Joyride by Susan Orlean is a memoir on her life and career as a nonfiction writer, with books including The Orchid Thief, The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin, On Animals, and her first, Saturday Night.
Orlean starts with her path as a writer. She graduated from the University of Michigan, then moved to Portland and worked at
Willamette Week as her second writing job there. She went to Boston and worked at the
Boston Globe, also as her second writing job there, and then New York City. She eventually wound up at
The New Yorker, first doing freelance pieces before she became a staff writer there.
There's fascinating anecdotes about journalism in years past, with large expense accounts, frequent travel to write stories, and often open-ended timeframes for time to complete them and how frequently staff writers had to publish. She also covers how access as a writer was different in the past, she wanted to write about working in missile silos, asked the military if she could visit, and did so with little difficulty.
Orlean describes her book Saturday Night as a wild experience of being passed to different editors, some of whom were interested in the book and others who were simply assigned to it. She twenty-five years ago wrote The Orchid Thief, expanded from a magazine article into her second book, which became the basis for the movie Adaptation, with the Charlie Kaufman-written screenplay about making the movie from the book. In researching Rin Tin Tin, she notes finding late in the research process a volume of material that expanded the scope of the book. When she wrote The Library Book, it coincided with her moving from a country home in Hudson Valley, New York to Los Angeles.
The "writer on writing" content she provides is fantastic. On subjects, she writes:
- Writers fall into two categories, those who have something they want to say to the world, and those who believe the world has something to tell them, with her in the second camp.
- Two categories of story subjects she loves are "hiding in place sight" and "who knew?"
- She likes to write about subjects that are passionate about something, especially if it likely wouldn't be covered by other writers.
- Every person has an unimaginably rich world inside of them. She loves the idea of describing a world, it may not be a celebrity world, but it's a world nonetheless.
- When you pick a topic, you declare it matters. Writing is then learning about that topic and sharing it, including your thoughts on it, with others.
- Editors or bosses she worked with said that her stories being about obscure topics made them require great execution to be successful.
- Subjects at times would feel an attachment with her, she's asking in depth about their lives.
On her writing process, she notes that:
- She reads her work aloud, listening for the cadence of the words.
- A lesson taught to her about writing that it involves reporting, then thinking, then writing.
- Her work is something that anyone could do, putting in the research and reading the archives to be able to describe something, but they don't.
- It was her job to do the research, think about it, and then tell the story.
- Another lesson she was taught is stories don't need a huge conclusion, they should leave readers falling forward, finishing the tale in their heads.
- The engine of her stories is the drive from ignorance to knowledge.
- To manage the volume of material from researching books, she put information on index cards and spread it all out, then grouped them together. It's assembling a coherent whole.
- She doesn't use a tape recorder, rather takes notes.
- Writing a book is about fulfilling a daily word quota.
It's an informative and compelling book and Orlean also covers being a speech coach for the Democratic National Convention, including trying to convince Senate candidate Barack Obama to tweak a speech.
