David Grann is an author and staff writer for The New Yorker, best-known for his books, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, and The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.
What I realized is, as I did this more, is that you are an excavator. You aren’t imagining the story. You are excavating the story.
A Master Class with David Grann | The New Yorker
Obsession is often a word that comes up when you read about David Grann and the gargantuan effort he undertakes to write his books. Like many of the characters that he writes about, the best-selling author is driven by a maniacal compulsion; in his case, to look for any small detail and uncover as many facts as possible for his story — no matter where he needs to go for it.
While working on his first book, The Lost City of Z, about the British explorer Percy Fawcett who disappeared in the Amazon, Grann spent three years searching for letters from Raleigh Rimell, one of the men who was part of the expedition, and nearly cried when he managed to track down a descendent who had them. He also trekked his way through the jungles where he briefly got lost himself.
For Killers of the Flower Moon, he spent a year writing letters to every American institution he could find connected to the case asking for archival documents. Once he had gathered research material, he spent half a decade working closely with members of the Osage Nation, recording their version of events and telling their story.
In researching his latest book, The Wager, Grann spent two years reading journals, court records and logbooks before deciding he had to go to the island itself to fully understand what he was writing about. This led to his journey from New York to Chiloé Island, where he met a boat captain who took him to Wager Island, a desolate place with nothing but seaweed, celery, and the cold wind.
“I do have a tendency to be very obsessive about the subjects I research because I want so hard to try to find out everything I can,” Grann admitted in a Goodreads interview. “That’s often an elusive quest because you can’t know everything about everything, but that process of trying to find that next beat, that next fact, that next detail, that is what consumes me.”
Growing up in Connecticut, Grann was raised by his parents Victor Grann and Phyllis E. Grann, the latter being the first female CEO of a major publishing firm, Putnam Penguin. He has been writing ever since graduating from college in 1989, at first hoping to become a novelist before being hired as a copy editor at The Hill. A couple years later, he became a senior editor at The New Republic where he covered politics, but his heart wasn’t in it.
“I was supposed to be covering Congress, but I kept wandering off my beat to investigate stories about con men, mobsters, and spies,” he admitted in a 2009 interview with Rolf Potts.
The turning point for him came when he was writing a story about Ohio congressman Jim Traficant for The New Republic. During his research, Grann found an obscure recording of Traficant in conversation with two mobsters that opened up his eyes to the possibilities of digging into archives.
“I hear Traficant dropping the F-bomb every other word, and I hear him talking about taking bribes, and then I hear about people coming up swimming in the Mahoning River. And it was a voice that was so different from the voice I heard on C-SPAN,” Grann said in an Intelligencer interview.
“It was kind of the beginning where I was thinking, Oh! These are the voices of the stories I want to tell. It also showed me the power of archives for the first time. You can find things that are just kind of sitting there if you look, and they can peel back facades and get you closer to the hidden truth.”
David Grann’s writing routine & process
For Grann, everything starts with finding the right subject for his next project. “For me, the most important part of the process is finding the story idea,” he told Andrea Pitzer. “If I can find the right idea, I can get out of the way and do a good story.”
So if he’s not researching or writing, then the author is usually busy on the look-out for interesting stories — whether it be from a passing conversation with a friend or a news brief from a foreign paper. “David spends weeks and weeks and months and months sifting through possible stories,” said New Yorker editor David Remnick. “I’d wander by his office and he’d be reading these archives and old letters and all kind of material, holding the paper close to his face like an ancient Talmudic scholar.”
Once he’s locked in on a subject, then it’s on to the mammoth task of research. From requesting boxes of archival material like he did for Killers of the Flower Moon, trekking to the Amazon for The Lost City of Z, or reading books on shipbuilding for The Wager, Grann spends an inordinate amount of time on his research process. As he sifts through the material, he’ll enter in any interesting facts or tidbits into a searchable database on his computer. Eventually, he’ll start working on outlining the structure of the story
“I tend to think in stories naturally, as if I were sitting down to tell someone the story,” he said. “I do think a lot about structure and to try to find a compelling way to tell a story. I spend a lot of time doing very elaborate outlines and think a good deal about structure and when information should be revealed.”
Once that’s all done, Grann is ready to start writing. In a 2017 Reddit AMA interview, the author recounted a typical writing day in his life.
I am an agonizingly slow writer. I try to set a five-hundred-word limit a day when writing. I’ll sit down around 9 a.m. (after loading up on lots of coffee). Then I’ll work till noon, break for lunch, and return to my desk. I might break in the afternoon for a nap or exercise (sadly the former is more common), before sitting back down to write again. Some days I may be free by dinner; but unfortunately there are days when I’m chained to the desk until late in the evening. As for editing, I try not to edit while working on the 500 words. But the next morning will usually revise. And I endlessly revise and edit every graph, page, and chapter — so many times I can’t count them. I think of all writing as rewriting.
I am David Grann, an author who likes to investigate hidden histories and tell true stories. AMA. | Reddit
During his revision process, Grann will enlist his wife, also a journalist, to provide a fresh pair of eyes. “The great challenge, once you’ve done all that research, is being utterly ruthless in cutting it out, so you don’t get bogged down in digression,” he said in a Goodreads interview. “I usually write much longer and then probably show it to my wife, who says, ‘David, cut.’ My wife is my best editor.”
Additional reading
The Lost City Of Z author David Grann on forensic science and true crime’s renaissance
In a 2017 conversation with Wired UK profile, Grann discusses The Lost City Of Z and Killers Of The Flower Moon. The author offers insights into his research approach and the evolution of forensic science, linking historical events to the modern legal system and FBI. The article also touches on the challenges of reporting in today’s media landscape and the popularity of true crime stories, providing a succinct glimpse into Grann’s storytelling methods and perspectives.
- On the sprawling research for Killers Of The Flower Moon: “When I began to think about the story, I wrote out… all the different characters, all the different victims. It did look like something out of Homeland, like a mad person’s outline. There were these webs and connections; all these oilmen and so many damn investigations, investigations by the PIs, the bureau investigations; dozens of victims. It was this floating mess.”
- On his storytelling technique: “I grew up listening to my grandmother telling stories about the world, and she would always tell it from beginning to end. I think that just influenced me. So whenever I tell a story, I want to tell it as if I were sitting down by the bed, telling it from beginning to end.”
- On developing his journalism career: “Journalism, it’s not like there’s some secret magic. There are some incredibly gifted writers in the world. You can count them on a hand. They’re blessed, and they’ve worked at their craft, but there’s very few. The rest of us, we are learning a craft and getting better at it. And I’ve been lucky that I’ve been at institutions that have allowed me to do that, and grow, over time.”
David Grann: The Devil Was Standing Right There
Speaking with Guernica Magazine, Grann discusses the conspiracy covered in Killers Of The Flower Moon involving not just a serial killer but a vast network of white opportunists, including law enforcement and politicians, driven by the tribe’s oil wealth. The article highlights Grann’s unique narrative structure, his research challenges, and the broader implications of this forgotten historical atrocity.
- On hearing about the Osage story: “I first heard about the story back in 2011. I knew nothing about it before I started—some cursory research told me the Osage were the wealthiest people in the world in the 1920s. They began to be serially murdered and it became one of the FBI’s major homicide cases. I had a sense of the murders as a racial injustice that had not been fully documented.”
- On the unresolved nature of the story: “I always thought of the horror of history being what you know, but by the end of the book I started to have the sense that the even worse horror of history is the horror that you don’t know. That was certainly true for many of the Osage, who, for generations, have lived with these mysterious suspicious deaths that in many cases have remained unresolved.”
- On his role as the writer: “The job of the writer is to be as true to the material as possible. In this case, it’s not fiction; you are given the people who populate the story. You need to be as true to that as possible. That’s your ultimate obligation and you have to go where that takes you.”
In a Goodreads interview with Todd Leopold, Grann talks about the complexities of his research and writing processes, and his personal motivations in exploring themes of murder and justice. The interview also offers insights into Grann’s approach to investigative journalism, his writing challenges, and his perspectives on one of the most sinister chapters in American history.
- On researching vs. writing: “I would say they’re equally difficult but very different. The research is difficult from more of a physical level, the time-consuming processes of actually trying to find the materials. Writing is more emotionally difficult. That’s the one you really struggle psychically. I would say both have great pleasures and rewards, too.”
- On how he looks for new ideas: “I read a lot of local newspapers. I often look for the one-inch brief in a newspaper that I find kind of alluring and hints at something, and I think that maybe there’s a deeper story in that, and I begin to look into it. I also try to talk to people. I often cold-call people who I think are smart and interesting in different fields.”
- On his obsessive writing nature: “The people I write about tend to have obsessions because they tend to be interesting people, breaking norms or pushing themselves to the limits or chasing something. I would say I live a very boring, conventional life and tend not to do very adventurous things. So it’s in writing about these subjects that I tend to do things that are more adventurous and tend to get outside myself a little bit.”
- On being driven by a moral purpose: “I think being a writer or reporter, hopefully, when you have a moral purpose to what you’re working on—when you’re trying to expose something or wrestle with something—it drives you more. I think that’s ultimately why you get into the business. You’re trying to do the story justice and do the victims justice.”
David Grann on murder, madness and writing for The New Yorker
In a conversation with fellow journalist Andrea Pitzer, Grann shares his journey from aspiring novelist to master of nonfiction. He discusses his approach to crafting compelling stories from real-life characters and situations, the process of structuring narratives, and the challenges of long-form journalism in today’s economic landscape.
- On what he looks for in a story: “On one level, there is a story that is compelling, there are characters that are interesting, but also there are some intellectual stakes—and perhaps the story in there that has the highest stakes is the story about Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas and may have been innocent.”
- On writing fiction: “In fiction, I struggled with characters and plot and coming up with what people did and said. In nonfiction, I realized that if I could find characters and stories that were real, I simply had to excavate them and tell them in a compelling way.”
- On the future of longform journalism: “I tend to be a little more pessimistic about things. I have a lot of friends who are really good journalists who have lost their jobs in recent years. The economics that support long-form journalism are very insecure right now. The kind of stories I do take a lot of time and a lot of money.”
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