By Brendan O’Meara
“The structure should grow organically from the material.”
“At what point are you taxing the reader, knowing when the reader has had enough.”
“I hated [calling people] at first, just terrified of calling people., but I’ve gotten over it. It took years.” —Scott Eden
Here we are again. Today I welcome Scott Eden, an investigative reporter for ESPN the Magazine. His piece on maligned former NBA referee Tim Donaghy was a piece two years in the making and came out in February.
As you may or may not know, this is The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to badass writers about the art and craft of telling true stories.
Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts and follow me on Twitter @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod.
Also, be sure to subscribe to my newsletter and check out this new thing I’m doing for #the100DayProject. It’s called Casualty of Words, and it starts in earnest on April 2. Check it out.
So Scott is here and he shares his path to journalism and specifically the kind of deep dives he takes into worlds that people would just rather him stay out of. He talks about his obsession over structure and about the famous New Yorker writers he reveres.
He also wrote this incredible piece Yasiel Puig and the industry around smuggling baseball players out of Cuba.
Thanks to Goucher College’s MFA in Nonfiction and Bay Path University’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction for making the show possible.
