You may know her as the author of The Orchid Thief (1998), who is depicted so strangely in the film Adaptation: traipsing through Florida, looking for a story and finding it in a man looking for orchids. You may know her byline from numerous New Yorker articles over the decades. You may know her as the author of other famed nonfiction books, including The Library Book (2018), about the burning of the Los Angeles Public Library in 1986, and Rin Tin Tin (2011), about the famous German Shepherd. Susan Orlean has had a dramatic life as a journalist and nonfiction author, and she tells us all about it and offers advice for writers in her latest book, Joyride (2025).

Orlean has a knack for making any topic interesting. She also has a knack for thinking of interesting topics. After decades of writing about other people and groups of people, not to mention animals and things, she now turns to an equally interesting topic: her life as a journalist and nonfiction writer.

Joyride is a great read, just as interesting as the other books of Orlean’s that I have read (The Orchid Thief and The Library Book). But if you are a writer, this book may be a particularly fascinating read. In writing about her writing life, Orlean can’t help but give advice to writers as she goes. She doesn’t set out to give advice. But in telling the story of a woman (herself) who did most things right in her long career, she can’t help but spew literary and career wisdom left and right.

In this blog post, I’ll share a small part of that wisdom. For the rest of the wisdom, you’ll have to read the book yourself.

Advice for Writers in Joyride by Susan Orlean #1

I love this passage in which Orlean describes being in a pitched battle with her reader:

“I picture a battle unfolding in those first sentences between me and the reader: Me, waving my hands and insisting the piece is worth reading, and the reader, grumpily resisting. That battle is pitched, but it’s my secret pleasure. I revel in a contrarian urge, a stubborn desire to seduce people into reading something they don’t care about. I’m not trying to trick anyone. I love these subjects, so I write as if I’m shouting, ‘You’re not going to believe how interesting this is!’ I keep shouting until the last sentence is on the page.”

As a writer, you have to be passionate about your topic. Writers talk about that a lot; that’s common knowledge. What’s not as often talked about is that you need something else as a writer. You need to be passionate about sharing your passion with others in the most enticing possible way. You need to be persuasive, compelling, seductive.

Because, let’s be honest—most people don’t want to listen to you ramble on about something you’re passionate about. Unless you describe it in such an interesting way that suddenly they become passionate about it, too.

Passion is contagious. To make it as a writer, you have to be a super-spreader.

Advice for Writers in Joyride by Susan Orlean #2

In describing her life in journalism and nonfiction writing, Orlean reveals that it’s not an easy career. Things don’t tend to go smoothly; things take time, lots of time. She succeeded in becoming a shining star of the publishing industry, and yet so many things went wrong or required immense and intense amounts of labor and commitment.

Orlean reveals that it takes her seven to ten years to research, write, and publish a well-researched, well-written nonfiction book. So all ye writers out there who are starting to get discouraged in year 3, take heart. Great books take time.

She also reveals that she struggles to work on two projects at once. For example, when she was working as a journalist for the New Yorker, writing shorter pieces, she wasn’t able to make much progress on her long-form books, and vice versa. She felt she had to choose one path or the other to focus on for long stretches of time. This has been true in my career as well—it’s almost impossible to maintain momentum on two major projects at once.

And Orlean, like most writers who publish, experienced massive disruptions to her projects due to the churning in personnel at publishing houses. It seemed that every time she landed a great editor or publisher, that person would leave the company and put her book in the charge of someone less passionate about it and her, in some cases derailing her project for years.

The moral seems to be that even if you throw your entire heart, soul, personality, effort, and willpower at a project, it will still throw back at you many issues and struggles. But with persistence and patience, you can overcome.

Advice for Writers in Joyride by Susan Orlean #3

Here is one of my favorite passages in Joyride:

“The single essential element in good writing is confidence. You need swagger to be a writer at all, to be convinced that readers should listen to you. . . . It’s a state of mind, a matter of willing yourself to trust yourself. I often picture this as walking along a narrow ledge and willing yourself to not look down: If you do, you’ll lose your nerve, and you’ll fall.”

Orlean goes on to say that anyone could interview subjects, experience events, and conduct extensive research. But anyone won’t. She will, and she did. She derives confidence from this fact.

There’s something about Orlean’s writing that assures me, as a reader, that she knows what she’s talking about. This is because she truly knows what she’s talking about: she did the work. But it’s also because she has convinced herself that she knows what she’s talking about, and she is able to convey utter confidence to her reader.

Susan Orlean’s Joyride: Advice for Writers and an Adventure for Readers

There’s lots of advice for writers in Joyride, including the gems I just discussed: (1) be not just passionate, but persuasive in your passion; (2) be persistent and patient; and (3) be confident.

But that’s definitely not the only reason to read this book. I’m sure I zeroed in on Orlean’s advice for writers because I’m a writer myself. The book is also a straight-up adventure story about her travels to unique locations and environments, her rocky and stable marriages and her son, and her wildness of spirit that helped her succeed in a very difficult industry. I heartily recommend it to you all.

Have you found wild and passionate confidence within yourself?