David Grann's Advice on Writing: 200-Page Outlines, Patience, and Writing From Inside History

David Grann wrote Killers of the Flower Moon, The Wager, and The Lost City of Z. All became New York Times bestsellers. Scorsese adapted the first into a film. Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker and one of the best narrative non-fiction writers alive.

His advice comes from David Perell's "How I Write" podcast, a two-part Nieman Storyboard deep dive, and a CBS 60 Minutes profile of his creative process.

Three Steps to Finding a Story

Grann has a simple test for whether a story is worth pursuing.

Step 1: Does it pique your curiosity? "Does something get under your skin?" If it does not obsess you, it will not sustain years of work.

Step 2: Can you find the underlying research? Without robust documentation, even the most compelling narrative cannot be told responsibly. Diaries, letters, court records, declassified documents. If the material does not exist, the story cannot be written.

Step 3: What is it fundamentally about? A story needs thematic resonance beyond surface drama. The Wager was not just a survival story. It was about truth itself: "We all tell ourselves stories in order to survive."

200-Page Outlines for 3,000 Words

For a single 3,000-word chapter, Grann may build a 200-page outline of information. Biographical details. Physical descriptions. Dialogue patterns. Environmental specifics from photographs and maps. Multiple eyewitness accounts of the same event.

Then he distills. Brutally. His wife read his first Wager chapter and objected to 10,000 words on shipbuilding. "No normal reader would ever have had the patience for that endless description."

The rule: "Sometimes you can do more with less. You're always trying to communicate something with an economy of language that gets to the essence."

This is Zinsser's "fight clutter" principle applied to narrative non-fiction. Research exhaustively. Then cut everything that does not serve the reader.

Never Start With a Theme

"I never come to a story with what it is about."

For Killers of the Flower Moon, Grann initially pursued a singular-villain theory. Research revealed the truth: "This is really less a story about who did it than who didn't do it. It was about a culture of killing."

The theme emerged from the material. He did not impose it. This requires patience and intellectual honesty. Most writers decide what they believe before they start. Grann lets the evidence decide.

Write From Inside History

"Describe things the way the people you're writing about saw them. They don't know what's going to happen in an hour. That is the way people experience history. You live inside of history."

Grann tells most stories chronologically. Not because it is simple. Because it preserves uncertainty. The reader does not know the ending. The characters do not know the ending. That shared ignorance creates genuine suspense.

Visit the Places You Write About

When Grann doubted his descriptions of Wager Island, he sailed there in winter. The trip revealed details invisible in archives: "They all had hypothermia. That had not even occurred to me for two years."

Physical experience reveals what documents cannot. The cold. The isolation. The scale. You cannot write vividly about a place you have never felt.

This echoes MacCulloch's insistence on walking the landscape. And Keefe's "meet sources where they live." The body understands things the mind alone cannot.

Diction Reveals Character

"What is their diction? Their diction reveals something about them. It may reveal their level of education, their mannerism and speed of speech."

The gunner in The Wager "wrote like a bullet. He wrote like Hemingway. He wrote the way he was: direct action, no adjectives, no adverbs." One sentence about how someone writes tells you who they are.

The Opening Sentence Crystallizes the Book

For The Wager: "The only impartial witness was the sun."

Grann struggled for this sentence. He wrote it fairly late. But it captures the book's true subject: conflicting narratives and the impossibility of objective truth. Every sentence in the book flows from that premise.

Stories Come From Footnotes

Grann discovered The Wager through a digitized 18th-century journal while researching mutinies online. The Aryan Brotherhood investigation started from two words in a news article: "arrested while in prison."

"It was just those words. That led to a very long story and investigation."

Read footnotes. Read endnotes. Read the sources that other writers skipped. The best stories hide in the margins.

The Writer's Experience

"Joy is often the discovery of some material or a conversation with somebody. People are telling you these stories that are so powerful and so moving."

Terror is execution. "Can I convey this? Can I do it?" The translation of research into prose remains the hardest part.

"I write to make sense of the world. Somehow, putting words together and finding the facts is my little way of trying to make sense of something."

Key Takeaways

Three tests for a story: curiosity, researchability, thematic depth.
Build massive outlines. Then distill ruthlessly.
Never start with a theme. Let it emerge from evidence.
Write from inside history. Preserve the characters' uncertainty.
Visit the places you write about. The body knows what the mind cannot.
Diction reveals character. One sentence about how someone speaks tells you who they are.
The opening sentence crystallizes the book. Get it right, even if it comes late.
Stories hide in footnotes. Read what others skip.

Grann's process is the opposite of AI-generated content. He spends years with material before writing a word. AI spends milliseconds. The depth shows. For writers who do the research themselves, AI editing helps with the distillation phase: cutting the 200-page outline down to the 3,000 words that matter.

This post draws from Grann's How I Write episode, the Nieman Storyboard deep dive, and the CBS 60 Minutes profile. Athens is an AI writing editor for writers who do the hard research first.