How to Choose the Right Story for Your Life

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When you're a non-fiction writer, you're an excavator. So choosing the right story is so important that I first came across this 18th century journal by John Byron. It was a digital copy that I found it online sent an archive and I started to read it. Then I realized like, okay, this really does have a clue to one of the more extraordinary sagas I had ever come across. That would have made an incredibly gripping story,. And also revealed something about the human condition.

David Grann is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His new book is The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.

“I became very haunted by the stories that [nations] don't tell. Nations and empires preserve their powers not only by the stories they tell, but also by the stories they leave out. … Early in my career, if I came across the silences in a story, I might not have highlighted them, because I thought, Well, there's nothing to tell there. And now I try to let the silences speak.”

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