Writing Tips – Home of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast

Episode 426: Asking for Blurbs, Unauthorized Biographies, and the Mystery of Aaron Rodgers with Ian O’Connor

Ian O’Connor is a modern-day master of the sports biography, the unauthorized sports biography. Unauthorized is not a dirty word, though the industry needs to rebrand around it. We’ll workshop that …

Unauthorized = true journalism, no editorial input from the central figure, more likely closer to the truth instead of the central figure’s truth. It is not a collaboration.

This is the biography you want to read.

And in the hands of someone like Ian, there’s no better reader experience. Ian handled his latest mammoth figure in Out of the Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers (Mariner Books) with utmost fairness and showed the grayness of Rodgers’s character, which makes for a gripping and complicated read.

Discovery and Writing Before You’re Ready

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By by by Brendan O’Meara

Hey CNFers, I didn’t have an interview in the can for this week, so I figured I’d try something a little new. Kinda new. Sorta.

This podcast is something of a craft essay. It’s similar to my parting shot … if I only published the parting shot. (Sidebar: This has me thinking, maybe I should bottle up my parting shots and run them on, say, Wednesday, as a mid-week pick me up. If they’re craft based, not if it’s personal. You can email me if you think you’d like that, similar to my flounder (defunct?) Casualty of Words, a writing podcast for people in a hurry. How did it not catch on?)

Episode 362: Svati Kirsten Narula

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By Brendan O’Meara

What a treat to have Svati Kirsten Narula (@svatikirsten) on the podcast to talk about her Outside feature “A Mountain Called Her Home” about the life and death of Nanda Devi Unsoeld about “went went wrong during this controversial adventure, shedding light on an enigmatic young woman who lived without limits.”

This is a great chat about patience, not burning bridges, and the struggle of lobbying for access with people who have felt burned in the past and, despite a reporter’s best intentions, burning those people again.

Episode 353: Isaac Fitzgerald

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By Brendan O’Meara

Are you holding onto a railing? OK, good, Isaac Fitzgerald (@IsaacFitzgerald) is here, CNFers! He’s the author of the incredible memoir-in-essays Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional (Bloomsbury).

Isaac is a frequent contributor on The Today Show, offering book recommendations to the masses. His CV has The Rumpus, McSweeney’s, BuzzFeed Books, among others. He’s also the author of How to be a Pirate, Pen and Ink, and Knives and Ink.

Episode 348: Carl Hoffman

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By Brendan O’Meara

Carl Hoffman is here (@lunaticcarl and @carlhoffmanstories)! He’s the author of Liar’s Circus: A Strange and Terrifying Journey into the Upside-Down World of Trump’s MAGA Rallies (Custom House).

I read this quick, as most of you will, and it is a strange and terrifying dive into the virtual reality chamber of MAGA Trump supporters. Carl is a long-time travel writer, and he turns that gaze and immersion at our own country.

It called to mind a conversation I heard with Henry Rollins, who has traveled all over the world, where he said the place he feels most unsafe in the world is … America.

Episode 347: Emily Fox Kaplan

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By Brendan O’Meara

It’s been a long time since we featured a writer from the Pipe Wrench Magazine roster, so it was it nice to welcome Emily Fox Kaplan to CNF Pod HQ to talk about her piece “Searching for Zarahemla.”

It’s a trippy travel piece that has a very David Foster Wallace vibe to it, though Emily hasn’t read any DFW. Just as well. Far be it from me to be a the bro to say, ‘You gotta read him.’

But read his tennis writing …

Episode 339: Jeff Pearlman

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By Brendan O’Meara

What a surprise! Jeff Pearlman (@jeffpearlman), author of The Last Folk Hero: The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson, came by the show to talk about writing biography (but don’t bring up the word craft, okay?).

This was a wonderful conversation from a brilliant writer and reporter, and a great advocate for the writing community at large. He’s the host of Two Writers Slinging Yang.

Writing this story was the hardest one he’d ever reported. He wrote it in backwards chronology, a la Memento. Did you know I did something similar back in 2016? True story. Jeff got $4 a word for his 3,000-word story; I got $200 for a 5,000-word story. That should give you an idea what kind of astral plane Jeff Pearlman works from. He’s a pretty cool dude.

Episode 332: David Maraniss

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By Brendan O’Meara

David Maraniss is the author of several biographies, including his latest, Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe (Simon & Schuster). This book will make a great addition to your sports biographies. But like great stories involving sport, it’s about so much more.

David has written biographies on Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Vince Lombardi, Roberto Clemente and now the great Jim Thorpe.

In this conversation we talk about David’s “four legs of the table” for writing biography, navigating around people who won’t talk, world building in biography, and a whole lot more.

Episode 328 [RERUN]: My #HippoCamp21 Talk — In Their Words: Lessons Learned from the Best of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast

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By Brendan O’Meara

This year has been a tough year to book guests. Thankfully some, like Ruby McConnell and Donna Talarico swoop in at the last moment and bail me out.

Sometimes, as was the case earlier this month when I was dealing a family emergency, I couldn’t face the mic and we missed our first week in YEARS.

I’m not a fan of “reruns,” especially when all the episodes are in the feed, but the feed is long and overwhelming. This week, to celebrate HippoCamp22, I figured why not re-surface my HippoCamp21 talk (which garnered such feedback as, “would not see him speak again.” Can’t win ’em all.).

Episode 293: The ‘Supremely Tiny Acts’ of Sonya Huber

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By Brendan O’Meara

Look who’s back? It’s Sonya Huber!

What a treat!

She the author of the memoir Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir of a Day (Mad Creek Books) and it’s one of the best experiences I had reading a book in 2021.

In this episode we talk about: