When the People in Your Book Read Their Chapters

There is a particular kind of fear that comes with placing a chapter into the hands of the person whose life is inside it.

For months—sometimes years—you have taken what they told you and shaped it into scenes. You have studied timelines, compared recollections, reconstructed conversations, and tried to capture not only what happened, but what it felt like when it did.

Then you send those pages back to the people who were there.

And you wait.

Recently, I began sending chapters from Bodacious: Master of Disaster to several of the men whose lives are woven through the book. By that point, I had interviewed them extensively. I had listened to their stories more times than I could count. I knew their voices, their humor, and the rhythms of the way they spoke.

Still, there were things I got wrong.

Cody Custer has been invaluable throughout the writing of this book. Without him, God only knows what kind of book it would have become.

Cody is one of the most gracious people I have ever known. Grace does not merely describe the way he treats people; it seems to be part of his nature. From the beginning, he has corrected me with extraordinary kindness. He has never made me feel foolish for misunderstanding something or embarrassed for having made an assumption. He simply explains how it really was.

Usually, somewhere along the way, he also makes me laugh.

People who know Cody only through social media may not see that side of him. When he cuts loose and is simply being Cody, he is tremendously witty and funny. He can correct me gently, tease me mercilessly, and leave both of us laughing.

In one chapter, I had written a line of dialogue for Cody as another cowboy prepared to get on Bodacious.

When he read it, he told me, “I never would have said that.”

“You wouldn’t have?”

“No. I think I would have said something like, ‘Run your knees in that sucker.’”

What the heck did that mean?

Cody explained that it meant driving your knees into the bull and holding on tight.

“Don’t you always hold on tight with your knees?” I asked.

“Well, yeah. Kinda.”

He laughed. I laughed. Then he began explaining the subtleties of the language bull riders used with one another—the small phrases through which they offered advice, encouragement, or support.

Changing that sentence required only a few words. But the conversation behind it taught me something much larger. Reconstructed dialogue can sound perfectly believable to a writer and still sound entirely wrong to the person whose voice she is trying to capture.

Cody is deeply invested in this book being right for the sake of posterity. He wants it to represent their lives and their world truthfully. He once told me, “We want this to be right. We all want this to be good.”

He spoke about a famous bull-riding movie and said that if the people making it had bothered to run parts of it past the bull riders, the result might have been far more authentic than the Hollywood version.

That has stayed with me.

Authenticity is not achieved by writing what seems like something a bull rider might say. It comes from listening closely enough to learn what these particular men actually would have said—and understanding why.

Sometimes a correction changes a sentence. Sometimes it changes an entire timeline.

While reconstructing the hospital scenes after Tuff Hedeman was injured by Bodacious, I assumed the men had seen him after surgery. It seemed logical that he would have been taken into surgery immediately after suffering such catastrophic injuries.

Cody told me that he is sure he saw him before surgery.

That sent me back to Clint Branger, who helped confirm that when the men first saw Tuff, he had not yet undergone the long surgery to reconstruct his face. Clint remembered Tuff’s jaw already being wired and his eyes nearly swollen shut, but he was certain the surgery had not yet taken place.

My assumption had created a major chronological problem in one of the most important passages in the book. Cody’s correction caught it before it became part of the finished story.

Clint approaches these chapters as a man who remembers the stories as they happened and wants to see them told correctly. He remembers who was in the room, who said what, and how one event led to the next. His corrections help preserve the story as he and the other men lived it.

Even details I considered insignificant mattered to Clint. In one chapter, I described the way the foam came loose inside the protective mask he wore when Bodacious struck him. Clint corrected me. It was a small physical distinction, but it changed how the impact occurred—and therefore how the scene should be written. 

That is the danger of a plausible detail: it can enter a manuscript wearing the clothes of a fact.

Narrative nonfiction allows a writer to shape a story. Timelines may be compressed, conversations reconstructed, and related moments brought together so the reader can experience events with clarity and momentum. But every choice must still serve a larger truth. When a detail begins distracting the person who lived the story—or makes him feel that the scene is no longer his—it deserves another look.

Cody protects the history and culture.

Clint protects the story and details as they lived it.

Every correction they make improves the book. More importantly, every correction is evidence of trust. They believe I care enough to listen, reconsider, verify, and change what I have written when necessary.

I am the writer of this book, but I am not the final authority on the lives inside it. The men who lived these stories have given me something more valuable than interviews. They have allowed me to return the pages to them and ask, “Does this sound true?”

Sometimes the answer is yes.

Sometimes the answer is, “I wouldn’t word it like that.”

And the story is better for it.