David Grann on The Wager, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Being Careful With Your Inspirations
"I never lose my sense of astonishment about the world, or shock, to be honest."
Hello from Nantucket! A famous former whaling capital is a fitting place for this edition, I hope you’ll agree, for reasons which will become clear in a moment. Things that happened in the several weeks since the last HWG: I went to London, and Corsica, and the Swiss Alps (more about which to come in a later missive), my story about some of the rising stars of the USWNT currently competing in the World Cup came out in the August issue of Vogue, and I wrote a little essay about why dogs are good for you for Carolina Bucci in which I brought up some really unseemly historical figures, sorry about that.
Now to the heart of the matter: I first read David Grann around 2011, at the behest of my sister, as steadfast a bellwether of good literary taste as anyone I knew then or now. “Have you read The Lost City of Z?” she asked. I hadn’t. It was history, decidedly not the kind of book I read on my own time. It also wasn’t the kind of book I thought of her reading. “I know,” she said. “But it’s so good.”
And so I read it, and was consumed by it, carried through in the expert hands of someone who loves language, and storytelling, and humanity (in all its faults and foibles), and really good research. It became a favorite, the book I pressed on friends and people I sat next to at dinners and waited to hear back about how much they loved it too. And then Killers of the Flower Moon came out, and I loved that, too, and it made my very short list for the “Best Books We Read in 2017” for Vogue. Then came more: The Old Man and the Gun, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, The White Darkness. And then on the road trip that now feels like it happened another lifetime ago but was in fact earlier this summer, I listened to the audiobook version of Grann’s very latest, The Wager. (Which, not for nothing, just made President Obama’s list of the books he’s reading this summer, too— love when Barry and I are on the same page.)
It’s a mythic tale and a sea yarn, a story of adventure and mayhem and mutiny and misleading histories written by the victors and the casual brutality of bureaucracies, and what happens to people when their carefully constructed hierarchies break down under pressure and they are pushed to the limits to survive. It’s an excellent book for any season but perhaps especially this one; there’s something delicious about a weary, damp, dismal story of sea travel and disaster when one is very hot and dry, or, say, crammed into a car speeding through a nascent heat dome with a less than thrilled golden retriever in the backseat. “It made you feel a lot better about your life, I bet,” Grann said when we spoke in early July. It did, but really so does does all excellent writing, which is to say, so does all of his work.
I reached out to Grann for this edition of Here We Go because I know many of you are writers or creatives, and I wanted to hear about his process: how his mind works, how he finds inspiration, how he keeps all of the flurry of facts straight, and how he got started. And, you know, what it’s like to have artists like Scorsese and De Niro and DiCaprio make something of yours into something of theirs, as they have with the forthcoming film adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon. (James Gray’s film adaptation of The Lost City of Z, starring Robert Pattinson and Charlie Hunnam, is no slouch, either.) Also because, in case it isn’t clear, I’m a truly enormous fan.
Grann was so generous, both of spirit and with his time. You don’t need to have read the book to take something vital from this conversation (nor, admittedly, do I think you can “spoil” something that happened in the 1740s), though I really do recommend reading The Wager, if you haven’t—and here’s an excerpt that ran in the New Yorker to whet your whistle. Plot points that might help if you haven’t: in 1740, a warship called The Wager left England for South America, part of a fleet tasked with a secret mission to capture a Spanish galleon full of treasure, the latest salvo in a new war with Spain. Instead, The Wager wrecks on a rocky island off of Patagonia, and the careful hierarchy aboard the ship splinters. Years later, two separate groups have miraculously survived, telling very different stories about what happened on that island—and depending on who the Navy believes, some will be hanged as a result.
(I mean, come on, is this a good story or what?!)
Without further ado, a (lightly condensed/edited version) of my conversation with David Grann, below.
ATC: Before we get into The Wager, which I loved, a new trailer for Killers of the Flower Moon just dropped, and the reactions I’ve seen are pretty uniformly rapturous. But what was it like to spend years with a book like that, one of these huge all-encompassing projects, and then hand it off to someone else to realize? Admittedly to not just anybody, to Martin Scorcese.
David Grann: To far more capable hands than my own! It's always hard at first, because you're so invested in a story. And of course, you're rooted in facts. When you hand off a project to screenwriters and directors, you have to let go. You're not going to control the project the way you control your book. But the truth is, I know so little about the filmmaking business. I always just try to get into the hands of people who do know what they're doing. And on that front, I feel pretty darn blessed. I mean, if Martin Scorsese and Leo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone and De Niro want to develop your project, you feel like, okay, well, they all know what they're doing. And then you want to make sure it's not just in the hands of people who are capable, but also people who share some of that fierce commitment to the story and the history, especially with a story like Killers of the Flower Moon. Each project is a little bit different, but that's not a story that's a lark. That's a serious, important piece of history. I feel really fortunate that they shared that kind of commitment to the story.
ATC: I wanted to talk to you about your process. Are you now somebody that people find a crazy little germ of a fascinating bit of history and they're like, David's going to want to know about this?
David Grann: It's funny. I now try to wear a sign saying 'I'm looking for a book' because it's the hardest thing to find the right idea. And actually, there've been a lot of generous people who do occasionally send me these ideas and some are quite good and I’ll look into them. But you're still a little bit out in the wilderness trying to find the right seedling that will grow. And to me, it's the hardest part, because you're really only going to be as good as the story you're telling. We're not working on fiction. We can't imagine what happens. The foundations of the story are so important. And then, of course, we now live in a world where every little thing is being picked over, in this world of podcasts and movies and social media. So not only do you want to try to find the right story, if there's so many authors, it's hard to find it. The right idea is something that you feel you can bring something new to that hasn't been so well trodden and explored. I find that a real challenge.
ATC: How do you know what's a good seedling? Are there certain elements that have to be there for you?
David Grann: It's a good question. Part of it is you have to go through a certain rational process of analyzing a story. The first is just that it piques your curiosity, something you read, something someone says to you. You’re at a cocktail party, you hear a sliver of a conversation and it kind of registers in the back of your head, or you're in a phone conversation and you hear something and you say, 'Oh, that's so interesting. I didn't know about that.' It has some kind of gripping, fascinating element. That's the first part: does it have something that holds you in its grip? The second part is a really important process: can you tell it? Can you actually, to beat a metaphor, take this seedling and actually build a forest? That has to do with what materials are there. With literary nonfiction rooted in human beings experiencing these events, it’s not just recitation of facts and birth dates and obituaries, but lives lived and experienced by humans. That involves finding diaries and testimonies of the people who lived or descendants of those people who can share with you oral histories. So you have to start to figure out, okay, do those materials exist? And then the third piece that's really important is does it actually have other dimensions to the story. So there are the gripping elements, if it's The Wager, of a sea yarn, and a story of adventure and mayhem. But within that story, are there deeper themes? If it’s Killers of the Flower Moon, that’s a story that highlights real systems of injustice and social injustice and who tells history and how history can get erased.
When you're looking for a book, you want to at least see some hints of deeper themes. If you're going to spend a lot of time with a project, it's going to hopefully illuminate something larger. Those are the kind of things I think I always, to some degree, consciously or unconsciously, bring when I look at a when I have an idea for a story. But I will say that after you go through all that process, there is still something very fundamentally irrational, which is you've got to walk away from a project and see if that story is still gnawing at you. You're going to spend so much time on this story, you’d better be passionate about it. So you go through the rigorous, the rational, but in the end, it comes down to: I'm kind of obsessed with that.
ATC: With histories like yours, which are so deeply researched and in the case of The Wager, so dizzyingly detailed and layered, how do you choose who to follow in the narrative, who to make the main thread to pull through?
David Grann: It's always kind of a puzzle—and it's a fun puzzle, but it's a challenging puzzle—to figure out the structure of a story. I think the structure in some ways is the most important riddle to solve. Part of that structure is figuring out who you're going to follow. How to tell the story. Because in any story, especially any sweeping story that maybe covers many years and has many participants, who should you spend time with? If you follow everyone, it just becomes an abstraction, it's much less felt, it's much less intimate. So you want to pick a few individuals who can illuminate the story. You're trying to find people who are in some ways representative. You obviously want to find people who are instrumental to the story.
In the case of The Wager, there are these conflicting narratives, not just the battle against the elements, but a battle over the truth. The captain, David Cheap, is a central figure and desperate to hold his command in the face of a mutiny. By the nature of the story, he’s a logical person to follow. The other person to follow very logically would be John Bulkeley, the gunner, because he's going to become this kind of challenging force that’s central to the actual story, the history, and how it turns out. So these are two players that are not just being swept along by history, but they are making history, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. They're actually shaping the very course of their lives and the lives of others. And then the third person I chose to follow was John Byron, the 16 year old midshipman. He's a little bit torn between the factions. He's also only 16 years old at the time, so he's more of an innocent. He's closer to the reader's eyes, seeing these events and this titanic battle being played out by these egos, and he's coming of age amid these horrors. So he provides innocent eyes into this world. In some ways, nobody's objective, but his subjectivity is less caught up in these deeply polarized factions. And he also, of course, would go on to become the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron. So right away you're like, whoa. And then when you learn that the poet Lord Byron's poetry was influenced by this very narrative that John Byron, the midshipman, wrote, you're like, Oh, wow, this is like a godsend. I was just so astonished by that.
They each come from a different place in society, and they each have a different station on the ship, so they also reflect this kind of class structure and hierarchical structure that I'm trying to illuminate in this kind of floating civilization of a ship. As well as what happens when that civilization cracks apart. They're each bringing their own subjectivity, but they're each coming at these events from a slightly different point of view. And then the final component, which goes back to your earlier question, which is so important, they also left behind a good chunk of material. Especially John Bulkley. I mean, he's this compulsive diarist. He's just a gift to a historian. Byron as well. Cheap is a little bit more clip, but we have his testimony at the court martial and his correspondence and various things. It was one of those rare cases where they were not only the best people to follow, but they also allowed me to follow them.
ATC: I did see Byron as the protagonist. Because he’s Lord Byron’s grandfather you know he survives, which makes it emotionally safer to invest in him as a reader, but you can imagine the movie version with him as the main character: he is of an upper class but in a sort of junior role and middle station, so he is able to move around the different parts of the ship. He’s literate and empathetic and is able to keep his head in these utterly insane circumstances. He’s I guess what Hollywood would identify as ‘the good guy.’
David Grann: Yeah, he's the one that's the most easy to relate to. But I will add, when I was working on the project, I was always haunted by the question: Who would I have been on the island? And I think we like to think maybe we'd just be a little bit more like Byron. But, I don't know. He faces a moral choice too, which is, I thought, kind of interesting because again, he's kind of like the reader's eyes onto this bewildering world. And he faces the choice that I think the reader is facing as they follow these people. Who would you go with? Who would you follow? Byron is being torn between both these elements.
ATC: When you’re taking on a project like this, what does the process look like? How does the research and writing break down for you?
David Grann: The first year is just research. Your eyes are wide open. You're not limiting anything you'll read, you're open to everything because you're still trying to figure out the contours of the story. The contours of the human beings who you’re following and their biographies and trying to get as close to their subjectivity as possible through records. So you’re just kind of open to everything. For example with The Wager, I felt like I was learning a foreign language. And I'm not very good at learning foreign languages. I had to learn the language of a ship to be able to read these documents, and also many of the documents are written in Old English. So you want to make sure you're not misreading. And the Navy uses all sorts of nautical language and coded words. So it took me about a year until I felt like I had a certain facility with the language to read these documents. And that was really critical because once I would want to be able to write, I wanted it to be second nature. I didn't want to be stumbling and looking things up, otherwise it would have been very wooden and blocky the way I wrote. And then there's probably another year of still just doing primarily research, but beginning to outline and beginning to take all the documents you have and starting to create what I call these digital databases, so that the information is kind of more movable and manageable. Copies and digital images, because there are so many primary resources that miraculously survived this expedition, logbooks that went around the world and they're disintegrating and water stained, but you can read them. So you're taking all this information, the diaries and journals, and then you're highlighting any of the relevant information and you start to transcribe that information into what I call digital libraries. And that way you know where information came from, but you can also then key search any information. So you create this unbelievably voluminous digital library. Sometimes it starts to break your computer because it's so big and then you have to break it into two files so the computer can withstand it. And then you're starting to have enough sense of it that you can start to create a general outline that you're going to follow. And then you start to create discrete outlines for each chapter.
In the case of The Wager, the first chapter is meeting David Cheap, who will become the future captain of The Wager. And you know that the expedition is struggling to set off from England. So you then search your database and you search for Cheap and you have all your biographical information and diary entries and letters. Anything about him, but also how did they load these ships? How were these ships made? All the things that were at the beginning of the expedition, and you create a kind of discrete outline. And then once you do that, you can start to write that chapter. And when you make each discrete outline, you then realize, Oh, I'm missing this piece, Oh, I need to learn more about this. So your research is always kind of ongoing, but rather than in the beginning, where you're kind of looking for everything, you're starting to become more narrow and focused. So it's like, Oh, how many trees does it take to build a ship? How did they load cattle onto a ship? It's very weird arcane questions you start asking: how tall were the masts?
ATC: I have always felt that what makes your books particularly good, as a reader, is that you really can tell how much you enjoy the details. I loved the asides about language from The Wager, like when you're talking about the origins of now common phrases like “under the weather.”
David Grann: To me, the joy of research, leaving out all the tedium of weeks and weeks of reading documents with a microscope that often yields nothing, is that within all of that information are these glorious gems. I never lose my sense of astonishment about the world, or shock, to be honest. Like, oh my God, they had 40 miles of rope on a ship. I mean, just that fact alone is kind of breathtaking. These facts just hit you: anchors weighing two tons, or there's a scene where they climb the mast and they use their bodies as sails—in a tempest. Their body as a sail! Hopefully what you're trying to do is separate the less interesting facts. So you burnish those facts that reflect your own astonishment, to hopefully share some of that with the reader.
I could have written a whole book on language. You almost sometimes have to control your excitement, because usually what I do is I get so excited about some weird thing, like I would spend months researching how you build a ship. Or when I started to see how much of their language was our own language, I just became obsessed. I would just go around every dinner table. “Guess what I learned today? ‘Under the weather’ was not a metaphor, it was when the seamen were quite literally kept below deck. So they were under the weather.” I just found that wild. So it's then about harnessing it. My wife, Kira, is always my first reader and I always joke— well, it's not actually a joke—I have what I call the “God no” file, which is after I finish a chapter, I give it to Kira, who's a journalist and a wonderful editor, and she'll read it and I'll kind of watch her reading in the corner of my eye. And occasionally I'll hear her go, “God, no.” And that's where I've gone off and gone off on some digression where I've probably written 20,000 words on nautical language. And so I have a “God no” file of what I’ve cut.
ATC: I feel like we all have a ‘God no’ file probably. Or should if we don't. I was going to ask if you get to a point when you're in a book, a couple years in and everyone's like, Dad, please stop talking about shipwrecks.
David Grann: Oh, yeah. Like scurvy. I would be at a party and I would see someone drinking orange juice and I'd say, “You know, that orange juice is very important because you need your vitamin C, if you don't, your hair will fall out and your teeth will fall out.” I think they were okay with me except for the scurvy. They were like, “no more scurvy, Dad.”
ATC: Your description of what happens to the body with scurvy was, forgive the expression, gnarly. I had no idea. Scurvy growing up was kind of a joke: get your vitamin C or your gums will bleed. I didn’t know that it was more like, get your vitamin C or all of the collagen in your body will liquefy.
David Grann: The thing about me is I'm like most readers, I'm always ignorant of the things I write about. My learning curve is huge, because I'm not a specialist. Whatever I wrote about once, I kind of then move on to something totally different. So I'm always just an ignoramus trying to figure things out. So I was like, oh, scurvy, I kind of remember scurvy does something to your gums. And then I thought, Well, have I ever really read a kind of forensic accounting of what scurvy would do to a ship? No, I don't think I have. Oh, and I have all these diaries and journals where the men and boys on board this expedition are describing day by day what is happening to their bodies. Okay, this is going to be my challenge: Can I reconstruct that plague, that great enigma of the age of sail that killed more people than tempests and shipwrecks and other diseases combined? So, yeah, I got very obsessed with scurvy. And the kids and my wife are very tired of me talking about scurvy. But I will also just say one other thing, which is that sometimes the world is strange: I can't remember the time frame exactly, but I was definitely writing those sections about disease at the time when Covid had broken out here and around the world. And remember in those early days where we were still kind of bewildered by what this plague was, there was a real knowledge gap. Do we social distance? Can you bring a package inside your house? Do you have to wash the package? We just didn't know yet. We were figuring it all out as we went along. And I'm writing about these men on the ship at the time where there is typhus or scurvy. And of course, they don't even understand germs. They don't understand vitamins. They don't understand social distancing. And even if they did, they had no space to do it. And so, you know, they're going around like in this deep paranoia, sniffing the air, trying to figure out what's causing these diseases. Is it in the air? Is it in our breath? Is it the light? What is it? And so I felt a deep sense of empathy for them as they were as they were going through that. And it added a dimension when I just happened to be writing those sections.
ATC: Did you always want to be a writer?
David Grann: Early on, I had a certain desire to write. I used to keep a journal in those days. I still remember my grandmother would get them for me and they had this kind of maroon covering and a little bit of gold on the ends of the pages. Very, very pretty. I would write stories in them. I would make up stories, or write down true stories. My grandmother would tell me stories and I would put them in there. And so I always had an interest in writing. Why you become a writer is a weird thing because not too many people around you are saying, Oh, I'm going to try to be a writer. You don't really know what the path is. And then I went to college and I was writing in various forms. And I was somebody in college who was trying my hand at every form of writing, not really knowing what was the best form of expression for me. So I would write really bad poetry. I wrote some short stories. I would write very serious, sober minded, boring essays about international relations and world governments and war strategy and all that kind of stuff. I would just kind of write. But it took me a long time to become a writer and actually have a career as a writer because I didn't have a lot of success early on, struggled to make a living, and didn't really know what the path was, and what form I would finally settle on.
ATC: And now you're the literary adventure guy.
David Grann: The adventure guy. [laughs] It's just the funniest thing, really, for anyone who knows me, it's just the funniest thing in the world. I'm like the George Costanza of adventure. I think I'm drawn partly to people who are kind of driven and obsessed and something kind of gets metastasized in their heads. Some idea, some dream, some illusion, some delusion. It kind of consumes them and compels them to do these kind of very extraordinary acts, acts that may consume them, because I think that's very typical of humans. And you know, there's a professional interest in that because they tend to make more interesting stories. I mean, there's a reason why we all remember Ahab in literature. I mean, also it's written by Melville, but it's but it's but you know, this kind of Ahab character is, is just very compelling. But I also am interested in how when you find people in tight quarters, or under extreme circumstances, it's where you really get to learn something about human nature, and the human condition, because that's when it really often will get revealed. It's when things get that fundamental and that existential where some of the niceties get peeled back and you get to learn about who people are, and you get to see the goodness and sometimes the shocking badness.
With Killers of the Flower Moon, it’s a story about America and about human nature and what happens when people dehumanize other people and are compelled by greed. And you get to see the repercussions and kind of horrific consequences of that. It also highlights something to me that is so important. Something that I, maybe because of the times we're living in, I'm interested in, also being Jewish and having family members who perished in the Holocaust. This idea of complicity, I think, is a really important idea, not just because it's something we don't talk about, but also because it's really the only way these systems of injustice prevail. You know, it takes more than leaders and more than demonic figures to orchestrate their plans. It takes ordinary human beings, professional human beings, sometimes people of seemingly good standing. And I think one of the things for me in researching Killers of the Flower Moon, we talked about research that will shock you, and the thing that just shook me to the core was just the breadth of the complicity in that society. This was not a history about these kind of few awful figures who were committing these crimes. They had all these co-conspirators. Doctors who would be administering poisons? Morticians who are covering up bullet wounds? Lawmen on the take? And then so many people who were complicit in their silence because they were getting wealthy off of this corrupt system of stealing oil money. But it's why I think it is so important. I never really planned on delving into the past—that's not that far in the past, that's just early 20th century. The Wager goes all the way back to the 18th century. But I do find that how these stories were often covered up or distorted in the way they are passed down can tell us a lot.
ATC: So, zooming out a little bit. You've done early Amazon exploration in Lost City of Z. (Still my favorite.) You've done the British Navy’s covered up history of shipwrecks and mutinies with The Wager. You've done the nightmare of the early American West with Killers of the Flower Moon. And you've done Antarctic exploration with The White Darkness. You’re covering a lot of big adventure bases. Do you have an idea of what you want to do next?
David Grann: Well, I'm trying to come up with it. And as I said when we started the conversation. It's the hardest part. I'm looking, I might have a seedling, but I'm not yet sure. Too early to talk about. Whatever it will be, it will be in a different world or a different realm or maybe even a different time period. Whatever I did last, I try to move into something new to consume me. But I think it will continue to explore some of the themes that I've explored in my last books, even if the subject matter is very different. And The Wager was interesting for me because it was also really a story about storytelling, and the way we shape our stories and the way we shape history, which was obviously a profound theme in Killers of the Flower Moon, too. So I think some of those themes about how our stories shape us and how we manipulate our stories is something that continues to intrigue me, that I'm still trying to wrap my brain around. But if you do have any ideas out there, people, please, send them my way!
ATC: Would you ever focus on a more recent topic?
David Grann: Yes! I totally would. It's funny, when I finished Killers of the Flower Moon, I said, whatever I'm going to do next is going to be in the present or recent. I never expected to end up in the 18th century. It was kind of the last place I thought I’d be: an 18th century British ship?! It was just that was the story that got hold of me. And I felt like it was such a good story and illuminated so many things and hadn't been over trod. But really I don't think in terms of time frame. It's funny, I began my career as a journalist, and to break news, It has to be of the moment. Most of my magazine reporting was that of that nature. And then at a certain point I lost the kind of strictures of time because I started to say, Well, you know, if it's a good story, it's a good story. Just because it's older, does it have any less value? Maybe we could see that story differently or with hindsight, maybe that story still holds great themes. And so I started looking to the past. All I'm looking for is the right story, and that could be of any time. Though in some ways I would prefer if I could call somebody up, maybe it will go faster.
ATC: Right. I was going to say the Titan submersible could be a David Grann story.
David Grann: It's true. It gets to this idea of money, and that there's this new form of travel that people are into, which is to just be blasted into space or under the sea under any circumstances. And what is that about? You know, again, when you do a story. It's not just the facts. It's not just the facade of the story. If you're looking at something like that, you’re looking at the psychology and the cultural moment that we're living in. There is a lot of actual richness to it. That's what's interesting about nonfiction, you do come across these stories. And I don't often know the answers to them. Half the time I'm just trying to illuminate and ask the questions and hold them up. I mean, in The Wager, I really was trying to leave it up to the reader to be the juror and to give their verdict. Whose side were they on? Who did they believe? Should [the mutineers] have been punished? Should they not have been punished?
ATC: The court martial scene at the end of The Wager felt very contemporary.
David Grann: What's so crazy is, this story took place in the 1740s. And just last week or a couple of weeks ago this mutiny took place in the Russian military. And there you have another imperial folly, right? It's an imperial war. It's an imperial folly. It's a disastrous war [against Ukraine] launched, and then there is this mutiny within the Russian military ranks that's put down. I was reading the New York Times after it happened and I don't remember the headline exactly, but essentially the distillation of it was: Putin and Russia tries to rewrite the story of the mutiny. They wanted it to go away. They wanted to erase it from memory. And, you know, it was another case of the mutiny that never was, which is what the major mutiny [on The Wager] was, the mutiny that never was. You don't always expect these parallel parallels. But that's why I always find history so instructive.
One of the things that interested me after Killers of the Flower Moon was why that part of our history—that was so important and was really one of the more monstrous crimes in American history and only took place a hundred years ago—was largely unknown outside the Osage Nation. We had excised it from our consciousness. I was very interested in that question of why certain histories get remembered and become part of our collective consciousness, and other parts are whitewashed or rubbed out or erased. And The Wager, as I began to look into it, one of the things that drew me to that story, one of those hidden dimensions to the story, was Oh wow, this actually is a perfect illustration of how that happens, which story prevails and which history prevails and which history will be passed down.
ATC: How did you first find your way into Killers of the Flower Moon? Was it through somebody telling you about the history of the FBI?
David Grann: Yeah, that's so interesting. I actually was speaking to a historian, a guy named John Fox, who’s a historian and he knew everything about law enforcement and he knew everything about the history of the FBI. And he was mentioning a bunch of different cases to me about the bureau's history. And he mentioned this case early in its history. And he said he didn't really know that much about this case, but he always thought it was interesting. And then, you know, a long time went by and I looked back at my notes and I saw at the bottom this case mentioned. And then I couldn't find much written about it. At that point, I wasn’t thinking I'll write a book, but, well, could there be an article? I don't know. And so I decided to make a trip out to the Osage Nation. And the first thing I did was I went to the Osage Nation Museum, which is in Pawhuska. It's a great museum. And in the museum at the time, I describe this in the book, they had this great panoramic photograph on the wall, which was taken in 1924, that had white settlers and members of the nation standing side by side. It looked really innocent if you're just staring at it. But I noticed that a portion of the photograph was missing. And I asked the then museum director, Kathryn Red Corn, why that part of the photograph was missing. And she said it had contained a figure so frightening that she and the others in the museum had decided to remove it. And she pointed to the missing panel and she said the devil was standing right there. And she went down into the basement and she brought up an image of that missing panel. And it revealed one of the killers of the Osage who was kind of peering out very creepily with this chapeau and little glasses from the corner. And I kept thinking about that photograph. And it goes to what we were just talking about: the Osage had removed that photograph, not to forget what had happened, but because they couldn't forget. And yet here there were so many people, including myself, who knew nothing about this history. We had completely forgotten and excised it from our consciousness. That was really the origin, that moment. And it's weird, very few books I've done or even stories I've done have that kind of crystalline origin story. But that really was the origin story. After speaking to Kathryn, I just felt this story had to be told. The only question was could I tell it, could I find the records, and the people who could record that history.
ATC: Who are your favorite authors? Whose books do you reach for when you feel stuck?
David Grann: I read so much non-fiction for work, so my pleasures are often more fiction. I have to read so much non-fiction and history and documents while I'm working. Sometimes I will look for inspiration in books that are kind of unrelated, but they planted something in my head. So I was working on The Wager, for example, and the first chapter was going to be about how these ships are built, and how they operate, and what life was like onboard. And I just had this thought: God, I remember reading The Great Bridge by David McCullough, and he made the construction of the Brooklyn bridge just so darn fascinating. And so I went and just looked at The Great Bridge again to watch how he brought that engineering and construction to life. They're not always direct. I’ll read Katherine Boo's book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, sometimes just for imagery. But the truth is, I look more to fiction for inspiration when I'm writing. For example, when I was working on The Wager, I read everything by Herman Melville. I read a lot of Joseph Conrad, I read Patrick O'Brian. Just to kind of live in that world and feel connected to it.
Someone like Melville is such an inspiration because he really was a sociologist. He had been on one of these ships, so he knows as much about life aboard a man-of-war as just about anyone, and he could describe it just so remarkably well. When I was working on Killers of the Flower Moon, I often read people who had written about the West or that period. I read a lot of Willa Cather, just for that sensibility and world. I read a lot of Cormac McCarthy. And they're inspirations also. They're just such fantastic writers. The only problem about reading them is like, you feel like you should never write another word again. I mean, if you're reading Melville and Cormac McCarthy and Willa Cather, you're like, yeah, maybe I should give this up. So you have to be careful about your inspirations.
ATC: What is the best advice you ever received about writing?
David Grann: It’s funny. I'll say this in two ways. My mother, who was an editor, had given me the advice to never become a writer. I think she just thought it was going to be a hard life. So, of course, I did what any good son would do, and I completely ignored her, and to prove her wrong, I became a writer. So that was very good advice to not follow. But I would say that the best advice I've ever had and I think the best advice is: there is no secret or magic about writing. There are certain abilities, but it's really just about doing. It's like any craft. The best advice I've ever gotten and the best advice to ever get is if you want to write, write, but you've got to write. You can't talk about it, you know. You go to conferences, and I would go when I was an aspiring writer, and you go and listen to every writer thinking that maybe some secret would be passed on that would unlock the secret of writing and make me into a writer like them. But the truth is, the only way to write is to write. Just write. When I got that advice, I wrote every which way. I covered high school graduations for a local paper. I did freelance. I used to get on a bus when I had a fellowship in Mexico and get paid a dollar for a story, and it was just enough to get me back home on the bus ride. So I think if you want to write, I don't know, whatever it is, whatever it could be, it could be, you know, catalog information, whatever it is, you just keep writing. It's the most prosaic advice one could ever give. But I do think it's the most profound, because the truth is there's no easy way. The only way is just to do it. And if you like it enough, you'll do it.
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That’s what I have for you this week. I hope you enjoyed what was an utter highlight for me! Thank you, as always for being here. See you next time.