Bryan Gruley's got a system.

It involves: a trade journal, four to five notebooks, a map of North Dakota, two Word documents, a pen, and an editor. The good news is that the map of North Dakota is optional -- and everything else is something you probably already have, and can use to improve your own writing.

Gruley is a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal. In early October, he stood at the head of a table at Poynter ringed by reporters and editors from around the country. He spent the morning describing the system behind "Battle Lines," a story he wrote that ran in the middle of A1 back in 1999.

Here's how it went.

"What happened?"

It began with Communications Daily. That's the main trade magazine for people who care what happens at the Federal Communications Commission. It's dry stuff, Gruley says, but comprehensive -- every beat reporter should read the trade publication in his or her niche.

One day, he spotted a blurb in Comm Daily that described the plight of a North Dakota phone company, Western Wireless Corp., that had had its lines shut off by the reigning local provider, Consolidated Telephone Cooperative, after only four days of service, and without warning.

All this in a town of 268.

Gruley's question: What happened here? That's the crux of his system -- the idea, the kernel, the seed, the question that begins: "What…?" When you find out what really happened, Gruley says, that's narrative. So, he went in search of answers.

An editor e-mailed him: "You're a pretty clever guy, figuring out how to get a junket to North Dakota in February!"

"Me, I love that feeling. Now I'm gone -- I'm outta the office -- the story is mine."

In North Dakota, Gruley looked for gray. Not just the gray of the snow-swept plains -- though there was plenty of that. Gruley's gray is the gray of complication, of getting all the angles. To write gray is a great thing, Gruley says, because great literature is gray, and life is gray.

In tiny Regent, N.D., he was filling notebooks -- writing down everything he could. "Now, you can't write every damn thing down," he says, "but don't sit there going, 'No, not important, don't need that' -- you do that at your peril."

If the idea is the crux of the story, reporting is the foundation. "Reporting is everything, or damn near everything," Gruley says. "You can't hide holes with fancy writing."

In Regent, Gruley fell in love with a blinking red light. It was the indicator lamp that lit the moment the lines in Trunk Group 55 were cut. Gruley fell in love with the phrase "Trunk Group 55," too, and it features prominently in his story. Gruley looks for cool details like these -- and not just images and words, but snippets of sound, taste, and especially smell, the master of memory.

Gruley talked to everyone he could. His approach was simple: Ask what happened. It took a while to arrange an interview with L. Dan Wilhelmson, CEO of Consolidated Telephone. "The personification of North Dakota," Gruley calls him. "Burly, rugged, craggy, down to earth." And Wilhelmson was cold, too.

"So what are you doin' here?" he asked the reporter from way out east.

I just want to know what happened, Gruley said. Wilhelm relaxed a little. Gruley asked him how he got into the phone business. Wilhelm told him about digging holes for telephone poles in 1959 -- and they were on a roll.

"Writing is elimination."

Back at the Journal's Washington bureau, Gruley posted a map of North Dakota above his desk and emptied his notebooks into two Microsoft Word documents, which he called DAKOTACHRONO.DOC and DAKOTASTUFF.DOC. He always uses files like these. The first file is his timeline of events. The second is -- well, stuff. Ideas for a lead, quotes, odd notes.

"You're not really building," Gruley says. "This is a process of deletion. I've not putting everything in my notebook in there." So he picks and chooses -- it will only be the first cut of many.

"Showing your crap to other people will liberate you."

When he's done with a draft, he prints it out and takes it away from the office. At a coffee shop or out on his deck at home, he starts crossing out. "I love this," he says, and you can tell he really does. Maybe it's the relief -- don't need this, don't have to worry about that. Scratch, scratch. Working on "Battle Lines," Gruley cut a section about legal proceedings because it seemed "boring and beside the point."

Gruley's not shy with his works-in-progress. He shops the files around to colleagues and editors, soliciting comments. In this case, he put a copy in front of Bill Grueskin, the Journal's deputy page one editor.

"Show it," Gruley says. "If you want it to go in the paper... you're gonna have to show it to someone eventually."

Meanwhile, Gruley returns, makes changes, and does it all again. "I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite over and over again. And I love it." The way he talks, you're struck by the image of Gruley the predator, looking for the sick words, the weak words, running them down on the high plains. He almost growls when he says it: "Make it shorter. Make it faster. Make it move."

"We have unbelievable jobs."

Bryan Gruley seems nothing but tough and pragmatic -- the kind of guy who plays hockey every Thursday night and, if he's working on a novel, well, he's doing it down in his basement. So you don't expect it when he weighs in on the emotional core of narrative journalism:

"Telling stories makes us whole," he says.

Bryan Gruley's got a system, but his writing isn't at all mechanical.

"Seen from the butte where Western Wireless has erected a 180-foot-high cellular tower," he writes, "Regent is a gray island of windbreak trees and weather-scarred buildings in a flat, boundless sea of winter white."

A line like that is a pure expression of Gruley's humane reporting, his knack for cool details, and his love of story. The system -- the notes, the files, the sharing, the rewrites -- is just what makes it possible.

It's a system any reporter can use. But bring your own story, and your own map of North Dakota.