David Grann is one of the few nonfiction writers whose books are routinely adapted into Hollywood movies, such as “Killers of the Flower Moon” with Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese.
He’s such an obsessive researcher that he’s cracked multiple murders that even the American government hasn’t been able to solve.
Then there’s his book, The Wager. I can’t think of a single book that more people I know said they read in one sitting. This interview is about how he finds stories, researches them, and turns them into page-turners.
Transcript
Table of Contents
[00:00] Intro
[01:53] The discovery that changed his book
[03:39] How to research like a detective
[05:37] His secret to great writing
[07:04] How to turn 200 pages of notes into one chapter
[08:28] David’s 3 steps to choosing what to write about
[12:36] Finding the deeper meaning behind a story
[17:06] Why you should visit the places you write about
[28:44] How to write characters that feel real
[31:10] Choosing the right details to bring scenes to life
[42:08] David’s technique to keep readers hooked
[46:07] The formula for a strong prologue
[54:27] How to edit your story without losing impact
[01:04:53] What writers can learn from movies
[01:09:44] How David learned to tell stories
[01:17:08] Finding human stories in big events
[01:20:16] How writing helps making sense of the world
[01:21:06] Discovering the story’s deeper theme as you write
David Perell:
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.
David Grann:
What? Yeah, well, in Killers of the Flower Moon, when I was researching that book, 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.
David Perell:
Wow. And what do you think accounts for that? How could it be that the intelligence agencies aren’t finding things?
David Grann:
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.
David Perell:
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 want to 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.
David Grann:
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 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 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 cases that were never properly charged.
David Perell:
And you must just have crazy patience, huh? I feel like I could never do that.
David Grann:
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.
It’s about the size of an airport hangar, and you could fit a few airplanes in there. You would pull these boxes. You’d get in there early in the morning, and out would wheel these boxes, but you could spend a lifetime going through those boxes.
David Perell:
So if I was like, man, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Wager, such a good book, how much of that being a great book comes down to research? Like, I just did the work to find the information to dig up, uncover the story, versus I sat down on my keyboard and I just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote.
David Grann:
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 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 then 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.
David Perell:
Whoa. So what is that outline like?
David Grann:
Oh, it’s just masses. So, for example, let’s say you’re meeting someone. In that chapter you’d have all the biographical details, every little 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. Who are all the various participants that describe what happened in that moment? 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? We see it. I know what you look like. I know your sweater.
David Perell:
Incredibly good looking.
David Grann:
Right, exactly. 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, in a more 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.
David Perell:
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. Talk to me about what are the conditions that you need to be like, yes, I’m gonna do this story.
David Grann:
Well, I will 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 going to be next?
And you keep waiting for that divine inspiration. It will never come. I mean, it is not a passive process. So after using a few weeks of that going, okay. Then you get terrified. You’re like, okay, I’ll never find another idea. I’ll never find another project. You start to 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 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. Sometimes they’re like, you know, I’m trying to save humanity right now. I have no time for your little book, your intrusion. Who the hell are you? And then everyone’s 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, thinking, 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. So I started reading books about mutinies and going online and searching. 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. 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 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 flicker that was the inspiration that first got its hooks into me. But that’s really only the first step. I always say that there are three steps to trying to find what your project is. The first is what’s the story? Does something pique your curiosity, 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, 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? 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 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. So I thought, whoa, okay. Okay, there’s a lot here.
But the third thing is, what is it about ultimately?
David Perell:
Deeper themes? Deeper?
David Grann:
Is it about something more? 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. If they didn’t tell a convincing tale, they were going to get hanged.
I always thought of this great line from the writer Joan Didion: “We all tell ourselves stories in order to survive.” I thought, “Oh, my God. 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.”
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.
Then ultimately the empire comes in and says, “Do we like any of these stories?” They begin to tell their own story.
I thought, you know what, we’re living through our times of post truth and battles over truth. This story kind of feels like a parable.
David Perell:
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?
David Grann:
That’s a good question. Yes, in a sense. I was sometimes drawn to crime stories, and they could be very intricate and maybe a bit salacious.
They do tell you something about the human condition, but ultimately, they would just feel like these stories I like to read, they may be the cover of the New York Post. They got these great headlines, and you read it.
In the end, they’re kind of gothic crime stories, and so I learned to separate those stories.
These stories, I do 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?
David Perell:
I have two images in my head. The first is, there’s that scene in 21 where Bradley Cooper’s looking at all the numbers as he’s thinking about counting cards. 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.
I also have this image of you walking through the woods or something, or a desert. Maybe you’re in Lost, and you’re trying to figure out where you’re going. What’s the story of that aunt or that woman who you met who had the file up in the attic? You just find these things. You’re like, “Oh, my goodness, how did I find that?”
But always following your nose and moving towards some clue without ever being sure that there actually is something right there.
David Grann:
You don’t know. Life is a mystery. Often the people I write about have a certain mystery, because when you tell other people’s stories, in hindsight, you know what happened. You know 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 going to happen in an hour. Am I going to fall off the boat? Am I going to drown? Am I ever going to see my wife? Am I ever going to hug my baby again? They just don’t know what is this disease. I don’t even know what’s causing this disease.
David Perell:
Oh, yeah.
David Grann:
So they live with that.
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. Maybe your research and maybe your book will be a disaster.
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.
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?”
David Perell:
In what way do you value sense of place? I know with the wager, you went down to Wager Island off Patagonia, Chile. So tell me about that trip and writing the sense of place.
David Grann:
Yeah, 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. I’m not from Chile; I wouldn’t even know who to hire, so it didn’t even enter my consciousness. I was just in the archives looking at documents.
Then, about two years in, you start to say, “Gosh, can I really understand what these people went through? Can I really understand that island unless I see it? Are they exaggerating in their journals? Are they keeping saying how cold they are or there’s no food?”
David Perell:
Is it that bad? Is it really that bad?
David Grann:
Is it that bad? Right. No, you’re right.
David Perell:
No, you’re right.
David Grann:
You know, people like to tell dramatic stories; they like to be the hero of their own story. So I got the cockamamie 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, and it looked solid. I was like, “This looks like a good vessel to take me.”
Of course, when I got there, it was fairly small, maybe 30-some feet. It was top-heavy and heated by a wood stove.
I decided to go in wintertime because that’s when the castaways had become shipwrecked, so I thought I had to understand that period.
It was so stormy that, for 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 because it’s that rough, that stormy out there.
Then, eventually, we got the clearance and slipped out. 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 chop down wood for the stove to keep the vessel warm.
They would take a little hose and run it off the boat into the glacial streams to get water for the vessel. It was the coldest shower I had ever taken. I think I might have only taken one shower the whole time. It was just freezing.
Then, after about a week of this, the captain said, “If we’re going to get to Wager Island, which is situated in a gulf known as the Gulf of Sorrow, or as some translate it, the Gulf of Pain, we’re going to now have to go out into the ocean.”
That’s when I got my first glimpse of those seas. What’s interesting about this journey is I don’t write about any of it in the book, but it all informed it. We weren’t even in some huge storm, but the seas were pretty enormous, windy.
I just sat on the deck of this vessel. You could not stand; if you stand, you might break something; you would get thrown. Things were getting tossed all about. I literally was sitting there when a bilge pump went flying past my head.
I’m used to the sea, but I took everything to ward off seasickness. I was basically half-drunk on Dramamine. I had the thing on the wrist, whatever the drugs you put up behind your ears, and just stay there.
The funny part that always amuses me is that I didn’t know how to pass the time. I just kept looking out the porthole, thinking, “I’m gonna throw up. So, what am I gonna do?”
I had on my iPhone an Audible of Moby Dick. So, I put it into my earphones just to listen there. I’m sitting like this, listening to Moby Dick on the floor because I’m on the deck, just sitting there like this, bracing myself. It’s like you’re in a tin can, just going like this.
I’m thinking, “God, this is the greatest American novel I’ve ever read!”
The worst novel to listen to, 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.
David Perell:
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 right at the top of Patagonia.
We did a trip basically to the Cape, and it was the same sort of thing. We were in a little bit bigger ship, and we were going through all the inlets. You’d read about the school. The sailors would go down, the ships would crash. Super dangerous. The first few days, we’d go through the little inlets. I’m like, what are you talking about? Calm water. Should go water skiing on this glass.
Then there was our third or fourth day, and they said, “Tonight we’re going to go out into the Pacific. It might get a little topsy turvy, but it’s good weather tonight, so we can do it.”
We finished dinner, and I go to sleep. At around 2 or 3 in the morning, I woke up because the ship was just boom, boom, boom, boom. I was like, oh, my goodness. This is what we read about in school. I’m going to go outside.
I get my stuff, and I start walking around the boat. Everything is falling over, and it is pitch black, middle of the night, deep, dense fog. You’re not even close to seeing the stars. I go outside. I open the door, and I go, “Nope.” 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 the cruise. It was a small cruise, basically. I was on the third or fourth floor, probably 50 feet up. Every 20 to 30 seconds, the waves were so intense that the water would splash the window.
In that moment, I understood why people revere someone like Sir Francis Drake. 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. 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.
David Grann:
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.
What’s amazing is, 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 mast, the strongest currents on Earth. They couldn’t even fly their sails. They had all blown out, and they were tipping 45 degrees. The ships were breaking apart. It allows you to have that kind of emotional connection.
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. Even just a small detail, we’ve talked a lot about research. In their journals, they kept saying, “It’s cold, it’s cold.”
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?” I said, “About 32.” I said, “Well, okay, that’s cold, but it’s not Antarctica.”
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. It suddenly occurred to me, the smallest thing. I was like, oh, they all had hypothermia. That had not even occurred to me for two years. I was doing the research. They wouldn’t have known the term hypothermia. I was like, oh, well, how would hypothermia affect their decision-making? So you’re just getting these subtle shifts, deeper understandings, getting closer to your material. They always said, “Well, we couldn’t find any food on the island.” I was like, oh, come on, there’s gotta be something.
David Perell:
There’s gotta be a Walmart or at least a Whole Foods.
David Grann:
You gotta get something there. You get there, and there really are no animals. There are some birds that fly around, and they had some clams they exhausted. There was some celery which they had eaten, which helped cure their scurvy, which I tasted. That was really it.
You talked about understanding the seas when you would climb the ship. There was a great line from a British officer who had described the island as a place where the soul of man dies in him. When I stood on that island, I said, okay, I understand why the soul of a man would die sitting here trapped on this island.
We talk about revelation, right? Revelation is the surprise, the unexpected. When we were on that island, the captain at one point pointed to a stream and said, “Take a look over here.” In that water was this timber. They were about 5 or 7 yards long, these thick pieces of timber. They didn’t have nails; there was no metal in them. You could see they were held together by round wooden pegs called tree nails.
They are the remnants of an 18th-century ship believed to be from His Majesty’s ship, the Wager. That was all that remained. 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—that was all that remained from that ferocious struggle.
David Perell:
The biggest lie that writers will tell themselves is, “Ah, I’ll remember that later.” There are 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.
I found a great solution to that problem. It’s called Podcast Magic, and they’re the sponsor of this episode. It’s super easy: If you’re listening on Apple or Spotify and you find a bit in this conversation that you really like, just take a screenshot of it and email it to podcastmagic@sublime.app. A minute later, you’ll get an email back with the transcript, the context, and all the information that you need. That way, you don’t need to write down all the information.
If you find something in the conversation that you really like, check out Podcast Magic. All right, let’s get to the interview. We’ve been talking a lot about place.
David Grann:
Yeah.
David Perell:
We’re talking about people because people are so core to these stories. You were talking a little bit earlier about the descriptions of people.
As you think about piecing together characters and describing them, turning them into three-dimensional people rather than two-dimensional ones—Captain Byron, how do we really understand this guy? How do you think about doing that?
David Grann:
It begins with underlying material, any documents, any letters. You’re trying—in journalism, nonfiction, or history—to be an external observer.
It’s different than a film. I’ve had films made of my stories. It’s different in 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. Unless you describe 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.
You do that by finding every scrap, every letter, every piece of writing, every observation. What house did they grow up in? What did that house look like? 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. If they’re in a profession, how did other people describe that profession? You’re trying to learn everything you possibly can to bring them to life.
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, or to gloss over their foibles or their sins. 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.
You feel a certain moral responsibility to write about them, even if it’s 300 years later than they lived. They will never see a single word you write about them.
David Perell:
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? I was prepping for this, and I was thinking about what is the difference between realism and impressionistic? I wonder how J.K. Rowling describes Hagrid.
So I went and pulled it out, 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.”
That’s a pretty good description. We’re not getting the whole description of Hagrid, but man, you can see what’s going on. There’s selective description.
David Grann:
Yes. You are always looking for the quote or the phrase that cuts to some essence, or when you hear. 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 fade away, but you will remember a couple little bits.
When you’re doing research, it’s not dissimilar. You’re also interested in the way people talk. 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.
David Perell:
Speed?
David Grann:
Are they quick talkers? All these little bits reveal the essence of who they are.
David Perell:
And people wrote about those things?
David Grann:
In some cases, it’s through a written medium. So you’re looking at how they write. For example, the gunner on the wager was not from the upper class, so he knew he could never be a captain, but he was very literate. He has the best account of what happened in terms of the level of detail and depth.
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. 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. So you’re getting something from him.
David Perell:
Totally.
David Grann:
Yeah.
David Perell:
Earlier you were talking about these strange combination of words, like you were talking about the perfect hurricane. I came across this one, “arrested while in prison.” Tell me about that.
David Grann:
That’s one of those things. We talked a little bit about trying to find a story. How do you come across one? I used to always read the briefs, especially when there were a lot of municipal newspapers. Unfortunately, there are not as many of them. They would always have that column where they just do these little summaries of the news.
I remember I was scanning the briefs in some California newspaper. I was reading, they’re usually an inch. They’re usually like two sentences. I came across a story that was describing the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang.
David Perell:
That sounds terrifying.
David Grann:
They were terrifying.
It said several of them had been arrested while in prison and some had been in solitary confinement, the leaders.
I just thought, “arrested while in prison.” That bizarro combination of words, you know, a little bit like the details we talk about that you might hear in speech or something. I just thought, arrested in prison?
David Perell:
This feels like antonyms.
David Grann:
Yeah.
I started to ask myself some basic questions like, and then some of them were in solitary confinement. How do you even run a gang for solitary? How can you be a gang leader if you’re in solitary? How do you communicate? What is your tenure? 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.
David Perell:
So let’s talk about this. Do you want to read it?
David Grann:
You can read it, or I can read it.
David Perell:
I want to hear you read it.
David Grann:
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.
David Perell:
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?
David Grann:
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 just described, they spread over the prairie. They look almost like confetti. And then the taller plants come and steal a lot, water and light, and they begin to die off. 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.
David Perell:
Tell me about this: 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, how much do you think about this as, “I’m going to paint a painting” versus, “I’m just going to share a few details and make sure that there’s a bunch of symbolism,” a kind of realism versus impressionism?
David Grann:
You’re looking for some of the most vivid language, especially here, because you are painting a scene. 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.
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. Spiderworts is just a word, but in itself, it’s just an evocative word. Black Eyed Susans. I mean, people who name things, sometimes they’re wonderful names and descriptors, and so they’re just poetic language, and it’s just their names. 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.
David Perell:
Yeah.
David Grann:
Also, we talk about setting, and it brings you into the prairie. It brings you into this part of the world, into the Osage tradition, and into a setting where this is going to take place.
For someone like me, that’s very striking because I’m a New Yorker, and 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. It’s forever flat. The tall grass, the bluegrass tall grass, looks like an ocean when it blows in the wind. For me, part of finding words for language is also trying to find words that help allow me to understand the world I’m writing about.
David Perell:
I always think about Robert Caro. 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. He said, “I need to go move there and actually live there for three years.” You can feel the time that he spent there and the way that he describes the limestone rock, the architecture, the shacks there. 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.
David Grann:
Caro is a hero. It’s interesting that you mentioned that because I had obviously read that book and LBJ, part of his series. I remember I had read an interview with him where he had described being out there camping out in that area.
When I was working on Killers of the Flower Moon, having not spent much time in a prairie, I was writing about a woman, Molly Burkhart, whose family is being systematically killed during this period. 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. 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.
So I decided you could. 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. 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 it have been like? What was the sky like, the vastness?
I 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.
David Perell:
How do you think about suspense? 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.” You just can’t stop reading.
David Grann:
The dirty little secret is often really simple, which is I tell most of my stories chronologically. You may have a prologue that will hook the reader and lay out the suspense that you’re going to get. But let’s say you’re going on the ship of the Wager. 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. You are getting on a ship, you’re gonna be heading out into a place you may not know. You’re gonna face elements that are gonna test your character that you may never.
David Perell:
I’m thinking a Shackleton.
David Grann:
Yeah, like a Shackleton. It’s going to test your character; it’s going to reveal your character, and you never know how it’s going to end. 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.
David Perell:
They might not see their wives and their children.
David Grann:
They don’t know anything. 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. That is the way people experience history. You live inside of history.
I always try to tell it with that level of suspense that people went through. Many of the stories I’m writing about have inherent suspense, and there are things you do structurally and you think. Even if you’re telling the story chronologically, where do you end a chapter? There are certain little tools and mechanics that you use, and I read a lot of suspense fiction. That probably helps.
David Perell:
Where and how do you end a chapter? I just opened up to a random page, page 110 right here: “The Wager was alone at sea, left to its own destiny.”
David Grann:
Yeah, okay.
David Perell:
Gotta go to chapter six.
David Grann:
Gotta go to chapter six. 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 is the whole story going to 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.
David Perell:
You write to the last sentence.
David Grann:
It’s very funny that you say that. 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. 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.
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. So, I ended up cutting it. I had to kill, you know what they always say? Kill your darling.
David Perell:
Talk about killing a darling.
David Grann:
Yeah, you had to kill your darling. And so yes, that was one.
David Perell:
And then how do you think about those prologues, like bringing people into?
David Grann:
Yeah, it’s a story. You want.
David Perell:
You said you struggle with those a little bit more.
David Grann:
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 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. Ding, my phone just beeped. Oh, I hear someone’s Spotify music playing. Oh, there’s a new movie out. This great podcast I can listen to.
So 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.
David Perell:
What do you think you’re trying to say? Like, hey, 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?
David Grann:
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. An explorer with his older son in 1925, looking for this place he called the city of Z. I followed in his footsteps to see what I could learn about what had happened to them 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?
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.
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. 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, 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’s some meaning to it. Hopefully there’s some beauty to it. You just need to do enough of that to hopefully get them to come along on a much longer journey.
David Perell:
As you think of the prologue versus the main event of the book, how much do you think about your role as David Grann? Is it like, man, I love it when my grandpa or my uncle tells stories. You know, Uncle John, he just has a way of telling a story, or do you think more of, hey, no, 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.
David Grann:
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 anything about them, usually, before I begin. What matters is the story.
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, the way the story should be told, that’s separate from yourself.
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 will give the reader some eyes and ears. If that is not important or needed for the story, I will vanish from the story.
David Perell:
What’s an example of when you would do that?
David Grann:
So, Lost City of Z was an example where it was very hard for me at first to insert myself because I had never really done that. I had 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, I alternate chapters. 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? So, you were always alternating.
I remember when I first gave that book, the manuscript, to a friend to read, and they said, “David, it’s good, but you gotta put a little more of yourself into it.”
The truth is, I’m like Larry David. 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.
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. The idea of me in the jungle, I had to put that into the book. The first time I did it, I was kind of a ghost. I was just kind of like, here I am, and this is what I see. So, that was hard.
We talked a little bit about The Wager. 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.” 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.”
It was very helpful to my reporting, but there’s not going to be a word about me. I try the best I can to let the story dictate the decisions I make.
David Perell:
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 it.”
David Grann:
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.
David Perell:
Really?
David Grann:
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 that the sun was the only impartial witness because this is a book that is ultimately about a fight over the truth, and it’s a fight of versions of the story. It’s a lot about what we’re talking about.
It’s 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. So, you are going to go on a journey where you are going to hear warring perspectives. The idea that there is an impartial witness, that it was the sun, 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. 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.
David Perell:
I didn’t make the impartial witness sun connection. I totally see that.
David Grann:
Yeah.
David Perell:
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, it’s a little much, man, you know?
David Grann:
I’ll give you a very concrete example. 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, as somebody who had no idea what a 18th century ship was like, I became very fascinated, found British historians to give me these tutorials. I went to England, I visited Nelson’s ship.
David Perell:
I want to go on a research trip with you.
David Grann:
These sound fun. He was great. Walking around, you see the cannons, you see all these stuff. You learn how the ships were built. They had to find a wood that was curved to fit the bends, and for the mast, 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 and you have 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.
My first editor is my wife, Kira Darn, who’s a wonderful journalist, runs a company called Retro Report, and just a great journalist, does documentaries. So she was my first reader. She always is, she always has been. And I will give her my first chapter very nervously, because imagine it’s your first chapter. You’re like, “Oh, my God, nobody has seen any of this. I finally spent years researching this. I’m putting my first words on the page.”
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 trying to gauge her reactions, her expressions. 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.” That was where I had written 10,000 or 20,000 words on the building of a ship. No normal reader would ever have had the patience for that endless description. I had to cut it.
At first, it’s like you’re mad, you stomp around. But ultimately, when you calm down, I knew she was right.
David Perell:
Right.
David Grann:
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. What are the most astonishing facts you learn? Not every fact. It took 4,000 trees, as I recall, to build one of these ships. 4,000 trees. That’s a fact worth keeping. It’s dense.
David Perell:
The economy of language there.
David Grann:
The economy of language. Sometimes you can do more with less. For something like the Wager, there’s a lot of setup where you have to introduce people to a world they’re not familiar with. You’re not writing about the 1950s where we have some images that we come. It’s 1740. Most people have no idea what’s a dockyard. So you have a lot more you have to set up. 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.
David Perell:
To understand the world of the Wager?
David Grann:
These people, where they’re coming. I had to learn a lot more. What did I actually need to get it to its essence?
Up until the very end, I think you have to be willing to 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. You need to separate research from what you’re trying to communicate with the research. 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.
David Perell:
Yeah, perfect. Hurricane, kind of.
David Grann:
Yeah. What were the winds? How did the rain fall, perhaps? You’re just trying.
Sometimes there’s one scene that just tells you everything you need. 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.
They were just tossing about in these 60, 70-foot waves, these wooden vessels that were kind of splintering. The captain couldn’t control a ship without sails. So what did he do? He ordered some of the seamen to climb the mass 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.
That is so vivid and tells you so much about the storm and what it was like for those seamen.
David Perell:
What part of the process gives you the most joy and what part of the process gives you terror?
David Grann:
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. 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.
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?
David Perell:
The actual typing, the actual communication?
David Grann:
Yeah. Can I do it?
I will say there is joy when every once in a while you feel like you get it. 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.
David Perell:
Partial witness.
David Grann:
This feels right. It’s crisp. I think I got it. I don’t know if that’s joy or relief, but in any case, there’s a certain pleasure to it.
David Perell:
What’s it like having Scorsese turn one of your books into a film?
David Grann:
You know, it’s funny. I think it’s not unlike what it would be like for anyone. People ask me this question, 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 that Scorsese wants to make a film. You know, you’re just kind of like.
David Perell:
I jump out of my chair so fast that I tear my hamstring.
David Grann:
I think the answer to the question is the same. If you imagine that you got a call from 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 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?
David Perell:
Are you pretty involved in the films?
David Grann:
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 can you provide? Who do you think might be able to help them? They also worked really closely with members of the Osage Nation. In terms of understanding the tradition, the language, the culture, the scene, all that kind of stuff, understanding the story deeper from the inside out. I think that was really important.
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, “Why don’t I know about this? Why didn’t I learn about this?” Part of what motivates you is to hopefully spread the word a little bit.
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.
David Perell:
What do you feel like us writers can learn from the film business in terms of how to tell a story?
David Grann:
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 a film allows you to inhabit people. I suddenly saw actors playing people I only knew in two dimensions on 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 around people who are interesting, and capture them, and reveal them. Those elements are shared.
A lot of my stories and books have been turned into film without me ever thinking about that. I just think that is that connection where if it’s a powerful story, it can be told in these different mediums. 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 reach that point of visualness, of vividness, of depth, one through words, one through film. I don’t think of them that much. I never think, “Oh, this would be a good movie.”
David Perell:
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.
David Grann:
Sure. So here is an example. We’ve talked about research.
Sometimes people say, “Why’d you write it this way? 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. 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.
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 I had a million choices I could create.
With a film, you can suddenly go different places. You create dialogue, even in a film that is—I’ve been very lucky to work with directors who are concerned about facticity and the truth, but nonetheless, they’re going to have people play them, and there’s going to be bits of dialogue. So you are more hamstrung.
So the puzzle is, how can I best tell this material based on being handcuffed? The decisions you make are determined by the underlying material. 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 that, 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, history. It’s a puzzle based on the research.
David Perell:
How’d you learn to tell stories?
David Grann:
I think the first stories I remember, and it’s the way I tell stories, were from my grandmother. My grandfather had had a stroke. He would sit on our porch.
David Perell:
How old are you at this time?
David Grann:
I must have been five, six, maybe seven. Young.
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.
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. He had one of these motorcycles where there was a little cart next to it. 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.
I’m looking at this figure, and I’m hearing these stories. Suddenly, I could see my grandfather as a young person running and risking his life, his life at risk, being brought to life. His soul was. Suddenly, I could see it, I could feel it, I could hear it. She would just weave these 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. 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. She shared those stories with me.
They were riveting, and they helped me. When I first started telling stories, I became a reporter, and I was a bad reporter.
David Perell:
This is in at The Hill in D.C.
David Grann:
I worked for 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, report out a story, and write it up, and I’d give it to the editor. The editor would say, “Yeah, this is good, but we gotta take your last graph and move it up to the beginning because the reader’s gotta know what happened. You know, newspapers, they gotta know what happened right away. You gotta know your second graph. You gotta give it away.”
They’re not going to read an essay down there. I was like, “Yeah, but you give it all away. Who gives the story away at the very end? You can’t.”
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.
David Perell:
How important is bigness with a story? 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, we’re on a walk in Atlanta one time, and it was raining, and then this happened.”
It’s a 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.
David Grann:
I think I never have a rule of, you know. I think storytelling isn’t about—if you’re telling a smaller story, there’s Joseph Mitchell, who wrote 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.
David Perell:
When you say one hell of a writer, what do you mean?
David Grann:
Well, you have to be 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. I mean, Mitchell wrote with such beauty. He was like a novelist; he wrote with humor.
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.
Partly as a writer, 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 an inch further? Can I just get more precise, more clear, have a more musicality in the language?
Someone like Joseph Mitchell, it’s music you’re reading, just a beautiful piece of music. There are writers who have that ability; most of us don’t. There’s a smaller number who have that power.
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? You can do it in a small story; you can do it in a big story. Sometimes in the big stories, it’s the smallest moments that speak to me, or may speak to.
I’ll give you one example. 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.
One is about to leave; the other to likely die on the island. I’m reading the journal, and before the captain gets left on the island and the gunner is about to leave, what do they do? They reach out and they shake hands.
I just thought, holy smokes, I never ever 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.
That is just a small moment of a human act. Talk about a detail. Somebody might read over that detail, 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.
David Perell:
Hearing you tell that story, it’s like I almost reject the premise of what I said, that the big stories, you got to look for the small things in the big stories, because that’s what makes it come alive.
Even with September 11th, I always think of the guy whispering in George Bush’s ear, the famous photo when he’s at the school in Florida. That’s a small story inside of a big one.
You talk to so many writers, and very often they find, even with 911, they’ll be like, oh, yeah, I wrote about the janitor in the Twin Towers, and just by following the janitor, I revealed something about this giant story.
David Grann:
The truth is, now that I even think more about your question, 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. Specifically, even in the big stories, moments of history, let’s call them, when you are sweating, these are almost always just people.
People with families or not families, desires, dreams, foibles. 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 destiny, and they’re going to be caught up in these events. Once they’re all burdened by their own story when they get on that ship. That story may have been a girlfriend they’re leaving behind or someone who spurned them or creditors who are chasing them or ambitions.
The truth is, humans live inside of big stories and with all their particularities. I think some of the most interesting stories are told from the bottom up.
David Perell:
Like ordinary people, starting there.
David Grann:
Just starting with people. Who are these people? Because they’re all caught up in. Sometimes people get caught up in momentous events.
My favorite Hitchcock is the ordinary person who accidentally, by some quirk of fate, suddenly gets caught up in a huge espionage ring, and they have no expectations.
I write a lot about the powers of detection, but some of the detectives I like writing the most about are often not professional detectives, but people are suddenly trying to make sense of themselves or their own world. We’re all kind of detectives the way we live.
David Perell:
You seem very driven by this quest to make sense of things. That seems to be core to who you are.
David Grann:
The world is a very chaotic place. There is a lot of disorder.
David Perell:
A lot of confusion, lies, red herrings.
David Grann:
There’s red herrings. There’s instability, emotion. I write to make sense of the world, to make sense of my own world. Somehow, putting words together and finding the facts is my little way of trying to make sense of something.
David Perell:
As you’re telling a story, are you deliberate about themes: love, loss, grief, hope? Are you deliberate about these being the pivot points that this story is going to orbit around? Or do those things just emerge? This is why I look for that deeper aboutness that the story is about. If I have that broader significance, whether to life or society, culture, whatever, then those things just emerge.
David Grann:
I never come to a story with what it is about.
David Perell:
Is that in the research process or in the writing process?
David Grann:
By the writing process, I hopefully know what it’s about.
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 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.
So, part of the puzzle is learning what a story is about. Sometimes I might have a preconceived notion. 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. You always have to be open.
I’ll give you an example in Killers of the Flower Moon. 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.
Then gradually, as I spoke to Morrow 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. This was really less a story about who did it than who didn’t do it. It was about a culture of killing.
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—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.”
At first, it took me a while because I had been, you know, your human mind just kind of organized your research around this concept, and then that got shattered and I was like, “Okay, all right, get my bearings. What is this story about?” and I’ll 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 come to them through the material itself.
David Perell:
You can come on how I write whenever you want. This is so fun.
David Grann:
Thank you so much. Thank you for coming on this show. It was a pleasure. Thank you, man.
David Perell:
Thank you.
