The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O'Meara

"It's all about consistency, and I know that that's the most boring answer on the planet, and the answer I didn't want to hear when I started my Substack three years ago. I just published every single week, trying out different niches, seeing what I could offer value in, until I got exactly where I wanted to land with it," says ghost writer and author Amy Suto. I got an email out of the blue, wouldn't you know, and it was this writer Amy Suto, who wanted to come on and talk about ghost writing and stuff of that nature. She is very clearly someone who doesn't need the attention. She's doing, let's say, quite well for herself. She has a $250,000+ substack and is the author of the book Write for Money & Power: The Anti-Starving Artists' Guide to Becoming a SEVEN-figure Writer. I'll take five figures. Maybe I should read that book. Amy is a story factory. She's a ghost writer to many high end folks. She runs online courses through her Substack like Make Substack Your Job, the 6 Week Substack Sprint Workshop, her Substack is her ecosystem and she has mastered it. A little bit more on Amy in a little bit. Amy Suto is based in San Francisco. She used to be a TV writer but eventually wanted more agency in her writing life. She serializes fiction from her Substack and offers tutorials and classes and a hub for sharing writing opportunities. I'm always a bit weary when you put all your eggs in the basket of a social media platform like Substack but I'm not the guy you want to take money advice from. Look at what I do, then do the opposite. Better yet, look at what Amy does. You can learn more about her at amysuto.com, sutoscience.com, and follow her on Instagram @sutoscience. In this episode we talk about: * TV writing * Ghost writing as fly on the wall * Inhabiting the client's voice * Memoir touch points * Needing to like the client * Battling voices * Charging what you're worth so you don't get burned out * Branding * Conflicting memories * Creative boundaries * Building a substack to $260,000 revenue * Asking the best questions * Volume over everything * And the great talk by Mark Duplass about the calvary not coming This episode will pair well with Jan Friedman's appearance, any of Jen A. Miller's appearances, as well Jennifer Goforth Gregory.

"What I tend to do is, if I write this really difficult explanatory section that is going through a lot of technical information and trying to boil it down, once I'm finished with that, then I get to write this other scene that I really want to write. I think of it as dessert. If I finish my broccoli, I get my ice cream sundae," says Mark Johnson, author of The Family Plan for The Atavist Magazine. Hey there CNFers, it's the creative nonfiction podcast … it's that Atavistian time of the month and we have a wonderful story written and reported by Mark Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, for his story "The Family Plan: When a little girl in Iowa was diagnosed with a rare incurable disease, her parents and their community came together to help her. They wound up making medical history." I tell you, this podcast nearly didn't happen. There was an audio glitch that didn't recorded more than half of the audio portion, but since I record video now to chop and put on social media, I was able to drag the video file into iMovie, decouple the audio from the video, and export the audio. Saved the day. Scary stuff. First we're going to hear from EIC Seyward Darby about why some Atavist pitches are thin and what to do about them and what it was about Mark's story that made it so easy to just slip in and edit the damn thing from the jump. Mark Johnson, who, as far as I can tell, has little to no internet presence. He might be on LinkedIn. Mark won this little award you might have heard of called the Pulitzer Prize. You hear of this thing? New to me, is it a big deal? He spent 22 years at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and most recently he was at The Washington Post, but was unfortunately part of its recent mass layoffs. His first novel, Though the Earth Gives Way, came out in 2022. In this conversation, we talk about: * Interview stage fright * Interview prep * Is it ever OK for a reporter to want to be liked? * Things that didn't work * Obsession * The stories we wake up with in our heads * Writing early in the process * "Reward" scenes and what they are * The great advice he received from the journalist Rick Bragg * Hidden beauties * And why these kinds of stories still matter to him As always, you can support the show by visiting patreon.com/cnfpod and subscribe to Pitch Club on Substack.

It was a few years ago at this point when I came up with the idea of a themed issue of the audio magazine called CODES. I was watching The Mandalorian and these bounty hunters never remove their helmets. They often punctuate an encounter with each other saying, "This is the way." Staying in the Star Wars world, you could extend the code to Jedis, whose objective is a monk-like devotion to order and justice and a devotion to the Force. Batman has a code that he never kills. That in the Dark Knight, the Joker teases him about it. Batman, out of necessity, breaks the code in killing Harvey Dent to save Jim Gordon's son. I admire people with singular devotion because I am someone who is so lacking in singular devotion. I say I want something and yet my habits rarely align with that thing I purport to want. That's why the people I tend to write about are obsessive and they give things up because the real sacrifice is not seeing their goals through, NOT giving up a night on the town, NOT giving drinking the weekend away, NOT eating multiple pizzas. I could go on. So it was with that in mind that I wanted to get a sense of the codes people live by. We have six essays in this issue. It features Sam Sharp, Lindsay Street, Jennifer Lang, Marilyn Wimp Paolino, Judith Evans, and Eren Simpson. Follow along with the show @creativenonfictionpodcast and consider becoming a patron over at patreon.com/cnfpod. Those contributions helped pay these writers for their work.

"In terms of the research, I can get lost in detective mode. Sometimes it's good if I know, okay, I only have an hour. I'm going to see what what can I learn about this one person in an hour. Then take it in those little pieces, and when I have time, I can get some writing done," says Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, author of The Pain Brokers. Today we have Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law and the debut author of The Pain Brokers: How Con Men, Call Centers, and Rogue Doctors Fuel America's Lawsuit Factory. It's published by Atria/One Signal Publishers. It's a story of greed, fear, and exploitation of a scam that targeted women who had potentially faulty pelvic mesh surgery, only to have a shady network of cons terrify these women, over the phone, with vast amounts of personal information, scaring them to have this mesh removed that effectively has ruined the lives of countless women. The Pain Brokers chronicles their plight, as well as the lawyers who sought justice and the predatory people at the spearhead of this scheme. So Elizabeth's focus of her teaching is in mass torts, class actions, and civil procedure. She's been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and won the American Law Institute's Early Career Scholars Meal in 2015, among a few other saucy awards. Her academic work and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and the Miami Herald, just to name a few. You can find her online at elizabethchambleeburch.com [http://elizabethchambleeburch.com/] or on the socials, like @elizabethcburch on IG. The Pain Brokers was named was of the best books so far of 2026 by The New Yorker and in this episode we talk about: * Making law interesting * Goat chokers * Locking in character to an idea * Structure Part 1 seven different times * How intimidating it all was * Getting IRL * The value we had as journalists * Getting lost in detective mode * What the hell are mass torts? * Mass tort du jours * The granular details and how to get them * Knowing where the landmines are * And what keeps her coming back Pair this episode with Ep. 443 with Jared Sullivan

"I had a really interesting conversation with a publisher for my first book, and the publisher asked me, 'How are you going to get out of the story?' And I think that's the thing that people often go into it having a great idea of two thirds of a really good story, how it goes up through the climactic action of your narrative. But then there can be this like long trail off where people can't bring themselves to wrap the story up, or not put as much thought into exactly how the story ends," says Catherine Grace Katz, author of Shadow Before the Flame. It's Catherine Grace Katz (@catherinegracekatz on IG)! Who first appeared on the show back on Ep. 222 for her acclaimed book Daughters of Yalta and she's back in the saddle again for Shadow Before the Flame: The Hindenburg Disaster and the Prelude to War. It's published by Viking. Two things are ubiquitous about the Hindenburg: It blew up and the journalist painting the audio picture of the disaster said, "Oh, the humanity." Beyond that, what else is there? Turns out, um, quite a f------ lot, man. I didn't know there were survivors. I didn't know it was a passenger vessel. Shadow will sit right beside the great historical yarns spun by the likes of Laura Hillenbrand, Erik Larson, and Hampton Sides. I'm always amazed how writers make work of this nature suspenseful when you know the outcome. Like, you know the Hindenburg blows up. You know Trudy Ederle swims the English Channel. And yet, when it happens, you're rewarded more than you could have imagined. What a fun time we had. Can't believe it's been six years since she was on the show. Oct. 2, 2020. Wild. Who'd have thought that she's such a fiery New York Yankees fan? Hmmm … In this episode we talk about: * The origin story of this book * The post-book funk * Step 1 of writing this book proposal * Getting out of the story * World building * Capturing the little nuggets * How she's more rooted in feel * The murder wall * Cutting yourself off from the research * The tech of zeppelins * Why they couldn't use helium * The echoes of history * Not writing the present into the book * The one thing she's totally inflexible about * The biggest change between book one and book two * And her hottest of hot takes Pair this episode with Ep. 132 with Laura Hillenbrand, Ep. 473 with Hampton Sides, and Ep. 368 with Tyler Hooper.