A reader can only feel a loss if they know what was lost. Start at the moment things went wrong and all they see is a victim. Start earlier: the job, the street, the morning routine, who was in the house.

Yusuf teaching in the same school where he had been a pupil is not background before the story starts. It is the thing that was taken, and it is why the rest lands. Give this part more room than feels necessary. It is usually the first thing people cut, and usually the part that was carrying the whole thing.

Take the same five things that happened, put them in a different order, and the reader draws a different conclusion.

Start at the beginning and events feel like they had to turn out this way. Open in the middle of the worst moment and the reader is off balance from the first line. Group by subject instead of by time and you are making a claim about a pattern. None of these is neutral and none is wrong. What matters is that you know which one you picked and can say why - because if you never chose, the order chose for you.

You were not in the room. They were. Your job is not to explain what their experience meant, but to set things up so it can be heard properly and at length.

In practice that means getting out of the way: fewer of your own words, longer stretches of theirs, no summary where the account itself will do. It also means not tidying up. If someone hesitates, circles back, or contradicts themselves, that tells you something about what happened. It is not a flaw to edit out.

You decide which pieces go in, which voice follows which, and where you let a silence stand. Those decisions are the work. The order you put things in already says something, whether you meant it or not.

Svetlana Alexievich, who built whole books out of other people's accounts, called herself not an author but "an ear". She still chose - which interview, which sentence, what to place next to what. Know that you are choosing, and be able to say why.

"Conditions in the camp were difficult" gives a reader nothing to picture. "My youngest forgot how to read. I taught him letters in the sand" does the same job and stays with them for years.

Look for the thing you can point at: an object, a smell, a time on a clock, the exact words someone used. Then trust it and stop explaining. The temptation is always to add context around a detail like that, and the context is usually what waters it down.

A court needs what can be checked: names, dates, places, who handed what to whom. A reader needs to know what it was like: the waiting, the fear, the thing that was lost that no document records. The same account has to be handled differently depending on where it is going.

Neither version is the more honest one. A case file that leaves out what it felt like is not lying, and a story that cannot prove its dates is not lying either. The mistake is not knowing which one you are making - or giving a reader the certainty of a case file when you do not have it.

Writing down exact times, places and names is not bureaucracy. It is the difference between an account someone can act on and one that can only be felt. A moving story with no checkable detail cannot be taken to a court, a committee, or a journalist who has to stand behind it.

Someone took a risk to tell you this. Recording it precisely is how you make that risk count for something. The Istanbul Protocol exists for exactly this reason: how testimony is written down decides whether it can ever protect anyone. That holds for an archive or an article as much as for a legal file.

People who have been through something terrible rarely tell it in order. It comes back in pieces, jumps around, stops at one detail and skips a year. Accounts change on the second telling - not because someone is unreliable, but because the shock kept part of it out of reach the first time.

Fatuma saying "I told you the shooting stopped at seven. That's not right. It stopped twice" is the most truthful moment in her account. Straighten that into a clean timeline and you have made it easier to read and less true. Sometimes the order that feels wrong is the accurate one.