David Grand, one of the best storytellers alive today and an absolute master at narrative nonfiction.
You might know him from Killers of the Flower Moon, which Martin Scorsese turned into a film.
And then there's The Wager.
I can't think of a single book that more people I know have said that they just read the entire thing from start to finish in one sitting.
So what is it that he does?
To find stories, to research them, to turn them into writing.
That just makes people flip from page to page.
Lush, vivid prose, great descriptions.
How does he do it?
That's what this conversation is all about.
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All right, let's get to the episode.
Well, i want to start with this, because this is crazy.
You said I've linked two new cases to a murderer that were not previously connected, and I've identified a killer who had not been identified before, just through documents, finding files and piecing together a circumstantial case.
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.
Wow.
And what do you think accounts for that?
How could it be that the intelligence agencies aren't finding things?
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.
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 going to 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'm going to do a story about this and then boom, you find something.
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 steering at documents weeks and weeks and weeks and then suddenly you open a folder.
It may not even be properly marked or indexed in the records.
One of the things that was so helpful for me in killers of the flower moon and piecing together evidence was in a folder i had seen somebody just somebody had cleaned out their office, probably back in the 30s or the 40s, 1930s or 40s, and just dropped in the secret grand jury testimony.
That evidence should not have been in a public archive but it was just sitting there unmarked, kind of scattered, And it was hugely helpful to me in piecing together some of these cases that were never properly charged.
And you must just have crazy patience, huh?
I feel like I could never do that.
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's 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.
And it's about the size of an airport hangar.
And you could fit in a few airplanes in there um, and you would pull these boxes uh, you get in there early in the morning and out would wheel these bucks but you could spend, you know, you could spend a lifetime going through those boxes.
So if i was like man killers of the flower moon, the wager, such a such a good book like how much of that being a great book comes down to research, like dude, i just did the work to find the information, to dig up, uncover the story, versus like i sat down at my keyboard and i just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote.
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't, then kind of convey them in words and create scenes around them.
But you could not do it without the first set.
So the first is, it's 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 3000 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.
Whoa.
So what is that outline like?
Oh, it's just massive.
So, you know, for example, let's say you're meeting someone.
So you know, 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 in 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?
You know, the different perspectives, every little fragment.
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 you know, we're sitting here looking at each other.
So we've seen it, right?
So we see it.
I know what you look like.
I know your sweater.
Incredibly good looking.
Yeah, so right, exactly.
But what if I, you know, I know what the color of the rug is.
But for most of the stuff I write about, especially when I'm doing historical work, I wasn't there.
Some of this stuff took place 300 years ago.
So who described it?
Where can I find that?
I have come across stories to answer your question kind of in almost in a more kind of crisp way.
I've come across some wonderful stories I would like to tell, but then I do some research and I can't find any records to tell it.
And those are stories that unfortunately can never be told.
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.
Sure.
And you're kind of scanning, you're browsing and talk to me about what, Or the conditions that you need to be like.
Yes, I'm going to do this story.
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, if you, you know... it is not a passive process.
So after using a few weeks of that going, okay.
And, and then you get terrified.
You're like, okay, I'll never find another idea.
I'll never find another project.
You start to kind of frantically look around and, and you do various things to do that.
I call random people.
I call people.
I may have read a newspaper story where I saw somebody did a, had a profession or was a scientist, had a breakthrough.
I said, Oh, that's really interesting.
I'll randomly see if I could track down that person and call them to pick their brain.
And, Sometimes they're like, you know, I'm trying to save humanity right now.
I have no time for your little book, your intrusion.
Who the hell are you?
And then everyone's like, oh, that sounds like so much fun.
Let's chat.
And you have these random conversations and maybe something will come out of that.
Or you start looking at books or subject matters that interest you.
Maybe you look at footnotes.
So, for example, The Wager, my most recent book.
I was sitting around and I was thinking, oh well, what would be interesting.
I thought, well, a subject that's always interested me was mutinies.
I was like, mutinies are just a very interesting form of rebellion.
And so I started reading books about mutinies and going online and searching.
And suddenly I ended up in a British archive that had online a digital scan of a journal from the 18th century.
It was written by John Byron, who had been a 16-year-old midshipman on the wager.
I had never heard of him.
I started reading this little booklet.
It was written in very old English.
So it had the S's were F's.
And at first I was like, oh, what is this?
It's 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 kind of the flicker.
That was the inspiration that That first got its hooks into me.
But that's really only the first step.
I always say that there are kind of three steps to trying to find what your project is.
The first is something to pique your curiosity.
So get under your skin.
Are you curious about it?
The second is we talked a little bit about it.
Is there underlying research?
Can you tell the story?
So I thought, well, this is an interesting story of survival.
These seamen who went around these storms and battled scurvy and then they end up shipwrecked and they die.
They descend into this real life Florida the flies.
Well, that's a crazy story.
But could you tell it?
And then lo and behold, I started to find in these archives all these journals and logbooks.
You could go to England and you could pull out these logbooks from the 18th century and they would come out in boxes and dust would just come off them and you would heal them.
And your shirt would literally be stained purple by the time you were done, because all the disintegrating binders
And so I thought, whoa, okay.
Okay, there's a lot here.
But the third thing is what is it about ultimately?
Or deeper themes, deeper?
Is it about something more so?
This had an unbelievable saga that would hold you in its grip.
But what is it about?
Why should?
Why, in the 21st century, in 2025 today, would we care about this story from the 1740s?
And the more i did research, i began to realize that when the survivors of the shipwreck were brought back to england, they were suddenly summoned to face a court-martial for their alleged crimes on the island, And if they didn't tell a convincing tale, they were going to get hanged.
And I always thought of this great line from the writer Joan Didion.
You know, we all tell ourselves stories in order to survive.
And I thought, oh my God.
Well, they quite literally have to tell a convincing tale, because if they don't, They're going to get hanged after everything they've been through.
And so they start having this incredible war over the truth.
They're each battling each other.
They're each shaping their stories, editing their stories, manipulating their stories.
And then ultimately the empire comes in and says, you know, do we like any of these stories?
And they begin to tell their own story.
And so I thought, you know what?
We're living through our times of post-truth and battles over truth.
And I thought, God, this story kind of feels like a parable.
Yeah.
Have you ever found a story that you felt like there was tension, there was suspense, there was drama, that didn't have these deeper themes?
Oh, that's a good question.
Yes, in a sense.
I'll say, like, I was sometimes drawn to crime stories.
And they kind of, they could be very... you know, intricate and maybe a bit salacious.
And they do tell you something about the human condition, but ultimately they would just feel they were like kind of these stories I like to read.
You know, they may be the cover of the New York Post.
You know, they got these great headlines and you read it.
But in the end, they're kind of gothic crime stories.
And so I learned to kind of separate those stories.
These stories, I do like reading them.
I do, I like reading them.
But would I want to spend years reading, researching and telling?
Do they have enough?
That reveals something is about us other than maybe the, the wackiness of the human condition.
You know, I have this image of.
I have two images in my head.
The first is like there's that scene in 21 where Bradley Cooper's looking kind of at all the numbers and whatnot, as he's thinking about counting cards.
And I'm just imagining you in this room with all your notes all over the place, like a freaking crazy madman, you know, trying to piece together the narrative.
And I also have this image of you like walking through the woods or something, or a desert, I don't know, maybe like you're in lost and you're trying to figure out where you're going and what's the story of that aunt.
Or like that woman who you met, who had the, who had the file like up in the attic or whatever, and you just find these things.
You're like, oh my goodness, how did I find that?
But always kind of following your nose and moving towards some clue without ever being sure that there actually is something right there.
You don't know.
I mean, and life is a mystery.
And often the people I write about have a certain mystery, because when you tell other people's stories you know in hindsight you know what happened right.
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 of the 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?
They just don't know.
What is this disease?
I don't even know what's causing this disease.
Oh, yeah.
So they live with that.
And I do think there is a kinship when you embark on a story.
That there is an element of mystery.
You don't know what you're going to find.
You don't know if your journey is going to end in disaster both.
Maybe your research and maybe your book will be a disaster.
I mean you.
There's an element of fear and risk and even a little terror when you, when you embark on these projects because you don't know that didn't denouement, you really don't.
You don't know what will come out of it.
And you know sometimes, when you're two and a half years in a project, you do feel like you're in lost.
You're like am i ever going to get off this island?
Yeah, in what way do you value sense of place?
So i know, with the wager you went down to wager island.
Yeah patagonia, chile.
So tell me about that trip and writing the sense of place.
Yeah, so it's interesting.
Um, 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.
I didn't even... How would you even get there?
I mean, there's not like the running ferries to Wager Island.
They're like, you know, I'm not from Chile.
I wouldn't even know who to hire.
So it just didn't even enter my consciousness.
I just was...
In the archives, looking at documents.
And then, about two years in, you just start to say, oh for gosh, what do I?
How do I?
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?
You know, are they, you know, they keep saying how cold they are.
There's no food.
You know, they're back in, you know, they kind of, you know.
Is it that bad?
Is it really that bad?
Is it that bad?
No, you're right.
No, you do.
You know, people like to tell dramatic stories.
They like to be the hero of their own story.
So I thought, well, and so that's when I, you know, 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 which we'd be going in and in the photograph it looked solid.
Look, you know, i was like this looks like a good vessel to take me, of course.
Then when i got there, it was a fairly small.
I can't remember how big it was, but it was not big um, maybe 30 some feet, i can't remember exactly, but it was top heavy and was heated by a wood stove.
I decided to go in wintertime because that's when the castaways had become shipwrecked.
So i thought i have to understand that period of winter.
It was so stormy that for five i think it was five days we could not depart.
We just stayed on the little boat waiting in the harbor.
The coast guard had blocked it off.
They said no vessels are allowed to help, which i didn't know they did.
But they said you can't leave because it's that rough, it's that stormy out there.
And then eventually we got the clearance and we slipped out And initially we kind of went in these channels along the coast of Patagonia, shielded from the ocean.
It felt pretty good, pretty safe.
My confidence was growing.
We would stop on these little islets.
And the captain and one of the crewmen would go off and they would chop down wood for the stove to keep the vessel warm.
They would take a little hose and run it off the boat into these islands, these little islands, into the glacial streams, to get water for the vessel.
I will say it was the coldest shower I had ever, ever taken.
I mean, it was so cold that I think I might have only taken one shower.
It was just freezing.
And then, after about a week of this, the captain says you know, if we're going to get to Wager Island, which is situated in a gulf known as the Gulf of Sorrow or, as some translate it, as the Gulf of Pain, we're going to now have to go out into the ocean.
And that's when I got my first glimpse of those seas.
And I will say what's also interesting about this journey is I don't write about any of it in the book, but it all informed it.
And so I got my first glimpse of these seas.
We weren't even in some huge storm, but the seas were pretty enormous um windy, we just had.
I just sat on the deck of this vessel.
Uh, you could not stand.
If you stand you would you know you might break something, you will get thrown.
Things were getting tossed all about i.
I literally was sitting there in a bilge pump just goes flying past my head like okay, just sit down.
I had taken every.
I'm used to the sea, but i took everything, Everything to ward off seasickness.
I mean, I was basically half drunk on dramamine.
I had the thing on the wrist, I had the whatever the drugs you put up behind your ears and just kind of stay there.
And the funny part that always, always amuses me is that I I Didn't know how to pass the time and I just kept looking out the portal and I think I'm gonna throw up.
So what am I gonna do?
And I had on my iPhone with me an audible of Moby Dick and Oh wow.
So I put into my earphones just to listen there.
I'm sitting like this listening to Moby Dick on the floor because again I'm on the deck just sitting there like this bracing myself.
And it's like you're in a tin can.
You're just going like this.
And I'm thinking, God, this is the greatest.
I think this is the greatest American novel I've ever read.
This is just incredible.
The worst novel ever.
The worst novel to listen to.
I was going to say.
You're listening to Ahab lead these poor people on his motto of maniac obsession.
But our captain was skilled.
He was an Ahabian, and he did manage to get us to the island.
Well, so last year I went to Patagonia, and I was looking up where Wager Island was.
It's a little bit north of Torre del Paine.
Okay.
It's decently up the coast.
It's like right at the top of Patagonia.
And we did a trip basically to the Cape.
Yeah.
And it was the same sort of thing.
We, you know, we're in a little bit of bigger ship, but we were going through all the inlets.
Yeah.
You know, you'd read about the school.
Oh yeah.
You know, the sailors would go down, the ships would crash, super dangerous.
And the first few days we'd go through the little inlets.
I'm like, what are you talking about?
Like calm waters.
I go water skiing on these, on this glass.
And then there was like our third or fourth day.
And they said, tonight we're going to go out into the Pacific.
So it might get a little topsy-turvy.
But they're like, it's good weather tonight.
So we can do it.
And we finished dinner.
And I go to sleep.
And then at around 2 or 3 in the morning I woke up because the ship was just boom boom boom, boom.
And I woke up.
I was like, oh, my goodness.
This is what we read about in school.
I'm going to go outside.
So I get my stuff and I start walking around the boat and everything has fallen over.
And it is pitch black, middle of the night, deep, dense fog.
You're not even close to seeing the stars.
And I go outside.
I open the door and I go, nope.
And I close it immediately.
I'm like, if I go outside, I will die.
Yeah.
So what do I do?
I go up to the third or fourth deck of, you know, it's a small cruise basically.
Yeah.
And I was on the third or fourth floor, probably 50 feet up.
And every 20 to 30 seconds, the waves were so intense that the water would splash the window.
And I'm telling you, in that moment, I understood why people revere someone like Sir Francis Drake.
Like the kind of courage, the audacity in order to go sail like that.
I just had no idea.
And I had that visceral sense of it.
And from that I'm like Yes, that's why you would go down, because there's no way that you can pick up on that by reading about it.
The terror, the fear.
You have to feel it.
You have to see it.
And it just helps you get closer to the people you write about to understand them.
And you.
What's amazing is like in my own experience, I'm only glimpsing a fraction of the level of storm and sea experience 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.
I mean, the ships were breaking apart.
But it allows you to have that kind of Emotional connection, for lack of a better word.
And then eventually we did get to the island and we anchored off it and then we took a little zodiac and we went on the island.
And even just a small detail, we've talked a lot about research.
So in their journals, they kept saying, it's cold, it's cold.
Now, when I was sitting in New York, I just put it into my computer.
What is the temperature in that part of Patagonia in wintertime?
Yeah, I said about 32.
And I said, well, okay, that's cold, but it's not Antarctica.
But then when I got there I was like oh no, it's really cold, because it was blowing about 25 to 30 miles per hour off the ocean every day, just hitting the island.
It's also always raining or sleeting.
And so it suddenly occurred to me, the smallest thing was like, oh, They all had hypothermia.
That had not even occurred to me.
For two years I was doing the research, they wouldn't have known the term hypothermia.
I was like, oh, and then you have, well, how would hypothermia affect their decision-making?
So you know, you're just getting these 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 got to be something, there's got to be a walmart or at least a whole food.
Yeah, you got to get something there.
And you get there like, there really are no animals.
There's some birds that fly around but, and they had some clams, they exhausted, but that was it.
There was some celery which they had eaten, which helped cure their scurvy, which i tasted, but that was really it.
And you know, you talked about understanding the seas when you would climb the ship.
And you know there's a.
There was a great line from a, a British officer who had described the island as a place where the soul of man dies in him.
And when I stood on that island I said okay, I understand why the soul of a man would die in him sitting here, trapped on this island.
And then there was, you know, we talk about revelation, right?
Revelation is the surprise, the kind of unexpected.
And so when we were on that island, the captain at one point said to us, pointed to a stream and he said you know, take a look over here.
And in that water was this timber.
And they were about five or seven yards long, these thick pieces of timber.
They didn't have nails.
There was no metal in them.
But you could see they were held together, these kind of round wooden pegs called tree nails.
And they are the remnants of an 18th century ship believed to be from His Majesty's ship, the Wager.
And that was all that remained.
I mean I just kept staring at that wood because after all that ferocious struggle, because on that island there had been coup and counter-coup and cannibalism and a murder and more than one murder.
And yet that was all that remained from that ferocious struggle.
The biggest lie that writers will tell themselves is, ah, I'll remember that later.
No, I mean, there's so many times when I'm listening to a podcast that want to save something and I just never end up saving it, because typing it into the phone is just too much work, you know.
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All right, let's get to the interview.
You know, we've been talking a lot about place.
Yeah.
Talking about people because people are so core to these stories.
And you were talking about a little bit earlier with the descriptions of people.
And as you think about piecing together characters and even more specifically describing them, turning them into not two-dimensional people but three-dimensional ones.
I mean, can actually, you know, Captain Byron.
Like, how do we really understand this guy?
How do you think about doing that?
So...
It does begin with underlying material, any documents, any letter.
Journalism or nonfiction or history, you are an external observer.
It's different than a film.
I've had films made on my stories.
It's different.
That you are internal.
The camera may be outside, but you have actors playing these people, animating them, playing them inside them.
As a nonfiction writer, you can't do that.
I mean, unless you described a wink or a tear, you don't know that happened to them.
So you're trying to get as close to their consciousness as possible.
In writing.
In writing.
And you do that through finding every scrap, every letter, every piece of writing, every observation.
What house did they grow up in?
What did that house look like?
Okay, maybe did the relatives write anything about them?
Who were their ancestors?
Where did they come from?
What was their lineage?
What was their class?
You are trying as best you can to understand them.
And let's say they're in a profession.
And how did other people describe that profession?
So you're trying to learn everything you can.
Possibly can to bring them to life.
And I always say that the job is not to romanticize the people you write about or to do hagiography, to make people seem better than they are, to gloss over their foibles or their sins.
And you're also trying not to exculpate them.
You write about some really bad people and you are not there to absolve them.
But your job is to understand them and to show them as real. fully rendered as you can.
And you feel a certain moral responsibility to write about them, even if it's 300 years later than they lived.
And you know, they will never see a single word you write about them.
Yeah.
How do you think about if you have 10000 descriptions of somebody, 10000 words?
How do you think about the ones that you choose?
You know, I was prepping for this and I was thinking about what is the difference between realism and impressionistic and I was like I don't I wonder how JK Rowling describes Hagrid and so I went and I pulled it up this is how it begins a giant of a man was standing in the doorway his face was almost completely hidden by a long shaggy mane of hair and a wild tangled beard but you could make out his eyes glinting like black beetles under all the hair and I was like, okay, that's a pretty good description.
And we're not getting the whole description of Hagrid, but man, you can see what's going on.
There's selective description.
Yes.
And, you know, it's funny.
You are always looking for the quote or the phrase that cuts to some essence.
You know, it's not so different from when you're in a conversation with somebody and someone says something really interesting.
You may have been talking at a dinner party.
And much of it will just kind of fade away, but you'll remember a couple little bits.
And when you're doing research, it's not dissimilar.
And you're also like, for example, whether it be a physical description, but I'm also even interested in the way people talk.
So what is their diction?
Their diction reveals something about them.
It may reveal their level of education, may reveal their mannerism and speed of speech.
Are they of Quick talker.
And so all these little bits that reveal the essence of who they are.
Yeah.
And people wrote about those things?
Well, you can.
So in some cases, it's through a written medium.
So you're looking at how they write.
So, for example, the gunner on the wager who was not from the upper class, so he knew he could never be a captain.
But he was very literate.
And he has the best account of what happened in terms of the level of detail and depth.
And he wrote the way his character is.
He did not write the way most people wrote in the 18th century, because most of the people wrote were all from the upper class aristocracy.
And it tended to be a very Baroque kind of style, very ornate.
And in a way, it really doesn't translate very well.
I mean, not a lot of great writing for that period.
He wrote like a bullet.
He wrote like Hemingway.
He wrote the way he was, direct action, no adjectives, no adverbs.
And so you're getting something from him.
Totally.
Yeah.
Earlier you were talking about these strange combination of words, like you were talking about the perfect hurricane.
Yeah.
But I came across this one, arrested while in prison.
Yeah.
Tell me about that.
Yeah.
So that's one of those things we talked a little bit about trying to find a story.
How do you come across one?
And I used to always read the briefs, especially when there were a lot of municipal newspapers.
Unfortunately, there are not as many of them.
And you know they would always have that column where they just do these little summaries of the news.
And I remember I was scanning the briefs in some California newspaper.
I was reading.
They're usually an inch.
They're usually like two sentences.
And I came across a story that was describing the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang.
And it said.
That sounds terrifying.
They were terrifying, and it said several of them had— I do not want to have a beer with those guys.
Yeah, they're probably worse than the seas around Cape Horn.
But in any case it said that several of them had been arrested while in prison and some had been in solitary confinement.
The leaders
And I just thought, arrested while in prison?
That bizarro combination of words, a little bit like the details we talk about that you might hear in speech or something.
I just thought, arrested in prison, arrested like who gets arrested while they're already in prison and then i started just feels like antonym, yeah.
And then i just started to ask myself some basic questions, like and then some of them were in solitary confinement, i said so how do you even run a gang, How can you be a gang leader if you're in solitary?
How do you communicate?
What is your tendency?
And so 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.
Let's talk about this.
Do you want to read it?
You can read it or I can read it, whatever.
Yeah, I want to hear you read it.
Okay, sure.
So in May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants such as spider warts 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.
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?
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 that describe they spread over the, over the prairie.
They look almost like confetti.
And then the taller plants come and steal their water and light, and they begin to die off.
And it's in the month of May when one of the first murders takes place in this reign of terror.
And so that is why I began in May and why I wanted to describe this moon.
And I thought it was very important to also anchor you in the Osage tradition, since this is an Osage story.
Yeah, talking about this, the spider warts, the black-eyed susans, the large moon, the tall plants, the coyotes, like you know, if you were to almost circle, all the things that you can see um like, how much do you think about this, as i'm gonna paint a painting versus i'm just gonna i don't know share a few details and make sure that there's a bunch of symbolism, a kind of realism versus impressionism.
What You're looking for some of the most you know the vivid language, especially here, because you are painting a scene.
And, you know, we talked a little bit about arrested while in prison.
There are certain phrases.
And when I was just doing the research, there's a wonderful Osage writer called John Joseph Matthews.
And he really is an unbelievable describer of nature.
And he has a book called Talking Moons, I believe it's called, where he describes these moons.
And there are certain words which were just so beautiful.
So spider words, it's just a word.
But in itself, it's just an evocative word, black-eyed Susans.
I mean, people who name things, sometimes there are wonderful names and descriptors.
And so it's just poetic language, and it's just their names.
But you could have said such as black.
You know, 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.
Yeah.
And also, you know we talk about setting and it brings you into the prairie, you know, brings you into this part of the world, into the Osage tradition and into a setting where this is going to take place.
Yeah.
And for someone like me that's very striking, because You know I'm a New Yorker and you know I had never been to a prairie.
I don't think, I'm pretty sure I'd never been to a prairie.
Not like that.
Certainly never some vast, open.
They are expansive.
Oh, they go forever.
And flat.
Yeah.
And the tall grass, the bluegrass tall grass.
Just, it looks like an ocean when it blows in the wind.
And so you know, for me, part of finding words for language is also trying to find words that Allow me to understand the world I'm writing about.
Yeah, I always think about Robert Carra when he was writing his biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson.
He wanted to go out and he needed to write about the hill country where LBJ was from.
And he said, I need to go move there and actually live there for three years.
And you can feel the time that he spent there and the way that he describes the limestone rock and the
The architecture, the shacks there.
I mean, it was striking because I ended up going to LBJ's ranch a few years ago.
And it was like the least surprising experience ever.
It was like I had been there already.
Yeah.
Well, Caro is a hero.
And it's interesting that you mentioned that, because I had obviously read that book and an LBJ part of the part of his series.
And I remember I had read an interview with him where he had described kind of being out there and camping out in that area.
And when I was working on Killers of the Flower Moon, again, having not spent much time in a prairie, I was writing about a woman, Molly Burkhart, whose family is being kind of systematically killed during this period.
And I read about how, when she was a young girl, she had been forcibly uprooted from her lodge where she had lived on the prairie, and made to go to this boarding school.
And I found the trail that she had taken.
I was told the trail she would have taken.
I was told it was a two-day trip to get there.
She would have gone back then because she would have gone in a wagon with a horse.
And so I decided the trail was now mostly covered up and overgrown and you couldn't drive through it.
But you could drive at least partway into it.
And I spent the night there, where she would have spent the night just camping out in the prairie, so I could just see what the prairie was like at night, what would have been like, what was the sky like, the vastness.
I didn't write any of it.
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.
Just 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 period to go as far as you have been, to go to a boarding school where you could no longer speak the osage language?
Yeah, how do you think about suspense?
Because the way that i discovered your work is my friend sam.
He read, He read the wager and he was like dude.
I just read this in one sitting.
I never do that.
You need to look into this guy's writing like it's just you just can't stop reading.
You can't stop reading.
How do you think about creating that?
I've heard that from so many people about about your writing.
Yeah.
So, I mean, the the dirty little secret is often really simple, which is.
I tell most of my stories chronologically.
I tell them.
You know you may have a prologue that will hook the reader and kind of lay out the suspense that you're going to get.
But let's say you're going on the ship of the wager.
Well, life and a voyage in particular.
There's a reason that so many narrators grew out of these sea tales because it mirrors a plot right.
I mean, you're getting on a ship.
You're going to be heading out into a place you may not know.
You're going to face elements that are going to test your character that you may never I'm thinking a shackle.
Yeah, like a shackle, right?
And it's going to test your character.
It's going to reveal your character.
And you never know how it's going to end.
And so part of it is just telling it in chronological order.
The key is to describe things and see things the way the people you're writing about saw them and experienced them, not with the power of hindsight.
So I, when I'm writing it, I know what's going to happen to all these people, right?
I know what happened.
But when they're living it, they don't.
They're living in suspense.
They might not see their wives and their children.
They don't know anything.
So that's the mindset you want to capture.
I always say if you tell a story with hindsight, you impose that knowledge.
That is an artifice, right?
That is not the way history is lived.
That is not the way we are living this conversation.
We don't know how the conversation will end.
We do not know what will happen later today.
And that is the way people experience history.
You live inside of history.
And so I always try to tell it with that level of suspense that people went through.
Now, many of the stories I'm writing about have inherent suspense and there are things you do structurally.
And you think, and the story, even if you're telling it um uh, you know chronologically, where do you end a chapter?
I mean, there are certain kind of little tools and mechanics that you, you do use and um, you know, i read a lot of suspense fiction.
That probably helps.
Where and how do you end a chapter?
I mean, i just opened up to a random page, page 110, right here, the wager was alone at sea, left to its own destiny.
Yeah Okay, got to go to chapter seven.
Got to go to chapter... Right.
And you're aware of that.
And you kind of have.
When I think of a story, I think of it in kind of There are two dimensions of the suspense.
There's the suspense of where is the whole story going to end, right?
But then also, where are these momentary scenes going to end?
And you want the suspense.
You have this kind of larger... You write to the last sentence.
You know, it's very funny that you say that.
So...
Not always.
For the wager I had from my trip.
A last line in my head after I made my trip that I thought I would end the book on.
And for a couple of 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's very poetic.
And I wrote it when I got to the end.
And then I looked at it and I looked at it and I thought it's poetic, but the sentence preceding it speaks to the larger themes and so i ended up cutting it.
I had to kill.
You know what they always say kill your darling.
About killing a darling, you had to kill your darling, and uh.
So yes, that was one.
And then how do you think about those prologues like bringing people into really?
Yeah, it's important yeah, you want you.
You said you struggle with those a little bit more.
They're very hard.
I find them the hardest because the 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.
Oop, ding, my phone just beeped.
Oop, I hear someone's Spotify music playing.
Oop, there's a new movie out.
Oop, this great podcast I can listen to.
And so you are competing for human beings attention.
And so part of the thing you're trying to do in the prologue is to say okay, come along with me.
You know, come along with me for a journey.
What do you think you're trying to say?
Like, Hey, here's, I'm framing this story.
Here's why it's important.
Here's why it's worth your time.
Like, what are the core questions that a prologue should answer?
Yeah, so i think you want to have some element of uh, usually um, you know, let's say let's talk about the lost city of z.
It was first book i did about explorers who disappeared in the amazon and explore.
With his older son in 1925 looking for this place he called the city of z and um, and then i followed in his footsteps to see what i could learn about what had happened to him and whether this city really existed.
And if it did, How would it transform our understanding of what the Americas look like before the arrival of Columbus?
Well, on my own journey, there was a period when I got lost in the jungle.
So that's going to happen towards the very end of the book.
But I plopped myself down, at least in the prologue, with myself lost but then weaving in the stakes of the story.
What it was about?
To give you a sense.
And so...
You don't know what's going to happen to me.
And I'm sitting here.
So, you know, 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.
You know, 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, OK, I got to know what's going to happen.
But also I'm subtly weaving in the themes and the stakes of this narrative, because what you're asked, what you're doing in the prologue is you're saying
Trust me.
Trust me, be with me.
There's a reason I'm telling this story.
And there are some stakes to it.
There's some suspense to it.
There's some meaning to it.
Hopefully there's some beauty to it.
And you just need to do enough of that to hopefully get them to come along on a much longer journey.
As you think of the prologue versus the main event of the book?
How much do you think about your role as David Graham?
Is it like man?
I love it when my grandpa or my uncle tell 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.
Yeah, it's a really good question.
So I'm a generalist and the subjects I write about are always new.
I don't know much anything about them, usually before I begin, and what matters is the story.
It is what is the story about, what is its meaning, what is its depth and your goal as an author.
I always have some ideal form in my head, that there is some ideal structure, that the way the story should be told.
That's separate from yourself and you're almost like a detective trying to figure out what is the structure, what is the voice.
You are always in service to the story.
I will insert myself into a story when I think it will help the story.
It will advance it.
It will help the reader.
It will give the reader some eyes and ears.
If that is not important or needed for the story, I will vanish from the story.
What's an example of when you would do that?
So Lost City of Z was an example where – and it was very hard for me at first to insert myself because I had never really done that.
I had to – reveal something about myself, because i thought it was so important to compare both the past and the present, what had happened to the amazon, to show everything.
In that i alternate chapters.
So, you're seeing, you're learning about exploration in the in the victorian eduardian period, and then you're learning about it.
When you go to these fancy stores and get your goods or you know, you get to take a malaria.
But how has the world changed?
And so you were always alternating.
I remember when i first gave that book, the manuscript, to a friend to read and they said you know David, it's good, but you got to put a little more of yourself into it.
And the truth is, I'm like Larry David.
And so I had to put Larry David into my manuscript that this is Larry David in the jungle.
Sorry, Larry.
I don't know where you are, Larry.
I hope I get to meet you one day.
But in any case, that became a little bit of a shtick, but that is true.
I don't hunt.
I don't camp, i hate all that stuff, i hate bugs, and so the idea of me in the jungle.
I had to put that in to the book but it was.
But the first time i did it i was kind of a ghost.
I was just kind of like and here i am and they'll be.
You know, this is what i see.
Um, so that was hard.
And then we talked a little bit about the wager.
So i made this trip to wager island and there was a time when i thought well, that might be a really interesting end to the book uh, and then when i got there i said you know what?
It doesn't belong.
Why am I here?
I don't belong here in this story.
So it was very helpful to my reporting.
There's not going to be a word about me.
And so I try the best I can to let the story dictate the decisions I make.
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.
So I struggled. 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've even had the full manuscript.
Really?
Yeah.
And it and it started.
It was almost only when I kind of finished the book and kind of understood it that I I I was able to execute.
I mean, I had something in there, but it was not.
The the sum was the only impartial witness, because I This is a book that is ultimately about a fight over the truth.
And it's a fight of versions of the story.
And it's a lot about what we're talking about.
It is how people tell their stories.
How do they construct them?
How do they shape them?
How do they edit them?
How do they sometimes manipulate them?
And so you are going to go on a journey where you are going to hear warring perspectives.
And so this idea that there is an impartial witness... that it was the 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.
So it's factually true.
You know, they were on this boat and the sun is looking down on them.
There's nothing else around, but everyone in that boat, everyone who had been on that island, is going to have a different version and everyone is going to be partial.
I didn't make the impartial witness sun connection.
Yep.
I totally see that.
Yeah.
Tell me about over-describing versus under-describing and what it's like, both in your first draft, as you're trying to make the writing vivid and then as you're kind of duking it out with an editor saying ah, it's a little much man, you know.
Yeah.
So, you know, I'll give you a very concrete example.
And I described a little bit about these outlines I will construct.
So in the first chapter of the wager, they are getting ready to set off on this voyage.
They have to find a ship and prepare the ship and load the ship.
So I, you know, as somebody who had no idea what a 18th century ship was like, became very fascinated, found British historians to give me these tutorials.
I went to England.
I visited Nelson's ship, you know.
I want to go on a research trip with you.
Yeah, these sound fun.
Yeah no, it was great.
And you know.
You're walking around, you see the cannons, you see, and then you know.
You learn how the, how the ships were built and they had to find a wood that was curved to fit the bends and and how you know for the mass they would deforest colonies in the americas to bring over the wood.
They needed a more flexible wood for the.
So you're doing all this research, you have hundreds of pages of outlines and and um, and you start to write it and you're just obsessed with all these details.
I've spent, I don't know how long researching how you would build and load a ship.
And then my first editor is my wife, Kira Darn, who's a wonderful journalist that runs a company called Retro Report.
And just a great journalist, does documentaries.
And so she was my first reader.
She always is.
She always has been.
I will give her my first chapter very nervously because imagine it's your first chapter.
You're like, oh my god Nobody's seen any of this.
I finally spent years researching this.
I'm putting my first words on the page and so you give it to her, and then I will See her sit down with her pen and I will peer through the corner.
She doesn't know.
I'm there just kind of like trying to, trying to gauge her reactions.
What are her expressions?
And then inevitably and I certainly heard it on chapter one of the wager, she's reading and I hear oh God no, God no.
And that was where I had written 10,000 or 20,000 words on the building of a ship.
And no normal reader would ever have had the patience for my, you know, that endless description.
And I had to cut it.
First, it's like you're mad and you're and you stomp around.
But you know ultimately when you calm down, I knew she was right.
And then you take that 10,000 words and you distill it to the most revealing.
That's where you get the best details.
What are the best details?
Distill it.
What are the most astonishing facts you learned?
Not every fact you learned.
It took 4,000 trees, as I recall, to build one of these.
4,000 trees.
That's a fact worth keeping.
Yes.
It's dense.
The economy of language there.
The economy of language.
And sometimes you can do more with less.
And I will say for something like the wager, because there's some setups. the wager we have to introduce people to a world they're not familiar with because you're not writing about the you know you're not even writing about the 1950s where you where we have some images that we come it's an 18 1740 most people have no idea what's a dockyard so you have a lot more you have to set up but you know up until the very end of the wager i was trying to cut it down because i i didn't want the beginning i had to learn so much to understand the world just myself Understand the world of the wager.
Yes to these people where they're coming.
I had to learn a lot more and so But what did I actually need to get it to its essence?
And so I up until the very end, and I do think you have to be willing 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 to the reader does not care at all about the backstory of you getting that fact.
All they care about is what is on the page and what they see and what they hear and what images it creates.
And so you need to separate research from what you're trying to communicate with the research.
And you're always trying to communicate something with an economy of languages that gets to the essence and brings something to life without bogging it down.
You know, you don't need 10,000 words describing the weather.
Nobody cares.
Yeah, perfect hurricane kind of.
Yeah, yeah.
And like, you know, what were the winds?
Or, you know, you just have a few, like how did the rain fall perhaps?
But you just are trying.
And sometimes there's one scene that just tells you everything you need.
I'll give you an example.
When they were coming around Cape Horn.
I found in one of the journals a description of how they could not fly their sails because it was so windy.
And so they're just tossing about in these 60, 70-foot waves, these wooden vessels that are kind of splintering.
And the captain couldn't control his ship without sails.
So what did he do?
He ordered some of the seamen to climb the masts.
And to hold on to the rigging with their bodies and use them as concave sails while the vessel is going 45 degrees to one side and then 45 degrees to the other, like this.
I mean, that is so vivid and tells you so much about the storm and what it was like for those seamen.
Yeah.
What part of the process gives you the most joy and what part of the process gives you terror?
A good question.
Um, joy is uh often the discovery of some material or a conversation with somebody, a source that is just so meaningful.
Uh, you know, they always say writers should be dispassionate, but i've cried in interviews.
I mean, you know it's sometimes people are telling you there's these stories that are so powerful and so moving and and you find yourself being touched in some profound way.
The same way you hope that you will then convey To somebody else the reader.
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?
The actual typing, the actual communication.
Yeah, can I do it?
I will say there is joy when every once in a while...
You feel like you get it.
And so, for example, the first sentence of the wager probably tormented me for years and years.
And then I thought, ah, I think this is it.
I think I got it.
Partial witness.
This feels right.
It's crisp.
I think I got it.
And I don't know if that's joy or relief, but in any case, there's a certain pleasure to it.
What's it like having Scorsese turn one of your books into a film?
You know, it's funny.
I think it's not unlike what it would be like for anyone.
You know, 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 Martin Scorsese wants to make a film.
You know, you're just kind of like... I jump out of my chair so fast that I tear my hamstring.
So, you know, I think the answer to the question is the same.
I think if you imagine that you got a call from someone who said Martin Scorsese wants to make your film story in the film,
You feel that sense.
Your brain flashes with all the great films that you've seen by him.
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?
Are you pretty involved in the films?
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 fact 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 they have, do you have a document you could share?
What records can you provide?
Who do you think might be able to help them?
Um, they also work to their really close with members of the Osage nation.
And um, in terms of getting you know uh, understanding the tradition, the language, the culture, the scene, all that kind of stuff you know, understanding the story deeper from the inside out.
And I think that was really important.
And I think, you know, I write about a lot of stories that are lesser known.
And part of what draws me to these stories is the fact that you feel like they should be better known.
You think these stories have an inherent impact interest, and you always wonder well, why don't i know about this, why didn't i learn about this?
And so part of what motivates you is is to hopefully spread the word a little bit right and and so for something like killers of the flower moon with scorsese, you know that was a story that um, you know outside the osage community, who obviously knew their history uh, 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.
What do you feel like us writers can learn from the film business in terms of how to tell a story?
You know, that's an interesting question.
I don't really think in those terms.
I'm going to be honest with you.
I don't...
I think they are two different mediums.
And I think too often we conflate the mediums, because I think a film is you're able to inhabit people.
I suddenly saw actors playing people I only knew in two dimensions 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 and around people who are interesting, and capture them and reveal them.
Those elements are shared.
And a lot of my stories and books have been turned into film without me ever thinking about that.
And I just think that is that connection where, if it's a powerful story, You know they can be told in these different mediums.
And one of the things that film does that I think should be done in good writing is you see the room?
You see it.
You see these people.
You hear them.
And so part of the things you're trying to do with writing now, it's a different medium.
You're trying to use words to convey that, but you are trying to do each reach at that point of visualness, of vividness, of depth, one through words, one through film.
So I don't think of them that much.
I never think like, oh, this would be a good... I've never once thought this would be a good movie.
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.
Yeah, sure.
So...
Here is an example.
We've talked about research.
Sometimes people say, well, why did you write it this way?
Or why did you choose this scene?
As a historian or a nonfiction writer, you are handcuffed.
You are handcuffed.
I don't open a story and say, I'm going to begin here.
I look at all these pieces of material I have.
This is all the material I have.
I don't have any more material.
I can't go over there.
I can't go into this room.
Oh boy, I wish they had said something there.
They didn't say anything.
I can't write that.
There's not going to be a lot of scenes in bedrooms.
Let's put it in their journal.
And so the puzzle is how do you make it work with these pieces you have.
Sometimes you begin books partly based on what the underlying research tells you and allows you to begin.
That's the scene that the material allows you to tell.
Not because it was necessarily, I had a million choices, I could create a million choices.
And with a film, you can suddenly go a different place.
You create dialogue. some, a film that is, you know, I've been very lucky to work with directors who are concerned about facticity and, and the truth, but nonetheless, we're going to have people play them and there's going to be bits of dialogue.
And so, um, you are more hamstrung.
Um, and so the puzzle is how can I best tell this material based on being handcuffed?
Uh, and, and, and, The decisions you make are determined by the underlying material.
And sometimes that is not always ideal, because sometimes there's somebody you would love to hear in a story, but there's no underlying record from them.
So you can't tell their story.
As I've gotten older and I do this more, I try to let the reader know about whose stories maybe aren't told but should be, but there's no way to fully tell them, so that at least the silences speak, because those are important too.
But it's just, it's a puzzle.
You know, I think history and stuff, it's a puzzle and it's a puzzle based on the research.
Yeah.
How'd you learn to tell stories?
You know, I think the first stories I remember are And it's the way I tell stories were from my grandmother.
And so my grandfather had had a stroke.
He would sit on our porch.
How old are you at this time?
Oh, I must have been five, six, a young boy, maybe seven.
Young, young, maybe even five or six.
And he would sit on our porch and he'd had a stroke.
So he couldn't talk much.
He couldn't really move much.
And I never really knew him.
I have no memories of him.
My memories are of him kind of just sitting there, not really being able to talk or communicate.
And my grandmother would sit there and tell me these stories about him, about how he had raced motorcycles and gone down the Khyber Pass and his brakes had failed and he had one of these motorcycles where there was a little cart next to it and his friend.
They're saying goodbye to each other and then they see a mound of sand and they roam into the sand and they went flying.
Or how he had fled Russia on foot during the revolution, carrying nothing with him.
And I just I'm looking at this figure and I'm hearing these stories and suddenly I could see my grandfather as a young person running and, you know, risking his life or his life at risk, Being brought to life.
His soul was suddenly I could see it, I could feel it, I could hear it.
And she would just weave these stories.
And so for me, that was the first time I felt the power of language.
You could bring somebody to life and you could see them.
And I also understood what stories can do.
I got to know my grandfather, who I never would have known because of my grandmother, because she remembered these stories.
She told me these stories.
These were not written down stories.
These were part of an oral tradition.
And she shared those stories with me.
And I think that was the first time I, and they were riveting and they helped me.
And I'll just tell you a funny story is that when I first started telling stories, I became a reporter, and I was a bad reporter.
This is in, at the Hill.
Yeah, the Hill newspaper in DC.
And I was a bad reporter because I always wanted to tell stories the way my grandmother told me stories.
So I would go out, I'd report out a story and I'd write it up and I'd give it to the editor and the editor would say yeah, this is good, but we've got to take your last graph And we've got to move it up to the beginning, because the reader's got to know what happened.
You know, newspapers, they've got to know what happened right away.
You've got to know.
Your second graph, you've got to give it away.
They're not going to read an essay down there.
And 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.
How important is bigness with a story?
And what i mean is like sully birds in the engine, gotta land in the hudson river, saves lives big story.
Twin towers fall 9 11, thousands of people die.
America changes forever big story.
But then there's stories i remember from my grandparents telling me it was just like oh yeah, you know, we're on a walk in atlanta one time and it was raining and then this happened and it's like small story.
But there's things that small story can capture about the human condition, maybe just because they're more relatable or more personable, whatever that a big story can't tell.
Yeah i, i think i never have rules.
You know, i think storytelling isn't about.
You know, I think if you're telling a smaller story, there are Joseph Mitchell who wrote Up in the Old Hotel.
He wrote these wonderful stories about the Bowery.
They're mostly people who just meet in saloons and he would tell their story.
And they're just exquisite character studies.
Now, I will say to pull off that story, you have to be one hell of a writer.
And when you say one hell of a writer, what do you mean?
Well, you have to be...
You have to be both very observant.
So you're doing your reporting, but you don't have some momentous event happening.
It's a small accumulation of detail.
So you have to be able to convey them either.
I mean, Mitchell wrote with such beauty.
I mean, he was like a novelist.
He wrote with humor and his choice of language is really, I couldn't do that.
I can't do that.
I'm not capable.
I wish I were.
I wish I had that power of prose.
I don't.
I know I don't.
And so you know, partly as a writer you kind of – you're always pushing up against your own limitations.
At least I am.
I am always pushing against my own limitations.
Can I push it out just like an inch further?
Can I just, you know, can I just get more precise, more clear, have more musicality in the language you know?
But someone like Joseph Mitchell, you know, you just –
It's music.
You're reading just a beautiful piece of music.
And there are writers who have that ability.
Most of us don't.
Most of us don't.
There's a smaller number who have that power.
But I think big or large is irrelevant.
It's like, is there meaning in the story?
What is the reveal?
How do you tell it?
And you can do it in a small story.
You can do it in a big story.
And sometimes in the big stories, it's the smallest moments that that speak to me or may speak to.
I'll give you one example.
And this is why I do like true stories because I do think that the truth can be more surprising.
I mean, more than at least my human mind could ever invent.
On the wager island, which depicts the captain and the gunner in this titanic struggle between two egos, two formidable figures battling it out both for power and survival.
And one is about to leave the other to likely die on the island.
And I'm reading the journal.
And before the captain gets left on the island and the gunner is about to leave him, what do they do?
They reach out and they shake hands.
And I just thought, Holy smokes.
I never, ever, I just never would have thought that would have been the act.
And that was the act.
There was a moment of just, and then they'll go back to hating each other.
But in that moment they both know what is at stake for each of themselves, how hard it's going to survive.
And they basically just wish each other well for one flickering moment.
And that is just a small moment of a human act.
And you talk about a detail.
Somebody might read over that detail, right?
Because they're not shooting at each other.
It's not dramatic.
But to me, that small detail tells you something about the human condition.
They just shook hands.
Yeah.
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, That's what makes it come alive.
You know, like even with September 11th, I always think of the guy whispering in George Bush's ear, the famous photo when he's at the school in Florida right,
Like that's a small story inside of a big one.
And you know, you just talk to so many writers and very often they find, Even with 9-11, 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.
And the truth is now that I even think more about your question is that almost all the people I tend to write about are not don't really write about prime ministers or dictators, or even necessarily uh, you know.
Uh, you know, the people leading a nation.
Um would have their own lives, in particular, in specificity, even in the big stories, moments of history, let's call them, when you are swept up, these are almost always just people.
You know, people with families or not families desires dreams, foibles I mean, one of the thing that interests me with the wager was just learning about each one of these people who get put on the ship through kind of destiny and they're gonna be caught up in these events.
But you know ones, you know, once they're, they're all burdened by their own story when they get on that ship, and that story may have been a girlfriend they're leaving behind, or someone who spurned them, or you know creditors who are chasing them, or you know, or ambitions, and so you know.
Truth is, humans live inside of big stories and with all their particularities.
And so I think in a way, I think some of the most interesting stories are told from the bottom up.
Yeah.
Like ordinary people.
Yeah.
Starting there.
Yeah.
Just start.
Or just people.
Or, you know, you're just, who are these people?
And because they're all caught up in, sometimes people get caught up in momentous events.
You know, my favorite, my favorite Hitchcock.
I mean, one of the things I love about Spina is like the ordinary person who kind of accidentally, by some quirk of fate, suddenly gets caught up in a huge you know espionage ring and they have no expectation.
And I always think that and I write a lot about powers of detection but some of the detectives I like writing the most about are just often not professional detectives, but people are suddenly trying to make sense of their self or their own world.
We're all kind of detectives the way we live.
Yeah, you seem very driven by this, by this quest to make sense of things.
That seems to be something that you is core to who you are.
Yeah, I think the world is a very chaotic place and There is a lot of disorder.
There's a lot of confusion.
There's lies.
There's red herrings.
There's red herrings.
There's distortion.
There's instability.
There's emotion.
And so I just speak for myself.
I write to make sense of the world, to make sense of my own world.
And somehow the element of putting words together, Finding the facts and kind of putting together is my little way of trying to make sense of something.
As you're telling a story, you're deliberate about themes, love, loss, grief, hope.
Like, are you deliberate about these are the pivot points that this story is going to orbit around?
Or are you just like, no, those things just sort of emerge.
And this is David, why I look for those deeper, that sort of deeper aboutness that this story is about.
Because then if I have that broader significance, whether to life or society culture whatever, then those things just emerge.
So I'll say I think I never come to a story with what it is about.
Now, is that in the research process or in the writing process?
By the writing process, I hopefully know what it's about.
Okay.
So in the research when I discover a story and I begin research mostly I've never heard of, I don't know anything about them.
So I have almost no priors.
I mean, I couldn't know what the themes are.
I don't even know what they are.
I don't know who the people are.
I don't know what happened.
And so part of the puzzle is learning what a story is about.
Sometimes i might have a, you know.
You start to have a preconceived notion.
Or you study the story you think, oh well, this is what it's about.
But then you do more research and you're like oh no no, it's not about that.
And and you always have to be open.
I'll give you an example in um, killers of the flower moon, so there's very little i had found written about it, but the bits i found written tended to be about how there was this kind of singular evil figure who had committed these crimes with a few henchmen.
Because that was the story that the FBI that had investigated the cases had concluded.
And that kind of got passed down.
And then gradually, as I spoke to Mauro Sage and uncovered documents, I began to realize that there were all these other killings.
And they were not connected to this singular evil figure.
And that this was really less a story about who did it than who didn't do it.
And it was about a culture of killing.
And I remember when that finally dawned on me, I was just like, whoa, wait a second.
The book I thought I was writing for two years.
I'd been working on at that point for two years.
It just got demolished.
And I have to write another book.
I have to write a book that this is what it is about.
It is about this much deeper and darker conspiracy.
And at first it took me a while because I had been.
You know, your human mind is just kind of organized.
Your research around this concept.
And then that got shattered.
I was like, okay, okay.
All right.
Get my bearings.
What is this story about?
And now start to move it in that direction.
So the themes grow out of the material.
You want to be aware of them.
You don't want to be blind to them.
You need to discern them.
But you have to kind of come to them through the material itself.
Yeah.
You can come on How I Write whenever you want.
This is so fun.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for coming on the show.
It was a pleasure.
Thank you, man.
Thank you.
