begun supplementing my nonfiction work with fiction, partly because itís a way of writing more about my own experience, but also because it enables me to sit down and write without investing the tremendous amount of time and energy it takes to do the reporting (it also frees me from depending on the goodwill and availability of my subjects).

Give some of your reflections about creative nonfiction as an emerging genre in American literature. Where do you see it going in the next several years, or even farther down the line?

I think creative nonfiction is the major literary innovation of the last half century. It proceeds directly from the revolution in communications technology. Writers have always drawn their material from real life, from stories long told, half truths and legends. Today, the "real story" is front and center before anyone has a chance to put it into words. TV, radio, newspapers, magazines and even Hollywood package this "truth" in slick, highly proscribed ways. Readers look to writers of creative nonfiction for the same reason they looked to Shakespeareís histories and dramas, to flesh out and bring to compelling life the events and people we experience from a distance.

Take Tom Wolfeís "The Right Stuff," for example. Few events in modern history had been more exhaustively documented by modern media than the early astronaut program. But it wasn't until Wolfe wrote his book that we leamed what it was really like to be John Glenn, or Al Shepherd, or the other original seven fliers. On page after page we leamed things we didnít know, or things we knew in faint outline but hardly understood. For instance, everyone knew that Gus Grissom's capsule sank at the end of his mission, and that he did not get another mission for a long time. It took Wolfe's reporting and writing to make us understand that Gus had "screwed the pooch," been found wanting at a critical moment. Our appetite for this kind of reporting and writing will only grow, and continues to be fed by highly skillful practitioners.

Another terrific example is Norman Mailer's "Executioner's Song," which not only fleshes out intimately the middle American nightmare of Gary Gilmore, it then tums and captures the media phenomenon Gilmore created by insisting that he be executed. In a world where we are all bombarded by facts, great nonfiction storytelling does what literature had always done--makes sense of things.

What are the specific literary techniques you attempt to use as a creative nonfiction writer? For example, do you attempt to write in scenes? Do you employ dialogue? Do you employ specific detail? How and why? What advice might you offer to young people interested in writing?

Scenes, dialogue, characters, plot, foreshadowing, metaphor, interior monologue ... you name it. I use every technique I've ever read and admired. I use them to make my writing as interesting as I possibly can, because thatís the point. No one was ever moved by something they didn't read. My goal is to keep the reader going, and the techniques of good storytelling are no secret.

My advice to young writers is to stop reading like readers, and start reading like writers. Re-read stories, books and passages from books that work for you. Dissect the prose. Write it out yourself longhand. Get inside the mind of the writer. Figure out why it works. Then go forth and do the same.