Everybody’s always telling their story; sometimes it’s disguised, but they’re always trying to tell the story of who they are, what they’re about, what their anxieties are. That’s always swimming underneath the surface. I’d parachute into these environments and talk with people. But the job—especially when I went from the daily paper to the weekly paper, where I could write stories with scenes and characters—was really just to listen and try to capture the scene.