What I stress to my students is how empowering this process is. The world is full of people with agendas, trying to persuade us to act on their behalf (spend on their behalf, fight and die on their behalf, oppress others on their behalf). But inside us is what Hemingway called a “built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” How do we know something is shit? We watch the way the deep, honest part of our mind reacts to it.

And that part of the mind is the one that reading and writing refine into sharpness.

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.

Your grandmother taught me to read when I was only four. She also taught me to write, by which I mean not simply organizing a set of sentences into a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of investigation. When I was in trouble at school (which was quite often) she would make me write about it. The writing had to answer a series of questions: Why did I feel the need to talk at the same time as my teacher? Why did I not believe that my teacher was entitled to respect? How would I want someone to behave while I was talking? What would I do the next time I felt the urge to talk to my friends during a lesson? I have given you these same assignments. I gave them to you not because I thought they would curb your behavior - they certainly did not curb mine - but because these were the earliest acts of interrogation, of drawing myself into consciousness. Your grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class. She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing - myself. Here was the lesson: I was not an innocent. My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue. And feeling that I was as human as anyone, this must be true for other humans. If I was not innocent, then they were not innocent. Could this mix of motivation also affect the stories they tell? The cities they built? The country they claimed as given to them by God?

The longtime newspaper writer Ed Cray, a professor of communications at the University of Southern California, has spent almost thirty years teaching journalism. He says, “The longer you work on a story, the more you can find yourself losing direction. No detail is too small. You just don’t know what your story is anymore.”

This problem of losing direction, of missing the central story, is so common that journalists have given it its own name: Burying the lead.

With each round of interviewing, June saw the links between old and new more clearly: “At first I wondered what I would do with my knowledge of literature. It seemed like such a waste. But then I realized that what I have always wanted is a job that keeps me constantly interested and always learning new things.” With each round, she also met more and more people who, like her, had “unconventional backgrounds,” or who impressed her as role models for whom she’d like to become: “I met an extraordinary woman—super smart and super nice—in fixed-income research, who graduated from my alma mater around the same time I did.