Mark Bowden is the author Black Hawk Down, a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award, and Killing Pablo, winner of an Overseas Press Club Award.  A national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, he has been a finalist for the National Magazine Awards twice in the last two years.  His writing has appeared in  The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.  A former reporter and columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, he is also the author of: Road Work (The Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004), Finders Keepers (The Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002), Our Finest Day (Chronicle, 2002), Bringing the Heat (Knopf, 1994) and Doctor Dealer (Warner Books, 1987). His next book, Guests of the Ayatollah, about the Iran hostage crisis, is due out in Fall 2005.

Your books involve prodigious research, mountains of material.  How do you manage it all?

There is no set way of doing it.  When I write a book, I invent the process anew every time.  It’s about maintaining files and grouping information as I’m reporting and assembling it in a way so that I’ll be able to find it again when I need it.  I then shuffle the files as I’m writing in order to organize the information for ready access.  I continue to report as I’m writing.  One of the things that happened when I was reporting Killing Pablo was that I inherited a large box full of files from the U.S. embassy in Bogotá.  The files were from the time of the hunt for Pablo Escobar.  I created an extensive outline of all of that information on the computer and organized it chronologically.  That way when I was writing I was able to easily do a search for a name or a date or a word, and then I would use it to find the original document.  The computer helped me find things I wouldn’t have been able to remember.  Most of my documents for that project were not electronic, they were paper.  But that electronic document that I created – it took a lot of time – proved to be really useful.

Once you have the material, do you outline before you write?

I always outline.  I start making outlines for anything I’m writing, whether it’s a magazine article or a book, very soon after I begin reporting.  It’s an old newspaper reporter’s habit.  When you’re a newspaper reporter, you never know when you’re going to have the rug suddenly pulled out from under you.  You never know when they’re going to say, “I need that story right now.”  You don’t always have enough time to fully develop a story.  I always like to have a clear idea of what the story is going to be if I have to write it right now.  I continue outlining with books because it helps me organize the story in my mind.  When you have the story organized in your mind, it helps you with the reporting.  It helps you make decisions about what is significant to you and what is not.  It helps you determine where the beginning of the story is, who the characters are, and what is most important. 

My outlines are very general.  I’ll sit down sometimes with a pad and a pen, and I sketch out the general overview of the piece that I’m writing.  An outline is a very fluid thing.  I change it many times over the course of writing because I find that in a long piece of writing, essentially what you’re doing is thinking the story through, carefully.  On these stories you can’t hold them in your head all at one time.  The only way to experience the story is to start doing it.  And once you start doing it you find yourself pulled in different directions, so if you adhere rigidly to an outline before you begin writing, in my opinion, you cut short any insights you gain through the process of writing.

What was the story you wanted to tell in Killing Pablo?

I was interested to know how Pablo Escobar wound up dead on a rooftop in Medellín.  I wanted to know to what extent the United States was responsible for that.  The quest of the book is to understand what happened, why it happened and how it happened.  That took me all the way back to “Who was Pablo Escobar?” “How did he become such a hunted figure?,” and “Why was everyone so eager to get him?” 

Were you surprised by what you found?

I’m always surprised by what I find.  I think that’s the essence of reporting.  I believe the real world always surprises you.  We all have a certain understanding of ourselves and the world around us, and it’s based on our own experience and what we’ve read.  You can’t get though life without having this idea in your head about the way the world is structured and the way things work.  But any time you actually go out and examine any piece of that, whether it’s yourself in psychoanalysis or in a story, it always turns out to be different than you expected.  And if doesn’t, it means you haven’t done enough reporting.

How do you go about choosing a structure for your books?

I look for in a story what I call the “dramatic center.”  I look for where the action is in the story.  I like to write about things happening.  When I wrote Black Hawk Down, it begins on page one with the helicopter taking off on the mission.  Essentially everything in that story is hung on the dramatic story, on the 18-hour battle.  In the case of Killing Pablo, I originally conceived of it as a chase.  The dramatic center of the story for me really began at the point where Pablo Escobar walks out of prison.  Then begins this 15-month long hunt in earnest for him.  But as I wrote the story, I realized that without a better understanding of who Escobar was and how things got to that point – with him walking out of jail – and what that meant for Colombia, the United States and everybody involved, that the story was nothing more than just a chase.  So the only thing to do then was to go back and write about Pablo Escobar’s life and times... that big, long first chapter which takes you all the way back to an assassination in 1949 and the beginning of the long period of violence and Pablo Escobar’s birth.  It’s essentially a condensed biography.  As I wrote it, I wasn’t sure that what I was doing wasn’t boring readers.  The action happens later on.  But the hope was that Escobar was such an interesting character and Colombia was such an interesting country that I would be able to hold a reader’s interest until I could get to the point where the book really picks up pace. 

In Killing Pablo you have several scenes with complex character interactions, but you weren’t there to witness them.  How do you keep from drifting into fiction as a nonfiction writer?

I think you have to be really careful.  The bottom line is that you have to be really honest with the reader.  I always try to show the reader where the information is coming from.  For example, in Killing Pablo, many of the conversations had been recorded or were in the documents that I had or were interviews that he done.  There were also transcripts of recorded conversations based on surveillance.  So a lot of the longer, more complex dialogue, or monologue, comes from those stories.  I did on occasion in the book write a scene based on the reminiscence of one or more characters who were present, and when I did that I indicated that.  I think that’s the best you can do.  I don’t think you can write compelling literary journalism or creative nonfiction without creating scenes with characters and dialogue. 

You’re not a fan of anonymous sources.  But in the case of Killing Pablo you were dealing with friends in the government and shady characters.  Did you have to bend any of your own rules or push the limits in order to tell the story you wanted to tell?

I don’t have any hard and fast rules about anonymous sources.  I operate on the principle that some information is better than no information.  I’m reluctant to use, as I think any reporter should be, off-the-record or anonymously sourced information.  I would prefer to be able to document everything and show who said something and why.  But in some cases, if you want to tell the story, you can’t have it the way you want it.  In the case of Killing Pablo, I felt very confident about the information because I had such a rich source of documentary material. 

Considering the content of your books, you obviously take a lot of risks.  Do you fear reprisals?