David Grann: How to Write Non-Fiction That Reads Like Fiction | How I Write

Summary

Podcast Summary: David Grann – How to Write Non-Fiction That Reads Like Fiction

Podcast: How I Write
Host: David Perell
Guest: David Grann
Episode Title: How to Write Non-Fiction That Reads Like Fiction
Date: November 5, 2025

---

Episode Overview

In this richly detailed conversation, narrative nonfiction master David Grann (author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Wager) sits down with David Perell to dissect the mechanics of compelling storytelling in nonfiction. Grann shares how his meticulous research process, acute attention to detail, and focus on human complexity enable him to craft historical accounts that read with the urgency and vividness of fiction. The discussion journeys from research breakthroughs and the handling of truth to the emotional and ethical responsibilities of writing about real people. Along the way, Grann and Perell trade stories about sense of place, suspense, prose economy, and the balance between themes emerging organically and deliberate meaning-making.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Research as the Foundation of Non-Fiction (02:10–07:56)

• Uncovering Hidden Truths:
  • Grann describes how, through combing archival material (including secret grand jury testimony), he unearthed previously unknown connections and identified killers not charged in the Osage murders (Killers of the Flower Moon).
  • “There were many cases that had never been properly investigated…there were these perpetrators that had gone unpunished.” (02:10, Grann)
• Corruption and Serendipity in Research:
  • He emphasizes the role of both corruption in history and sheer persistence in research, often spending weeks examining unmarked boxes.
  • “A lot of research is staring at documents, weeks and weeks…and then suddenly you open a folder... and it was hugely helpful.” (03:56, Grann)
  • Grann highlights patience as central: “The only difference between being a writer and a non-writer is the writer is just willing to basically sit for hours and hours…looking through endless boxes.” (04:54)

2. The Interplay Between Research and Writing (05:56–07:54)

• Grann stresses that great nonfiction absolutely requires foundational research.
  • “If you are not a fiction writer, a great book can’t exist without the first. The research is foundational.” (05:56)
• His outlines for chapters can run to hundreds of pages, gathering every possible detail (biography, physical description, quotes, context).

3. Finding, Selecting, and Committing to a Story (08:28–13:51)

• Discovery Process:
  • Rather than waiting for inspiration, Grann actively contacts people, explores archives, and follows footnotes.
  • The spark for The Wager came from reading a little-known 18th-century journal, discovering both a gripping story and deeper contemporary resonance.
  • He outlines a three-step filter: 1) Does the story spark curiosity? 2) Is there enough underlying research to tell it? 3) Is it “about something more”? (Deeper themes—13:36)
  • “They start having this incredible war over the truth...it feels like a parable.” (13:51)
• Not all dramatic stories have deeper themes: “Do they have enough that reveals something about us other than maybe the wackiness of the human condition?” (14:00)

4. Navigating Mystery & Uncertainty in Storytelling (15:40–17:06)

• Grann compares his research journey to a real-life mystery, much like the characters he writes about.
  • “There is an element of mystery. You don’t know what you’re going to find... And sometimes, when you’re two and a half years in...you do feel like you’re in Lost: am I ever going to get off this island?” (15:49)

5. The Importance of Place & Firsthand Experience (17:06–27:51)

• Travel as Research:
  • Grann describes his trip to Wager Island in Patagonia, which profoundly deepened his understanding of the physical ordeal faced by his historical subjects.
  • “I wasn’t there. Some of this stuff took place 300 years ago. Who described it? Where can I find that?” (07:54)
  • Even small experiential details, like the realization of hypothermia’s impact, arose from being physically present.
  • He notes that, while none of his journey appears directly in the book, it’s essential for authenticity.
  • Memorable Quote: “There was a great line from a British officer...‘a place where the soul of man dies in him.’ And when I stood on that island, I said, okay, I understand why..." (26:23)

6. Bringing Characters to Life (28:43–34:38)

• Building Three-Dimensional People:
  • Grann’s method: Gather every possible scrap—letters, descriptions, biographical fragments—then select details that reveal essence.
  • He distinguishes between “external observer” nonfiction and the internality of film, emphasizing honesty over hagiography.
  • “Your job is to understand them and to show them as fully rendered as you can. And you feel a certain moral responsibility...” (29:09)
• Details in Description:
  • Selectivity creates vividness; diction, mannerisms, and even writing style convey character (e.g. the gunner in The Wager wrote “like Hemingway”—33:48).

7. The Art of Vivid and Symbolic Scene-Setting (35:47–40:14)

• Symbolism & Metaphor:
  • The paragraph about the “flower killing moon” is unpacked as not just evocative imagery but also a central metaphor for Killers of the Flower Moon (35:48–37:22).
  • The choice of specific names (“spiderworts,” “Black Eyed Susans”) and vivid language brings place and tradition to life (37:44).
  • Place informs writing: “For me, part of it, of finding words for language, is also trying to find words that help allow me to understand the world I’m writing about.” (38:45)
• Immersive Reporting:
  • Like Robert Caro, Grann describes sleeping on the actual trail his subject walked as a child to better write about the prairie at night (40:14).

8. Suspense and Narrative Structure (42:08–47:09)

• Chronology and Perspective:

  • Grann builds suspense by narrating events chronologically and entering the uncertainty of his characters.
  • “The key is to describe things and see things the way the people you’re writing about saw them and experienced them, not with the power of hindsight.” (43:20)

• Techniques:

  • Structural devices like where to end chapters, use of prologues, and the necessity to “hook” readers in a competitive media landscape (44:47–47:09).
  • “You are competing for human beings’ attention...Part of the thing you’re trying to do in the prologue is to say, okay, come along with me, come along with me for a journey.” (46:17)

9. The Writer’s Role and Voice (49:09–52:23)

• Grann aims to vanish into the story, only appearing when it serves understanding.
  • “…you are always in service to the story. I will insert myself…when I think it will help the story...If that is not important or needed for the story, I will vanish from the story.” (49:37)
• Example: In The Lost City of Z, alternating chapters compare past and present explorations, with just enough of his own perspective to bring in the reader where helpful.

10. Economy of Language & Editing (54:27–59:26)

• Cutting Details:
  • Early drafts contain mountains of research; later drafts are heavily distilled for only the most vivid, essential facts.
  • “I had to take that 10,000 words [about ships] and you distill it to the most revealing...The reader does not care at all about the backstory of you getting that fact.” (57:40–58:18)
• Concrete, surprising details (e.g. 4,000 trees needed to build a ship) have power; the rest must be cut ruthlessly.

11. Emotional Stakes, Joy, and Terror (60:29–61:49)

• Meaningful Discoveries:
  • Joy arises from emotional resonance—sometimes to the point of tears in interviews.
  • Terror is in the writing itself, the “Can I convey this?” anxiety.
  • Relief (or joy) sometimes occurs after breakthroughs, such as finally landing on the right first sentence.

12. Translating to Film & Lessons from Cinema (62:01–69:44)

• Grann shares the surreal feeling of having Martin Scorsese adapt his work, being minimally involved but ensuring factual accuracy in collaboration with the Osage Nation (62:05–64:53).
• Mediums Compared:
  • Non-fiction writers are “handcuffed” by the historical record—they can only dramatize what evidence permits, unlike film, which can fill gaps creatively.
  • “As a historian or a nonfiction writer, you are handcuffed...The puzzle is, how do you make it work with these pieces you have?” (67:05)
• Powerful writing, like film, must achieve vividness, “you see the room, you see these people, you hear them.”

13. Learning Storytelling from Oral Tradition (69:44–72:49)

• Grann credits his storytelling instinct to his grandmother, who told family stories so vividly that they brought people to life.
  • “For me, that was the first time I felt the power of language…she remembered these stories. She told me these stories.” (70:08)
  • His drive to delay resolution and “not give it away,” even when editors demanded otherwise, traces to this oral tradition.

14. Big vs. Small Stories, and the Human Condition (72:49–80:16)

• No Rules, Just Meaning:
  • Great storytelling can be about huge historical events or small, intimate moments; what matters is meaning and specificity.
  • “Big or large is irrelevant…sometimes in the big story stories, it’s the smallest moments that speak to me.” (74:02)
  • Example: The simple handshake between adversaries on Wager Island is more revealing than melodrama (73:31).
  • Grann gravitates to stories of ordinary people swept up in greater events, where “humans live inside of big stories and with all their particularities.” (78:02)

15. Making Sense of Chaos: Writing as Personal Meaning-Making (80:16–81:06)

• For Grann, writing is about imposing narrative order on the world’s disorder: “The world is a very chaotic place...I write to make sense of the world, to make sense of my own world.” (80:27)

16. Themes: Chasing and Discovering “What It’s About” (81:06–84:00)

• Emergent Meaning:
  • Themes are not imposed—they are discovered through research, sometimes contradicting initial assumptions.
  • On Killers of the Flower Moon: “The book I thought I was writing, for two years...just got demolished. And I have to write another book...it is about this much deeper and darker conspiracy.” (81:52)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On research patience:
  “The only difference between being a writer and a non-writer is the writer is Just willing to basically sit for hours and hours, either fixing one sentence or looking through endless boxes.” (04:54, Grann)
• On stories and deeper meaning:
  “The third thing is kind of, what is it about ultimately? Is it about something more?...What is it about? Why in the 21st century, in 2025 today, would we care about this story from the 1740s?” (12:35, Grann)
• On the role of the writer:
  “Your job is to understand them and to show them as fully rendered as you can. And you feel a certain moral responsibility to write about them, Even if it’s 300 years later…” (29:09, Grann)
• On suspense:
  “The key is to describe things and see things the way the people you’re writing about saw them and experienced them, not with the power of hindsight.” (43:20, Grann)
• On ruthless editing:
  “The reader does not care at all about the backstory of you getting that fact. All they care about is what is on the page...” (58:18, Grann)
• On learning from family stories:
  “For me, that was the first time I felt the power of language. You could bring somebody to life and you could see them.” (70:08, Grann)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:10] — Research breakthroughs & Osage murders
• [05:56] — Research vs. writing: the essential foundation
• [08:48] — How Grann finds new story ideas
• [13:36] — Evaluating deeper meaning in potential stories
• [17:20] — The Patagonia trip for The Wager
• [26:23] — Sense of place & understanding hardship
• [29:09] — Approach to characterization in nonfiction
• [35:47] — Vivid and symbolic language ("flower killing moon" excerpt)
• [42:08] — Building suspense through structure
• [49:37] — Authorial presence in nonfiction
• [54:27] — Editing: from sprawling research to concise prose
• [62:05] — Scorsese film adaptation & lessons from film
• [69:44] — Learning storytelling from his grandmother
• [74:02–79:32] — Big vs. small stories; the revealing power of detail
• [80:27] — Writing as sensemaking in a chaotic world
• [81:52] — Themes emerging from research

---

Tone and Style

The episode blends Grann’s thoughtful humility and practical wisdom with Perell’s curiosity and admiration. Grann is generous with his process—never oversimplifying, always aware of the “messiness” and mystery of research and writing—and both men frequently pivot from granular advice to universal truths about storytelling, history, and the human condition. The conversation is filled with humor (self-deprecating and otherwise), warmth, and a sense of collaborative discovery.

---

For Listeners: Why This Episode is Essential

Whether you’re an aspiring author, a lover of narrative nonfiction, or simply a curious reader, this episode offers an invaluable, behind-the-scenes look at what transforms research into story and fact into feeling. Grann’s success isn’t explained by magic or talent alone but by patience, a hunger for deeper meaning, empathy for his subjects, and ruthless dedication to clarity and economy in prose. If you’ve ever wondered how non-fiction can thrill, move, and stick with you as deeply as any novel, this conversation is your manual—and your invitation to look closer at the world and those lost boxes in the archive.

Transcript

[A]

David Grann, one of the best storytellers alive today and an absolute master at narrative nonfiction. You might know him from Killers of the Flower Moon, which Martin Scorsese turned into a film. And then there's the wager. I can't think of a single book that more people I know have said that they just read the entire thing from start to finish in one sitting. So what is it that he does to find stories, to research them, to turn them into writing that just makes people flip from page to page? Lush, vivid prose, great descriptions. How does he do it? Well, that's what this conversation is all about. Okay, let me show you this new tool that I've been using to write called Sublime. And they're the sponsor of this episode. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how I use Sublime to write this post on X, which got almost a million impressions. So it started off with the basic note taking stuff. I was just throwing notes in, but it's the stuff that came after that was really unique. That's what makes Sublime special. You'll see here that I had this mind map and that allowed me to begin to see connections that weren't even there. And I was blown away by this. And then it didn't just end there. Sublime has this save1discover100 feature where you can just put in a piece of information and all of a sudden it just starts recommending things. It's like having a research assistant that actually has good taste, and these are put in there by actual human beings. And so now I had the mind map, I had all the related ideas, and I really started to think about, how am I actually going to struct this piece? And Sublime helped me see parts of my structure that I didn't even realize were there to see how ideas were actually connected. See, Sublime is built by people who care about creativity and beauty and not just productivity and efficiency. And you can feel that as you use the app. So if you want to use Sublime in your own writing, well, you can go to Sublime app and use the promo code Purell, and they'll give you 20% off. All right, let's get to the episode. Well, I want to start with this because this is crazy. You said, I've linked two new cases to a murderer that were not previously connected. And I've identified a killer who had not been identified before, just through documents finding files and piecing together a circumstantial case.

[B]

What? Yeah, well, in Killers of the Flower Moon, when I was Researching that book, I. I discovered that there were many cases that had never been properly investigated by the authorities and that there were these other killings. And going through the records and finding secret grand jury testimony and various bits, I began to realize that the evidence circumstantially all pointed to this figure who had not been previously identified, and worse than that, had never been charged and had gotten away with it. Which was one of the great horrors when I was working on that story of Killers of the Flower Moon, that there were these perpetrators that had gone unpunished.

[A]

Wow. And what do you think accounts for that? Like, how could it be that the intelligence agencies aren't finding things?

[B]

Well, at that time, this was taking place in the early parts of the 20th century when these killings were taking place, there was a great deal of corruption in local law enforcement and poor training. It was very easy for the powerful to tilt the scales of justice to pay somebody off. And as it turned out, with these killings, which was basically the systematic targeting of members of the Osage Nation for their oil money, because of the corruption, because of prejudice, a lot of people got away with this.

[A]

Yeah. So how does that research process work? You just look and you're scanning. You're looking and you're scanning. There's been a few, what I guess I'm gonna call breakthrough moments that I wanna get to. It seems like there's kind of these moments when you're gazing around, you're like, ah, I can do a story about this. And then boom, you find something.

[B]

Yes. I mean, when you're doing research, there is a level of serendipity about it and a level of tedium that shouldn't go unmentioned. I mean, a lot of research is staring at documents, weeks and weeks and weeks, and then suddenly you open a folder, it may not even be properly marked or indexed in the records. One of the things that was so helpful for me in Killers of the Flower Moon and piecing together evidence was in a folder I had seen. Somebody had just. Somebody had cleaned out their office, probably back in the 30s or the 40s, 1930s or 40s, and just dropped in the secret grand jury testimony. That evidence should not have been in a public archive, but it was just sitting there unmarked, kind of scattered. And it was hugely helpful to me in piecing together some of these that were never properly charged.

[A]

And you must just have crazy patience, huh? I feel like I could never do that.

[B]

Well, I always joke that really the only difference between being a writer and a non writer is the writer is Just willing to basically sit for hours and hours, either fixing one sentence or looking through endless boxes. Endless boxes. You know, it was amazing. For Killers of the Flower Moon, one of the major sources of research was a branch of the National Archives, which is in Fort Worth, Texas, not far from where you were back. Yeah. And it's about the size of an airport hangar. And you could fit in a few airplanes in there, and you would pull these boxes, you get in there early in the morning, and out would wheel these boxes. But you could spend, you know, you could spend a lifetime going through those boxes.

[A]

So if I was like, man, Killers of the Flower Moon, the wager, such a good book, like, how much of that being a great book comes down to research? Like, dude, I just did the work to find the information to dig up, uncover the story, versus, like, I sat down on my keyboard and I just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote.

[B]

Well, there's probably a convergence of the two. But I will say, if you're writing nonfiction, if you are not a fiction writer, a great book can't exist without the first. It just. It can't exist. So the underlying research, the details you extract from the research, what lets you create scenes, what lets you get as close to the people you're writing about to have emotion from their diaries or their letters or their correspondence. So they are interconnected. If you can't then kind of convey them in words and create scenes around them. But you could not do it without the first. So the first is foundational, and I think sometimes people forget that. I mean, I will have an outline for a chapter, a single chapter in a book that may be only a 3,000 word chapter. I may have a 200 page outline of information that I have absorbed from all the records and all the documents that will allow me to reconstruct something faithfully, but also vividly.

[A]

Whoa. So what is that outline like?

[B]

Oh, it's just masses. So for example, let's say you're meeting someone. So in that chapter you'd have all the biographical details, every physical detail about them. Did they walk with a limp? What color are their eyes? Anything they said? What's their manner of diction? Do you have any quotes from them that reveals how they speak? Let's say you're building an opening scene around them. Well, who are all the various participants that describe what happened in that moment? You know, the different perspectives, every little fragment, every letter. Let's say it took place in a restaurant. Do you have any description of the restaurant? Do you have a photograph of the restaurant. What will allow you to piece it together? So you're looking at. We're sitting here looking at each other. So we've seen it, right? So we see it. I know what you look like. I know your sweater.

[A]

Incredibly good looking.

[B]

But what if I know what the color of the rug is? But for most of the stuff I write about, especially when I'm doing historical work, I wasn't there. Some of this stuff took place 300 years ago. So who described it? Where can I find that? I have come across stories, to answer your question, kind of almost in a more kind of crisp way. I've come across some wonderful stories I would like to tell. But then I do some research and I can't find any records to tell it. And those are stories that unfortunately can never be told.

[A]

Okay, so I'm trying to just imagine this where you're early on in a book, maybe you just finished a previous one. Now you're looking for a new idea and you're kind of scanning, you're browsing. And talk to me about what are the conditions that you need to be like, yes, I'm gonna do this.

[B]

Well, we'll say, whenever I finish a project, I'm exhausted. Some of these projects have taken me years and years, half a decade, sometimes more. And I sometimes find myself just sitting in my office, sitting in a chair not unlike this one, just kind of looking around going, okay, what's next? What's gonna be next? And you keep waiting for that divine inspiration. It will never come. I mean, if you, you know, it is not a passive process. So after using a few weeks of that, going, okay. And then you get terrified. You're like, okay, I'll never find another idea. I'll never find another project. You start to kind of frantically look around and you do various things to do that I call random people. I call people. I may have read a newspaper story where I saw somebody, did a. Had a profession or was a scientist who had a breakthrough. And I said, oh, that's really interesting. I'll randomly see if I could track down that person and call them to pick their brain. And sometimes they're like, you know, I'm trying to save humanity right now. I have no time. For your little book. Yeah, for your little book. Your intrusion. Who the hell are you? And then everyone's wondering like, oh, wow, that sounds like so much fun. Let's chat. And you have these random conversations and maybe something will come out of that. Or you start looking at books or subject matters that interest you. Maybe you look at footnotes. So for example, the Wager, my most recent book, I was sitting around and I was thinking, oh, well, you know what would be interesting? I thought, well, a subject that's always interested me was mutinies. I was like, mutinies are just a very interesting form of rebellion. And so I started reading books about mutinies and going online and searching and suddenly I ended up in a British archive that had online a digital scan of a journal from the 18th century. It was written by John Byron, who had been a 16 year old midshipman on the Wager. I had never heard of him. I started reading this little booklet. It was written in very old English, so it had the S's were F's. And at first I was like, oh, what is this? This is hard to read. It was kind of faded. But then every once in a while I would come across these remarkable descriptions. I mean, we're talking about writing, right? So I'm reading this journal and I would come across a passage. He described the, the storm around Cape Horn. He said, the perfect hurricane. That's such a modern kind of phrase. The perfect storm. The perfect hurricane. He started describing the scurvy and how it got inside people's bodies. Oh, this is kind of interesting. By the time I finished, I thought, this has got the hints and the clues to one of the most extraordinary sagas I'd ever come across. So that was the kind of the flicker that was the, the inspiration that first got a tuxen to me. But that's really only the first step. I always say that there are kind of three steps to try and define what your project is. First is. Is something pique your curiosity? Does it get under your skin? Are you curious about it? The second is, we talked a little bit about it. Is there underlying research? Can you tell the story? So I thought, well, this is an interesting story of survival. These seamen who went around these storms and battled scurvy and then they end up shipwrecking. They descend into this real life Florida, the flies. Well, that's a crazy story, but could you tell it? And then lo and behold, I started to find in these archives all these journals and logbooks. You could go to England and you could pull out these logbooks from the 18th century and they would come out in boxes and they would. Dust would just come off them and you would heal them and your shirt would literally be stained purple by the time you were done because all the disintegrating binders. And so I thought, whoa, okay, okay, there's a lot here. But the third thing is kind of, what is it about ultimately?

[A]

Or deeper themes?

[B]

Deeper? Is it about something more? So this had an unbelievable saga that would hold you in its grip, but what is it about? Why in the 21st century, in 2025 today, would we care about this story from the 1740s? And the more I did research, I began to realize that when the survivors of the shipwreck were brought back to England, they were suddenly summoned to face a court martial for their alleged crimes on the island. And if they didn't tell a convincing tale, they were going to get hanged. And I always thought of this great line from the writer Joan Didion. You know, we all tell ourselves stories in order to survive. And I thought, oh, my God. Well, they quite literally have to tell a convincing tale, because if they don't, they're going to get hanged after everything they've been through. And so they start having this incredible war over the truth. They're each battling each other. They're each shaping their stories, editing their stories, manipulating their stories. And then ultimately the empire comes in and says, you know, do we like any of these stories? And they begin to tell their own story. And so I thought, you know what we're living through, our times of post truth and battles over truth. And I thought, guys, story kind of feels like a parable.

[A]

Yeah. Have you ever found a story that you felt like there was tension, there was suspense, there was drama that didn't have these deeper themes?

[B]

Oh, that's a good question. Yes, in a sense, I'll say. Like, I was sometimes drawn to crime stories, and they kind of. They could be very, you know, intricate and maybe a bit salacious, and they do tell you something about the human condition. But ultimately, they would just feel they were like, kind of. These stories I like to read, you know, they may be the COVID of the New York Post. You know, they got these great headlines and you read it, but in the end, they're kind of gothic crime stories. And so I learned to kind of separate those stories. These stories. I do like reading them. I do. I like reading them. But would I want to spend years researching and telling them? Do they have enough that reveals something about us other than maybe the wackiness of the human condition?

[A]

You know, I have this image of. I have two images in my head. The first is, like, there's that scene in 21 where Bradley Cooper's looking kind of at all the numbers and whatnot as he's thinking about counting cards. And I'm Just imagining you in this room with all your notes all over the place like a freaking crazy madman trying to piece together the narrative. And I also have this image of you, like, walking through the woods or something, or a desert. I don't know, maybe, like, you're in lost and you're trying to figure out where you're going and what's the story of that aunt or, like, that woman who you met who had the file, like, up in the attic or whatever. And you just find these things. You're like, oh, my goodness, how did I find that?

[B]

But.

[A]

But always kind of following your nose and moving towards some clue without ever being sure that there actually is something right there.

[B]

You don't know. And life is a mystery. And often the people I write about have a certain mystery, because when you tell other people's stories, in hindsight, you know what happened, Right. They found the lost city, or they didn't find the lost city, or they disappeared. But the people, as they are experiencing these events, they have no idea. If you're on the ship with a wager, you literally don't know what's gonna happen in an hour. Am I gonna fall off the boat? Am I gonna drown? Am I ever gonna see my wife? Am I ever gonna hug my baby again? They just don't know what is this disease? I don't even know what's causing this disease. Oh, yeah. So they live with that. And I do think there is a kinship when you embark on a story, that there is an element of mystery. You don't know what you're going to find. You don't know if your journey is going to end in disaster. Both maybe your research and maybe your book will be a disaster. I mean, there's an element of fear and risk and even a little terror when you embark on these projects, because you don't know the denouement. You really don't. You don't know what will come out of it. And sometimes when you're two and a half years in a project, you do feel like you're in lost. You're like, am I ever going to get off this island? Yeah.

[A]

In what way do you value sense of place? So I know with the wager, you went down to Wager island off Wager island off Patagonia, Chile. So tell me about that trip and writing the sense of place.

[B]

Yeah. So it's interesting. I spent the first two years researching that book in archives, and I'll be honest, it never really occurred to me that I might go to Wager Island. It just seemed like this remote, windswept, cold, barren place. How would you even get there? I mean, there's not like they're running ferries to Wager Island. They're like, I'm not from Chile. I wouldn't even know who to hire. So it didn't even enter my consciousness. I just was in the archives looking at documents. And then about two years in, you just start to say, oh, gosh. Well, do I. How do I. Can I really understand what these people went through? Can I really understand that island unless I see it? Or are they exaggerating in their journals? You know, are they. Are they keep saying how cold they are, or there's no food, you know, they're back in it. You know, they kind of, you know, is it that bad? Is it really that bad? Is it that bad?

[A]

Right.

[B]

No, you're right. No, you, you do. You know, people like to tell dramatic stories. They like to be the hero of their own story. So I thought, well, and so that's when I got the Cockamania idea to try to go there. And I found this Chilean captain who could take me there. It's funny, he sent me a photograph of the vessel which we'd be going in. And in the photograph, it looked solid. Looked, you know, I was like, this looks like a good vessel to take me. Of course, then when I got there, it was a fairly small. I can't remember how big it was, but it was not big. Maybe 30 some feet. I can't remember exactly, but it was top heavy. It was heated by a wood stove. I decided to go in wintertime because that's when the castaways had become shipwrecked. So I thought, I have to understand that period. At winter it was so stormy that for five, I think it was five days, we could not depart. We just stayed on the little boat waiting in the harbor. The Coast Guard had blocked it off. They said no vessels are allowed out, which I didn't know they did, but they said, you can't leave because it's that rough, it's that stormy out there. And then eventually we. We got the clearance and we slipped out. And initially we kind of went in these channels along the coast of Patagonia, shielded from the ocean. It felt pretty good, pretty safe. My confidence was growing. We would stop on these little islets and the captain and one of the crewmen would go off and they would chop down wood for the stove to keep the vessel warm. They would take a little hose and run it off the boat into these islands. These little islands into the glacial streams to get water for the vessel, I will say, was the coal coldest shower I had ever, ever taken. I mean, it was so cold that I think I. I think I might have only taken one shower the whole time. It was. It was just frizz, but. And then after about a week of this, the captain says, you know, if we're going to get to Wager island, which is situated in a gulf known as the. The Gulf of Sorrow, or as some translate it as the Gulf of Pain, we're going to now have to go out into the ocean. And that's when I got my first glimpse of those seas. And I will say what's also interesting about this journey is I don't write about any of it in the book, but it all informed it. And so I got my first glimpse of these seas. We weren't even in some huge storm, but the seas were pretty enormous, windy. We just had. I just sat on the deck of this vessel. You could not stand. If you stand, you would. You know, you might break something. You would get thrown. Things were getting tossed all about. I literally was sitting there in a bilge pump. Just goes flying past my head, like, okay, just sit down. I had taken every. I'm used to the sea, but I took everything to ward off seasickness. I mean, I was basically half drunk on Dramamine. I had the thing on the wrist. I had the. Whatever the drugs you put up behind your ears and just kind of stay there. And the funny part that always, always amuses me is that I didn't know how to pass the time. And I just kept looking out the porthole and I think I'm gonna throw up. So what am I gonna do? And I had on my iPhone with me an audible of Moby Dick. Oh, wow. So I put into my earphones just to listen there. I'm sitting like this, listening to Moby Dick on the floor. Cause again, I'm on the deck, just sitting there like this, bracing myself, and it's like you're in a tin can. You're just going like this. And I'm thinking, God, this is the greatest. I think this is the greatest American novel I've ever read. This is just incredible. The worst novel. The worst novel to listen to. I was gonna say, you know, you're listening to Ahab lead these poor people on his monomaniac obsession. But our captain was skilled. He wasn't Ahabian, and he did manage to get us to the island.

[A]

Well, so last year, I went to Patagonia. And I was looking up where Wager island was. It's a little bit north of Torre del Paine, so it's decently up the coast. It's like right at the top of Patagonia. And we did a trip basically to the Cape. And it was the same sort of thing. We're in a little bit of a bigger ship, but we were going through all the inlets. You'd read about the school. Oh, yeah. The sailors would go down, the ships would crash. Super dangerous. And the first few days we'd go through the little inlets. I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, calm water. Should go water skiing on these, on this glass. And then there was like our third or fourth day. And they said, tonight we're going to go out into the Pacific. So it might get a little topsy turvy, but they're like, it's good weather tonight, so we can do it. And we finish dinner and we, you know, I go to sleep and then at around 2 or 3 in the morning, I woke up because the ship was just boom, boom, boom, boom. And I woke up. I was like, oh, my goodness. This is what we read about in school. I'm gonna go outside. So I get my stuff and I start walking around the boat and everything is falling over and it is pitch black, middle of the night, deep, dense fog. You not even close to seeing the stars. And I go outside, I open the door and I go, nope. And I close it immediately. I'm like, if I go outside, I will die. So what do I do? I go up to the third or fourth deck of, you know, it was a small cruise, basically, and I was on the third or fourth floor probably 50ft up, and every 20 to 30 seconds, the waves were so intense that the water would splash the window. And I'm telling you, in that moment, I understood why people repeated revere someone like Sir Francis Drake. Like, the kind of courage, the audacity, in order to go sail like that. I just had no idea. And I had that visceral sense of it. And from that I'm like, yes, that's why you would go down. Because there's no way that you can pick up on that by reading about it. The terror, the fear.

[B]

You have to feel it, you have to see it. And it just helps you get closer to the people you write about to understand them. And you. What's amazing is like, in my own experience, I'm only glimpsing a fraction of the level of storm and sea and tumult that the seamen encountered because they had come across Cape Horn in the perfect hurricane, where they have waves that are dwarfing a 90 foot master. The strongest currents on Earth. They couldn't even fly their sails. They had all blown out and they were tipping 45 degrees. I mean, the ships were breaking apart. I mean, but it allows you to have that kind of emotional connection, for lack of a better word. And then eventually we did get to the island and we anchored off it, and then we took a little Zodiac and we went on the island. And even just a small detail, we've talked a lot about research. So in their journals, they kept saying, it's cold, it's cold. Now, when I was sitting in New York, I just put it into my computer. What is the temperature in that part of Patagonia in wintertime? Yeah, I said, about 32. And I said, well, okay, that's cold, but it's not Antarctica. But then when I got there, I was like, oh, no, it's really cold because it was blowing about 25-30 mph off the ocean every day, just hitting the island. It's also always raining or sleeting. And so it suddenly occurred to me, the smallest thing was like, oh, they all had hypothermia. That had not even occurred to me for two years. I was doing the research. They would have known the term hypothermia. I was like, oh. And then you have, well, how would hypothermia affect their decision making? So, you know, you're just getting these. These subtle shifts of deeper understandings, getting closer to your material. They always said, well, we couldn't find any food on that. And I was like, oh, come on, there's gotta be something.

[A]

There's gotta be a Walmart or at least a Whole Foods.

[B]

Yeah, you gotta get something there. And you get there, like, there really are no animals. There's some birds that fly around, but. And they had some clams they exhausted, but there was some celery which they had eaten, which helped cure their scurvy, which I tasted. But that was really it. And, you know, you talked about understanding the seas when you had climbed the ship. And, you know, there was a great line. Line from a British officer who had described the island as a place where the soul of man dies in him. And when I stood on that island, I said, okay, I understand why the soul of a man would die. And I'm sitting here trapped on this island. And then there was. You know, we talk about revelation, right? Revelation is the Surprise. The kind of unexpected. And so when we were on that island, the captain at one point said to us, pointed to a stream, and he said, you know, take a look over here. And in that water was this timber. And they were about 5 or 7 yards long, these thick pieces of timber. They didn't have nails, there was no metal in them. But you could see they were held together, these kind of round wooden pegs called tree nails. And they are the remnants of an 18th century ship believed to be from His Majesty's ship, the Wager. And that was all that remained. I mean, I just kept staring at that wood because after all that ferocious struggle, because on that island there had been coup and counter coup and cannibalism and a murder and more than one murder, and yet that was all that remained from that ferocious struggle.

[A]

The biggest lie that writers will tell themselves is, I'll remember that later. No, I mean, there's so many times when I'm listening to a podcast, I want to save something and I just never end up saving it because typing it into the phone is just too much work, you know? Well, I found a great solution to that problem. It's called Podcast Magic and they're the sponsor of this episode. So what you do, super easy. Say you're listening on Apple or on Spotify. If you find a bit in this conversation that you really like, just take a screenshot of it and then email it to podcastmagicublime app. If you email it like a minute later, you'll get an email back with the transcript, the context, all the information that you need. And then that way you don't need to write down all the information. So if you find something in the conversation that you really like, well, check out Podcast Magic. All right, let's get to the interview. You know, we've been talking a lot about place.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Talking about people, because people are so core to these stories. And you were talking about a little bit earlier with the descriptions of people. And as you think about piecing together characters and even more specifically describing them, turning them, not turn them into not two dimensional people, but three dimensional ones. And we can actually Captain Byron, like, how do we really understand this guy? How do you think about doing that?

[B]

So it does begin with underlying material. Any documents, any letter. You're trying journalism or nonfiction or history. You are a external observer. It's different than a film. I've had films made on my stories. It's different that you are internal. The camera may be outside, but you have actors playing these people. Animating them, playing them inside them. As a nonfiction writer, you can't do that. I mean, unless you described a wink or a tear, you don't know that happened to them. So you're trying to get as close to their consciousness as possible in writing. In writing. And you do that through finding every scrap, every letter, every piece of writing, every observation. What house did they grow up in? What did that house look like? Okay, maybe did the relatives write anything about them? Who were their ancestors? Where did they come from? What was their lineage? What was their class? You are trying as best you can to understand them. And let's say they're in a profession, and how did other people describe that profession? So you're trying to learn everything you possibly can to bring them to life. And I always say that the job is not to romanticize the people you write about or to do hagiography to make people seem better than they are, to gloss over their foibles or their sins. And you're also trying not to exculpate them. You write about some really bad people, and you are not there to absolve them, but your job is to understand them and to show them as fully rendered as you can. And you feel a certain moral responsibility to write about them, Even if it's 300 years later than they lived. And you know, they will never see a single word you write about them.

[A]

Yeah. How do you think about. If you have 10,000 descriptions of somebody, 10,000 words, how do you think about the ones that you choose? You know, I was prepping for this, and I was thinking about, what is the difference between realism and impressionistic? And I was like, I don't. I wonder how J.K. rowling describes Hagrid. And so I went and I pulled it up, and this is how it begins. A giant of a man was standing in the doorway. His face was almost completely hidden by a long, shaggy mane of hair and a wild, tangled beard, but you could make out his eyes glinting like black beetles under all the hair. And I was like, oh, okay, that's a pretty good description. And we're not getting the whole description of Hagrid, but, man, you can see what's going on. There's selective description.

[B]

Yes. And, you know, it's funny, you are always looking for the quote or the phrase that cuts to some essence, or when you hear. You know, it's not so different from when you're in a conversation with somebody and someone says something really interesting. You may have been talking at a dinner, and much of it will Just kind of fade away. But you will remember a couple little bits. And when you're doing research, it's not dissimilar. And you're also like, for example, whether it be a physical description. But I'm also even interested in the way people talk. So what is their diction? Their diction reveals something about them. It may reveal their level of education, may reveal their mannerism and speed of speech. Speed. Are they of quick talk? And so all these little bits that reveal the essence of who they are. Yeah.

[A]

And people wrote about those things?

[B]

Well, you can. So in some cases it's through a written medium. So you're looking at how they write. So, for example, the gunner on the wager who was not from the upper class, so he knew he could never be a captain, but he was very literate and he has the best account of what happened in terms of the level of detail and depth. And he wrote the way his character is. He did not write the way most people wrote in the 18th century because most of the people who wrote were all from the upper class aristocracy. And it tended to be a very baroque kind of style, very ornate. And in a way, it really doesn't translate very well. I mean, not a lot of great writing for that period. He wrote like a bullet. He wrote like Hemingway. He wrote the way he was. Direct action, no adjectives, no adverbs. And so you're getting something from him.

[A]

Totally.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Earlier you were talking about these strange combination of words, like you were talking about the perfect hurricane. Yeah. But I came across this one. Arrested while in prison.

[B]

Yeah. Yes.

[A]

Tell me about that.

[B]

Yeah, so that's one of those things. We talked a little bit about trying to find a story. How do you come across one? And I used to always read the briefs, especially when there were a lot of municipal newspapers. Unfortunately, there are not as many of them. And they would always have that column where they just do these little summaries of the news. And I remember I was scanning the briefs in some California newspaper and I was reading, they're usually an inch. They're usually like two century sentences. And I came across a story that was describing the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang. And it said, that sounds terrifying. They were terrifying. And it said several of them had.

[A]

I do not want to have a beer with those guys.

[B]

Yeah, they're probably worse than the seas around Cape Horn. But in any case, it said that several of them had been arrested while in prison and some had been in solitary confinement. The leaders. And I just thought arrested while in prison. That Bizarro combination of words, a little bit like the details we talk about that you might hear in speech or something. I just thought arrested in prison. Arrested. Like, who gets arrested while they're already in prison? And then I started to.

[A]

Just feels like antonyms.

[B]

Yeah. And then I just started to ask myself some basic questions. And then some of them were in solitary confinement. I said, so how do you even run a gang from solitary? How can you be a gang leader if you're in solitary? How do you communicate? What is your tendency? All these questions started to emerge, but it just started from that we talked about. What is it that seizes you? It was just those words. I remember that article was about that long. And then it led to a very long story and investigation of the Aryan Brotherhood, the most murderous prison gang.

[A]

Let's talk about this. Do you want to read it or.

[B]

You can read it, or I can read it.

[A]

Yeah, I'm gonna hear you read it.

[B]

Okay, sure. So in May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants such as spiderworts and black Eyed Susans begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water. The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away. And before long, they are buried underground. This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower killing moon man.

[A]

So what's going on here? How do you think about. As you're thinking about constructing a paragraph like this? What are the elements that you see?

[B]

So this, in many ways, I thought, was a metaphor for the book and what I would be writing. The Osage name each month after a particular moon and in the month of May, in their tradition, is this little flower killing moon. Because all these beautiful little flowers I described, they spread over the prairie. They look almost like confetti. And then the taller plants come and steal their water and light, and they begin to die off. And it's in the month of May when one of the first murders takes place in this reign of terror. And so that is why I began in May and why I wanted to describe this moon. And I thought it was very important to also anchor you in the Osage tradition, since this is an Osage story. Yeah, tell me about this.

[A]

The spiderworts, the black Eyed Susans, the large moon, the tall plants, the coyotes. If you were to almost circle all the things that you can see, like, how much do you think about this? As I'm gonna paint a painting versus I'm just gonna, I don't know, share a few details. And make sure that there's a bunch of symbolism, a kind of realism versus impressionism.

[B]

Well, you're looking for some of the most, the vivid language, especially here. Cause you are painting a scene. And we talked a little bit about Arrested while in prison. There are certain phrases. And when I was just doing the research, there's a wonderful Osage writer called John Joseph Matthews. And he really is an unbelievable describer of nature. And he has a book called Talking Moons, I believe it's called, where he describes these moons. And there are certain words which were just so beautiful, so spiderworts. It's just a word, but in itself it's just an evocative word. Black Eyed Susans. I mean, people who name things have sometimes they're wonderful names and descriptors and so they're just poetic. It's just poetic language. And it's just their names. But you know, you could have said such as, you could pick some boring name or some non vivid name. It so happens that those particular details create an image and have a power just in their very name.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And also, you know, we talk about setting and it brings you into the prairie, you know, brings you into this part of the world, into the Osage tradition, and into a setting where this is going to take place. And for someone like me, that's very striking because, you know, I'm a New Yorker and you know, I had never been to a prairie, I don't think. I'm pretty sure I'd never been to a prairie. Not like that. Certainly never some vast, open expansive that go forever flat. Yeah. And the tall grass, the bluegrass tall grass. Just. It looks like an ocean when it blows in the wind. And so, you know, for me, part of it, of finding words for language is also trying to find words that help allow me to understand the world I'm writing about. Yeah.

[A]

I always think about Robert Cara. When he was writing his biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson. He wanted to go out and he needed to write about the hill country where LBJ was from. And he said, I need to go move there and actually live there for three years. And you can feel the time that he spent there and the way that he describes the limestone rock and the architecture, the shacks there. I mean, it was striking because I ended up going to LBJ's ranch a few years ago and it was like the least surprising experience ever. It was like I had been there already.

[B]

Yeah, well, Caro is a hero. And it's interesting that you mention that because I had obviously read that book and lbj, part of his series. And I remember I had read an interview with him where he had described kind of being out there, camping out in that area. And when I was working on Killers of the Flower Moon, again, having not spent much time in a prairie, I was writing about a woman, Molly Burkhart, whose family is being kind of systematically killed during this period. And I read about how when she was a young girl, she had been forcibly uprooted from her lodge where she had lived on the prairie and made to go to this boarding school. And I found the trail that she had taken. I was told the trail she would have taken. I was told it was a two day trip to get there. She would have gone back then because she would have gone in a wagon with a horse. And so I decided the trail was now mostly covered up and overgrown and you couldn't drive through it, but you could drive at least partway into it. And I spent the night there, where she would have spent the night just camping out in the prairie so I could just see what the prairie was like at night, what would have been like, what was the sky like, the vastness. I didn't write any of, didn't write any of it because it was me, it was my own trip. But it was just again helping me somehow feel closer to the people I write about to understand what they would have been imagining. I just sat there thinking, what would it have been like to be a seven or eight year old girl forcibly uprooted from your home, Your tradition suddenly being hauled across this prairie to go as far as you have been, to go to a boarding school where you could no longer speak the Osage language. Yeah.

[A]

How do you think about suspense? Because the way that I discovered your work is my friend Sam, he read the Wager and he was like, dude, I just read this in one sitting. I never do that. You need to look into this guy's writing. Like, it's just. You just can't stop reading. You can't stop reading. How do you think about creating that? I've heard that from so many people about your writing.

[B]

Yeah. So, I mean, the dirty little secret is often really simple, which is I tell most of my stories chronologically. I tell them, you may have a prologue that will hook the reader and kind of lay out the suspense that you're going to get, but let's say you're going on the ship of the Wager. Well, life and a voyage in particular. There's a reason that so many narratives grew out of these sea tales, because it mirrors a plot, right? I mean, you are getting on a ship. You're going to be heading out into a place you may not know. You're going to face elements that are going to test your character that you may never.

[A]

I'm thinking a shackle to you.

[B]

Yeah, like a shackle of them. Right. And it's going to test your character. It's going to reveal your character, and you never know how it's going to end. And so part of it is just telling it in chronological order. The key is to describe things and see things the way the people you're writing about saw them and experienced them, not with the power of hindsight. So I. When I'm writing it, I know what's going to happen to all these people. Right? I know what happened. But when they're living it, they don't. They're living in suspense.

[A]

They might not see their wives and their children.

[B]

They don't know anything. So that's the mindset you want to capture. I always say if you tell a story with hindsight, you impose that knowledge. That is an artifice. That is not the way history is lived. That is not the way we are living this conversation. We don't know how the conversation will end. We do not know what will happen later today. And that is the way people experience history. You live inside of history. And so I always try to tell it with that level of suspense that people went through. Now, many of the stories I'm writing about have inherent suspense. And there are things you do structurally and you think. And the story, even if you're telling it chronologically, where do you end a chapter? I mean, there are certain kind of little tools and mechanics that you do use. And I read a lot of suspense fiction. That probably helps.

[A]

Where and how do you end a chapter? I mean, I just opened up to a random page, page 110 right here. The wager was alone at sea, left to its own destiny.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Okay. Gotta go to chapter.

[B]

Gotta go to chapter. Right? And you're aware of that. And you kind of have. When I think of a story, I think of it in kind of there are two dimensions of the suspense. There's the suspense of where's the whole story gonna end, Right? But then also, where are these momentary scenes going to end? And you want the suspense, so you have this kind of larger.

[A]

You write to the last sentence.

[B]

You know, it's very funny that you say that. So not always for the wager, I had from my trip, a last line in my head after I made my trip that I thought I would end the book on. And for a couple years I was like, my last line would be something about, you know, the only sound was the eternal hush of the sea. I quite liked it. It was very poetic. And I wrote it when I got to the end and then I looked at it and I looked at it and I thought, it's poetic, but the sentence preceding it speaks to the larger themes. And so I ended up cutting it. I had to kill, you know, what do they always say? Kill your darling.

[A]

Talking about killing a darling.

[B]

Yeah, I had to kill your darling. And so, yes, that was one. And then.

[A]

How do you think about those prologues? Like bringing people into.

[B]

Yeah, it's a story. Yeah. You want.

[A]

You said you struggle with those a little bit more.

[B]

Right. They're very hard. I find them the hardest because they're a little bit more. You're looking at a story way above. I like to kind of be in the weeds with the story and with a prologue, you're kind of. How much do you give away? You're trying to make sure you can pull the reader in. Why? Why do you care about this story? Look, I know the world in which we live. The world in which we live is a world in which I live. Oop. Ding. My phone just beeped. Oop. Oh, I hear someone's Spotify music playing. Oh, there's a new movie out. Oop. This great podcast I can listen to. And so you are competing for human beings attention. And so part of the thing you're trying to do in the prologue is to say, okay, come along with me, come along with me for a journey.

[A]

What do you think you're trying to say? Like, hey, here's. I'm framing this story, here's why it's important, here's why it's worth your time. What are the core questions that a prologue should answer?

[B]

Yeah, so I think you want to have some element of usually, let's say, let's talk about the lost city of Z. It was the first book I did about explorers who disappeared in the Amazon. And explorer with his older son in 1925 looking for this place he called the City of Z. And then I followed in his footsteps to see what I could learn about what had happened to him and whether this city really existed. And if it did, how would it transform our understanding of what the Americas looked like before the arrival of Columbus? Well, on my own journey, there was a period when I got lost in the jungle. So that's going to happen. Towards the very end of the book. But I plop myself down, at least in the prologue, with myself lost, but then weaving in the stakes of the story, what was about to give you a sense. And so you don't know what's going to happen to me. And I'm sitting here, so we do know I made it out, but that's enough. So you have a bit of a cliffhanger, and I could weave in. And it's very short. I don't remember what it was, but it's like 800 words, a thousand words. It's short, but it's just enough to hook you. You say, okay, I got to know what's going to happen. But also I'm subtly weaving in the themes and the stakes of this narrative. Because what you're doing in the prologue is you're saying, trust me, trust me, be with me. There's a reason I'm telling this story, and there are some stakes to it. There's some suspense to it. There some meaning to it. Hopefully there's some beauty to it. And you just need to do enough of that to hopefully get them to come along on a much longer journey.

[A]

As you think of the prologue versus the main event of the book, how much do you think about your role as David Graham? Is it like, man, I love it when my grandpa or my uncle tells stories. Uncle John, he just has a way of telling a story. Or do you think more of, hey, I'm going to kind of remove myself a little bit from this. I am more in service of the story, and I don't really want my personality to be a big part of it.

[B]

Yeah, it's a really good question. So I'm a generalist, and the subjects I write about are always new. I don't know much anything about them, usually before I begin. And what matters is the story. It is, what is the story about? What is its meaning? What is its depth and your goal as an author? I always have some ideal form in my head that there is some ideal structure, that the way the story should be told, that's separate from yourself. And you're almost like a detective trying to figure out what is the structure, what is the voice. You are always in service to the story. I will insert myself into a story when I think it will help the story, it will advance it, it will help the reader, It'll give the reader some eyes and ears. If that is not important or needed for the story, I will vanish from the story.

[A]

What's an example of when you would do that.

[B]

So Lost City of Z was an example where. And it was very hard for me at first to insert myself because I had never really done that. I had to. To reveal something about myself because I thought it was so important to compare both the past and the present, what had happened to the Amazon, to show everything in that I. Alternate chapter. So you're seeing you're learning about exploration in the Victorian Edwardian period. And then you're learning about it when you go to these fancy stores and get your goods or you get to take a malarial pill. How has the world changed? And so you were always alternating. I remember when I first gave that book, the manuscript, to a friend to read. And they said, you know, David, it's good, but, you know, you gotta put a little more of yourself into it. And the truth is, I'm like Larry David. And so I had to put Larry David into my manuscript that this is Larry David in the jungle. Sorry, Larry, I don't know where you are, Larry, I hope I get to meet you one day. But in any case. But that. That became a little bit of a shtick. But that is true. I don't hunt. I don't camp. I hate all that stuff. I hate bugs. And so the idea of me in the jungle, I had to put that into the book. But the first time I did it, I was kind of a ghost. I was just kind of like, and here I am. This is what I see. So that was hard. And then we talked a little bit about the wager. So I made this trip to Wager Island. And there was a time when I thought, well, that might be a really interesting end to the book. And then when I got there, I said, you know what? It doesn't belong. Why am I here? I don't belong here in this story. So it was very helpful to my reporting. There's not going to be a word about me. And so I try the best I can to let the story dictate the decisions I make.

[A]

I want to read this opening sentence. Here's how you start the wager. And I'm curious to hear why you wrote it like this. The only impartial witness was the sun. For days it watched as the strange object heaved up and down the ocean, tossed mercilessly by the wind and the waves. Once or twice, the vessel nearly smashed into a reef, which might have ended our story. Yet somehow, whether through destiny, as some would later proclaim, or dumb luck, it drifted into an inlet off the southeastern coast of Brazil where several inhabitants laid eyes upon Us.

[B]

So I struggled for the first sentence for that book. Sometimes you have a first sentence, sometimes you don't. I wrote that sentence fairly late. I think I might have even had the full manuscript.

[A]

Really?

[B]

Yeah. And it started. It was almost only when I kind of finished the book and kind of understood it that I was able to execute. I mean, I had something in there, but it was not the sum, was the only impartial witness. Because. Because this is a book that is ultimately about a fight over the truth. And it's a fight of versions of the story. And it's a lot about what we're talking about. It is how people tell their stories, how do they construct them, how do they shape them, how do they edit them, how do they sometimes manipulate them. And so you are going to go on a journey where you are going to hear warring perspectives. And so this idea that there is an impartial witness, that it was the son, just occurred to me. So it's again, it's this metaphor that fit the subject of the book and it's also literally true. So it's factually true. You know, they were on this boat and the sun is looking down on them. There's nothing else around. But everyone in that boat, everyone who had been on that island is going to have a different version and everyone is going to be partial.

[A]

I didn't make the impartial witness. Son connection. Yep, I totally see that.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Tell me about over describing versus under describing and what it's like both in your first draft as you're trying to make the writing vivid, and then as you're kind of duking it out with an editor saying, ah, it's a little much, man, you know.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So.

[B]

I'll give you a very concrete example. And I described a little bit about these outlines I will construct. So in the first chapter of the Wager, they are getting ready to set off on this voyage. They have to find a ship and prepare the ship and load the ship. So I, as somebody who had no idea what a 18th century ship was like, became very fascinated, found British historians that give me these tutorials. I went to England, I visited Nelson's ship. You know, Abraham, I want to go.

[A]

On a research trip with you.

[B]

These sound fun. Yeah. No, he was great. And, you know, you're walking around, you see the cannons, you see all these stuff. And, you know, you learn how the ships were built. And they had to find a wood that was curved to fit the bends and how, you know, for the mass they would deforest colonies in the Americas to bring over the wood. They needed a more flexible wood for the. So you're doing all this research, hundreds of pages of outlines, and you start to write it, and you're just obsessed with all these details. I've spent I don't know how long researching how you would build and load a ship. And then my first editor is my wife, Kira Darn, who's a wonderful journalist, runs a company called retroport. And just a great journalist, does documentaries. And so she was my first reader. She always is. She always has. And I will give her my first chapter very nervously, because imagine it's your first chapter. You're like, oh, my God, nobody's seen any of this. I've finally spent years researching this. I'm putting my first words on the page. And so you give it to her. And then I will see her sit down with her pen and I will peer through the corner. She doesn't know I'm there. Just kind of like trying to gauge her reactions, what are her expressions. And then inevitably, and I certainly heard it on chapter one of the wager, she's reading, and suddenly I hear, oh, God, no. God, no. And that was where I had written 10,000 or 20,000 words on the building of a ship. And no normal reader would ever have had the patience for my, you know, that endless description. And I had to first, it's like you're mad and you're this. And you stomp around. But, you know, ultimately, when you calm down, I knew she was right. And then you take that 10,000 words and you distill it to the most revealing. That's where you get the best details. What are the best details? Distill it. You know, what are the most astonishing facts you learn? Not every fact you learn the most. Took 4,000 trees, as I recall, to build one of these sheds. 4,000 trees. That's a fact worth keeping.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And so it's dense.

[A]

The economy of language there.

[B]

The economy of language. And sometimes you can do more with less. And I will say for something like the wager, because there's a lot. There's some setup to the wager. We have to introduce people to a world they're not familiar with. Because you're not writing about the. You know, you're not even writing about the 1950s, where you. Where we have some images that we come. It's an 18, 17, 40. Most people have no idea what's a dockyard, so you have a lot more you have to set up. But up until the very end of the Wager. I was trying to cut it down because I didn't want the beginning. I had to learn so much to understand the world, just myself.

[A]

To understand the world of the wager.

[B]

Yes. These people, where they're coming. I had to learn a lot more. But what did I actually need to get it to its essence? And so I up until the very end. And I do think you have to be willing the cut. You really do. You cannot get so wedded. Here's the truth. It might have taken me five years to find a fact, to locate it, to find the letter. The reader does not care at all about the backstory of you getting that fact. All they care about is what is on the page and what they see and what they hear and what images it creates. And so you need to separate research from what you're trying to communicate with the research. And you're always trying to communicate something with an economy of languages that gets to the essence and brings something to life without bogging it down. You don't need 10,000 words describing the weather. Nobody cares.

[A]

Perfect hurricane, kind of.

[B]

Yeah. And what were the winds? Or you just have a few, like how did the rain. Rainfall, perhaps. But you just are trying. And sometimes there's one scene that just tells you everything you need. I'll give you an example. When they were coming around Cape Horn, I found in one of the journals a description of how they could not fly their sails because it was so windy. And so they're just tossing about in these 60, 70 foot waves, these wooden vessels that are kind of splintering. And the captain couldn't control a ship without sails. So what did he do? He ordered some of the seamen to climb the masts and to hold on to the rigging with their bodies and use them as concave sails while the vessel was going 45 degrees to one side and then 45 degrees to the other. Like this. I mean, that is so vivid and tells you so much about the storm and what it was like for those seamen. Yeah.

[A]

What part of the process gives you the most joy? And what part of the process gives you terror?

[B]

That's a good question. Joy is often the discovery of some material or a conversation with somebody, a source that is just so meaningful. They always say writers should be dispassionate, but I've cried in interviews. I mean, sometimes people are telling you these stories that are so powerful and so moving, and you find yourself being touched in some profound way. The same way you hope that you will then convey to somebody else, to somebody else. But the idea that you're just some cold calculator receiving information, that's just not true, nor should it be true. Terror is always writing. Terror is always. Can I convey this?

[A]

The actual typing, the actual communication?

[B]

Yeah. Can I do it? I will say there is joy when every once in a while you feel like you get it. And so, for example, the first sentence of the wager probably tormented me for years and years. And then I thought, ah, I think this is it. I think I got it.

[A]

Partial witness.

[B]

This feels right. It's crisp. I think I got it. And I don't know if that's joy or relief, but in any case, there's a certain pleasure to it.

[A]

What's it like having Scorsese turn one of your books into a film?

[B]

You know, it's funny. I think it's not unlike what it would be like for anyone. People ask me this question and. And I think my experience would completely model anybody else if you just randomly went up to someone. I don't know anything about the film business. It's not my world. I work in archives. I work on books and articles. I've never written about Hollywood. I don't have really friends in that world. But I love films. I love Martin Scorsese films. You get a call if Martin Scorsese wants to make you film. You know, you're just kind of like. Like.

[A]

I jump out of my chair so fast I tear my hamstring.

[B]

I was like, so, you know, I think the answer to the question is the same. I think if you imagine that you got a call from that someone who said, lawrence Griselli wants to make your story into film. You feel that sense. Your brain suddenly flashes with all the great films that you've seen by him. And then. And you know, then that goes away. Then you start to think of this, okay, so this is going to be a film. What's it going to be?

[A]

Are you pretty involved in the films?

[B]

I don't get that involved. I'm so busy working on my books. I'm always there as a resource for them. Scorsese and his team were very concerned with factual accuracy, which was very important to me, especially with a book like that. And so you're there sharing materials. An actor may want to learn something more about the person they're playing. Do you have a document you could share? What records you provide? Who do you think might be able to help them? They also work to their really closely with members of the Osage nation. And in terms of getting, you know, understanding the tradition the language, the culture, the scene, all that kind of stuff. You know, understanding the story deeper from the inside out. And I think that was really important. And I think, you know, I write about a lot of stories that are lesser known. And part of what draws me to these stories is the fact that you feel like they should be better known. You think these stories have an inherent interest. And you always wonder, well, why don't I know about this? Why didn't I learn about this? And so part of what motivates you is to hopefully spread the word a little bit. And so for something like Killers of the Flower Moon with Scorsese, that was a story that outside the Osage community, who obviously knew their history intimately and knew what had happened, even in Oklahoma, most people didn't know about this. So the idea that someone like Scorsese. I'm not naive. I know books can reach so many people. But a movie by Martin Scorsese is going to reach a lot more. And hopefully this story will become part of our history, which is where it belongs.

[A]

What do you feel like us writers can learn from the film business in terms of how to tell a story?

[B]

That's an interesting question. I don't really think in those terms. I'm going to be honest with you. I think they are two different mediums. And I think too often we conflate the mediums because I think a film is. You're able to inhabit people. I suddenly saw actors playing people I only knew in two dimensions, paper. So they're very different mediums. But I will say there is a visualness to the medium that I think influences us all, even as writers, just the way writers influence film. And so I think it's how you construct scenes and around people who are interesting and capture them and reveal them. Those elements are shared. And, you know, a lot of my stories and books have been turned into film without me ever thinking about that. And I just think that is that connection where if it's a powerful story, they can be told in these different mediums. And one of the things you. One of the things that film does that I think should be done in good writing is you see the room, you see it, you see these people, you hear them. And so part of the things you're trying to do with writing now, it's a different medium. You're trying to use words to convey that, but you are trying to do each reach at that point of visualness, of vividness, of depth, through one, through words. So I don't think of them that much. I never think like, oh, this would be a good. I've never once thought this would be a good movie.

[A]

Draw out a little bit more of the. Film is like this. Books are like that. Film is like this. Books are like that. I want to feel like we haven't gotten to the bottom of this.

[B]

Yeah, sure. So here is an example. We've talked about research. Sometimes people say, well, why'd you write it this way? Or why did you choose this scene? As a historian or a nonfiction writer, you are handcuffed. You are handcuffed. I don't open a story and say, I'm going to begin here. I look at all these pieces of material I have. This is all the material I have. I don't have any more material. I can't go over there. I can't go into this room. Oh, boy. I wish they had said something there. They didn't say anything. I can't write that. There can be a lot of scenes in bedrooms. Let's put it in their journal. And so the puzzle is, how do you make it work with these pieces? You have. Sometimes you begin books partly based on what the underlying research tells you and allows you to begin. That's the scene that the material allows you to tell. Not because it was necessarily. I had a million choices. I could create a million choices. And with a film, you can suddenly go different places. You create dialogue, even. Even a film that is. I've been very lucky to work with directors who are concerned about facticity and the truth, but nonetheless, we're going to have people play them, and there's going to be bits of dialogue, and so you are more hamstrung. And so the puzzle is, how can I best tell this material based on being handcuffed? And the decisions you make are determined by the underlying material. And sometimes that is not always ideal, because sometimes there's somebody you would love to hear in a story, but there's no underlying record from them, so you can't tell their story. As I've gotten older and I do this more, I try to let the reader know about whose stories maybe aren't told, but should be, but there's no way to fully tell them so that at least the silences speak, because those are important, too. But it's a puzzle, I think, history. It's a puzzle. And it's a puzzle based on the research.

[A]

Yeah. How'd you learn to tell stories?

[B]

You know, I think the first stories I remember, and it's the way I tell stories, were from my grandmother and so my grandfather had had a stroke. He would sit on our porch.

[A]

How old are you at this time?

[B]

Oh, I must have been five, six. A young boy, maybe seven. Young, young. Maybe even five or six. And. And he would sit on our porch and he had had a stroke, so he couldn't talk much. He couldn't really move much. And I never really knew him. I had no memories of him. My memories are of him kind of just sitting there, not really being able to talk or communicate. And my grandmother would sit there and tell me these stories about him, about how he had raced motorcycles and gone down the Khyber Pass and his brakes had failed and he had a little. Had one of these motorcycles where there was a little car next to it. And his friend, they're saying goodbye to each other and then they see a mound of sand and they roam into the sand and they went flying. Or how he had fled Russia on foot during the revolution carrying nothing with him. And I just. I'm looking at this figure and I'm hearing these stories, and suddenly I could see my grandfather as a young person running and, you know, risking his life or his life at risk, being brought to life. His soul was. Suddenly I could see it, I could feel it, I could hear it. And she would just weave these stories. And so for me, that was the first time I felt the power of language. You could bring somebody to life and you could see them. And I also understood what stories can do. I got to know my grandfather, who I never would have known because of my grandmother, because she remembered these stories. She told me these stories. These were not written down stories. These were part of an oral tradition. And she shared those stories with me. And I think that was the first time I. And they were riveting and they helped me. And I'll just tell you a funny story, is that when I first started telling stories, I became a reporter and I was a bad reporter.

[A]

This is at the Hill in.

[B]

Yeah, the hill newspaper in D.C. and I was a bad reporter because I always wanted to tell stories the way my grandmother told me stories. So I would go out, I'd report out a story and I'd write it up, and I'd give it to the editor, and the editor would say, yeah, this is good, but we gotta take your last grab. And we got to move it up to the beginning because the readers got to know what happened. You know, newspapers, they got to know what happened right away. You got to know your second graph. You got to give it away. Hippity hop, chop chop, hippity hop. They're not going to read an essay down there. And I was like, yeah, but you give it all away. Like, you can't. Who gives the story away at the very end? You can't. And so. But. So I always wanted to tell. I didn't know how my grandfather was going to make it out of Russia on foot. I didn't know if he was going to survive the Khyber Pass in his motorcycle. If you put the ending, you would ruin the story. So I always kind of told stories almost instinctively the way my grandmother told me stories, which I think we all tend to be more instinctive the way we tell stories.

[A]

How important is bigness with a story? And what I mean is, like, sully, birds in the engine. Gotta land in the Hudson River. Saves lives. Big story. Twin towers fall. 9, 11 thousands of people die. America changes forever. Big story. But then there's stories. I remember from my grandparents telling me. It was just like, oh, yeah, you know, we're on a walk in Atlanta one time and it was raining, and then this happened. And it's like, small story. But there's things that small story can capture about the human condition, maybe just because they're more relatable or more personable, whatever, that a big story can't tell.

[B]

Yeah, I think I never have rules, you know, I think storytelling isn't about, you know, I think if you're telling a smaller story, there are Joseph Mitchell, who wrote, you know, up in the old hotel, he wrote these wonderful stories about the Bowery. They're mostly people who just meet in saloons and he would tell their story, and they're just exquisite character studies. Now, I will say, to pull off that story, you have to be one hell of a writer. And when you say one hell of.

[A]

A writer, what do you mean?

[B]

Well, you have to be both very observant. So you're doing your reporting, but you don't have some momentous event happening. It's a small accumulation of details. So you have to be able to convey them either. I mean, Mitchell wrote with such beauty. I mean, he was like a novelist. He wrote with humor. And just his choice of language is really. I couldn't do that. I can't do that. I'm not capable. I wish I were. I wish I had that power of prose. I don't. I know I don't. And so, you know, partly as a writer, you kind of. You're always pushing up against your own limitations. At least I am. I am always pushing against my own limitations. Can I push it out Just like an inch further. Can I just, you know. You know, can I just get more precise, more clear, have a more musicality in the language? You know? But someone like Joseph Mitchell, it's music you're reading, just a beautiful piece of music. And there are writers who have that ability. Most of us don't. Most of us don't. There's a smaller number who have that power. But I think big or large is irrelevant. It's like, is there meaning in the story? What is the reveal? How do you tell it? And you can do it in a small story. You can do it in a big story. And sometimes in the big story stories, it's the smallest moments that speak to me, or may speak to. I'll give you one example. And this is why I do like true stories, because I do think that the truth can be more surprising. I mean, more than at least my human mind could ever invent. On the Wager island, which depicts the captain and the gunner in this titanic struggle between two egos, two formidable figures battling it out both for power and survival. And one is about to leave, the other to likely die on the island. And I'm reading the journal, and before the captain gets left on the island and the gunner is about to leave him. Him, what do they do? They reach out and they shake hands. And I just thought, holy smokes. I never, ever. I just never would have thought that would have been the act. And that was the act. There was a moment of just. And then they'll go back to hating each other. But in that moment, they both know what is at stake for each of themselves, how hard it's going to survive. And they basically just wish each other well for one flickering moment. And that is just a small moment of a human act. And you talk about a detail, somebody might read over that detail, right? Because they're not shooting at each other. It's not dramatic. But to me, that small detail tells you something about the human condition. They just shook hands.

[A]

Yeah. Hearing you tell that story, it's like I almost reject the premise of what I said, that the big stories, you gotta look for the small things in the big stories because that's what makes it come alive, you know, like, even with September 11th, I always think of the guy whispering in George Bush's ear, the famous photo when he said that. School, School in Florida. Right. Like, that's a small story inside of a big one. And, you know, you just talk to so many writers, and very often they find, you know, even with 9, 11, they'll be like, oh, yeah, I wrote about the janitor in the twinned house. And just by following the janitor, I revealed something about this giant story.

[B]

And the truth is, now that I even think more about your question is that almost all the people I tend to write about are not. I don't really write about prime ministers or dictators or even necessarily the people leading a nation would have their own lives in particular, and specificity, even in the big stories, moments of history, let's call them, when you are swept away. These are almost always just people, people with families or not families, desires, dreams, foibles. I mean, one of the things that interests me with the wager was just learning about each one of these people who get put on the ship through kind of destiny, and they're going to be caught up in these events. But one's. Once they're all burdened by their own story when they get on that ship. And that story may have been a girlfriend they're leaving behind or someone who spurned them or, you know, creditors were chasing them or, you know, or ambitions. And so, you know, the truth is, humans live inside of big stories and with all their particularities. And so I think, in a way, if you're one of the most. I think some of the most interesting stories are told from the bottom up.

[A]

Like ordinary people. Starting there.

[B]

Yeah. Just starting. Or just people. Or, you know, you're just. Who are these people? Because they're all caught up in. Sometimes people get caught up in momentous events. You know, my favorite Hitchcock. I mean, one of the things I love about Spinach is like, the ordinary person who kind of accidentally, by some quirk of fate, suddenly gets caught up in a huge, you know, espionage ring, and they have no expectations. And I always think that. And I write a lot about the powers of detection, but some of the detectives I like writing the most about are just often not professional detectives. But people are suddenly trying to make sense of their self or their own world. We're all kind of detectives the way we live.

[A]

Yeah. You seem very driven by this, by this quest to make sense of things. That seems to be something that you Is core to who you are.

[B]

Yeah, I think the world is a very chaotic place. There is a lot of disorder, there's a lot of confusion.

[A]

There's lies, there's red herrings.

[B]

There's red herrings. There's instability, there's emotion. And so I just speak for myself. I write to make sense of the world, to make sense of my own world. And somehow the element of putting Words together, finding the facts and kind of putting together is my little way of trying to make sense of something.

[A]

As you're telling a story, are you deliberate about themes? Love, loss, grief, hope? Are you deliberate about. These are the pivot points that this story is going to orbit around? Or are you just like. No, those things just sort of emerge. And this is, David, why I look for those deeper. That sort of deeper aboutness that this story is about. Because then if I have that broader significance, whether to life or society, culture, whatever, then those things just emerge.

[B]

So I'll say, I think I never come to a story with what it is about.

[A]

Now, is that in the research process or in the writing process?

[B]

By the writing process, I hopefully know what it's about. Okay, so in the research, when I discover a story and I begin research, most of these I've never heard of. I don't know anything about them. So I have almost no priors. I mean, I couldn't know what the themes are. I don't even know what they are. I don't know who the people are. I don't know what happened. And so part of the puzzle is learning what a story is about. Sometimes I might have a. You know, you start to have a preconceived notion, or you. The story, you think, oh, well, this is what it's about. But then you do more research and you're like, oh, no, no, it's not about that. And you always have to be open. I'll give you an example in Killers of the Flower Moon. So there's very little I had found written about it, but the bits I found written tended to be about how there was this kind of singular evil figure who had committed these crimes with a few henchmen. Because that was the story that the FBI that had investigated the cases had concluded, and that kind of got passed down. And then gradually, as I spoke to Moro Sage and uncovered documents, I began to realize that there were all these other killings and they were not connected to this singular evil figure. And that this was really less a story about who did it than who didn't do it. And it was about a culture of killing. And I remember when that finally dawned on me, I was just like, whoa, wait a second. The book I thought I was writing for two years, I'd been working on at that point for two years. Two years. It just got demolished. And I have to write another book. I have to write a book that this is what it is about. It is about this much deeper and darker conspiracy. And at first, it took me a while because I had been. You know, your human mind is just kind of organized your research around this concept. And then that got shattered, and I was like, okay, okay. All right. Get my bearings. What is this story about? And now start to move it in that direction. So the themes grow out of the material. You want to be aware of them. You don't want to be blind to them. You need to discern them, but you have to kind of come to them through the material itself.

[A]

Yeah, you can come on how I write whenever you want.

[B]

This is so fun. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming up. It was a pleasure. Thank you, man.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Thank you.