📝 David Grann’s Writing Routine

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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.

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.”

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