Tough, but Fair: How to Elevate Your Craft from Blogging to Literary Journalism

There’s a scene in *Better Call Saul* that’s stayed with me for years. The show ran for six seasons from 2015 to 2022, and I watched it religiously—new episodes every week on AMC, on actual cable, the whole ritual.

## Prologue: What a Drug Kingpin Can Teach Us About Ethics

In [the second episode](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3857028/plotsummary/), two skateboarding twins accidentally target the wrong car in an insurance scam masterminded by lawyer Jimmy McGill. Instead of hitting their intended mark, they follow an elderly woman into her house… only to discover she’s the grandmother of Tuco Salamanca, a volatile drug kingpin. Tuco [beats them unconscious with his grandmother’s cane](https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Cal_and_Lars_Lindholm), then drags Jimmy and the twins out to the desert, planning to kill all three of them.

<figure> <img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*jeM544G0ciLmqWmJvf2Ufw.png" alt="Source | (Edited by the Author)"> <figcaption>Source | (Edited by the Author)</figcaption> </figure>

Jimmy, displaying the sharp-tongued persuasion that would eventually make him Saul Goodman, [talks Tuco down from murder](https://www.thedailybeast.com/better-call-saul-breaks-bad-the-revenge-of-tuco-and-an-homage-to-walter-white/) to breaking one leg on each twin—“a total of two legs”—arguing they can’t skateboard for six months and they’ll be scared of Tuco forever. How does he manage this impossible negotiation? By [appealing to Tuco’s ego](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/BetterCallSaulS1E2Mijo), arguing that people respect a criminal who’s **“tough but fair,”** not a complete psychopath.

Now, you’re probably wondering what the hell this has to do with literary journalism, but bear with me. The phrase stuck with me because it captures something essential about what we’re trying to do when we write for other people. Not the violence, obviously. The tension. The impossibility of holding two opposing truths at once. Being rigorous without being cold, being critical without being cruel, being honest while still being humane.

I think about this every time I sit down to write something I want other people to read. Not poetry, not fiction, not the journal entries I’ve been keeping since I was fifteen. The other stuff. Creative non-fiction. The essays that make claims about the world. The investigations that name names. The cultural criticism arguing someone else got it wrong.

The stuff that could actually hurt someone if I fuck it up.

## Prologue 2: Before We Get to Creative Non-fiction, Let’s Talk About Webcomics

Before we get into the mechanics and the ethics codes and the pre-publication checklists, let me tell you about three things I think about when I’m trying to figure out whether a piece of writing is any good.

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