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2007 gewann Lawrence Wright für sein Buch „The Looming Tower“ (dt: Der Tod wird euch finden) den Pulitzer-Preis in
der Kategorie General Nonfiction. Im Interview mit dem New Yorker Journalismus-Professor Robert Boynton erzählt er, wie er
Themen findet, wie besessen und akribisch er recherchiert, wie er
Recherche-Gespräche führt, wie er gewaltige Massen von Informationen
mit Hilfe von Karteikarten bändigt und wie er, selbst während des
Schreibens, weiter recherchiert:
„In the past, one of my major
mistakes was starting to write too soon. I didn’t really know what I
was trying to say, and had to stop, go back to my sources, and fill in
the gaps. So even when I’m officially “writing,� my day is probably
divided evenly between writing and doing additional interviewing.“
Für "Der Tod wird euch finden", sein Buch über Al Qaeda, sprach Wright
mit mehr als 600 Menschen und bereiste monatelang den Mittleren Osten.
Entstanden ist eine 500 Seiten starke, ungemein detailreiche Chronik
der Ereignisse, die zu den Terroranschlägen vom 11. September 2001
führten. Wrights Großreportage kreist um vier Männer: Osama Bin Laden
und seinen Stellvertreter und Mentor Ayman al-Zawahiri; ihnen gegenüber
stehen John O`Neill, oberster Terroristenfahnder des FBI, und der
ehemalige saudische Geheimdienstchef Turki al-Faisal. Gekonnt verknüpft
Wright die Lebenswege seiner vier Helden zu einem facettenreichen
Gesamtbild der Versäumnisse, der Zufälle und Fehleinschätzungen auf dem
Weg zum 11. September 2001.
Wir entnehmen das Interview dem Buch „The New New Journalism“, in dem der New Yorker Journalismus-Professor Robert S. Boynton sich mit 19 profilierten amerikanischen Reporter über ihr Arbeit unterhält, von John Krakauer bis Susan Orlean - jenen Schreibern also, die dem Aufruf von Tom Wolfe gefolgt sind, einen neuen, erzählenden Journalismus zu begründen.
Das
Interview wurde geführt am 3. November 2002 - als Lawrence Wright
bereits mitten in der Recherche zu „The Looming Towers“ steckte.
Lawrence Wright
Robert S. Boynton: What kinds of subjects are you drawn to?
Lawrence Wright: I'm interested in why people believe what they believe. America has a huge supermarket of beliefs to choose from. It's liberating, but there's also a terrifically dangerous quality to it. The times when people are led into trouble—via political or religious movements—they're always animated by strong beliefs.
Yet reporters rarely take beliefs seriously. The status of a religion reporter at a newspaper is comparable to that of an obituary writer’s. Reporters are skeptics, so the whole idea of belief is a little repugnant to them. When they are confronted with someone who is genuinely captivated by belief, reporters take pity on them by not writing about their beliefs.
RSB: How do you develop your general interest in belief into a story idea?
LW: I often stumble onto them. At the outset, my stories may not seem to be about belief. But once I get going, that is the angle I tend to pursue.
For example, in 1991 my therapist told me about the plague of multiple personality disorders (MPD). Both he and his wife, who is also a therapist, were treating a number of young women with MPD. And when they started probing it, they almost always uncovered memories of satanic abuse in the woman’s childhood. The scale of what he described was astounding. He said that Satanists in Austin, Texas, alone were responsible for 50 murders a year—a figure that actually exceeded Austin’s total murder rate! I thought, “What's going on here?�
RSB: That’s fascinating information, but how did you develop it into a story?
LW: I started reporting. I attended a workshop at which a policeman claimed that Satanists were responsible for 50,000 murders a year in the US—a figure which exceeded the entire national murder rate. And this guy was a well-respected cop!
That’s when I knew there was a story there: a story about believers and those who believed them. I went to Tina Brown, then editor of The New Yorker, and told her I wanted to write about MPD. She wasn’t that interested until I told her that most people with MPD claimed to have been victims of satanic abuse. That got her excited.
(...)
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