How do I balance reporting facts with exploring the emotional truth in my writing?

This is the real craft: they're not opposites, they're partners. Emotional truth emerges *from* careful observation of facts, not instead of it. When you report—interview someone, witness an event, research a story—you're gathering both what happened and how it landed in the room. The feeling is data too. I'm thinking of the difference between writing "a woman was sad about leaving her village" versus describing the specific way she looked at her garden one last time, the plants she decided to take with her, the one she left behind. The second version gives you both the emotional truth and the reportorial integrity. The facts ground the feeling in reality; the emotional truth makes the facts matter to readers. Start by writing down what you observe *and* what you notice about how people respond to it. Don't separate the two. When you're in the reporting phase, stay curious about the interior dimension of events—not to impose your interpretation, but to capture what's actually there. The examined creative practice is about seeing how the external and internal exist together.