The man sat across from me, pouring out his heart as he revealed one of the most tormented moments of his professional life. As he remembered it, he faced a deep moral quandary during a lunch with a companion, one that raised questions about the future of his life and his career. In his mind, it was clearly a critical turning point.

For several minutes, I peppered him with questions about that event. Then I looked him in eye, bracing to bring up what I knew would be perhaps the most difficult question of all.

"Do you remember what you were eating for lunch that day?'' I asked.

And so it goes in the reporting of narrative nonfiction, the style I use in my new book, The Informant: A True Story.* When writing such books, every fact -- from the weather conditions, to the color of the wallpaper, to the types of meals eaten by the characters -- has to come from somewhere. Oftentimes, it requires the reporter to be as dogged in pursuing minutiae as in trying to crack the big secrets of a criminal investigation.

In many ways, the reporting of such books is like working on the world's largest jigsaw puzzle. Everything provides a piece -- an interview here, a receipt there, a document, a video -- and all of these pieces must be brought together into a cohesive narrative, one that doesn't show any of the seams. What that means, of course, is an enormous amount of rewriting. Each new discovery of information must be run through the narrative and accounted for.

Making it all the more challenging in The Informant was a simple fact: This was a story about a criminal investigation that was replete with lies. In this case, the FBI secured the assistance of the highest-ranking corporate executive ever to serve as a cooperating witness. For more than two years, that man, Mark Whitacre, provided the government with an unprecedented array of evidence about corruption at the nation's most politically powerful corporation, the Archer Daniels Midland Company.

But, unknown to the FBI and ADM, the entire time that Whitacre was working for the two organizations, he was simultaneously losing his mind. Eventually, the case spun out of control, as Whitacre became trapped by his own lies, and the government struggled to find out where the truth began.

Wrapping lies within truth was complex for narrative nonfiction, but, fortunately, many others had shown the way to soar while using this narrative technique. Indeed, in attempting this project, I was standing on the shoulders of giants -- great authors who had blazed the trail for writing powerful narrative nonfiction. For me, one of the most influential was undoubtedly Ken Auletta's 1986 masterpiece, Greed and Glory on Wall Street. I read it just a few years out of college (and with absolutely no interest in business reporting), and found it fascinating, unlike most any other nonfiction book I had read at that point. This was not some story told from afar, with the voice of an academic or advocate leading you through a morass of facts. Instead, Auletta used narrative to bring you into the room -- sometimes into people's heads -- as the story unfolded around you.

In the years since I read Auletta's book, I have come to understand more about narrative nonfiction style. While dismissed by some critics as a technique prone to misstatement and error, I have found it unquestionably to be the most demanding in its reporting requirements of any type of writing I have done.

Before I decided to commit myself to writing books using this technique, I educated myself; I read every narrative nonfiction book I could find, including many I had missed in my high school and college years. I found everything from the fabulous to the ridiculous, from the impeccably reported to the obvious hack jobs. But I learned something from each and every one.

The worst will go unmentioned, but suffice to say that many of the true-crime genre fall into this category. But the best were brilliant. I began with the true trailblazer, Truman Capote, who certainly boasted of being the first to use the technique for In Cold Blood. But over and over, the best seemed to be either in the worlds of politics or business. The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Indecent Exposure by David McClintik. There was J. Anthony Lukas's masterpiece, Common Ground. Back in the business world, there was Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar. The brilliant Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart. And, in recent years, Jonathan Harr's triumph, A Civil Action.

With The Informant, I wanted the format to reflect the substance: What better way to tell a story where truth and lies meld together than by using a narrative technique that closely followed those used by novelists? And so, after my review of nonfiction works, I pored through dozens of novels, both good and bad, trying to understand what made one superb and another garbage. I noticed that, in the best of novels, the story often did not start at its natural beginning. In Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, the reader comes in after the book's main character has an affair -- even though that relationship is at the center of every event in the story. Instead, the reader sees the wreckage the affair has bequeathed to most every character in the story.

As I began writing my book, the most complex choice involved the decision of where to begin the story. Using the dictates of most nonfiction, the answer would have been easy: I start where the action begins. Instead, I drew charts of the storyline, attempting to find the starting point that would allow me to hide the truth for as long as possible. Once I started down this path, the setup became easy. The story evolved into five plots, with each new one redefining the facts of the last. In essence, I was putting the readers in the position of the characters in the book who were deceived. With that plan in mind, I set off on my reporting extravaganza, seeking out the details that would allow me to write what is essentially a non-fiction novel.

By the time I finished my manuscript, I was worried. The Informant, I feared, had broken some rules and invented a series of others. I felt convinced that some in the journalism field might chastise me for going too far, even though every word of the book was completely true.

I decided to judge this book the best way I could imagine. I wrote letters to many of the authors whose books I had admired, whose work I had learned from, and asked them to read my manuscript. I was astonished at the number of them who accepted. The manuscript was sent to them; I sat back and waited for the response.

In a few weeks, it arrived. James B. Stewart deemed my book "a remarkable achievement.'' Jonathan Harr called it "epic,'' saying that I had told the story "masterfully.'' David Baldacci said "this nonfiction book leaves many thrillers in the dust.'' And weeks later, in the New York Times Book Review, Bryan Burrough would say that The Informant "ranked with A Civil Action as one of the best nonfiction books of the last decade.''

I felt overwhelmed. I had been uncertain about my gamble. But now, here they were -- some of my heroes in the field of writing, both in fiction and non-fiction -- praising my work. This, by far, was the greatest moment in my professional life. I cannot imagine exceeding it.

Kurt Eichenwald is an investigative reporter with The New York Times. He has twice been awarded the prestigious George Polk Award for excellence in journalism and was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize. Eichenwald is also the author of Serpent on the Rock.

* A January/February 2001 Book Sense 76 Pick

"This is the inside story of how A.D.M. became the most powerful company in America, buying politicians, gouging billions from consumers, and fighting FBI investigations. It reads like a Grisham novel and it's all the more suspenseful because it actually happened. Truly gripping!"
- Erik Johnson, Book Soup, W. Hollywood, CA

Author photograph by Fred R. Conrad.