David Graham details his nonfiction career, recounting research for The Lost City of Z involving the Kalapalos tribe and Killers of the Flower Moon, which exposed a wider Osage murder conspiracy than the FBI revealed. He describes his 2018 voyage to Wager Island, where he found timber from the HMS Wager but refused to take artifacts, leaving them in the stream. Graham emphasizes that success relies on daily discipline and finding stories with power rather than relying solely on authorial skill, concluding with a visit to the Folger Shakespeare Library showcasing rare first folios owned by women collectors. [Automatically generated summary]
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Writing Fiction in New York00:14:34
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From the nation's iconic libraries and institutions, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined the country in conversation with civic leader and author David Rubenstein.
As a young boy growing up in Baltimore, I went to my local library and was inspired to read as many books as I could.
Hopefully people will enjoy hearing from these authors and hopefully they'll want to read more.
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Now from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, Chronicler of Adventurers, Crimes and Obsessions, best-selling author of Killers of the Flower Moon and the Wager, David Graham.
When you wrote The Killers of the Flower Moon, obviously a lot of research.
We'll talk about it in a moment.
But did you ever expect that you would get a call from Martin Scorsese saying, I want to make this into a movie, or that Leonardo DiCaprio would play one of the heroes in the movie?
I mean, you know, I mean, even one's wildest ambitions, I don't think that would ever occur to them.
They might be deluded.
And when you're working on these projects, you're so focused on the research.
You're so, you know, it's a little bit like seeing the folios today here in the library.
You're going back and you're looking at these old documents and studying them.
You're trying to decipher them and decode them.
And the last thing you'll ever think in your mind is that these obscure stories that have kind of been forgotten by much, many people would ever become a movie, let alone that Martin Scorsese would be interested.
My mother was a really pioneering editor in the field of publishing.
And she really was the first woman, major publishing houses, the first woman editor-in-chief at one of the larger New York publishing houses, and then the first CEO of a publishing house.
So it was kind of part of the background.
I grew up around writers.
I will say that my mother, perhaps knowing the difficulty of the life of a writer, had given me one piece of advice.
She said, whatever you do, David, you don't become a writer.
And I, being a very good son, decided to prove her wrong.
And I will say, I think after Killers of the Flower Moon was finished, I remember saying, reading it in an early manuscript and her finally saying, I don't know, I must be about 45 then or 50, she said, I guess it was a good thing you became a writer.
Well, there was a lot of pressure for me to get a career.
I was kind of foundering about it.
I was a school teacher for one year, hardest job I ever had.
I had a full head of hair before.
Was bald after trying to teach eighth grade, seventh grade boys and girls.
And then I got a master's degree from Tufts University in law and diplomacy, which was good because at least it had law in the title, so it would soothe my anxious parents about my ambitions of becoming a writer.
And then I got a fellowship at Boston University in creative writing.
You know, you don't, my journey as a writer is one of discovery.
I didn't know what form it would take.
And so I tried writing newspaper stories.
And I discovered, you know what, I'm a pretty bad newspaper reporter.
One, I'm pretty slow.
And two, I would write these stories and the editors would look at them and they'd say, oh, this is good, but we want the ending to move it up to the first graph.
So everybody will know what would happen.
I'd say, but that gives the whole story away.
You got to tell it from beginning to end.
And then eventually I realized that I could take these literary techniques I had studied.
And I never had an imagination to be a novelist.
But I realized you could find these true stories and you could excavate them.
So rather than invent them, I became this kind of excavator to tell these true stories that would hopefully have the same compelling quality of literature.
I did a story for the New Yorker that was called The Lost City of Z about an explorer who had disappeared in the Amazon in 1925 with his oldest son, his son's best friend, looking for this ancient civilization, this semi-fable place, and they had disappeared.
And when I finished the magazine piece, it was the first time I had finished the piece, and it was long.
New Yorker has long stories, but it was the first time when I had finished the piece, I felt like there was still so much more to tell.
And part of the origins of that book, really what happened was I went, when I learned about this explorer who had disappeared, I went to Wales and I tracked down a descendant of Fawcett.
And it was his granddaughter.
And I remember, you know, telling her what I was interested in.
I'd like to tell the story.
And she said, well, you know, would you like to know what had happened to my grandfather?
And I said, yeah, you know, yeah, sure, if at all possible.
And I remember she led me into a back room.
I felt like I was in a Victorian novel.
She led me into a back room.
There was this old chest.
It was made of wood.
She opened it up.
Inside were all these books.
There were diaries and journals.
Some of them were still covered with mud.
Some were held together with keys.
They were disintegrating.
And I said, what are they?
She said, well, those are my grandfather's logbooks and diaries.
And she let me go through them.
And they held these enormous clues both to who he was as a person, as this kind of last of this kind of territorial explorer that came out of Victorian Edwardian England, and also clues to what had happened to him.
He had, early in his career, he had been a map maker.
He had gone to the Royal Geographical Society, he had trained as an explorer.
It's really interesting.
You could find these books at the Royal Geographical Society where they would train explorers.
And in those days, you know, these booklets, you know, the medicine was so primitive.
So they'd say, you know, if you are bleeding out or getting gangrene, you take gunpowder and you explode it in the wound.
It had all these little lessons and diagrams for them.
But he had studied that.
He had mapped a lot of the borders of a lot of the South American countries.
And during those journeys, he had started to gather clues that suggested to him there might be this ancient civilization.
He found old pottery, he found these earth mounds.
And it was these things that built together this theory so that finally in 1925, post-World War I, he set out with his son, his older son, Jack and Jack's best friend.
In its day, one of the things I love about history, and when I first came upon this story, it was in a footnote, actually, in a story I was reading about how Percy Harrison Fawcett had helped inspire the Lost World, the Conan Doyle novel.
And so I put it into one of these old historical databases, and up came these crazy headlines in the New York Times.
Fawcett disappears into jungle, Fawcett's still missing, wife praying, looking for, and in its day, it was a sensation.
So if you said, you know, where was Fawcett buried?
It was kind of saying like, where is Jimmy Hoffa buried?
So it reminds me, as you talk about it, there was somebody who tried to climb Mount Everest the first time and he didn't quite ever come back, Mallory.
I will say, though, one of the things that was happening right then, and it's interesting to library, is it was kind of the beginning of mass media and telegraphs.
And so Fawcett was writing these accounts, you know, and that he would then give to runners from different indigenous communities.
And they were running out, you know, it took them a long time, but they were bringing out his accounts as he was going deeper and deeper into the jungle.
And then these would be telegraphed and read all around the world in Africa, in Asia.
So the whole world, with a three-month delay, was following this expedition.
And then suddenly there was silence.
So it created this great sense of wonder and mystery.
I am very much suited for the place we are in for archives and libraries.
One can look at my physical physique.
But usually what happens is when I'm doing research, you start to feel like and wonder, can you really know what was happening?
And one of the things I found in those journals in the chest, one of them described where Fawcett had gone.
Fawcett had described where he wanted to go.
And he had never made that public because he was afraid some rival would beat him to the discovery.
So I thought, well, if everybody had gone that way and other people had gone and disappeared or not come back, I thought, well, maybe if everybody went that way, what if I go that way?
See, that's how much I chose I don't know about camping.
REI.
So I went to an REI store.
I've never been to an REI store and I haven't been since.
But I went in there and I started looking at all the cool gizmos and gadgets and putting them into my container and pushing on the aisle.
And then this guy comes over to me, looked like he was 22 and it looked like he'd just come down from Mount Everest.
And he says to me, you've never camped, have you?
He starts taking out all the things out of my bag and saying, look, we've got to get you a mosquito net, we're going to get you some boots, some water-resistant material.
We're going to go into the southern basin of the Amazon.
It was an area where the indigenous communities have territorial control over these areas, but they've been under assault so much from settlers and people seeking wood and forestry that it's really dangerous.
You can't just wander onto the land.
So I found a guide who spoke the indigenous languages, would introduce me, and we set off.
And it ended up taking all total about two months.
Well, the thing about Fawcett was he was older, but he was a well-trained explorer.
He had been doing this for years.
And he had almost invincibility about him.
He would always emerge from these expeditions when half the parties would die.
So it was almost inconceivable that he would die.
And then when he didn't come back, many people didn't believe it.
But when I went into the Amazon, I stayed with an indigenous group, the Kalapalos, and they had an oral history, which was like a beautiful poem.
It reads like a beautiful epic poem.
And it describes in there their first encounter with these white men, and it was Fawcett.
And in this poem, one of the reasons I knew it had an authenticity is it described this explorer playing a little flute.
And I knew from Fawcett's letters to his wife home that he had brought a little recorder with him.
He said, so he wouldn't go mad in the solitude of the jungle.
And it described how they could see a fire in the distance, that Fawcett had insisted on going to the east, and they had warned him not to head into that direction.
And they could see the fire from Fawcett's camps rise above the trees.
And then suddenly the fire and the smoke goes out, and they go to investigate and they're gone.
And the presumption from this oral history, which I think is the closest and best recording we have of what happened, was that Fawcett was likely killed with his party by one of these indigenous groups there.
It's about how members of the Osage Nation in northeast Oklahoma in the early 20th century have become among the wealthiest people per capita in the world because of these oil deposits under their land.
The Osage had been driven off their ancestral lands and they had finally eyed this area in what was then Indian territory.
It's now part of Oklahoma.
And it was an area that was rocky and hilly and seen as infertile by settlers and therefore worthless.
So an Osage chief at the time actually stood up and he said, our people should move there because the white people will finally leave us alone and we'll be happy there.
And so they purchased their land.
They had a deed to that land.
And they ultimately maintained, even as a lot of their surface territory disappeared into the hands of whites, they maintained this collective trust, this mineral trust over all the minerals under the land.
It was about the size of Delaware.
And then oil was discovered in that land.
Some of the largest deposits in the United States ever found.
Well, for many years, the Osage, in particular, this one family of Molly Burckhardt begins to be seriously murdered.
Her older sister is found shot in the back of the head.
Not long after, her younger, well, not long after that, her mother begins to grow mysteriously sick each day becoming more insubstantial, and evidence would indicate she was poisoned.
So within just a span of a few months, she lost her older sister and her mother.
And not long after that, her younger sister was so terrified, moved into a house to be nearer.
And about three in the morning, Molly hears this loud explosion.
She goes out to the window and she can see a bomb basically blowing up her younger sister's house.
So one after the other, the Osage began to be killed, and they would crusade for justice, but because of corruption at the time, because of prejudice, these crimes were not looked into.
And finally, after the official death toll had climbed to about two dozen or more, the Osage Nation's tribal council issued a resolution pleading with federal authorities to step in.
They put together an undercover team, including one of the members was a Native American.
And they posed as cattlemen.
One posed as an insurance salesman.
And in particular, they followed the money in the deaths of Molly's case.
And in particular, they followed the wills to see who was profiting from each of these killings.
And they ultimately led them to somebody who Molly knew and somebody who Molly thought she loved.
It led them to her own husband, Ernest Burckhardt, and Ernest's uncle, who had masterminded the scheme.
And these were essentially inheritance schemes.
So they involved somebody marrying into a family while pretending to love them, having children with them in many cases, while systematically plotting to kill them.
We're in the Folger Library, and I think always of this quote from Julius Caesar about conspiracy and about hiding thy face.
And that was very true of these crimes.
So just to answer your question really quickly, the FBI was able to identify some of the henchmen, but there was a much deeper and darker conspiracy that the Bureau never exposed.
There were many other deaths, many other suspicious deaths, and they were unconnected to Ernest Burckhardt and his uncle.
I went out to a massive archive out in Oklahoma, a branch of the National Archives, about the size of an airport hangar.
And in that archive, I was doing research on this guardianship system.
And just very quickly, the guardianship system was a system which the government forced many of the Osage with their money to have these white guardians to manage their fortunes.
It's this very prejudiced and paternalistic system.
And so I was doing research on the Guardians, and I pulled out a booklet that identified who a guardian was and whose Osage's fortunes they had managed.
And I was looking through that booklet, and I noticed that under the name of one of the Guardians, they had five Osages whose fortunes they had managed.
The only other thing in this little booklet was if one of them had died, somebody had written the word dead next to their name.
And I noticed in the first name, dead, the next name, dead, third name, fourth names, all dead.
And then I began to look through the book more quickly, and I noticed other guardians, and they had about 12 Osages whose money they may have managed, and they had about a 50% mortality rate.
And this defied any natural death rate.
I remember the Osage had money, they had healthcare, and this booklet contained the hints of a systematic murder campaign, and it really ended up demolishing the notion of the book I thought I was writing.
There was the people who had masterminded some of the killings of Molly's family, Molly's husband, her husband's uncle, and a henchman were prosecuted and convicted.
But it turned out that this was really less about this singular evil figure or just a singular evil figure.
It was really about this culture of killing in which many people were participating in these crimes.
So when you concluded that it had been more extensive, you decided to write a book about it, did you expect the U.S. government to do anything at that point to go after people or their descendants or somehow have some redress for the descendants of the people who had lost lives?
You know, as a writer and a historian, the job you view yourself, you never know what kind of impact you will have.
And so the thing that you're trying to do, the thing you can hopefully control is to document this, is to research and to put it out there and let people absorb it and hopefully produce change that way.
It's not one, it's not like you're writing a book about Abraham Lincoln might be a bestseller, George Washington is probably going to be a bestseller, or John Kennedy is going to be a bestseller.
This is a tribe that nobody in the east of probably Oklahoma has heard of.
And it happened a long time ago.
So were you shocked when your book became the number one bestseller?
And I remember, you know, I spent really six years working on that book.
And I remember my wife sitting me down before it came out and just saying, no matter what happened, you did something you believed in and it's important.
And so you have no expectation.
And that anyone would read the book or that it would become part of our, that it would help deepen our understanding of this very important history was one of those unexpected surprises.
I don't remember what it's, how it, but I will say this.
I remember going to Oklahoma and beginning to hold events to discuss this history.
And even in Oklahoma, where these crimes took place, outside the Osage Nation, who deeply were aware of their history, but outside the Osage Nation, Uncle, many people there had not heard of it.
And I remember arriving and more and more people coming, descendants coming.
And one of the most amazing experiences I had in the wake of the book, you know, more than anything else, was I had asked the publisher if they would send me back to the communities where I'd done research.
I would go to the Osage Nation.
I would spend usually two months out of the year every year there.
And I remember they had an event for me in Fairfax, which has a town of just about a thousand people.
And they arranged it, and so many members of the Osage Nation had come and lined up, so many people I had interviewed.
And for me, that was more rewarding than anything else.
So when they're making the movie of this book, do you sit there on the set and say, well, it didn't happen that way, or you want to be factually accurate, you got to do it differently, or they didn't want to pay attention to you?
And the most important thing, you know, it's Martin Scorsese.
I would never say to Martin Scorsese, you know, I really don't think you should do that tracking shot.
I would go this way.
You know, they all know what they're doing.
But the one thing that was very important to me was I had worked so closely with the Osage Nation in working on my book, and they needed to develop those relationships.
And they were so committed to doing that and working so closely.
So many members of Osage participated in the film, were consultants, there were Osage actors in it.
And to me, that was really what was the most important.
And you're there as a resource.
You know, you're there if they need you.
As, you know, sometimes an actor might want court transcripts.
Or I even had a video of Ernest Burkhard Molly's husband as an elder gentleman.
And I was able to send that to Leonardo DiCaprio so he could see that, get a better sense of the person he was playing.
Well, you know, the good thing about being a nerd book writer, you spend all your time in the archives, is basically if you get invited to the Oscars or a movie comes out, it's directed by Martin Scorsese for at least two days, your kids think you are cool.
So the premise behind the book was about a British maritime ship in the 18th century that was part of a squadron in a war against Spain that was being set out on a secret mission to try to capture a galleon filled with so much wealth it was known as the prize of all the ocean.
And it focuses on this one ship, the wager.
And the squadron and the wager ship just undergo one calamity after another from scurvy to hurricanes.
And eventually the wager gets shipwrecked on a desolate island where the crew and the officers slowly descend into a real life Lord of the Flies.
It's known as the wager for a very simple kind of almost literal reason, which was the wager, Sir Charles Wagers, was in the Admiralty at the time and was a leader, and so it was named after him.
It was known as the wager, but obviously it was metaphorical.
And one, you're looking for a story that grips you.
I remember I was doing research.
I came upon the story when I found a copy of a digital manuscript in a British library.
It was written by John Byron, who had been the 16-year-old midshipman on the wager, who would later go on to become the grandfather of the poet, Lord Byron, whose poetry is greatly influenced by this narrative I was suddenly reading.
And it was written in very old English.
I certainly did not think reading it at first that this would ever be a bestseller.
It was written in this old English, the F's are S's, or the S's are F's.
But I kept pausing over these very arresting phrases.
He referred to it as the perfect hurricane.
He describes the scurvy that's consuming the ship and getting into the shipmates' mind and sending them mad.
And I started to realize that this odd little old manuscript contained the seeds of one of the most extraordinary stories of survival and mayhem I had ever come across.
But I will just say that that would not have been enough.
That would not have been enough because that would have been a great story.
But what does it mean and what is it about?
And at that time, when I was doing the research, I started to say, well, would there be enough material to actually tell the story?
And I found out that some of the survivors, after this horrific shipwreck, have made it back to England.
And after everything they have been through, they are suddenly summoned to face a court-martial for their alleged crimes.
And if they don't tell a compelling story, if they don't convince the Admiralty that their version is true, after everything they've been through, they're going to get hanged.
And so there begins this war over the truth and the war over these stories.
And it really echoed our times in which we're having these wars over history, wars over truth.
And so I thought this weird little 18th century story that I never heard of felt like a parable.
Yeah, the seeds of destruction of this expedition were planted right at the start.
Great Britain did not have conscription at the time.
They were short of volunteers.
And so they began to press people.
And people from the American Revolution know about pressing, which is they would go around and they would look for anybody who had the telltale signs of a mariner.
They would even check your fingertips if you had a little bit of tar on them.
Tar was used on ships to make things water resistant.
You were a mariner.
They would essentially abduct you and take you on the ship.
But even then they were short of seamen.
So they went to this old pensioner home and they took 500 of these people, many of them who were in their 60s and 70s, some of whom were missing a limb, and some who were so sick they had to be lifted on stretchers onto the ship.
Right, so they go on the ship, the wager, and the wager is one of several ships that were involved in this expedition to try to capture the Spanish gold.
But the wager is going on a route that is the most dangerous route probably on the earth.
They were going to go around Cape Horn, so they're going to go around the tip of South America between the very bottom of South America and Antarctica.
And that has the roughest seas on Earth.
And, you know, many people have heard that.
It wasn't until I did the research that I actually knew why.
And there are real geological reasons for this.
It's the only place on Earth where the seas circle the globe.
It's suddenly, you have to understand these people on the ship, many of them didn't swim back then.
That surprised me.
Seaman often did not know how to swim.
And these ships were their homes.
They were also these murderous instruments for war.
They were their fortresses.
And suddenly it hits a rock and a two-ton anchor falls through the hull of the ship.
Then another wave comes and washes the wager off of this rock and it's careening through the Gulf of Pain.
Its tiller is broken.
And then finally, it smashes between these two pillars of rocks and the ship begins to break apart.
The cabins collapse.
Water is surging upward.
Rats are surging upward.
Those who have been suffering from scurvy in their hammocks, who could not get out, they drowned.
But miraculously, the ship did not entirely sink yet.
It was kind of perched between these rocks.
And the few survivors climb up onto the tops, onto the remnants of the ship, and they look out in the distance, and they can see this island, which would become known as Wager Island in the distance.
So one group, these kind of the mutineers who overthrow the captain, leave the captain behind on the island.
About 30 of them survive and they make it back to England.
And it really is a lesson in trying to tell your story first.
They quickly rush out their story of what had happened.
One of them, the leader of the group, was a very good writer and had documented everything.
And he kind of sets this narrative of what had happened, that they had suffered and they had eventually built the ship and they had traveled some 3,000 miles leading one of the longest castaway voyages ever recorded.
And they were treated as heroes.
They were seen as heroes who had led this miraculous journey of survival.
Well, at least when they initially land in Brazil.
And then several months later, this other little ship, as you described, is basically a dugout canoe, washes ashore with the captain who's so delirious he can't even recollect his own name.
And then when he begins to get better, he says, wait a second, those people aren't mutineers.
The expectation was that some of them would definitely hang.
I mean, mutiny was the most severe crime, an accusation in a naval body because it threatens the very order of the ship and it threatens the order of the empire.
And so the mutineers were praying on the day before they went into the trial.
The captain himself had shot somebody on the island, and the countercharge was that he had committed murder.
So there was a chance that he could hang if he couldn't justify.
They get in this room, and the Admiralty's listening to all these stories back and forth, and they start to think, you know, do we really like any of these stories?
They're making us look like brutes, not like gentlemen, and they're undercutting the British Empire.
And so they eventually do something that's really astonishing and shocking given the British history of treating mutinies.
And not only do they whitewash it, they then begin to construct and encourage there is one kind of heroic deed that came out of this squadron and this mission: that one of the ships in the squadron, only one, survived the journey, and it actually captured the galleon.
And so that story becomes the one the gold is paraded through England.
The war had been disastrous, the expedition had been disastrous, more than 1,300 people had died on this expedition.
But here they had this victorious narrative.
That's the story they want to tell.
And that becomes the alternative history, the kind of mythic tale of the sea that would get passed down through history.
I found somebody, I found through the help of somebody, I found a Chilean captain who had a boat, and he said he could take me from Chiliway Island, which is about 350 miles north of Wager Island.
It was actually where Captain Cheap and Byron ended up when they escaped before getting back to England.
And he sent me a photograph of the boat.
I wish I could show it.
But in the photograph, it looked really pretty good.
I was like, this is good.
I can handle this.
And then when I finally got there after several days and got to the boat, it was this pretty small, kind of ungainly boat that was wood heated.
You know, it was heated by a wood stove.
And it was so rough that for the first five days, I think it was five days, we could not actually even leave the harbor.
You couldn't stand on the boat because it's so rough.
I was listening foolishly to Moby Dick in my earphones, which, as I've said before, is I think the greatest American novel ever written and the worst book to ever listen to when you're on the wager, going, I mean, on this boat looking for the wager remnants.
But we did.
We made it to the island.
I had a skilled captain, and at one point he pointed, we were looking.
I mean, the island is still windswept.
It's barren.
It's cold.
There is nothing there, no signs of this ferocious struggle that took place there.
And I could understand why this British officer described the island as this place of where your soul would die in you.
I thought, well, my soul would die in me here.
But the captain at one point pointed to a little stream, and he said, Come over here.
And in that stream, we could see this wooden timber.
It was about five yards in length.
I could see it floating.
The water was very clear.
And they were the remnants from an 18th century warship believed to be from His Majesty's ship, The Wager.
And we know what they were and are because an earlier expedition, a British Chilean scientific expedition, had discovered them.
You know, it's funny, you felt kind of blasphemous.
I mean, it felt blasphemous.
I honestly, I did actually think about it, but I mean, this should probably be in a museum, and I felt like it was an artifact, and I felt like it was like plucking a folio from this library and walking out with it.
So even though it was this decaying wood in a stream, I just left it there.
Well, I must have done two years of research before that trip, and then the book took a good three and a half years to finish the research and writing.
Yeah, well, I would say my one piece of advice, whatever you don't become David Graham.
You don't want to be in my head.
You know, there are lots of ways to do this, so I'll keep it really simple because it really is.
There are no real secrets.
The key, I think, to writing and learning is reading and writing.
Reading and writing.
And whatever form, however way you can write, if you're writing on cereal boxes, the descriptions, if you're writing line notes to music, if you're writing for your local newspaper, if you're writing poetry, you have to write, you have to sit.
There are no ways out.
I mean, the difference I always say between a writer and a non-writer is the writer is willing to sit for hours staring at his computer, rewriting the same sentence.
When you're writing, do you get up in the morning and say, I'm going to write for three hours, or I'm going to write a thousand words, or I'm going to write so many pages?
How do you decide how much you're going to write before you stop at the end of the day?
I get up early, drink too much coffee, read too many newspapers, get to the computer, and try to write 500 words.
The thing I have discovered about writing, which is why I actually like to do chores around the house sometimes, is because those correlate with time in and output.
You know, you do the dishes, you know how long it'll take to do the dishes.
So that 500 words, sometimes I'll go to my computer and at lunchtime, I'm like, 500 words are done.
I'm done.
And then sometimes 7 o'clock, 8 o'clock at night, and I'm at 200 words, and I just can't get it there.
And after you write your 500 words, do you go back the next day and say, how could I have written something so poorly and edit it all back or you don't?
Yeah, I do tend to, you know, the times when the 500 words come best is when I have separated my editorial voice that is looking over my shoulder saying, that stinks, that's a repetitive word.
That's not very creative.
Does the comma really go there?
The best 500 words come when I'm more in an unconscious state.
And so it tends to flow better.
And then the next day I come back and then I really try to use that voice.
And I do edit it.
And you never know.
I mean, that's what's so erratic.
Sometimes I look at it, I'm like, yeah, that's pretty good.
I'm done.
And sometimes I'll be rewriting those 500 words all week.
Yeah, so my wife, who I've now spoken much about, her name is Kira Darn.
She's a journalist too.
She's wonderful.
And she's my first reader, brilliant editor.
But I will usually take my manuscript when I finish a chapter.
And I say, well, you read this.
And then, well, let's just give an example of the first chapter of the wager.
So you're so nervous, it's the first chapter.
And you kind of, you watch her as she takes the pen and you can see her reading.
And I'm kind of in the distance.
She doesn't know I'm watching.
Kind of peeking nervously, trying to gauge reactions.
How are the eyes moving?
And inevitably, I'll suddenly hear the word, oh God, no.
Oh, God, no.
And that is where I have spent probably six months researching the construction of the ship of the wager.
And I have written, I think personally, a magisterial account of 20,000 words of how to build an 18th century ship, including where the wood floats from, where it's cut down, how it's bent.
That will then become about maybe 600 words.
And I have at my desk, I really do, I have what I have written on it now.
It's called the God-know file with all the wonderful descriptions that would have bored everybody to tears but me, ghosts.
Well, I'll say I think, I don't know about being a number one bestseller, but I think the key, I really believe in the story more than the author.
There are so many writers who are better writers than me.
You know, they're just incredibly gifted.
They can write these beautiful metaphors.
They're exquisite.
You know, my belief is that if I can find the right story, a story that has power and meaning and grip, and get out of the way.
I mean, I'm doing the research, and I got to put it on the paper, but get out of the way.
To me, that has always been, I spend so much time trying to find the right story because to me, that's really what it's about, much more than the hand behind.
If I was stranded on the island, I mean, you know, you might want to be reading Lord of the Flies or, you know, Cormick McCarthy of just the darkness and the ravenousness of human nature for getting clues.
But maybe you'd want to get something sweet in there, you know, maybe something a little distracting.
I mean, I, for distraction, read a lot of detective fiction.
So I'd find some, you know, Raymond Chandler novel and curl up in the cold as I froze to death reading that.
Well, you're an incredible American success story, and I want to thank you for giving us the benefit of how you've done this.
And we don't know what you're going to write your next book about, but I got a feeling it's going to be a New York Times number one bestseller.
So David, I want to thank you very much for being with us and giving us the insights of how to be a great writer.
Thank you.
unidentified
Thank you, David.
Such a pleasure.
David Grant and David Rubenstein viewed the Folger Shakespeare Library's collection of first folios, the first published collections of Shakespeare's plays, and also visited the library's vault.
Would you like to have a look at two of the folios that we decided to isolate?
So, these two were folios that were owned by women.
This one was owned by Margaret Bay, and you can see that she's written an inscription.
She sort of tried to sort of test out what it might be like to write with a quill and write kind of sub-par verse.
And then this one was owned by Olivia Cotton, who may have been, who was related to the Hutchinson family, which was an important family in the 17th century.
So, it just shows you that women were reading Shakespeare as well, even in the 17th century.
This is one of the famous vaults where we hold the Folger collection in all its forms.
But I'm going to take you first back into this other room.
And what I would like to show you is back in this corner.
So, we've seen the first folios and the Folger's obsession with this collecting this magnificent object.
This is the collection of quartos that they also collected.
So, these are the earlier, smaller, cheaper versions of the plays.
18 of the plays were printed in this format and often during Shakespeare's lifetime.
So, this is Pericles, for instance, and 1609 with Shakespeare's name on it, and is a very good example of the way the plays appeared in this earlier format before we get to the first folio.
And so, of course, the Folgers wanting to collect everything they possibly could that documented this work.
The folios were very important.
So, now we're going to head back this way.
So, we're going to head back here.
We have a little bit of room where I have a few things set out.
So, this is one of the 82 first folios, but I wanted to show this one in particular because to me it demonstrates a little bit of something about Henry and Emily's obsession with this book.
This is a copy that is actually made up.
In other words, all of the sections come from various copies, and it was put together to make a copy.
So, even in this state, all of these leaves are detached.
This binding is essentially a shell, but it is complete more or less in its parts.
And so, again, we have it right now.
It's arranged that the Tempest in the opening of that play is what you see when you open this binding, but it doesn't really exist.
But the Folgers were just devoted to collecting every single copy that they could because they felt as though, if they were to do that, that someday we would learn something new about Shakespeare.
unidentified
See more with David Graham in the vault at the Folger Shakespeare Library on America's Book Club, The Treasures, available at c-span.org/slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page.
C-SPAN's America's Book Club programming is brought to you by the cable, satellite, and streaming companies that provide C-SPAN as a public service.
Starmer Addresses Iran Crisis00:00:13
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And now, British Prime Minister Kier Starmer addresses the ongoing situation in Iran and the Middle East while taking questions for members of the House of Commons.
He also speaks about rising energy and fuel costs, gun regulations, infrastructure, and continued support