David Gessner Nonfiction Craft Talk: Watching, Waiting…then Plunging In

Years ago a professor gave me this assignment: find an animal and observe it over the course of several days. This seemed straightforward, and honestly a little boring, but I chose a great blue heron and, well, it changed everything. For me being a writer revolved around the pleasant drudgery of daily typing, but here was something different. Years later I wrote a book about ospreys (see below), and for six months observed these birds while filling up several notebooks. When the birds migrated south in September, I blasted out a draft of the book in a month, patience leading to its opposite. Many of the techniques I learned during that year I applied to the writing my latest, The Book of Flaco. I’ll talk about some of these, including setting out on writerly adventures (“vacations with a purpose”), the art of talking to strangers, the pleasures of not overplanning, and, circling back to where it all started, watching and waiting.

David Gessner is the author of thirteen books that blend a love of nature, humor, memoir, and environmentalism, including the New York Times bestselling All the Wild That Remains, and the forthcoming The Book of Flaco: The World’s Most Famous Bird (Blair, Feb. 2025). Gessner is a professor at University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he also founded the literary magazine Ecotone. His own magazine publications include pieces in the New York Times Magazine, Outside, Orion, and many other magazines. In 2017 he hosted the National Geographic Explorer show The Call of the Wild.