To Follow Someone — Creative Teacup

The Art and Craft of Profile Writing: An Interview with Susan Orlean

The following is the creative thesis I submitted to the Vermont College of Fine Arts as part of my MFA in creative nonfiction.

It begins in a Florida swamp.

It was 2015, and I was struggling to figure out how to structure a book I’d been working on for over a year; I’d interviewed 120 people about a dream come true in their life, but now I had no idea how to turn those interviews into a book. The structure I’d imagined when I started (something more like a how-to book, with anecdotes and quotes scattered throughout) no longer felt right. The book I’d set out to write wasn’t the book I was going to write. It needed to be something else, but I still had no idea what that was. Part of me wanted to scrap the whole thing, but by then I already had 750,000 words of interview transcriptions bound and printed in heavy stacks (I was so afraid of my computer crashing and losing all the interview work I’d done over a span of two years). And despite the yellow highlighter I’d dragged through those pages or the hours I held and stared at those two spiral-bound “books”, I felt no closer to writing the book I’d dreamed of writing.

I felt lost in my own life too. The year before starting that book I’d left a successful career in higher education because I didn’t want to work in that industry anymore. But I had no idea what to do next. Deep down I wanted to be a writer, but I also lived in central Florida, and for some reason it just didn’t feel like a place where one could be a writer. But there was the internet after all, so I learned all I could about freelance writing and got a few gigs, but within a year I felt stuck again. To be a full-time freelance writer you had to be willing to write what other people wanted, and most of what people seemed to want were quick listicles or self-help essays. I wanted to interview people and write long-form profiles. I wanted to spend hours researching something, experiencing something, and bringing people to life on the page. I learned quickly that when it came to writing, I was an artist, not a technician; I only wanted to write what I wanted to write, and that wasn’t the way to get consistently paid. And every other day it seemed like another big publication was consolidating, cutting jobs, and paying less. Writing, it seemed, at least for me, wasn’t going to be a way to pay the bills.

Once I realized I was an artist, I decided to do what other artists did, like the actors I’d read profiles about who had day jobs waiting tables and then auditioned at night. I got a job at a mall retail shop where I spent my days folding surf-brand T-shirts using that square folding contraption and clicking the security tags into the special magnet that released them from their vice grip.

I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life or my book.

And that’s when my husband recommended I watch the movie Adaptation. He knew it was about a screenwriter feeling stuck on how to turn a book into a movie, and he thought the protagonist’s stress over structure would at the very least make me feel less alone. Neither of us knew it would change my life.

Originally, the film was supposed to be an actual true adaptation of Susan Orlean’s non-fiction book The Orchid Thief, about a Florida man named John Laroche who’d been arrested after taking orchids from the Fakahatchee Strand in south Florida.

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman was hired to turn Susan’s book into a screenplay, but he struggled with it so much that what he turned into the studio instead was a very meta script about, well, himself, and his struggle to turn a book into a screenplay. Most of the movie chronicles his own self-loathing and the myriad ways he tries and fails to fit her book into a screenplay structure.

I loved it, especially the scene when the character Charlie panics about how to communicate a deeper meaning in the movie. We hear inside his thoughts, where he, in a manic state, starts to brainstorm about how the movie should begin at the dawn of time, that it shouldn’t really be about flowers, but about all of humanity. I laughed, finally able to see the humor in what up to that point felt only like turmoil: the kind that comes from being lost in your own research, from trying to find a meaningful theme in a storm, and from trying to say something true without pretending you know anything for sure.

But the part of the movie that changed my life happens about an hour in, when the author of The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean (played by Meryl Streep), follows John Laroche (played by Chris Cooper) into the swamp to try to find the illusive ghost orchid he’d spent years trying to find.

As they trudge through the murky water, a voiceover of Streep, as Orlean, explains why she’s following this strange man into a Florida swamp.

“Most people yearn for something exceptional,” she says, “something so inspiring that they’d want to risk everything for that passion, but few would act on it. It was very powerful. And it’s intoxicating to be around someone so alive.”

In the swamp, he’s a few steps ahead of her. Then he turns and says, “Come on, just follow me.” And she does.

That’s when I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

I watched Meryl Streep as Susan Orlean inch forward as Florida swamp water rose slowly from her calves to above her knees, breathless but determined, following a person she wanted to write about into his world. As she walked through the mud, I felt like something inside me bolted out of a chair and stood straight up.

Wait, what? I thought. People follow people around and write about them? As a…job?

I couldn’t have told you what happened after that moment in the movie, because all I could think about after that was how I wanted to know more about Susan Orlean.

I promptly bought The Orchid Thief, and in the years since have bought every book Susan Orlean has ever written, and listened to many of her podcast interviews. I even attended one of her in-person talks at the Glendale Public Library. I learned that Susan Orlean was a prolific writer who had been writing for The New Yorker since 1987 (also the year I was born) and published her first book, Saturday Night, about how a variety of people across America spend their Saturday nights, in 1990. I learned from her podcast interviews that there was a time when she wanted to be a writer but didn’t think it was possible, and I found great comfort in that. (Deep down I’d wanted to be a writer for as long as I could remember, but never took the desire seriously because it did feel impossible.) Susan writes on her website, “I studied literature and history and always dreamed of being a writer, but had no idea of how you went about being a writer—or at least the kind of writer I wanted to be: someone who wrote long stories about interesting things, rather than news stories about short-lived events. There is no guidebook to becoming that kind of writer, so I assumed I’d end up doing something practical like going to law school, much as the thought of it made me cringe.”

So she was surprised when she got a writing job at a now-defunct monthly magazine called Paper Rose in Portland, Oregon, a place she’d moved in order to kill time before going to law school. But from there, each small writing job led to another and she never went to law school.

I was enamored with Susan’s writing, and her story. At that time, I was making decent money freelance writing, but when I tried to pitch long-form, profile-like stories, they were always met with some version of “that sounds nice but we really just want more of the kind of pieces you’ve been doing,” which were mostly listicles or essays about myself. I hated writing those, so I thought maybe that meant I didn’t have what it took to be a writer. But here was Susan, making a living writing long-form in-depth pieces, and most of them about other people. I loved how her pieces allowed us to get to know her subjects too, and how she could infuse her keen eye for humor and meaning into anything, whether it was a profile about a man in New York who sells fans for a living or a competitive semi-professional surfer girl in Maui (which, by the way, I only realized a few months ago, also inspired one of my all-time favorite movies, Blue Crush).

But most of all, I loved that she wrote about people, and spent a lot of time with those people. I knew I didn’t want to write about myself, and I definitely didn’t want to write news (or lists). I thought that meant I couldn’t be a writer for a living. Sure, I’d interviewed 120 people for a book, but at the time that project already felt like a mistake, and, at the end of the day, it still felt like a hobby. But Susan gave me hope, and showed me what an engaging profile looked like, how it needed to capture the texture of a person’s current life while also bringing you into their past; how she too would be a character in the story, not as an act of self-aggrandizement, but as a conduit for the reader, so that they too could feel the magic of inhabiting a person’s life, of following a person into their world.

I didn’t think I’d be able to get a job at The New Yorker, of course, though at the time I researched like crazy, looking for any and every possible job that involved writing profiles. It was 2015, and even then the prospects were bleak. The signs of erosion were everywhere, and it was clear profiles were written by senior writers who’d paid their dues and lived in New York. The only path available then seemed to be to move to New York City, work a lowly job at a magazine for at least five years, and then hope that maybe, just maybe, I’d move up and be able to write profiles and features one day. I’m not afraid of starting from the bottom, but deep down, already seeing the changes in the media landscape, I had a feeling that by the time I paid my dues, the club would have already folded.

I didn’t move to New York City.

But I did start a blog. I called it Creative Teacup, and the first profile I wrote was about Ashley Brown, the actress and singer who originated Mary Poppins on Broadway. For that piece I followed her (and her dog Eddie, who traveled with her) backstage to her green room when the show came to the Dr. Phillips Center in Orlando, Florida, as part of her role in The Sound of Music.

A few years later, I moved to San Diego, California, and often rode the Pacific Surfliner to Los Angeles, whisking past the turquoise ocean on my left as I headed north to profile people who worked in the entertainment industry—actors and writers and camera people and animators. While Susan was interested in finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, I longed to find the ordinary in the extraordinary. I was most drawn to people living extraordinary lives, especially in the arts, but what I wanted to know was how they trudged through the ordinary—fear, imposter syndrome, self-doubt, rejection—to get to where they were.

When I heard that Susan Orlean was coming to the Glendale Public Library in 2019 to do a talk about her latest book, The Library Book, I booked a train ticket and a hotel and was one of the youngest people in the room that night. Her books were for sale at a small table in the corner, and after her talk, she did a signing. I’d read all of her books on my Kindle, but I promptly walked to the table and bought her entire collection in paperback and waited in line to meet her.

I’d heard people in front of me telling her what to inscribe in their book. Oh, I thought, is that something you’re supposed to do to help her out, make it go faster? Ok! So when it was my turn I told her about the Adaptation swamp moment and how she was the person who made me feel like writing for a living might one day be possible. So I asked her to inscribe The Orchid Thief with “writing for a living is possible.” At least, that’s what I think I said. It was also surprisingly loud for a library at the time, people milling and buzzing with the joy of seeing their favorite writer, buying books and perhaps catching up with fellow Susan Orlean fan-friends. She smiled and we had a lovely moment and then I took my newly signed copy of The Orchid Thief and stacked it on top of the other five books of hers I’d purchased and walked out of the library.

When I got back to my hotel, I opened The Orchid Thief to see the signature, and inscribed was the following:

“Writing is possible.”

I laughed, and thought that was probably the truer statement.

Her inscription was a reminder that I could always write what I wanted to write—that writing was always possible, no matter what the market or industry was doing. And it reminded me that when I watched Adaptation, it wasn’t Susan getting paid that inspired me—it was simply the idea that she could follow someone into a swamp and then write about it. I knew getting paid to do it was part of what gave her the ability to spend that time, and that was appealing; I wanted more time with my subjects, and I knew doing it for a living would be a way to get more time.

And in 2019, that dream had come true. I got a job writing profiles and telling stories for ConvertKit, a software company for creators. In my first few months in that role, I flew to Florence, Oregon, North Carolina, and San Francisco and followed creative people around frozen beaches and Silicon Valley streets and interviewed them in their kitchens and ate the peach cobbler they made for me. But in 2020, following people around to write about them was no longer an option. Interviews turned to Zoom, and later I decided it made more sense for the business, and my own travel fatigue, to keep them that way.

I kept up my blog, kept interviewing people in person whenever I could, including finding people in Florida when I needed to leave California and move back home because of a family health crisis. For the past seven years, in addition to writing profiles and now making documentary films about creators for my day job, I’ve also been waking up early and staying up late to write profiles of people who fascinate me, people I want to follow into proverbial swamps even when no one is paying me to do so.

Profiles are my ghost orchid, my passion, my obsession. So I kept going, and kept writing. (I’ve written 75+ long-form profiles to date, and eventually did turn those 120 interviews into a book called The Little Book of Big Dreams: True Stories about People Who Followed a Spark, which comes out November 7, 2023 from She Writes Press.)

In The Orchid Thief (spoiler alert), Susan Orlean never actually sees a ghost orchid. They are rare and hard to find.

For years I dreamed of profiling Susan Orlean, but deep down I knew I never could. How could I profile the best profiler? How would I not become paralyzed knowing how much better of a job she would do than me? So I decided I would never profile Susan Orlean.

But in early 2023, when I found out I could interview a writer I admired for my creative thesis for my MFA at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, I decided to take a shot. I knew it was a long shot, but if I’ve learned anything from interviewing more than 200 people it’s that while asking may lead to “no” 99% of the time, it’s that 1% that changes your life.

So I asked Susan Orlean if I could interview her.

And she said yes.

For a little over an hour we talked—albeit over Zoom—about the art and craft of writing long-form profiles, her process, what she’s learned in her decades-long writing career, and if profiles still matter today—especially in a world where we can learn about most people by simply scrolling through social media on our phones. This is not a profile. I already told you I cannot write a profile of Susan Orlean. But I can learn from her.

I wait in my Zoom room for Susan to pop up. She’s not late, I’m just early. I’m wearing a lavender tank top and an oversized black blazer I haven’t worn in years, something I decided to throw on at the last minute. Behind me are dozens of original paintings I’ve collected over the last few years, a few prints from my favorite artists, and a poster of Taylor Swift. I started putting up posters after 2020, when I decided to lean in to my own obsessions more, to stop hiding them as I didn’t realize I had been, for fear of seeming too juvenile or like some “crazed” fan. To love something, I decided, was a good thing, and I was done being embarrassed by it. That change is also what gave me the courage to contact and interview Susan Orlean.

Susan’s name pops up in my Zoom “waiting room” right on time, and I let her in. She glows, and I don’t think it’s just my own admiration that makes it seem that way; I’m pretty sure it’s the California light. It streams in easily through her all-glass writing office. She’s wearing a loose-fitting bright royal blue turtleneck (it’s March, but it’s unseasonably cold in California today, she says) and wears her fire-red shoulder-length wavy hair down, with her long bangs parted to the side and tucked behind her right ear. All I can think is that if she’d been an actor she could have easily played herself in Adaptation. Maybe it’s my own adoration speaking, but to me, she looks like a movie star with a kind of old-Hollywood casual glamour. She lives in Los Angeles, and behind her (and all around her) are glass walls. Behind the glass, a landscape of vibrant and varied green rises up a hill. In front of that are various items to cook outside with: one full-sized grill with a long silver lid, one petite grill with a round forest-green top, and one very small outdoor pizza oven. I can see one part of her desk on camera—the wood looks like a kind of matte gold. It’s clean and seems to glimmer.

I greet Susan and she asks about where I live and I tell her I’m currently living back where I was born, in Orlando, Florida. We talk about Florida and its oddities, and I tell her how accurate and illuminating I thought her description of Florida in The Orchid Thief was.

“…there is something about Florida more seductive and inescapable than almost anywhere else I’ve ever been,” she writes. “It can look brand-new and man-made, but as soon as you see a place like the Everglades or the Big Cypress Swamp or the Loxahatchee you realize that Florida is also the last of the American frontier. The wild part of Florida is really wild. The tame part is really tame. Both, though, are always in flux…Nothing seems hard or permanent; everything is always changing or washing away. Transition and mutation merge into each other, a fusion of wetness and dryness, unruliness and orderliness, nature and artifice.”

I don’t read her own work back to her, but I do tell her how the juxtaposition moved me, how she helped me see where I’m from more clearly, and perhaps help me grow back a love I’d lost, or maybe never really had. She seems delighted to talk about her old work, and not from any sense of writerly ego—far from that—but a writerly curiosity. She, like most writers and artists I know, including myself, does not go back and read her old work. The Orchid Thief came out in 1998. She hasn’t read it since.

Susan speaks slowly and deliberately, but you never feel like you are looking at your watch waiting for the next word. It’s more like you feel lucky to be on the other end of a conversation with someone who values words so much and offers each of hers as a carefully wrapped gift, not because she thinks her words are so precious, but because, perhaps as a profile writer herself, she knows how each one can help the writer listening turn an interview into something more. Her pace feels generous, and if the mandolin were a voice, it would be hers.

Her eyes are pale blue, and when she smiles you can see almost all of her top teeth in a way that makes it seem like she is one of those people who is more alive than most. She uses her hands when she talks, and when she does I catch a glimpse of her short bright-red nails, though even they can’t hold a candle to her hair.

After Susan and I talk a bit about the beauty and turmoil that is Florida, I ask her more about her all-glass office, a concept I’d fallen in love with when she posted it on Instagram years ago. The space, she explains, was originally an outdoor dining area that she had closed in with glass and then added an air conditioner and a heater. Writing in her house is harder, she says, and being in the glass office makes her feel like she’s “actually at work.”

Susan began that work after college, writing for local publications such as Willamette Week, The Village Voice, and The Boston Phoenix. Then, a Rolling Stone writer who previously wrote for the Willamette Week read her work and asked her to contribute to Rolling Stone. She moved to New York in 1986 and contributed to Vogue, and then, in 1987, she contributed her first piece to the publication she’d dreamed about working for since college: The New Yorker. In 1992, Susan became a staff writer, and in 1994, she began following a story about a guy in Florida who’d been arrested because of orchids.

While I was drawn to profiles specifically and then later got a job writing them, when Susan started her writing career profiles were simply part of her job, something she was assigned. As the profile assignments kept growing, Susan started to understand why the form was so popular.

“There is an enduring curiosity that we all have about other people and what their lives are like,” she says. “Whether it’s someone famous or just someone who’s different from us in some way.”

The first profile Susan Orlean remembers writing was of a city councilwoman in Oregon as part of her job at a newspaper there.

“I found it very intimidating,” she remembers. “Suddenly, with a limited amount of exposure to this person, I was going to have to make pronouncements about who she was and what she was and what she cared about.” There was a kind of power, she realized, in telling the world who someone else was, even if that telling was admittedly only one writer’s perception. But that perception would be in print, and that power terrified her in the beginning. We aren’t writers because we’re hungry for power; we are hungry, but for something else entirely. For understanding. Insight. We are treasure hunters, looking for the poetry that hides in ordinary places. We live in that place between journalism and creative non-fiction; we aren’t writing to degrade or gossip or unmask, but to shed light.

While that power was intimidating early on, Susan was grateful for the profile assignments because they offered something not every assignment did: a built-in story—a kind of, as she explains, “buy one get one free” assignment; write a profile, get a story for free. Whereas some assignments included simply showing up somewhere or researching something and hoping to find a narrative, a profile almost always came with one, because a life almost always comes with one.

“I liked the idea that you didn’t have to explain the meaning of the story,” she says. “A profile explains itself.” Of course, making meaning from a profile interview isn’t easy, but there is a certain ease in that you don’t have to start by explaining what the story is about, at least on the surface. That part is obvious. The challenge comes later, in showing (and finding) what the story is about beneath the surface. A good profile is about more than just the details of one person’s life. A good profile illuminates details about everyone’s lives.

While Susan liked that profiles came with a built-in story, she also found that unlike other stories, they, as she puts it, “required a kind of confidence. It was pretty daunting that I was going to somehow be able to sort of assess this person and explain who they were.” But she enjoyed the challenge. So much so that when she was assigned to profile then 10-year-old actor of Home Alone fame, Macaulay Culkin, for Esquire magazine, she said no. She didn’t want to profile Macaulay Culkin (she’s not very interested in profiling famous people), but she also didn’t want to turn down the assignment. The magazine cover was already set with a headline, though, one that read “The American Man at Age Ten.” But Susan had another idea. She asked the editor if instead of interviewing Macaulay Culkin she could profile a non-famous 10-year-old boy. That, she says, was the first big leap she took when it came to choosing her own profile subject, trusting and moving towards her own interest versus what an editor assigned.

That profile was printed in Esquire in 1992, and became part of the collection The Bullfighter Checks her Makeup (Random House, 2002). In that profile, Susan does what she is now known for doing best: she takes the profile lens that’s so often pointed at celebrities and points it towards someone ordinary to reveal something extraordinary. A celebrity profile often shows a life mostly removed from what is common. A Susan Orlean profile finds magic in what is common. For example, in “The American Man at Age Ten,” she writes:

“Once, I asked him what the biggest advantage to adulthood will be, and he said, ‘The best thing is that grown-ups can go wherever they want.’ I asked him what he meant, exactly, and he said, ‘Well, if you’re grown up, you’d have a car, and whenever you felt like it, you could get into your car and drive somewhere and get candy.’”

She spent about two weeks with the boy and his family to write this piece, and I can’t help but feel jealous. The most I’ve ever been able to spend with a subject is two days, and it’s not lost on me that the profile I wrote from those two days is the most popular one I’ve ever written. My conversation with Susan convinces me that more time with a subject is the singular most important factor that can take a profile from good to great. I come to realize that so much of what makes Susan’s writing special is in the amount of quality time she spends with her subjects. The extra time she spends not only gives her time to ask more questions, gather more scenes, or fill more than one reporter’s notebook, but it also gives her the space to employ the technique that has become the most essential part of her profile process, a technique she happened upon by accident, because the 10-year-old boy she profiled was shy.

To find him to begin with, Susan had asked all her friends if anyone knew of a 10-year-old boy whose parents might be open to her profiling him. She found a family who was willing to take part, and the parents and the boy had both agreed to the profile.

But when Susan arrived to their house on the first day, the boy was understandably shy. He probably didn’t really understand what he was agreeing to, she said, and now here was this strange woman in his house asking him questions.

“[He] became very self-conscious and didn’t talk to me,” Susan says. She had a deadline, and now she was worried. “I didn’t have that much time to work on the piece, so I couldn’t afford having days go by where he wasn’t talking to me.” She didn’t know what to do.

But instead of badgering the kid with questions or trying to fake her way into his world, she decided in the moment that the best strategy would be to simply sit there, in his world.

“I spent a lot of time just sitting quietly, probably thinking, What am I gonna do? And also probably wondering why I had wanted to do this anyway.”

Susan sat there, and said nothing. She didn’t know then that this would become her most essential profile strategy.

“And you know,” she says, “the great irony is that sitting quietly around someone you want to profile is a very good thing to do, as opposed to peppering someone with questions. So in a roundabout way, I ended up doing what was probably the very best thing I could do, which was to sit, observe, let him approach me (which is ultimately what happened), and have him want to show me his world.”

And show her he did.

“I’m not into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles anymore,” he told her. “I grew out of that…The best television shows are on Friday night on ABC. It’s called TGIF…The best candy is Skittles and Symphony bars…Crybabies are great because if you eat a lot of them at once you feel so sour…The most beautiful woman in the world is not Madonna…I think the most beautiful woman in the world probably is my mom.”

“It was very fortunate,” she says of learning this observational style. “It came about not as a strategy on my part, but rather a byproduct of me being a little bit frozen thinking, What am I gonna do?”

Susan also liked the way observation created a power shift; now instead of her having some kind of Writerly Power over her subject, the power was in his hands.

“[I was] beholden to him. I had to wait for him. And that really turned out to be a revelation. That is the way it should be.”

And while it happened by accident then, going forward she became intentional about creating that environment in future interviews, asking for the time, so that she’d have the space needed to be able to get to know someone in a more natural way, as opposed to, as she puts it, “a subject feeling like you’re in charge and they’re kind of performing for you.”

But it’s not easy to ask someone for a lot of time, nor is it easy for people to offer a lot of time. People are busy—even, or maybe especially, non-celebrities. I ask Susan how she gets the time she needs.

“I think a lot of times people assume that you’ll sort of sit down and talk to them for 20 minutes and that will be it,” she says. “It’s really tricky to ask for a lot more time because people definitely react if you were to say, I’d love to spend the day with you, you know? A lot of people feel uncomfortable. It’s something you kind of have to navigate very carefully. And usually, what I try to do is take the focus off of them and instead say, You know, I’d love to spend time so I can get to know your world. And instead of them feeling quite so much under a microscope, it makes them feel less self-conscious.”

And it’s also the truth. “For many people that I [interview],” she says, “they inhabit a world I’m not familiar with.” Susan also makes it clear that her subjects don’t have to drop everything to talk to her—and in fact, the opposite is better. It’s easier for people to say yes when they understand she’s just going to be hanging around in the background, and that they aren’t going to need to talk to her for eight hours a day or really change much about their original plans and obligations for the time they’ll spend together.

“I try to make it feel more like I’m gonna come and hang out,” Susan says, “which is exactly true.”

Susan doesn’t ask a lot of questions, and sometimes doesn’t even do a long sit-down interview with a subject. “I do feel like that is often what people don’t do enough of in profiles,” she says. “To sit down and do a 20-minute interview with someone is a very artificial kind of situation. And usually we profile people whose worlds interest us.” Having that extra time to see that world with your own eyes, and see them in action in that world, can make all the difference.

“[And] ideally, at some point,” she says, “they sort of forget about you [because] they’re busy doing their work. And to me that is an opportunity to see people much more authentically living their lives. Doing a profile where you’re not visiting a person in real life, while you probably could do it, you lose a huge piece of what, to me, feels very important and essential to what makes a profile interesting.”

It’s not lost on me that we are talking through a Zoom screen right now, and that this piece would be so much better if instead of telling you how at one point I saw Susan’s adorable dog Ivy slowly lumber behind her to find another cozy spot in the glass office, I could tell you what it felt like to pet Ivy or how it feels to sit inside a glass office that gives the illusion that you’re writing outdoors.

But even Susan doesn’t always get her perfect scenario either. Once, when she was tasked to profile Thomas Kinkaid, she was only given thirty minutes. “That was something where I did prepare [questions],” she says, “because I felt like, I have such a short amount of time, I need to make sure that anything that I really want to hear from him I don’t forget.”

Twenty-minute interviews aside, Susan doesn’t usually prepare questions or research ahead of time, another way she tries to create a more natural conversation. It’s also another way to offset the power dynamic and show the subject she really wants to learn, not criticize. When a writer does too much research or acts like they know more than the subject about their own work or life, it’s natural for the person being profiled to feel closed off, defensive, or even offended. Susan instead finds that the less she learns about a new person and their world before she begins the interview process, the better she can authentically create a natural environment, one where the subject doesn’t feel patronized or on display, and one closer to what it feels like when you meet someone new at a party whom you enjoy talking to. This dynamic often results in subjects giving Susan even more time than they originally promised.

Once the interview is done, it’s time for the next phase of a profile, but it’s not the writing. “It’s a really important phase that I think people often forget,” Susan says of this step. “Often people think you report and then you write, but that leaves out this essential transition. My first editor, who is really wonderful, used to say it should be a three-part system where you report, you think, and then you write.”

The thinking part, she says, is a critical part of the process. And it is a process. “The way that prompts me the most to begin processing is I type up my notes. I feel like typing up my notes is a good mechanical way for me to go over everything I learned and kind of re-picture it and re-hear all the quotes with a little bit of distance, hear them in a different way. And I think what you’re doing is you’re beginning to edit, you’re beginning to separate the stuff that’s not going to end up in the story from the stuff that really is.”

I don’t type up my notes, but I absolutely have a thinking part of the process. For me, it involves reading through and sorting the full transcript of an interview. I begin by coding every section with what it is about, highlighting my favorite stories and quotes, and crossing out sections that meander or that I don’t think will be a part of the final piece. Then I sort all of those sections in a kind of mad shuffle, like when a magician mixes upside-down-cups as quickly as possible so you can’t guess which one is hiding the marble. From there, I review all of the sections again and put them into a solid beginning-to-end order that best matches the progression of the story I most want to tell.

After Susan types up all of her notes, she prints them out, and then reads them again with a highlighter in hand. “I usually highlight the things that have stuck out to me,” she says, “that seem that they’re clicking, the things that I’m thinking, Okay, that’s going in, that’s going in.” (Later, during my own thinking process, I smile when I realize I’ve highlighted her quote about highlighting.) “I think by the time you’ve gone through that [step],” she continues, “you are really familiar with the material. You really know the story. I used to say, and I mean it very sincerely, that in a perfect world you could write your story without your notes, with the exception of the verbatim quotes; you know the story. Which is why I often recommend that people talk out their story before they begin writing.”

Sometimes, before writing, Susan will tell her story to a trusted listener. And during this telling, she might find herself sharing a detail she hadn’t thought was important before, or notice later that she’d left out a scene she had thought was going to be central. When we tell a story out loud, we are often editing it in real time to hold the listener’s interest, so this process can help us see our stories more clearly. When you can talk it out, Susan says, “you have a story to tell.”

Like, she shares as an example, “let me tell you about this 10-year-old boy who I just hung out with and the way he lives his life, and these funny things he said. I don’t feel you can write well unless you actually know the story and that you could simply tell it out loud. Then the writing is just the process of putting it on the page and then shaping it in an elegant way and, you know, doing the writerly things.”

The “writerly things” are what happen in phase three of the profile creation process. For Susan, that involves spreading her printed and now-highlighted notes out all around her, and then writing the story from beginning to end, chronologically.

“Some people are very good at writing sections,” she says, “and I’m not good at that. I sort of need to know what came before, before I can write. I think in profiles that’s particularly true. I feel like I really need to start with the lead. I really need to feel my way to the tone of the piece and then tell it the way I would tell it naturally. Sometimes that means that you have a blank page for a long time, and that can be really disconcerting. But I almost never start anywhere other than the beginning.”

Susan’s goal is usually to write one thousand words per day. She often begins each day by revising what she wrote the day before, and then writes one thousand new words that she’ll edit the next day, along with what came before.

“I don’t really do a full draft and then revise,” she explains. “And so it’s one step forward, two steps back.” However, by the time she’s reached the end of a piece she’s revised it all multiple times and, more often than not, when she comes to the end it’s ready to hand off to an editor.

As for me, I follow a method inspired by something I heard once in a Joyce Carol Oates Masterclass, where she said something about how first drafts should be fast—words blazing through the blank page like wildfire. It’s also informed by what I learned from Dorthea Brande in Becoming a Writer (Tarcher/Putnam, 1934), who wrote about about how employing intentional methods, like fast drafts, create vital space for creativity happening in our subconscious to flourish, and guard against perfectionism. From Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird (Penguin Random House, 1994) I learned that first drafts should be a space to let the childlike part of you romp around in the yard (and that it’s really okay for the first draft to be bad). So, about six years ago, I started doing full, fast drafts that I call (and label in the document titles) “wildflower drafts” (wildfire felt a little too violent for me). (A few years after developing that method—after my life went through its own kind of mad shuffle which included moving across the country—I got a wildflower tattoo; I chose that imagery for non-writerly reasons, but smiled to myself days later when I opened my latest draft and realized my subconscious may have had a hand in my choice.)

After my first wildflower draft, I review it in its entirety from beginning to end and begin the often painful process of editing all that wildness. When I ask Susan if she’s noticed any patterns when it comes to edits of her work she says, “I have bad habits that, I’m happy to say, I’ve gotten better at noticing. I think being a good editor is almost more important than being a good writer, and learning to edit yourself is the best thing you can do.”

She finds the best way to do that is reading her work aloud. “I feel like it’s so useful for catching rhythm and sentence structure that doesn’t quite work. Rhythm is very important to me and I feel like it’s really critical to the reader’s experience of a story, which is why I like to read my pieces out loud, keeping an eye on the length and tonality. I like people to feel propelled through the story so that they want to read the next sentence and the next and the next, and you know, that’s not an accident. You have to make that happen.”

The longer she’s been a writer, she says, the easier it is to throw things away that aren’t contributing to the overall flow or goals of the piece. “I think it’s harder when you’re younger and less experienced,” she says, “you feel much more defensive. I used to think the minute things were on the page they were perfect. And now I’m much more flexible about editing.” But, she admits, even now it’s still hard sometimes to throw things away. When that happens, she has a little trick.

“Instead of just deleting,” she says, “I will open a new document and I’ll cut the section that I’m having doubts about. I paste it into this other document and I feel like, well, it’s always there. I can always go back and get it. And even though it’s a silly trick, I think it actually makes me feel much more willing to just say, I don’t know, maybe this isn’t so good; let me toss it out and try something new. I think you have to learn your habits and learn to trick yourself into editing yourself a little bit more sternly.” I find it comforting that Susan and I share a “trick”—before I edit a piece I “duplicate” it so that the prior version is always saved. Like Susan, it gives me peace of mind to cut, change, and dismantle without the fear of hitting a point of no return. And like her, I know it’s a trick, because I never return to those former versions. But their existence gives my brain a kind of freedom it wouldn’t have otherwise—it helps erase fear that might hold me back from sternly editing. And I think anything we can do to erase fear—even if only a trick—helps our writing.

The next phases of editing are typically more out of our hands. Since Susan mostly writes for The New Yorker, once a piece is done it goes to an editor, and then to the fact check department, where they contact the subjects and go through all the factual material and then get back to Susan with anything that needs to be changed. “It can be kind of maddening,” Susan says.

“The fact checker will come back to you with many, many little corrections and you do feel like, I’m a terrible reporter. I can’t get anything right. I think it’s important to realize that is just the way it is. You’re gathering lots of material. It’s inevitable that you will get a date wrong or get a place wrong. And often when you’re reporting, you don’t want to distract people by saying, What was the exact name of the hotel? You feel like, all right, we’ll fill that in later.” Sometimes, a subject will tell a writer one thing and then later tell a fact checker another. I’ve had this happen to me during fact checks too, and as Susan and I exchange our most maddening fact check experiences, we talk about how in the end, it’s not that the subjects are lying during an interview or changing their story, it’s just that truth and memory are fragile, and both writer and subject are just doing the best they can.

Susan’s beautiful red and white Welsh Springer Spaniel, Ivy, slowly comes into view behind her, but almost as a ghost since I can only see her reflected in the glass behind Susan. It almost looks like an illusion, as if Ivy walked through the bottom of the hill, beneath the pizza oven, and into the sky. A soft breeze rustles a few of the leaves behind her, and I secretly feel just a bit sad that our time is coming to an end. I have time for just two more questions, and decide to ask her about the changes she’s seen in writing and media, both since 1987 as well as in just in the last few years.

“I have a two-part answer,” she begins. “For better or worse, I’ve managed to carve out a lane that hasn’t changed.” Susan talks with her hands throughout the interview in the most delightful way, always illustrative, never manic, like a calm and softly encouraging maestro. But when she says “I’ve managed to carve out a lane,” she intertwines her hands together as she elaborates, red nails visible, almost as an act of prayer or gratitude. She continues, “I like writing about things that most people wouldn’t have thought could be written about. And I’ve been very lucky because I’ve had publishers and magazine editors who’ve been willing to stick with that. I have not changed what I write about and I haven’t felt the sort of pressure of the marketplace. But I also know that is not typical.” Here is where she unclasps her hands, as if she knows how rare and precious of a writer’s life she lives.

“Generally speaking, the landscape of publishing has changed,” she says, “and at the same time that it really shrank and a lot of magazines folded and a lot of newspapers folded, suddenly there was this whole explosion of websites that gave almost unlimited space.” Whereas with magazines you could only publish as many pages as you had ads to support, the internet allows for writers to take up more space if they choose.

When it comes to what hasn’t changed in the world of profiles, she says that people have always and likely will always have an appetite to learn more about people who are famous in some capacity. “I think celebrities have always dominated a lot of what gets written about. It will always be the case whether they’re celebrities from music, movies, fashion, politics or whatever. Most of the people who will get profiled are people who readers already know.”

When it comes to interest in reading about non-famous people, Susan can’t really say whether that has waxed or waned in the last 30 years. For most of her career, she has and still is making a living writing about people readers do not know and have likely never heard about before. And she knows that’s rare.

She stops for a moment and tells me that she needs to turn the heat on. It’s a cold snap in California, and she is after all in a kind of glass house. She bends down to turn on a heater that must be below her desk, and tells me she forgot to put on socks so hopefully this will help.

The heat kicks on, and she continues, “I think ultimately, my optimism is that, I do believe writing is meritocracy. I feel like if you’re a good writer, you will find your way. I feel like if you’re really good it’ll work out.”

I want to believe this is true, and I don’t quite realize it, but I am holding my breath. “And I mean,” she says, “I know that’s optimistic, but I also believe it. I really do. I think if you’re really a good writer, even if you’re not yet super experienced, but you’re really passionate and you use some cleverness and enterprise to connect with the right people, and also make yourself useful, you’ll have a chance.” I exhale.

The book publishing world, however, she says is a different story, where merit is more easily buried. “If you write a book, will it sell a million copies? I mean, that’s a different thing,” she says. “Books are different.” I notice a cardboard cutout the size of a moderate television propped up against a corner behind her. I can’t see the whole thing but from the red font and feathers it looks to be a large rendering of her latest book, On Animals, perhaps a prop from a past book event.

“It’s a much more entrepreneurial gamble to write a book,” she continues. “If you write a story, and finally get a story in The New Yorker, The New Yorker has millions of readers. There’s a good chance millions of people will read your story. Even a really good book can have a very modest audience. And there’s this whole mechanism of promoting a book that is a little out of your control. You can have a publisher who agrees to publish your book and likes your book and thinks it’s terrific, but then they print only small number and they distribute it modestly. And there’s not a lot you can do about that.”

There is so much out of a writer’s control, and while Susan thinks improving craft is the best chance anyone has at getting noticed, the other thing she says hasn’t changed is the necessity of good work being met with a bit of enterprise—and luck.

“You have to be kind of smart about getting your work in front of the people who can make a difference,” she says, “and choosing subjects that might give you a bit of traction. I think that’s always been true. I think it will always be true. And, except for the fact that we’re now digital and that there have been systemic changes, I don’t think the basics have changed. I really don’t.”

Our time is up. The hour Susan generously set aside has passed, and I could easily spend two weeks asking her all of the questions I have. But I only have one minute left. I ask if her if she has time for one last question, but also let her know she is free to go now. She graciously stays.

I ask my final question, one that’s a little more philosophical, something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, especially when I consider how much has changed in the media landscape even in just the last few years, let alone the last thirty.

“Before social media,” I begin, “one of the few ways you could really get to know someone you didn’t know was through a profile. And now, we have social media where people, including celebrities, willingly share a lot about themselves and their world with other people directly. I’ve found myself philosophizing: What does a profile do that social media doesn’t?”

“Well,” she says, “I think that’s a great question.” (I can die happy now.)

“I think in part,” she says, “celebrities decided to take charge of their profiles in the sense that they were going to expose themselves on social media.” I don’t realize until later that the word “profile” is both how we define the longform writing I love as well as the small digital space we call our own on a variety of social media platforms. I also later incredulously realize that what drew me to Susan in the first place was watching Meryl Streep as Susan Orlean literally follow a subject into a swamp, and that we also use the term “follow” when it comes to who we watch on social media.

“Question is,” Susan continues, referring to profiles and followings of the social media variety, “how real is that, how managed is that?”

She’s referring specifically to celebrities here, but I find myself thinking about the rest of us too, and how social media dictates what we learn about people rather than getting a sense of their most unique or even interesting qualities. On my own Instagram profile, for example, you might learn I have a fluffy red dog, that I wear bright clothes, that I listen to Taylor Swift a lot, that I go to Disney almost every weekend, and that I really like cheese. Those facts are probably true of quite a few other Instagram profiles. But, by looking at my Instagram alone, you would never know about how the movie Adaptation changed my life, or about the time I broke down on a bathroom floor after receiving a rejection letter, or why the crochet purple and red rooster in my office is so important to me. These are the kinds of details a profiler might unearth. And what a profiler does is mine the details of a life and turn it into a story—one about more than just who a person is. A good profile says something about all of us.

Susan goes on to share that on the very morning of this interview her Instagram feed was flooded with news about model and actress Cara Delevingne. Vogue had recently done a profile of her, but what Susan was seeing was news about how Cara had recently shared on her own social media profile (to her 43 million Instagram followers) information about her addiction problems and all she’d recently been going through. “And you think, well, do I even need to read the story in Vogue because it’s now all [over the internet] and she’s posting and talking about it?”

But what a profile can do, Susan says, is provide something more experiential than social media, and often something deeper.

And Susan, like myself, thinks it’s a good thing that celebrities (especially women) can now write their own narrative and share their own story. But a writer can also bring something to the table, unearth what people often can’t see in their own life because they’re busy living it. “I think it’s a good change,” Susan says, “[because] I think that it pushes writers to think, what can I bring to this that’s fresh and different or more interesting than what you’ve already seen on Instagram?”

When it comes to non-famous people, however, Susan says not much has changed. While, yes, we can learn about a variety of people and their unique worlds by scrolling social media, we still only see the curated parts of that life. And, for most of those people, their world or their life won’t be witnessed by millions of people. But when Susan hangs out with them for a few weeks and then writes a profile, that’s usually what happens.

The best profiles give readers one of the closest experiences they can get to actually meeting that person in their own living room. Susan has been doing this her entire career, inviting us to remember what it feels like to be 10 years old, or to be so passionate about something that you’d trudge through a swamp for it. And while now we can tell our own stories on blogs and social media and learn about the lives of more people than ever before just by scrolling, there is value in both sharing our own stories and letting others write about what they see in us. There is value in sharing and in truly being seen.

Every morning I walk my fluffy red dog by a lake near my apartment, where I often delight in wildflowers and even share pictures of them on my Instagram stories. But I also own 35 paintings and prints of flowers (including one that features a white orchid), because while I see flowers on my own every day and often buy them from the grocery store and carefully place them in clear glass vases, it’s the way each artist sees and shares flowers in their paintings that tells me something new, or reminds me of something old.

Before I say goodbye to Susan, I tell her how happy it made me to see her dog Ivy (an Instagram celebrity in my eyes) pass by earlier, through the reflection.

“They like to sit in the office with me,” she says of her two dogs, “which I don’t love because then they start playing and they’re very distracting.” We laugh and I thank her again.

“I hope you got what you need,” she says, and I know she means it, because usually she is the one asking the questions, and she knows what it means to get what you need (and what you hope for). I already know as we end the call that I got even more than I’d hoped. And while I wasn’t able to follow Susan around her mid-century modern home or follow her as she walked over that bright green dining room rug she has that reminds me of grass, or follow her into her clear glass office and sit on that white and brown spotted chair I saw behind her, or follow her outside to taste a warm prosciutto and bell pepper pizza she cooked in the small pizza oven, in many ways, I’ve been following her all along.

You can learn more about Susan Orlean here, and you can pre-order The Little Book of Big Dreams wherever books are sold (release date is 11/7/23).