Transcript
Table of Contents
[00:27] How Susan Structures Her Stories
[04:06] Transforming Index Cards Into a Narrative
[07:20] How to Hook Readers
[11:01] The Way Susan Chooses a Story
[14:17] Writing Advice Susan Would Give Her Younger Self
[18:10] The Challenge of Writing About Yourself
[23:11] How Susan Got Her First Book Deal
[29:54] Becoming a Brutal Self-Editor
[32:19] Susan’s Biggest Writing Trick
[42:45] How to Choose a Book Subject
[49:05] Breakdown of Susan’s Writing Method
[55:04] Does Structure Kill Creativity?
[01:02:27] Why Libraries Matter
David Perell:
Susan Orlean writes nonfiction books that read like fiction, sort of working in the style of Joan Didion or Tom Wolfe. But what makes her different is how intentional she is about her writing process. She’s very intentional about the research, the writing, the editing phases, all of it.
And if you’re thinking about your own process, how can you structure your life in order to lead to good writing? Well, you’re going to love this episode.
You know, the first thing that I wanted to ask you about was about stories and thinking through the structure of a story before you begin it. I want to hear how you work through that problem.
Susan Orlean:
In practical terms, for many, many years and now for the third or fourth book, I’ve used a system of index cards, transferring all of my material, or at least the material that I know is really instrumental in what I’m writing, onto these 5x8 index cards so that I really have all the material in front of me. That can be lots of cards.
On the last two books of mine before this memoir, “Rin Tin Tin” and “The Library Book,” I had about 700 of these index cards. So I’m really breaking out the material into these digestible chunks.
Then I take the cards and I move them around physically.
David Perell:
That sounds fun.
Susan Orlean:
It’s fun. You need a lot of space. That’s the only challenge. You need a big open space that your dog isn’t going to walk through, which I’ve learned the hard way. It happens all the time.
I use those cards, though, to move around and begin seeing a structure. How is this going to— what pieces of information fit with other pieces of information? Or what are the themes that I see coming through in the book?
It really is a matter of literally picking up the cards and moving them physically. I think it’s a really important part of it for me to keep reacquainting myself with the information, keep sort of remembering, oh, this anecdote, you know, this is important. This goes here and refreshing my memory.
David Perell:
What’s on a card? Like, is it a story about a dog? Or is it, you know, the dog was this name from this place. This is what it was. How much information is on it? How do you think about, okay, this card is complete?
Susan Orlean:
It really varies. In some cases, it can be something very small. The dog’s name is. I mean, that’s probably too small, but it can be something very specific like that. In some cases, it can refer to an additional document.
If I’ve used a legal document for research, rather than breaking the legal document into a million pieces, I’ll have card number 35, legal document. I know, okay, I’ll go fish that legal document out of my file. But it’s a reminder to me so that I can say, oh, so the legal document and all the stuff that I’m drawing from the legal document fits in this section.
If I were telling somebody, here’s my system. I think it’s an intuitive kind of sense of what is a chunk of thought. A chunk of thought can be something very small, or it can be something significantly bigger.
David Perell:
And then how do you go from 700 cards to then, like, a specific story in a book that you’re writing?
Susan Orlean:
If I were telling somebody, here’s my system. I think it’s an intuitive kind of sense of what is a chunk of thought. A chunk of thought can be something very small, or it can be something significantly bigger.
David Perell:
And then how do you go from 700 cards to then, like, a specific story in a book that you’re writing?
Susan Orlean:
I’ll give you an example using the library book, because it’s very fresh in my mind. I had all of this material. I knew the book wouldn’t be strictly chronological, so that was partly why the structure was so important. I always had to reground myself in the time frame.
But I began seeing information kind of fitting into themes like fire. All of the information about fire and arson, all the information about the history of the LA library itself, just that specific history, the story of Harry Peake, the guy who confessed to the arson.
So as I began organizing these thematically, they began having within them the story that I was going to tell. Now, I still had to connect them. You can’t just do, “Here’s a story about arson. Here’s a story about this guy.” But I then could begin building the connective tissue between each of those thematic chunks.
David Perell:
I like what you said about there’s a difference between a writer who can write a good sentence, and then there’s something else, sort of like the professional leagues of writing is when you can actually tell a good story, and then all the sentences kind of make up that story. It’s like the parts that then lead to the sum, but the sum is so much bigger than the parts or something.
Susan Orlean:
Absolutely. The nature of nonfiction writing, of course, is that you have to, at least to begin with, be a good researcher, a good reporter gathering interesting information. But the difference between me saying, “All right, now, I’m just going to read you bullet points of information,” versus...
David Perell:
It’s a snooze fest.
Susan Orlean:
Let me tell you this amazing story. Sit back. I’m going to spin a mood. I’m going to engage you in the characters. I’m going to, very importantly, but subtly explain to you why this is a story that you really should listen to.
Those different elements subtly have to come together to lift a story out of just being an assemblage of information into being a story, a yarn, a story where if you’re sitting across from me at dinner, you’re gonna listen maybe for an hour as I tell you this incredible story about the biggest library fire in American history. A story that you maybe didn’t think you would have any particular interest in.
David Perell:
How do you think about leads at the beginning? The importance of yanking someone in, hooking them in?
Susan Orlean:
The most important.
David Perell:
The most important.
Susan Orlean:
Yeah, it’s always important, but in a universe of competition for people’s attention, there’s an argument to be made that all of us have lost some capacity to focus.
David Perell:
Yeah, I’m like a sidewalk pigeon sometimes.
Susan Orlean:
We’ve all gotten, unfortunately, very used to things quick change, bite of information, next bite of information. So the very importance of a lead has never been greater.
Depending on the story you’re telling, in my case, I would say 90% of the time, I’m telling you a story that you don’t necessarily think you need to know. How can I get you to give me your attention? It’s all in that lead. Let me hook you in. Let me give you a little bit of information that’s going to be intriguing enough that you go, “Oh, wait a minute. What’s this about?”
David Perell:
Let me read this from the orchid thief. Actually, why don’t you read it right here?
Susan Orlean:
Okay. John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale eyed, slouch shouldered, and sharply handsome in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth.
And there you have it.
I spent a lot of time thinking about that lead.
On paper, nobody necessarily could care about this incident, which was this very kooky guy and his crew of Seminole Indians being arrested with wild orchids that they had taken out of a swamp in Florida.
There are some people who are interested in orchids who might be curious about reading it, but overall, the general reader might have thought, I don’t need to read this, and I’m not interested in any of the elements in this subject.
But people are very interested in people, and I was counting on the fact that somebody would read that description of John Laroche and go, “Tell me a little more.”
David Perell:
Yeah, cause the last sentence kind of sends you for a loop. You’re like, what?
I laughed when I heard that just now.
This morning you noticed I was reading it. I was like, wait, what?
Okay, explain this to me.
Susan Orlean:
And by the way, I think a very good reaction to a good lead is, “Wait, what?” That, in a way, is almost the ideal, because when we’re saying, “Wait, what?” you’re saying, “I’m gonna read a little more because I am completely confused.”
The juxtaposition of saying that he’s this handsome guy with the very jarring detail that he’s missing his teeth, I knew would make people stop and say, “I’ve got to tell me more.”
David Perell:
Tell me more about this people being interested in people thing.
You’re choosing stories: fire in Los Angeles, orchids in Florida.
You’re choosing stories that aren’t like a presidential election or the Yankees game that a bunch of people are interested in.
There’s a social intuitiveness that people have.
You’re looking for stories that the spotlight hasn’t been shined on.
You’re like, “Hey, look over here.”
Susan Orlean:
If you’re writing about a celebrity, a news story, war, or murder, those are things that people instantly and easily have a curiosity about.
David Perell:
Yeah.
Susan Orlean:
They may not stay to read the whole story, but they’re at the very least going to read the first couple of paragraphs.
Choosing stories that are not urgently necessary requires that you are extremely seductive as a writer, that you say, “Give me a minute here. There’s a payoff if you’ll read this. This is really an interesting story.”
It relies on the fact that I genuinely think it’s an interesting story, and I don’t do things unless I think they’re absolutely fascinating and that I’m dying to tell people about them.
I know, though, that I have to overcome their initial sense of, “I don’t need to read this. It’s not my hobby or my curiosity, or I don’t live in Florida. I don’t need to read a story about Florida.”
All of these reasons you might not read it.
David Perell:
Do you feel like there’s a balance or you need both between, “Hey, hey, hey, hey, I’m Susan Orlean, I really need to tell the story. I just feel called to tell the story,” versus, “Hey, David Perell, you’re the reader, dude. You gotta know this story.”
How much of it is about you and your excitement versus the reader and their need to know?
Susan Orlean:
That’s a great question. I think it’s a balance. I think the reader in all of these instances isn’t sure they need to know. So what I’ve gotta convey to them is I didn’t need to know it either. But I became fascinated, and the payoff was this amazing story. So I’m actually sympathetic with the reader.
I’m not a person who collects orchids. I don’t even like Florida. So it’s not that I write about things that I’ve already naturally had an interest in. I’m really in the same position as the reader. I’m just a little ahead of them. So I can turn back and say, “Oh, my God, keep coming because, wow, you’re not gonna believe what I found.”
David Perell:
With where you are now, if you were to go back to you as an early writer and look at your stories, and let’s just suppose that your stories back then kind of stunk. If you’re reading them now, you’re like, “Ah, you could have done so much better. Come on.”
What would you tell early you to be like? These are the lessons that I’ve learned that I wish you would have known back then because your stories would have been so much better.
Susan Orlean:
I think as a young writer, I was very seduced by the gimmick of clever writing. Just making things clever and snappy and funny. Not that any of those are bad in and of themselves. But I think the more powerful writing is writing where you pull your punches a little. You have a tone that’s got a little more confidence and is a little less like, “Hey, look at me.”
And then when you have something really punchy, it hits.
David Perell:
Yes.
Susan Orlean:
Yeah.
David Perell:
I was reading a piece over the weekend. It was a Substack piece, and I was just like, “Oh, this is so overwritten.” It’s like you’re trying so hard to write this lush and impressive prose.
It’s like, stop trying to impress your 9th grade English teacher. I can feel you trying to do that. You have some idea in your head of what good writing equals flowery writing, and if you can just cut that out and just be plain with me. Fine, go for a little bit of style, but it was so overwritten that I read like a hundred words, and I just.
Susan Orlean:
I had to close it, and I think it’s a classic.
David Perell:
It was so annoying.
Susan Orlean:
Young writer error is that overwriting. Even now, it raises my hackles, and I know that I did it when I was starting out.
You hit the nail on the head. When you’re in ninth grade, if you write something flowery that shows that you’ve sort of thought about the writing, you are very likely to have your ninth grade teacher say, “Wonderful job.” The confidence of plainer, subtler writing is something you have to grow into.
David Perell:
I read this from a YouTuber named Casey Neistat many years ago. He was a really popular YouTuber, kind of like the guy who invented the vlog.
He was talking about the simplicity of his videos. He only uses very simple cuts, and he only uses Helvetica fonts. Somebody texted him and said, “Hey, Casey, why do you do that?”
He said, “It’s kind of like a steakhouse. The very best steakhouses serve their steak a la carte. It’s just steak, maybe a little bit of peppercorn, maybe one little thing on top. But it’s the crappy steak that then you douse in sauce and whatnot. A great steak is served simply, and that’s what I want to do with my videos. I like the challenge of not being able to add all the bits and bobs and just drench it in sauce.”
Susan Orlean:
It’s a perfect comparison, especially because the meat is what ends up really hitting with readers. That is the amazing information you’ve learned, the great quotes you’ve gathered. And in addition, of course, it matters to have the great descriptions and the tone and the mood.
But overwriting, working so hard that you’re falling all over yourself, you can’t say a simple sentence. It’s exhausting. As a reader, it’s exhausting.
David Perell:
How is it different going from writing about other people to writing about yourself in the memoir?
Susan Orlean:
The big challenge, when I decided to work on a memoir, I felt a little baffled and thought, “How do I do this?” I know how to do a story. I know that I come up with an idea, begin researching, figure out who to talk to, and go see what there is to see. How do I do that about myself?
So, number one, I literally didn’t know how to do it. Number two, I found myself having to really convince myself that it was a story worth telling. I’m so accustomed to saying, “Here’s a world you’ve never heard of. You don’t know anything about it. I’m going to lead you.”
David Perell:
Well, also, you’ve had the revelation yourself, so I would guess that there’s a felt sense of, “I know what it’s going to be like for somebody else once they discover what I’ve discovered.” But maybe you didn’t have that almost by definition.
Susan Orlean:
Right, that’s exactly right. When I’m writing a story about a new world that I’ve stumbled into, a lot of what I go through as a writer is what the reader will go through as a reader. So I’m experiencing it, and I can write through that experience. That’s very central to how I write and why I write. I’m going to experience this, then I’m going to tell you, and you’ll experience it with me as your proxy.
In the case of writing about myself, I couldn’t have that discovery. I didn’t have that period of time that’s very typical for me with a story where I’m thinking, “Okay, who’s who here? Who are the characters? What’s the story? What’s the narrative?” I didn’t know how to replicate that experience because I wasn’t discovering myself. I wasn’t having that adventure of going into a new world. I had to try as much as I could to create some version of that.
What I did initially is I hired a friend of mine who’s a wonderful journalist. I had her interview me.
David Perell:
Oh, wow.
Susan Orlean:
To me, that helped me have that experience of hearing myself tell my story as if I were a new, strange, interesting person that I was meeting. While I didn’t use a lot of those transcripts verbatim, I think it unlocked that feeling for me of saying, “Oh, I hadn’t really thought about myself that way.”
David Perell:
How did you identify what stories were worth telling? I would guess that as you’re telling stories, there are things that you only remember after thinking about it for a few months.
Susan Orlean:
In the case of this series of interviews that I did with my friend, I didn’t tell her what to ask me. I said, “Here I am.”
David Perell:
What are you interested in?
Susan Orlean:
“What are you interested in?” In part, it helped me sense what people might be interested in in my story.
David Perell:
Did that surprise you? What?
Susan Orlean:
A little bit, yeah. It was certainly enlivening. There was nothing where I thought, “Whoa, I never imagined anyone would be interested in that,” but rather I thought, “Oh, I really should remember to write about that and talk about that.” I think we all have a sort of abbreviated life history that we keep in our head, and I was trying to go beyond that. It was really helpful to have her zero in on parts of my life that I had thought, “Oh, that’s not so interesting,” or that I just wasn’t thinking about.
David Perell:
Is there a specific story from the book that you really enjoyed writing about?
Susan Orlean:
There were a lot. I have to admit, I really enjoyed writing about the process of getting my first book contract.
David Perell:
Oh, tell me about that.
Susan Orlean:
I came up with the idea, which I don’t recommend. I thought it was about time that I write a book. It wasn’t that I thought I have a book idea and here it is, and I’m dying to do it. I thought I’m kind of at that point in my career where I should be writing a book.
I met with an agent. He said if you have an idea, bring it to me, and I came to the meeting with 12 book ideas. You can imagine 11 and a half were not good.
I was sort of in this mode of, first of all, I didn’t really understand what a good book idea was. I’m still not sure I understand, but I definitely didn’t understand then. Secondly, I was just sort of bubbling over. I want to do a book. Here are a bunch of ideas I have, and I really needed somebody to say this will not work. This one? This one, maybe. I needed someone to help me understand what made a good book idea.
As I recount in the book, he encouraged me on one of the ideas that was a good kind of marketable idea. So I wrote a proposal.
The thing that was interesting to me, looking back on it, is I thought I can see why this would work as a good book idea. I didn’t really want to do it, but I thought, “Well, it’s time for me to write a book, so if I can sell this as an idea, then I should do it,” which is really not a good way to go about writing a book.
When you’re young and you’re not particularly experienced, you just move. You sort of have other people say do X, Y, Z, and you do it.
So I wrote this proposal, circulated it, and I had never written a book. Publishers are already a little bit wary when you’ve never written a book. I got lots of incredibly enthusiastic rejections. “She seems terrific. We’d be really interested in seeing what other ideas she has.” All of these responses were actually very encouraging and positive, but nobody was biting on the idea except for one publisher who said, “We really want to do a book with you.”
Then she said, “Is this the book you really want to do?” For better or worse, I said, “No, I don’t really want to do this idea.”
She said, “Well, what do you want to do?”
I just blurted out this other book idea that I had. I said, “I want to do a book about Saturday night in America. I want to travel around the country, spend Saturday night in a whole bunch of different kinds of places, and write a book about it.”
David Perell:
Oh, that’s such a good premise.
Susan Orlean:
And she said, “Great. Done.”
David Perell:
Why? Because she liked the premise or because she liked your passion?
Susan Orlean:
I think it was a combination.
David Perell:
Do you think you had the same enthusiasm that you just said that with? If I was a publisher, big suit and tie, 47th Floor, Midtown Manhattan, and someone walked in and the idea didn’t feel crappy, at least for me as an agent or a publisher, if someone came in with that kind of enthusiasm, I feel like I’d be very tempted to greenlight this.
Susan Orlean:
I think that she was responding to the enthusiasm for this other idea. I’ll tell you so that it can be a little more concrete. I had done a story for the Boston Globe following two different people who were preparing for the Ironman triathlon. This was in the 80s. Triathlons were very new. The Ironman had just been established, so there was a lot of novelty.
I found two people from very different worlds who were both training for the triathlon. So I thought I could expand this into a book; I’ll follow three people instead of two. It really is like a year to get ready to do the Ironman. Fitness was becoming a sort of American obsession. There was a lot that recommended it as a good idea.
Somehow or another, all of these publishers just must have sensed that either they thought it’s too much like a magazine piece and doesn’t have the breadth to be a book, or maybe they were picking up on me not being fully invested. I don’t know.
David Perell:
There’s a stench of inauthenticity that is very easy to smell on people.
Susan Orlean:
Absolutely. It wasn’t that I was somehow trying to pull a fast one by any means, but I feel like somehow that little spark of saying, “I’m dying to do this,” was missing.
With a young writer who’s never done a book before, I think it’s pretty essential that they are literally burning with the desire to do the book. So, in the case of Joni Evans, who was then the head of an imprint at Simon and Schuster, I think she thought, “I really like you, I like your writing. I feel like I want to do a book with you, but what do you really want to do?” She somehow sensed that this triathlon book was not where my heart was.
When I said I wanted to do this book about Saturday night, she said, “Great, done. I’ll call your agent tomorrow. We’ll get the paperwork.”
David Perell:
You’ve said that over the years as well. You’ve sort of adopted the mantra of “be brutal,” like a little bit harder on yourself. How do you think you went about that?
Susan Orlean:
In the beginning, like a lot of young writers, a lot of inexperienced writers, I felt like every word I wrote was pure gold. I would cringe every time something was cut or something was rearranged.
David Perell:
Cringe like, get angry or be like, “Ow, why are you doing this to me?” What was that?
Susan Orlean:
I wouldn’t say angry, but I certainly was a little indignant. Like, “That was a great sentence. I don’t see why you have to remove that sentence or those words or that description.”
I actually feel like switching to writing on a computer from when I started, I wrote on a typewriter.
David Perell:
Yeah.
Susan Orlean:
Those old-fashioned machines. Working on a computer made a huge difference because if you’ve written something, typewritten something, or handwritten something, editing is messy, inconvenient. It’s just easier to leave things as they are.
A computer makes editing really fluid. You can move something and then say, “No, no, I liked it the way it was,” and put it back. It encourages a lot more experimentation where you think, “I thought this was good, but let me try it without this sentence.”
I became a lot more comfortable editing. I started refining that so that I began to feel like I was a very good editor of my own work, that I could go back and really lean pretty hard on myself and clean up work and make sentences better and remove extra flab.
David Perell:
Did you develop tricks to do that, or did you just kind of become more comfortable and confident with yourself as a writer?
Susan Orlean:
A little bit of both. I would say my biggest trick was reading my work out loud and discovering that it’s an almost foolproof way to hear a sentence that doesn’t work, to hear something that’s repetition, to hear things that are not quite clicking. And it became something I did very, very regularly is just read it out loud. Sometimes when you’re reading out loud and you get a little bored, that’s a sign that it may be a little boring.
David Perell:
Totally.
Susan Orlean:
So I began using that as my first line of editing. That’s probably the only trick, per se, that I can think of. But other than that, it was just reading each sentence very closely, assessing if it worked rhythmically, if it worked logically, if it served a purpose.
And then, after I write the next day before I continue, I go back and read what I wrote the day before and edit it pretty intensely.
And I wouldn’t say it ever becomes something where I literally can’t move ahead, because that can happen. But I feel like when it’s fresh in your mind but you’ve had a night to sleep on, it is a great time to edit.
David Perell:
One of the things that I feel when I write is I’ll get to the editing. There’s times, not always, but there’s times where it just feels like kind of a drag.
I find especially the early stages of the editing, once you’ve gotten stuff on paper, but the structure isn’t working or the flow isn’t working, like there’s some big moles in the piece, for lack of a better word, I get a little frustrated. And one of the things that I noticed as I was prepping for this is you seem to have just developed a capital L love for editing. You seem to just love it.
Susan Orlean:
I do. In fact, sometimes I think maybe I missed my calling. Maybe I should have been an editor.
It is very satisfying to take something, say you wrote it on Monday, and you think, oh, my God, I nailed it. This is fantastic. Tuesday, you come back and read it and think, yeah, it’s pretty good. But I think it could be better and tweaking. And it’s such a good feeling to see something just dialing it up a little more and hitting just a little bit of a higher level of polish.
David Perell:
I think it was Enzo Ferrari. He was once asked, how did you make such a good car? And he said, I just looked at everything in a normal car, and I just made it better and better and better and better. And the reason I made a great car is I just did that for every single part of the car.
It might have been him, might have been somebody else, but it really hit me. And the difference between you and me is you seem to really love that process. I love the results of the process, but the actual process, I’m not a patient person. And patience is core to that.
Susan Orlean:
It is. It can feel like drudgery.
David Perell:
Laborious.
Susan Orlean:
Yeah. But I’ve gotten to that. I really enjoy it.
I love catching stuff and thinking, I’m so glad that I can take this out, because now I see it and I don’t like it, or it’s redundant, or there’s something wrong. I’m so pleased to think I’m making it better, that I don’t mind the tedium. For instance, with Joyride, my memoir, I don’t know how many times I read the entire book, and each time I kept feeling like, I can turn the dial a little higher, I can get it a little better, whether it was noticing my bad habits. And that’s not always that easy to do on the first or second or third read, but on the fourth read.
David Perell:
Like your bad habits as a writer.
Susan Orlean:
Yes.
David Perell:
Got it.
Susan Orlean:
Yeah. What are your...
David Perell:
Bad habits as a writer?
Susan Orlean:
I’ll give you an example, which is a very common bad habit. I think many of us do, and I don’t know why, but instead of saying, “I went to the store,” we very often will say, “I would go to the store and buy candy.”
And it’s a way of referring to the past. Is that the subjunctive? I’m not going to get my grammatical terms right.
David Perell:
I’m so bad at it, so even if you get it wrong, I’m just going to nod my head and pretend you nailed it.
Susan Orlean:
Pretend it’s right. It’s a habit that’s very common. I see it now all the time when I’m reading.
It was an editor at the New Yorker who one day pointed it out to me and said it’s much more powerful to not use the word “would,” but just say, “I went to the store.”
Now, there are times when you specifically want to use the word “would” because of the tone and the fact that you’re referring to something in the deep past. There are times, but we often use it when we don’t mean it that way. It’s like a placeholder or something. It’s just a habit that I certainly have, and I see it all the time.
Maybe it’s a little passive. Instead of saying, “I told my mother I was leaving home,” you say, “I would tell my mom I was leaving home.” It’s sort of passive in a way, and when you remove it, it’s really striking.
You realize that very often you write a much stronger sentence without it. So that’s what I mean when I say bad habits. I think it’s easy to develop these little grammatical crutches, ways of writing, using too many adjectives, all of those things that are very easy to do.
But if you edit yourself ruthlessly, you can pluck those things out and have a much better piece of writing.
David Perell:
What’s the problem with using too many adjectives?
Susan Orlean:
I think description is very important, and each description you use should be a real punch, a really strong punch of visual imagery.
Something so vivid, something so strong. So if you use too many and they get sort of mushy, it’s just not as potent as if you pick one really strong image and hit it hard.
David Perell:
Yeah.
Susan Orlean:
This isn’t to say there’s a meter running that, oh, you’ve used too many adjectives. Rather than stringing a million adjectives together, for instance, in the instance of describing John Laroche from the section I.
David Perell:
Just read, “Tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale eyed, slouch shouldered, sharply handsome.”
Susan Orlean:
Look, I’m contradicting myself. That’s a lot of adjectives or phrases that are adjective-like, but they are clean and mean.
David Perell:
Yeah.
Susan Orlean:
Each one describes one specific quality of his physical presence.
David Perell:
Yeah. When I’ve done so much public speaking throughout my life, one of the principles that I developed over the years was what I call the “pick one” principle. This had to do not with adjectives, with examples.
Sometimes I’d be trying to make a point and I’d be like, “There’s this, this, this, this, this.” It’d be like six points. People were like, “Dude, this is way too much.”
Over the years, I’ve gotten more and more confident, developed conviction in the idea of just find one really good example and just make the point vividly. Just boom, punch them in the face. Then they can remember that. You can speak way slower during that point and then just move on to the next thing.
Susan Orlean:
It’s interesting because rather than diluting your own language, you’re choosing to consolidate all the power of what you’re writing or saying into one really strong, vivid takeaway for the reader or the listener.
It’s true that people can only absorb a certain amount, so flooding them with description often has the effect of canceling it all out. Ultimately, I like the idea always that a reader is listening sort of passively, and then you really hit them with something very strong where they’re going to go, “Whoa!” Then they’re listening again, and they’re comfortable, and then again it’s like, “Wow, that really got me!” It’s hard to do that if you’re like, “Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.” It’s just too much.
David Perell:
You were talking earlier about learning how to choose topics and picking books, and I feel like we didn’t get to the end of that point.
Susan Orlean:
How to choose a book subject?
David Perell:
Yeah. Like, what have you learned about choosing a frame, choosing a topic? What book are you going to write about? What’s too much width versus not enough width in a topic?
Susan Orlean:
I’m not sure that you can be absolutely prescriptive. Certainly, if I think about my books, one could make a strong argument that none of them made sense as books, and I’m okay with that.
The single most essential piece of this is, are you in love with the subject? Are you deeply, intensely, genuinely curious? There’s nothing that can replace that. That’s really at the heart of it.
Secondly, I think you have to see the subject as being three dimensional. It’s one thing to say, well, the story starts here and ends here. That’s okay, but a book really needs more dimension. It has to resonate.
I mean, to sustain someone’s interest for 300 pages is a pretty significant undertaking. So the story has to really have this dimensionality and depth. Width is one thing, but really it’s the depth. How many layers down does this go? How complex is the subject?
It was very funny the other night. I was giving a talk, and this woman raised her hand when I was taking questions. She said, “I really liked the library book. I really like the Orchid Thief. Why on earth did you write a book about Rin Tin Tin?” It was sort of challenging.
I said, “What’s your knowledge of Rin Tin Tin?” She said, “Well, it’s just a TV show from the ‘50s.” I said, “Well, that’s what I thought, too.” Then I discovered that Rin Tin Tin was a puppy of German war dogs found on a battlefield in World War I, who was brought to the United States by an American GI who fantasized about getting him into movies.
He became the largest silent film star of that era. In fact, the only reason Warner Brothers exists today was that Rin Tin Tin made them so much money in the 1920s as a silent film star and spawned an entire generation of German shepherds starring in silent films. There were something like 60 different German shepherd dog stars in the ‘20s.
Then talkies came along, and Rin Tin Tin went on the vaudeville circuit. He was on the vaudeville circuit through the United States, and then he became a television star in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Of course, the show was one of the high-rated shows of that era.
At this point, I thought, I’m really getting this woman to being able to say to her, “Yeah, I know it seems like a nothing subject, but in fact, it was this incredibly rich, fascinating story that became so many levels. In a sense, it sort of traced the entire development of modern Hollywood.”
It also traced this very interesting story of the German shepherd breed and its various ups and downs in this culture. It was a lot about World War I and how the Germans used millions of animals in the war and what that was all about. I think I convinced her, but it made perfect sense to me that someone having not read the book would think what a funny subject for a book, a TV show.
David Perell:
Yeah, you’re talking about dimensionality. And I got the image of just a prism that can—this topic that you’re about to explore—can it be a good prism to talk about a lot of different things? You talk about World War I, German shepherds, TV, Hollywood, whatever it is. And Rin Tin Tin was that prism.
Susan Orlean:
Exactly. In fact, I like the use of that word, prism, because it is something that ideally you can take it and turn it in many different directions and go, “Oh, I’m now seeing it from this direction. Oh, now I see it from this direction.” And yet, they’re all part of the same story.
David Perell:
Yeah.
Susan Orlean:
To me, that’s how a book really holds you in its thrall. It has that richness. Some books are very much a narrative. They are the story of Amelia Earhart’s last flight. They have a very specific focus.
But even then, a good book will be deeper than that. It will give you that context, that opportunity to look at it from a few different directions. Otherwise, it can be a fantastic magazine piece that’s 10,000 words long. But a book is 100,000 words long or more, and that’s a lot of Amelia Earhart.
Similarly, it’s a lot of Rin Tin Tin. I almost felt like I didn’t have enough room because there was so much there.
David Perell:
As you go about writing a book, which sometimes takes you six to eight years, how do you keep yourself disciplined through that time?
I know you love order and structure and are very intentional about this. So what do you do on a day-to-day basis? What would day number 734 be?
Susan Orlean:
The first phase is the research and the reporting. Those days look like me with a phone, me traveling, me at the library, me digging through archives. I don’t have a metric for measuring 9 to 5. Rather it’s task-based.
I really need to read the material on how arsons are investigated for the library book. I’ve got to go interview the head of the arson unit of the LA Fire Department. So that’s on my agenda for today.
Those days look really different. And I haven’t written a word, with no intention of writing.
David Perell:
You do all the research before you even start the writing, huh?
Susan Orlean:
It feels very natural to me to work that way. I can’t write yet because I don’t know what I’m writing about. So those days in the early phase, I’ll look at my computer now and again and think, “Oh my God, I haven’t written a word.” But I know that I’m in the learning phase.
David Perell:
How long is that first phase?
Susan Orlean:
It really depends. It can be a couple of years.
I know, but there’s just a lot to learn. Certainly, with the library book, it was probably three or four years of research. There’s just so much to learn.
I’m not the world’s fastest researcher, but I’m not slow. It was just there’s a lot to learn. I mean, just learning about how arson is investigated probably took six or eight weeks, and that’s just answering one question: interviewing arson investigators, reading about arson. I feel like when you read the book, you’re not going to go, “Boy, I bet that was eight weeks of research.” But I need to really understand the subject before I can write that portion of it.
The tip of the iceberg is because I’ve done all of the underlying research.
Then there’s a phase where it’s all about thinking, and that doesn’t look productive. But once you’ve gathered all this material, which is quite overwhelming, you need to process it. What did I learn? What does it all amount to?
What that will look like in terms of what I’m actually doing day-to-day is, in many cases, it’s typing up all my notes. It’s transferring the notes onto the index cards. It’s moving my index cards around, starting to think, “What’s the structure here?” Again, no words on the page.
But also in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, “Where do I start? What’s my lead? What’s the tone here?” I think we underestimate the amount of time we need to digest. I mean, it’s hard to go from reporting to, boom, sit down and write. You really need that time to go, “What did it mean? Why did I do this? What really did I learn?”
Finally, phase three, writing.
With writing, the lead will take its own time, but then I have a very mechanical approach, which is I have a daily word quota. I try to hit that word quota every day, five days a week.
David Perell:
Five.
Susan Orlean:
Yeah, five. And if I’m really running behind, I’ll do six. But I feel like you do need to live your life a little bit.
I look at it as a task. My task today is to tell you a thousand words of this story. I don’t think of that as being in any way demystifying of the artistic process. I think it’s very helpful and comforting to feel there are certain parameters. It’s very intense to have a book that you’re writing. And if you sit down every day feeling defeated because you know you won’t finish the book that day, it doesn’t help you.
On the other hand, if you can say, “I’m trying to write a thousand words today, and if I write a thousand words, then I did it. I accomplished it.” It’s just a relief to think, “Okay, I’m going to do this in a methodical way, and within that methodology, I can be as creative as I possibly can.” But there is a certain logical process that’s underway.
David Perell:
How do you think that structure informs the quality of your work? Even more, do you feel like there are certain trade-offs that you make by being so disciplined and rigorous?
I’ll throw something out there as an example. Take the craziness of Kerouac’s work, you know, “burn, burn, burn,” like a fabulous Roman candle. It’s so passionate and over the top. You can just feel the energy, the vibe. He wrote that really fast. His legend has that big scroll and whatever. It’s delightfully sloppy at certain points, but in a way that’s very passionate and heart-centric.
So, do you think that with that structure, it’d be harder to get to a place? Do you feel like there are trade-offs that you make with structure in terms of how that informs what you can and can’t do in your writing?
Susan Orlean:
I think that’s fair to wonder. I’ve never felt it. I feel like it’s very liberating to have a daily deadline. I feel like I can write the best thousand words I can possibly write.
At the end of the day, it’s okay for me to take a deep breath and walk away from the computer. Am I temperamentally similar to Jack Kerouac? Probably not. I mean, I’m not.
David Perell:
After spending about an hour with you so far, I would say probably not.
Susan Orlean:
Yeah. At the same time, I am not a super fill-in-the-color-by-number person, but it was immensely liberating to give myself these deadlines. It’s weird.
Instead of looking at the void and feeling like this is overwhelming, and to be honest with you, my response to feeling overwhelmed is to think, “I’m going to go organize my knife drawer. I’m going to go do laundry. I’m going to go for a walk.” It’s too much. I can’t begin to begin.
Instead, it’s just, “Oh, I’ve got a thousand words to write.”
I feel like you should write how you find works for you, whatever rhythm works for you. So, again, I try not to say, “This is what works.”
It’s funny, though, because the person who introduced me to the idea of a daily quota was my New Yorker editor. In the beginning, when I was writing my first book, I just felt like I don’t know how to do this. I’ve never written something this long. I just don’t know how to do it. And his approach was to take all the mystery out of it, turn it into something very practical, and you can tackle and manage it instead of feeling like I’m just overwhelmed. I don’t even know where to begin. Alright, well, maybe I won’t begin. Maybe I’ll go screw off.
Yet, it does not feel to me that it removes the poetry from the process. It enhances my ability to feel relaxed and to sit there and work on a sentence and play with that sentence and get it really right.
David Perell:
Yeah, I was amazed. I learned that Eminem worked from 9:00 to 5:00 every day or some sort of very standard hours. One of the greatest lyricists of all time, when it was the end of the day, clock hit 5:00. All right.
Susan Orlean:
It’s like giving someone a budget. For some people that feels very restrictive and suffocating. I think for a lot of people it’s oddly liberating to think, “Okay, I’ve got 100 bucks. Now I get to pick how I want to spend it.”
Instead of just, “I’m spending and spending and spending and did I spend too much? Did I spend too little?” I think you would find perhaps more people than you think have a very regimented, yes, particularly because it keeps you from staring into the void. And I think that’s where it’s got this enormous comfort. It gives you a manageable goal.
You know, they always say you should have a goal that you train for, that you know you’re going to make, and then have a goal that you can really reach that little extra. It made all the difference in the world. I’m not sure that I would have been able to train for a marathon if I didn’t have that system of thinking. “Okay, like, I’m not going to run the pace of a Kenyan superstar, but I can have a goal for me and then I can try to get a little beyond that, what makes sense for me.” The weird thing is I ended up running it almost exactly to the time that I trained for.
David Perell:
Hmm.
Susan Orlean:
Which I thought was really interesting. It has more to do with running than writing, but it’s interesting how if you say to yourself, “I’m going to write a thousand words a day,” that you may actually find that you’re writing a thousand words a day.
David Perell:
I mean, running is so psychological. We know this. Look at the four minute mile.
I mean, what was it? Bannister did it, and then all of a sudden, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It’s crazy.
Also, if you look at marathon times, there is a huge spike in the number of people who finish a marathon right before the top of the hour. So like right before hour three, right before hour four. If you look at the numbers, it’s not like a linear increase at all.
Susan Orlean:
I mean, it’s mind over matter. I talk about running the marathon in the book because I think it is not an accident. They are very similar. You can’t really look at the finish line or you’ll get freaked out.
Before I ran the New York City Marathon, someone said to me, “Do you want to drive the route?” And I said, “Absolutely no way. Are you kidding? 100%, I do not want to do that. I don’t want to look and be suddenly thinking, I’m going to run something that takes like a half hour to drive.”
David Perell:
But probably more than that, by the way. Probably more than half an hour with.
Susan Orlean:
New York City traffic.
David Perell:
Probably longer than the actual marathon with traffic.
Susan Orlean:
Actually, with traffic and all those bridges. Yeah, for sure.
But at the same time, I thought, I know the pace that I can run comfortably, and if I do that for a mile, and then I do it for the next mile, and then I do it for the next mile, lo and behold, I’m going to be at the end.
David Perell:
Talk to me about memory and permanence, like in the context of libraries.
Susan Orlean:
It was very much the underlying theme of the library book. As I mentioned, the largest library fire in American history: 400,000 books burned, 700,000 books damaged. What does that mean?
The awareness that really came to light for me was the way books are our system of making permanent memory. And memory, by definition, can’t be permanent. We all pass away, and our internal thoughts and memories go with us.
But books are this perfect vehicle for preserving the output of what’s in our minds, whether it’s technical knowledge, some fictional creation of our minds, whatever it is, books represent that. So the destruction of a library hits us really hard.
Even if in this era, books are more replaceable than they were in the time of the Library of Alexandria, where those books, we’ll never know what we lost, because books tended to exist in one copy, and that’s it. So a library burned. You’ll never know what got lost.
In our current era, books are created in multiple copies. It’s not as immediate of instant, pure, absolute loss. Although, in the case of most libraries, they have collections that have been built over decades. And so those books aren’t necessarily replaceable.
What’s more important and what really resonated for me through the writing of the book was that libraries have an outsized emotional presence that has to do with them keeping safe this collection of our shared knowledge and storytelling. So they have a way of being immortal more than any individual can be.
David Perell:
What do you make of the kind of decline of libraries in so many cities?
One of the things that is really cool about New York is the New York Public Library at Bryant Park on 42nd Street, and then also the Jefferson Market Library down kind of in Greenwich Village. They’re so beautiful, and people go work there. There’s this sense of gravitas of what a library is.
You walk in, you want to kind of take off your hat, kind of make sure your tie is in a good spot, because it almost feels like a sacred place. It has kind of the undertones of stepping into a cathedral or something. But in so many places, the library has just become not that.
Susan Orlean:
I would sort of push back against that. I’m not sure that I agree that they are in decline. I would say libraries are afflicted with all of the woes that cities are afflicted with. They are not immune. And because of their unique openness, I mean, they are one of the few places that anyone can go. It means that everyone who passes through a city is welcome at the library. And that has a lot of complicated friction involved.
But libraries, to their credit, have evolved with the times. The way we consume the written word has changed a lot, but libraries have changed with that. They loan out ebooks, they loan out videos, they loan audiobooks.
David Perell:
Actually, just a tip for people, if you join the public library, you can get ebooks and take them out whenever you want and save so much money that you don’t have to spend on Kindle books.
Susan Orlean:
Right.
David Perell:
I didn’t know this for years.
Susan Orlean:
Yeah. The only thing is you might be on a waiting list. The book is popular because the library buys X number of ebooks, X number of audiobooks, and so they don’t just give them out endlessly. They have a very specific relationship with publishers controlling that.
But if you’re willing to get on a list for a popular book, you can borrow it from the library. If you don’t have a computer, you can borrow one from the library. They have become these public portals to information.
And libraries just have evolved with each change in the culture admirably. They aren’t a bunch of old people running them, saying, we won’t change. We were going to do things the way we’ve.
David Perell:
Some stodgy.
Susan Orlean:
Yeah. Many libraries that I’ve encountered in the LA system, as a perfect example, have young, really dynamic people running them who look at the future, who look as books having many different forms. They’re not just saying it’s either the Shakespeare Folio or it’s nothing.
I mean, they see them as kind of community centers for knowledge, however that may be conveyed to the public. So I see them absolutely as still really vital and healthy.
David Perell:
Wow, that was so fun. It was great to meet you.
Susan Orlean:
Thank you. This was awesome.
