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

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.