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"By day, this stage at Disney-MGM studios is home to the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular, where Hollywood stuntmen and women dodge fire and gigantic boulders. Some of the set is still in view, a re-creation of the Cairo marketplace where Indiana Jones outsmarts his pursuers in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But tonight, this stage will feature the twenty couples competing in the UCA Parnter Stunt National Championship."

That's an excerpt from Cheer!, a smart, comprehensive look at the world of competitive cheerleading--a work of journalism with the gorgeous descriptions and sweep of a novel.

Today, journalist Kate Torgovnick will be our special guest, talking about how she chose the characters Cheer!--delivering some useful interviewing advice in the process.

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
Cheer! has a pretty large cast of characters, but it could have included hundreds of more people. The smoothness and focus of the book depends on organization. How did you decide how organize the big picture (picking teams to follow) and the little picture (which individual characters to follow within your teams)? Do you have any advice for a non-fiction writer organizing a book out of a similarly sprawling topic?

Kate Torgovnick:
Honestly, the three teams chose me. I started “casting” for the book in March 2006—I sat down one day and started calling college cheerleading coaches across the country. I’d been doing that for about four hours when the Duke lacrosse scandal broke. Continue reading...

So this is what would happen for the next few weeks: I’d talk to a coach, they’d be interested in doing the book, they’d bring it up to the school’s bureaucracy, who would give a resounding, “NO!,” and send me back to the beginning. Luckily, a few schools were willing to participate.

The first team I decided on was Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches, Texas. The team had won four national championships in a row and the cheerleaders literally wore championship rings on every finger. They were all these finely-tuned cheerleading machines, many of whom were cheering for their 5th, 6th, 7th, even 8th year in college.

I also wanted to follow this team because they’re located in Texas, the cheerleading capital of the universe. And I instantly bonded with their coach and Director of Student Life. SFA was a no-brainer.

Since SFA is a coed squad, I knew I wanted my second squad to be all women. I decided on the University of Memphis for the simple reason that they have a great All-Girl cheer squad and they were the first one to say yes. In retrospect, they really added a nice contrast because it’s a huge sports school—their football games draw in 60,000 spectators and their basketball team routinely goes to the NCAA tournament. Perhaps you saw them in the Final Four this year?

For the third team, I was originally thinking Brigham Young University—I just liked the idea of Mormon cheerleaders. But alas, permission did not come through. I started reading cheerleading magazines for inspiration, and I saw an article about Southern University, a team that had come within a tenth of a point of being the first black team to win a cheerleading national championship. I called the coach and he described the team to me as, “Both teams in Bring It On rolled into one.” I was sold.

As for the individual “characters,” there were some people I met at tryouts and was so fascinated by them that I knew they’d be a big part of the book. Some people I bonded with midway through the year and decided to focus on more. Then there were a few people I had barely talked to all year, and then at Nationals they became hugely important. In those cases, I interviewed them furiously and then went back and inserted them into the beginning of the book. 

My biggest advice to someone working on a project like this is to interview as many people as you possibly can from the beginning—the more ground you cover in your reporting, the more options you have in your writing as well as in shaping the story. But honestly, you kind of have to submit to the flow since it’s impossible to know at the beginning what is going to happen in the end. And trust me, things you never expected are going to happen. So allow yourself the uncertainty.