David Grann on the three things you need to write a book
From a 2017 interview:
You’ve said there are three things you need to write a book. What are those things?
I haven’t done enough books to have any fixed rules. But at least with “The Lost City of Z” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” I looked for at least three crucial elements before beginning. The first is the most obvious but also the hardest to find—and that is a story worth telling. Is the subject matter gripping? Are the people involved interesting? Are there things to discover along the way? I also want to make sure the story is about something larger than just the particulars. “The Lost City of Z” is a tale of adventure, but it is also fundamentally about whether an ancient civilization could exist in the Amazon and how such a discovery would transform our understanding of what the Americas looked like before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. “Killers of the Flower Moon” is a crime story with many twists and turns, but ultimately it’s about a grave racial injustice and about the formation of the United States as a country.
The second critical element I look for is whether there is enough source material. As a nonfiction writer, there are lots of stories I would love to tell, but I often can’t because there’s simply not enough living sources or historical records. In the case of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” I spent months trying to assess what source material existed. I sent letters to courthouses and police departments. Using the Freedom of Information Act, I filed requests for documents with the FBI and other government agencies. While I was waiting for a response, I worked on other stories at The New Yorker. As materials began to trickle in, I would put them in the corner of my office and not even glance at them. Finally, after nearly a year, I began to comb through these materials. They were only a fraction of what I would need to write the book, but they gave me the confidence to commit to the project, which would take me nearly another four years to complete.
The final element that went into my decision to do a book is less rational. It’s whether, at some emotional level, I feel compelled to tell this story. I know how long books take, and if I don’t feel that need—indeed, even a compulsion—I’ll lose my mind and undoubtedly write a terrible book.