Clay Stafford talks with Scott Eden on “Where the Story Comes From”

Scott Eden interviewed by Clay Stafford

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In this cover conversation, Scott Eden takes readers behind the scenes of A Killing in Cannabis, not only the crime itself but also the reporting, structure, and narrative choices that bring it to life. From shaping true crime without compromising facts to navigating limited access, missing pieces, and unresolved questions, Eden offers a clear, unvarnished look at what it takes to build narrative nonfiction that is both truthful and compelling. “Scott, I love your literary, narrative style, and I’m making this up, ‘past the farmer’s market, then past the tool shed, then past the old maple tree, and past the garage on the left.’ The way you phrase your paragraphs takes me out of nonfiction and into the characters’ lives.”

“That was a drive the main characters would make almost daily, or even more often, from one part of Santa Cruz to another. I drove that same route many times. You start noticing what’s on the side of the road. And some of those places, you include on the page because they’re thematically relevant. They’re not random. Each spot is relevant to the book’s themes.”

“The timeline goes back and forth. It’s great storytelling, but what was your reasoning for doing that rather than a linear progression?”

“I was assigned A Killing in Cannabis because Tushar Atre was killed, so the murder was, to a degree, always going to be the center of my investigation. But I quickly became more interested in Tushar’s efforts to build a weed startup as an outsider coming from afar.”

“And the relationships.”

“Tushar fell in love with Rachel, a black-market weed commercial producer, who had grown up in the Emerald Triangle. He then had a tumultuous relationship with Rachel, who is, in many ways, a main character of the book. Originally, I was just going to tell that straight and then have the murder happen kind of out of nowhere at the end. Still, somewhere along the line, we had the idea to intersperse Tushar’s career in cannabis with the murder investigation. As I said, the reporting will govern the structure. There are always limits on the reporting. Any project will have limits on what the journalists can and can’t do. For example, when I started reporting, four people had been arrested, but their cases had not been fully adjudicated. In such instances, sheriffs, detectives, law enforcement, and prosecutors generally do not speak to the press on the record. I couldn’t interview the detectives who investigated the murders. I had to rely on court documents and on talking to some retired sheriff’s deputies who had been on the case. Mostly, it was from court documents, so I had a good idea of how the investigation unfolded and how they proceeded. I didn’t have a detective to make a central character, so the idea was then just to include snippets, little brief chapters that are snapshots of a point in time of the investigation, just enough to pull the reader along and remind them that there was a murder here and a huge investigation as part of that. It took them eight months to finally arrest people.”

“You’ve got a really nice emotional and logical build that goes all the way through, and to tear it down and look at the story’s construction, it looks like you’ve built those peaks and valleys to take the reader through the plot.”

“There were two plots. One was the investigation, the police procedural, with brief chapters interspersed with the chronology of Tushar’s career in weed, which itself had about three acts. It naturally had that rhythm, just the facts of how his business evolved. He had three partners. Among them was his romantic and business partner, Rachel, but he also had three other partners with whom he fell out, in sequence. Those periods with each partner made it a natural three-act progression.”

“How much literary latitude can you take when you’re writing narrative nonfiction, and when is it permissible to insert, as you have, your own descriptive flair?”

“There’s no latitude when it comes to facts, none at all. There’s no exaggeration or fabrication.”

“When someone in quotes says something, have you found that somewhere?”

“Right, it’s from their memory. In the book, when people are remembering dialogue, I put it in italics because I thought there was more fidelity to the truth in not putting it between quotation marks, which, to me, seems like you either heard it or it’s in a document. That was a decision we made in the book itself, but in terms of the lyricism of the prose, I try to use sentences that sound good and are entertaining.”

“In those instances where you write ‘not the real name,’ what criterion did you use to include some people’s names and omit others?”

“If they asked me. Just if they said, ‘I prefer not to be named for X, Y, and Z reasons.’”

“For writers who want to tackle true crime, how does writing true crime differ from writing a traditional crime novel or a procedural?”

“I treated this just as I would any other long-form journalistic project I’ve worked on. It was a matter of absolute fidelity to the facts and of talking to as many people as possible. The research is key. The narrative structure emerges from the research itself, so the path forward, for me, is to do as much reporting as possible.”

“Did you get frustrated by the page-length requirements? I’m wondering how much was left on the editing floor.”

“There was a lot, but probably for the best. Good editors help shave away the parts where it starts to drag or where I fall in love with a digression that’s just too much. We don’t need all of that, and keeping the narrative train on track is a good thing. I tend to overwrite, so I need an editor and other sets of eyes that can tell me when the train is being derailed or going off in a direction the reader may not need.”

“It’s got to be frustrating, though, because I don’t like to give away plot spoilers. There’s a guy in Ohio you want to talk to, and he keeps blowing you off. That’s got to be frustrating as a journalist.”

“Very early in the reporting on the book, right after the magazine article was finished and the book reporting really began for me, I got an explosive tip from someone that readers will learn about if they reach this chapter. It was so explosive, so juicy…”

“It sets up an entire conspiracy theory.”

“I spent so much time trying to find the full story behind this tip. Essentially, there’s a mystery there that remains unsolved. That was extremely frustrating. Again, the result of your research, even if you don’t solve that mystery, governs the structure of the book. So there’s a way to make that reporting failure, or the failure to really solve that mystery, actually a good thing, to make it enhance the narrative and remain truthful.”

“You balance four things when you’re writing. You’re telling the truth, you’re telling a story, you’re protecting sources, and you’re protecting yourself. How do you find that happy middle ground, where all the little circles come together, and you’ve got the perfect center, like a Venn Diagram?”

“That might come from facing the page every day and then making these micro-decisions based on that. You have the whole story outlined, say, and you’re writing this chapter, and then those micro-decisions need to be made as you’re writing this little chunk. Like, here’s the part where I need to protect the source, and I have to write it this way to do that. And you deal with it then. I probably don’t think about protecting myself much, but here’s a part where, you know, the narrative will be served by going in this direction, and then it takes you to a place maybe that you didn’t really know you were going, so you have to decide at that point to go with the flow in terms of the storytelling aspect. Those are decisions that are made on the day that you’re putting together this chapter, or this scene, and then something occurs to you to go in a different direction, and you explore that. Sometimes, too, there are distinct phases. Research phase, writing phase, editing, revision phase. Sometimes, they overlap. You get yourself into the writing phase, and you’re telling this part of the story, but you realize, ‘I want to go off in this direction, but I don’t have that material.’ You have to do a little extra reporting, make a new phone call, ask a few more questions of someone; to get the thing you need to take the story in the direction that you suddenly realize it needs to go. It’s not clear, distinct phases. Sometimes they overlap and thread into each other.”

“Somebody reads A Killing in Cannabis and says, ‘I like what Scott Eden did there. I want to do it myself.’ What cautions, pitfalls, and encouragement do you have for writers who are looking to go that route?”

“When it comes to heavy-duty reporting, the more experience you have, the better. We live in a world where it’s harder to get magazine assignments for difficult subjects like this. Because of the number of magazines that have gone out of business, have slimmed down, or don’t publish as often, it’s hard even to gain that experience these days. I think the best way for people who want to pursue journalism is to start from the ground up. Get a job as a reporter. It’s hard, but it’s still possible. You learn by doing, by going out there and talking to people, sitting down with them, listening to their stories, writing them down in your notebook or recording them on an audio recorder, and then going home to go through them, corroborating what people tell you. I mean, you only learn by doing.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, Killer Nashville Magazine, and Killer Nashville University. https://claystafford.com/

Scott Eden is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work has focused on crime, corruption, injustice, business, science, technology, and the dark side of sports. He’s written for ESPN The Magazine, GQ, Wired, The Atavist, The Believer, and many other publications. He is the author of Touchdown Jesus. https://www.spiegelandgrau.com/a-killing-in-cannabis