Susan Orlean on storytelling and the joy of discovery

Oct 16 –

Susan Orlean has built a career out of noticing what others might overlook. Whether it’s writing about orchids, libraries, gospel singers or 10-year-olds, she’s made the ordinary feel extraordinary — not by inflating her subjects, but by revealing their depth.

Now, with her latest book “Joyride,” published on October 14 by Simon & Schuster, the best-selling author and New Yorker staff writer turns the lens on herself. Part memoir, part literary masterclass, her story is a story of her stories — and the curiosity that drives them.

Speaking with Reuters from her home in Los Angeles, Orlean reflects on the future of literary journalism, the risks posed by artificial intelligence and what she believes machines will never master.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Why did now feel like the right time to turn the lens inward?

I had toyed with the idea of writing a book about writing. And then I felt like, who am I to be telling people how to write? Wouldn’t that be a boring book, a bit academic? And then I thought a different approach might be to take one piece and really take it apart and examine it. As soon as I began toying with that, it became obvious to me that I needed context. It didn’t make sense just to drop into a piece — but rather, why did I choose that piece? What was going on in my life?

Some of that is specifically personal, but it’s also very obviously professional — particularly, I think, because writing is the kind of profession that you really inhabit. You don’t do it and punch the clock and come home and leave it behind. It really becomes your identity and the way you look at the world.

You write that your greatest virtue as a reporter is your willingness to admit ignorance. How has that shaped your approach?

I think coming into a story with a lot of ego is the most defeating possible posture. If I were to think of what quality a writer needs to have, it’s the willingness to learn — and the way you learn is to be open about your ignorance. I mean, it’s like going to university: You don’t begin with this attitude of, “I’m going to go to this course on sociology, knowing about sociology.” You’re going to learn. And it’s a subtle shift, but it’s really significant.

I write a lot about people who don’t get written about. So to approach them saying, “I know everything about your world, now just give me a few anecdotes,” I don’t think that’s a good way to begin a relationship with people. You want them to feel in a very profound way that you’re really interested in them. And if you’re not, maybe you shouldn’t be a writer or maybe you shouldn’t do that story.

To that end, you write that you often go into interviews without notes — an idea that might seem almost heretical in today’s journalism culture. Why do you think that method has worked so well for you?

Part of what animates a story is the genuine experience of the writer coming to understand this new world, this new place, this new person. Being overprepared, having your list of questions — I’m not saying you shouldn’t even know the name of the town you’re in. But overpreparation, to me, begins chipping away at the possibility for delight; the possibility of being excited that you’ve learned something new. I don’t want to learn that new thing back in my office. I want to learn it on the spot with the people I’m writing about in the subculture that I’m exploring or the place that I’m discovering, because then that’s what I can bring to the story. And I feel that there’s a sincere delight in my stories that I can’t fake.

I do lots and lots and lots of reporting after the fact, where I need to find out more about something that someone mentioned, get the history. But I feel that at least part of the experience has to have the rawness of adventure and even the disorientation of being in a new world.

I want to ask you about AI, as I know you were part of a group of authors who have raised alarm about AI models being trained on writers’ works without permission. What’s at stake for writers in this moment?

The risk of AI, I think, is moving us further and further from primary sources of information. If you look at Wikipedia, Wikipedia cites the source material. ChatGPT, or AI in general, part of its function is to process all that stuff and give you an answer. You don’t see the work. So I think there are multiple problems: one is not really knowing from where this material arose so that you can assess how you value it. I mean, is this a good source? Is this junk? And secondly, I think it’s really not that different from kids using AI for homework. Are you really learning the material if you’re having it presented to you as a pre-digested chunk of information?

I use AI as a task rabbit: I have it make itineraries for me, I have it look up phone numbers, I ask it if the post office is open at 5 p.m. I want it to process all the information and just give me one chunk of answer. But for a writer, I think that’s an exceedingly dangerous way to learn because you are not discovering; you aren’t digging in and coming through the effort of learning to an understanding.

You’ve written about libraries, orchids, gospel singers, high school basketball players, 10-year-old boys. What draws you to the ordinary, and what makes them so extraordinary?

It’s an intuitive kind of gut reaction to feeling I just want to learn more about this. I think that’s why stories that are suggested to me often don’t work, because I just don’t have that gut reaction to it. It’s like a first date — you just have chemistry.

I think that the fact that you can learn so much, even about something you think you know, brings me to the place of extraordinary. Of course, we all know what libraries are like. We’ve all been in libraries millions of times. But if you stop for a minute and think about it, it suddenly is this incredibly complex thing. You don’t really know how they work and you can’t imagine how many people come in and out.

And in the case of the Los Angeles Library [the subject of her 2018 book “The Library Book,” which tells the story of the 1986 fire that broke out there, affecting more than 1 million books], who could imagine that it had this catastrophic event that was so dramatic? Yet, from the outside, it’s just like a library. How ordinary. I’ve yet to find any topic that didn’t yield a lot more than what it might seem like at first blush. If I think of the story of mine that’s been quoted the most, it’s “The American Man, Age 10.” What could be less amazing on the surface than a 10-year-old suburban kid? Not everything can be a story. I think what is necessary is the writer’s passion and curiosity for it. And it can be something so small, but within that small thing, you can see a universe. And to me, that capacity exists in almost everything.

What are you hoping your readers, particularly the writers among them, will take away from “Joyride”?

The path to a fulfilling life, in my humble view, is to cultivate your curiosity. The excitement of discovering something you didn’t know, some world you didn’t experience, that’s what keeps you alive. We’re in a world in which turning inward and turning away from difference is unfortunately being preached as the way to exist, and I think it’s terrifying. To me, that’s kind of the end of humanity. Humanity is about this adventure of being alive and of learning.

For writers, I think we’re all very concerned about the nuts and bolts of the profession and how you get started and how you get assignments, and I am not minimizing that. It gets more challenging all the time. I look at my start and the era that I came into being a writer, there were wonderful opportunities that just don’t exist anymore. But I think the one thing that no one can take away from you — and, frankly, I don’t think AI could ever take away from you — is the idea of what you want to write about; the idea of honing your curiosity, the idea of learning what stories really animate you. That’s what you are selling to an editor, to a magazine. And that can’t be replaced.

I think we need to all be the most beautiful sentence writers and the best reporters. But even before that, we have to be gobbling up the world. And grabbing onto it with the energy and enthusiasm and excitement that really is what being a writer is all about.

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