Episode 487: Robert Weintraub and the ‘American Hindenburg’ – Home of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast

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“Writing is so easily not done.” — Robert Weintraub

Today for Ep. 487, we’ve got Robert Weintraub, a NYT best selling author, and his Atavist piece “American Hindenburg: In the early days of flight, airships were hailed as the future of war. Then disaster struck the USS Akron.” It’s at magazine.atavist.com. Consider subscribing. I finally did. I paid $24.99 for a year to support this blockbuster journalism. You think I get freebies? Then you don’t know how stupid I am.

We hear from lead editor Jonah Ogles about his side of the table and how he advises people to model their stories after previously published ones and how there’s never really a wasted moment by doing as much research as possible. Either you find out there’s nothing there, or you find out there’s there there and you have more grist for the mill. Great stuff.

Robert is the best selling author of No Better Friend, The Divine Miss Marble, The House that Ruth Built, and The Victory Season. He has a Substack called NYC 1000 where he counts down the top 1,000 sporting events in New York City. That’s at weintraubr.substack.com.

Robert cut his teeth as a television producer at ESPN, but soon began writing for Slate, The New York Times, The Guardian, Grantland, and now The Atavist.

We talk about creating these historical narratives and grounding the characters in their present, looking at a magazine and then thinking what kind of stories you can pitch there, and how his Atavist story started as a book proposal.