Friday, April 4, 2025
Become a Patron!Nick Davidson, @nickgdavidson on IG, a freelance journalist, says, “We usually think of hunting stories and looking for ideas, but I feel like it’s the other way around: stories hunt the storyteller, and I’m just prey.”
I love that sentiment.
Nick is on the show to talk about his piece for The Atavist Magazine titled “The Balloon that Fell From the Sky.” It’s a remarkable and tragic story of a gas balloon race where one of the teams was shot out of the sky by a Belarusian helicopter. It’s a gripping story that Nick spent the better part of three years reporting and writing.
Nick’s work has appeared in Outside, VICE Sports, Men’s Journal, The Atavist, and Garden & Gun, among many other places. He’s also a musician and an avid outdoorsman. In this episode, we talk about:
- What he’s better at now than he was just a few years ago
- Letting stories find you
- Recreating scenes
- Conversations vs. interviews
- How to ethically handle sensitive stories
- And a whole lot more
We also hear from Jonah Ogles, the lead editor of this piece to get his side of the table as well. Great stuff!
If you dig it, share it, and tag me on IG @creativenonfictionpodcast or Bluesky @brendanomeara.bsky.social.
As journalists, and specifically freelance journalists, we’re always on the hunt for stories.
It creates this hustle hamster wheel2 that is on the one hand necessary, but on the second hand, it’s exhausting. You barely have enough time to enjoy the fruits and spoils of a job well done before you’re desperately trying to fill the well back up.
But Nick Davidson, freelance journalist, has a refreshing approach, one borne of experience and maturity. He says:
“We usually think of hunting stories and looking for ideas, but I kind of feel like it’s the other way around. Stories hunt the storyteller, and I’m just prey, before I know it, I’m shot with an arrow, and this thing has grabbed me. And then, to kind of change the metaphor a bit, then you do this courtship. I’ve come to trust the story, what the story has. I don’t mean to get weird about it, but the story chooses the storyteller as its channel to be birthed into the world.”
Through experience, travails, acceptances, and rejections, at the heart is patience.
“Patience and surrender are so key. And the other thing is, talking about success is — I struggle with this myself — is comparing yourself to other writers and saying, ‘Why am I not at X place right now?’ And the answer to that is because you’re not that person. Yes, your journey, you as a writer, as a human, isn’t about them. So what you can do is look to other people who are having success, people you admire, and you celebrate them to an extent. I think that any human being’s success is all human success.”
Like so much about this morass we’ve gotten ourselves into, so much of it boils down to time, to staying in the game long enough for the skills to improve, for luck to tap you on the shoulder. Yes, even for others who lacked — for one reason or another, out of their control or not — the perseverance or the privilege to keep going. Endurance often rewards us with hard-won intuition.
“When a story grabs me, chooses me, I trust that I’ve gotten a lot better at that, but practically speaking, I’ve gotten better at pitching because I understand myself as a writer and how I want to present what I know about the story, and I feel like I better understand how to give everything I have to it without making it super long and overloading the editor, but really going for it and knowing exactly what elements I want in a pitch to make it kind of unavoidably interesting.”
When we pull the lens back, why would we want to be cut from the mold of our heroes? Drawing inspiration is one thing, but to want to BE them is, quite frankly, a disservice to the ever-developing self.
“So don’t get beaten down and discouraged by someone else coming out with an amazing story that you didn’t happen to do. I mean, get over it. Find your story. I feel like nature doesn’t make copies, only originals, so everybody is original. There’s never been a Nick Davidson before me. There’s never been a Brendan O’Meara before you. So nobody who’s alive today, no human who has ever been alive in human history, can tell you how to how to be successful in your way. Only you have that map inside of yourself to figure out how to be the storyteller that you are.”
Be sure to pair this podstack and podcast with any of the past Atavist issues and go read Nick’s piece “The Balloon That Fell From the Sky.”
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