There’s a kind of reading that’s really a form of listening — not to what a writer is saying but to how they’re solving a problem. Every great piece of nonfiction is an argument about structure, and most writers never explain it aloud. The argument is in the choices: where the piece starts, when it digresses, what it leaves out, how it ends. You can enjoy the work without seeing any of this. But once you start seeing it, you can’t stop — and eventually, some of it becomes yours.
This guide is for both kinds of reading. Each writer here is worth your time as a reader. Each one also has something specific and stealable for anyone who writes. I’ve tried to name both.
The ten: John McPhee, Robert Caro, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Michael Lewis, Joan Didion, David Grann, Sam Anderson, Susan Orlean, Tom Junod, and Wright Thompson. Different registers, different obsessions, different methods. What they share is a commitment to making difficult things feel inevitable — and the discipline to make that look effortless.
They fall into three loose clusters, which might help you find your entry point. Structure builders — McPhee, Caro, Grann — write pieces that feel inevitable because the architecture is invisible but load-bearing. Emotional access — Orlean, Junod, Thompson — get you inside feeling before you know you’re there. Voice and form — Didion, Sullivan, Lewis, Anderson — the sentence, the digression, the explanatory seduction, the essay as genuine inquiry. The clusters overlap, and the best writers in each group are doing all three things at once. But if you’re trying to solve a specific problem in your own writing, the clusters tell you where to look first.
Structure Builders
John McPhee
McPhee is the master of structure as argument. His subject is always the thing he’s writing about — oranges, or shad, or the Swiss army — but his real subject is always how to organize reality into something a reader can move through without getting lost. He has spent fifty years at The New Yorker solving that problem, and the solutions are worth studying.
What makes him distinctive is the container — the frame he finds that makes movement through his material feel inevitable. “The Search for Marvin Gardens” uses a Monopoly board. “Travels in Georgia” uses a road trip. “Coming into the Country” uses Alaska itself as the organizing principle. Once you see this move, you start looking for containers in everything you write.
Start here: Draft No. 4 (2017) — his only book on method. He makes explicit what the work only implies. Then go back to “The Search for Marvin Gardens” (collected in Pieces of the Frame) and watch the Monopoly board doing structural work you’ll now recognize.
The move: He never begins at the beginning. He begins at the moment of maximum interest and works outward. Study his opening three paragraphs in any piece — they’re almost always doing three things simultaneously: establishing voice, creating a question the reader needs answered, and concealing the seams of what’s about to be explained.
Practice: Before you draft anything, ask: what’s my Monopoly board? What container makes the movement through my material feel earned rather than arbitrary? The answer doesn’t have to be clever — it has to be true to the material.
Robert Caro
Caro is not scalable. He spent four years in the Hill Country before writing a word about LBJ’s childhood. Most of us can’t do that. What’s teachable isn’t his research volume but the conviction beneath it: the place always tells you something the person won’t.
He goes to the physical world first. The Hill Country, the Senate cloak room, the New York neighborhoods that Robert Moses destroyed and rebuilt. The evidence in rooms and landscapes is different from the evidence in documents and interviews. It’s slower, harder to get, and almost impossible to fake — which is why it reads as truth.
His other great technique is the texture of power in a specific moment. He’s not interested in power abstractly. He wants to know exactly what it felt like to be in that room, on that day, when the vote happened or the deal was made. The specificity is the argument.
Start here: Working (2019) — short, essential, his book on method. Then the introduction and Part One of The Power Broker (1974). You don’t have to read all 1,200 pages (though you may want to).
The move: Before you draft, ask what you haven’t visited yet — literally or through deep primary material — that your subject requires. Don’t write about what AI is doing to writing in the abstract. Write about what happened at the desk, in the revision, in the specific conversation where you first felt it.
Practice: Pick a subject you think you understand well. List the physical places or primary sources you haven’t examined. Go to one of them before you write.
David Grann
Grann writes reported narrative with no visible seams. The research disappears into the story. His pieces feel inevitable — as if the events unfolded this way and he simply transcribed them, which is the opposite of true.
What he’s actually doing is severe selection. For every detail in a Grann piece, there are probably twenty he cut. The invisibility of the construction is the construction. He also has a gift for the late turn — the moment near the end of a long piece when everything you thought you understood about the story reorganizes itself. You don’t see it coming because he’s been quietly laying the groundwork for fifty pages.
Start here: “The Lost City of Z” (The New Yorker, 2005 — the article, before the book; available via library or The New Yorker archive). Then Killers of the Flower Moon (2017), starting with the prologue.
The move: Read a Grann piece, then read his source notes and bibliography. The gap between what he found and what he kept is the lesson. Severe selection is the craft. Ask of every detail you’ve gathered: is this load-bearing, or is this just interesting? Cut the merely interesting.
Practice: Find a piece of your own with too much in it — most first drafts qualify. For each scene or fact, ask: does the story collapse without this? If not, cut it and see.
Emotional Access
Susan Orlean
Orlean’s gift is emotional access through unexpected subjects. She writes about orchid thieves, libraries, a ten-year-old boy who wants to be a farmer, a rooster who survives a hurricane. The subjects seem minor or eccentric at first — and then, twenty pages in, you realize you care intensely, and you’re not entirely sure how she got you there.
The technique is finding the human stakes inside an apparently small world. She never argues for her subjects’ importance. She doesn’t need to. She finds a person inside the subject whose desire or grief or obsession is recognizable, and the subject becomes a lens rather than a topic. The orchid isn’t about botany. It’s about longing for something rare and possibly unattainable — which is a feeling every reader knows.
Her other quality worth studying is warmth without sentimentality. She likes the people she writes about, and it shows, but she doesn’t protect them from complexity. The affection is structural — it keeps the reader inside the piece even when the material gets strange.
Start here: “Orchid Fever” (The New Yorker, 1995) — the piece that became The Orchid Thief, free on her website. Then The Orchid Thief (1998) to see how she expands a magazine piece into a book without losing the intimacy.
The move: Find the desire. Whatever your subject is — a technology, a place, a cultural moment — ask: who wants something here, and what do they want it to mean? Orlean always finds the wanting before she finds the explanation. The wanting is the story.
Practice: Take a subject you consider too small or too niche for serious treatment. Write five hundred words looking for the person inside it whose desire is universal. Don’t explain why the subject matters. Find the longing.
Tom Junod
Junod is the most emotionally courageous writer on this list. He will go directly at the hardest thing in the room — grief, shame, heroism, moral failure — without flinching and without grandstanding. The difficulty of his subjects never becomes the point; it’s just the material he works with.
His two essential pieces are “Can You Say… Hero?” (Esquire, 1998 — the Mr. Rogers profile) and “The Falling Man” (Esquire, 2003 — about the iconic 9/11 photograph; archived here). Both approach subjects that could easily become sentimental or exploitative, and neither does. The reason is that Junod never tells you how to feel. He constructs the scene with such precision and restraint that the feeling arrives on its own — and because you got there yourself, it stays.
His move is moral seriousness worn lightly. He writes about goodness, evil, courage, and failure as if they’re ordinary things worth examining — which they are, but most writers either avoid them or overload them with significance. Junod just looks directly and describes what he sees.
Start here: “Can You Say… Hero?” is one of the best magazine profiles written in the last fifty years. Read it first for the experience, then again to study how he handles the problem of writing about a genuinely good man without turning him into a saint.
The move: Find the place in your draft where you’re protecting the reader — where you’ve softened something difficult or resolved something that should stay unresolved. Take the protection out. Trust the reader to handle what you found.
Practice: Write about someone you admire without using the word “remarkable,” “inspiring,” or any synonym for either. The constraint forces you to show rather than nominate.
Wright Thompson
Thompson is the best sportswriter working, but calling him a sportswriter is like calling Caro a biographer — technically accurate, structurally misleading. Sport is his entry point into the things he actually writes about: fathers and sons, time and loss, the cost of greatness, the way a place shapes a person without their knowing it. He goes to Augusta to write about golf and comes back with something about mortality.
His signature move is the long approach — he circles his real subject for thousands of words before naming it directly, accumulating details and scenes that seem atmospheric until suddenly they’re load-bearing. By the time he arrives at what the piece is actually about, you’ve already felt it. The argument has been made through accumulation rather than assertion.
The other thing worth studying is his relationship to place. Like Caro, he believes geography is character. But where Caro uses place as evidence, Thompson uses it as mood — the Delta humidity, the Oxford Square, Tuscaloosa on a fall Saturday. The physical world in his pieces isn’t backdrop; it’s pressure. The place is doing something to the people in it, and Thompson makes you feel that pressure before he explains it.
Start here: “The Secret History of Tiger Woods” (ESPN The Magazine, 2016) — free on ESPN. Then The Cost of These Dreams (2019), his essay collection, for range.
The move: The long approach. Find a piece where you’ve stated your theme too early — in the first few paragraphs, or even the first page — and try cutting everything before the first scene. Let the theme arrive late, carried in by the material rather than announced at the door. Thompson earns his conclusions by making you live inside the evidence first.
Practice: Write the opening of a piece where you are forbidden from stating your subject directly for the first five hundred words. Use only scene, image, and detail. See how long you can hold the reader’s attention before the subject names itself.
Voice and Form
Joan Didion
Didion’s influence is atmospheric — the way certain music gets into your rhythm without you noticing. Read her long enough and she’s in your prose before you’ve decided to let her in. Short sentences that accumulate unease. Syntactic disruption as emotional argument. The feeling that something is wrong before you can name what it is.
Her compression is earned, not imposed. Every short sentence in Didion is short because something has been removed — usually the explanation, the transition, the reassurance. The gap between sentences is where the dread lives.
Start here: “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album” — the title essays from the two collections. Both are available in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (her collected nonfiction).
The move: Read her aloud. The rhythm is the content — she’s using sentence length and syntactic disruption the way a composer uses tempo. After reading, copy a paragraph by hand. Transcribe it literally. That’s the fastest way to feel what she’s doing that reading alone won’t give you.
Practice: Take a paragraph of your own prose and remove every transition, every explanatory phrase, every “which meant that” and “in other words.” Read what’s left. Some of it will collapse. Some of it will be better.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
Sullivan writes essays that seem to wander and don’t. The wandering is load-bearing — he’s following a thought three levels deep and coming back with something you couldn’t have anticipated at the beginning. The digression is the form, not a departure from it.
His most distinctive quality is intellectual honesty about confusion. He doesn’t resolve his ambivalence before he writes. He writes into it — and the reader, who is also usually confused about whatever Sullivan is confused about, feels accompanied rather than instructed.
Start here: “Upon This Rock” (GQ, 2004) and “Mister Lytle” (The Paris Review, 2010 — free online). Both are long. Both earn it.
The move: Map the digression structure. Where does he leave the main thread? How many levels deep does he go? What’s the connection that brings him back — and notice that the return is always doing more work than the departure. The digression isn’t decoration. It’s the discovery.
Practice: Write a digression deliberately. Leave a thread, go three moves away from it, come back with something earned. Do it in a single paragraph first. The constraint is useful.
Michael Lewis
Lewis solves a specific problem better than anyone: how do you make a reader who knows nothing about a technical world care desperately about it? His answer is consistent across every book — character before concept, always. He never explains a mechanism until a person needs it. The felt stakes come first; the explanation follows as relief.
Reading The Big Short and Moneyball in the same week is instructive. He’s solving the same problem in both — finance and baseball analytics are equally opaque to the lay reader — and the method is identical. Find the person who sees what others don’t. Follow their perception. Let the explanation arrive through their eyes.
Start here: The opening three chapters of The Big Short (2010). Then do the same for Moneyball (2003). The structural similarity will be visible.
The move: The “felt stakes first” rule. Find the human cost or gain before you find the explanation. If you’re writing about AI or markets or any technical subject for a non-specialist reader, ask: whose life is this changing, and how does it feel from inside that life? Start there.
Practice: Take a technical subject you understand well. Write a one-paragraph scene — a person, a moment, a decision — that creates a question in the reader’s mind that only the technical explanation can answer. Don’t explain yet. Just create the need.
Sam Anderson
Anderson is the most underrated writer on this list and probably the closest in register to how many of us actually write about culture and technology. He covers serious subjects — basketball, video games, music, cities — with genuine curiosity and a light touch that never condescends. He lets his own confusion and delight stay on the page.
The move that distinguishes him is writing into uncertainty. He doesn’t resolve his ambivalence before he writes. He doesn’t know what he thinks until he’s almost done, and he lets the reader feel that process rather than hiding it. This reads as honesty, which it is — but it’s also a structural technique. The essay becomes a genuine inquiry rather than an argument dressed as one.
Start here: His Thunder piece, which grew into the book Boom Town (2018) — start with the book’s opening chapters, which are available in the Amazon preview. Then search his byline in the NYT Magazine archive for recent pieces — he’s still active and still excellent.
The move: Find a place in your draft where you’ve resolved an ambivalence too early — where you’ve told the reader what to think before the material has earned the conclusion. Pull the resolution out. Write toward it instead of from it.
Practice: Write a draft where you’re not allowed to state your thesis until the final paragraph. See what the material does when it has to carry itself.
How to Use This Guide
The apprenticeship model works faster than the study model. Don’t just annotate what these writers do well — find one move per writer that you could use in your next piece and try it, imperfectly. The imperfection is part of the process.
A suggested path: read Draft No. 4 (McPhee) and Working (Caro) back to back. They’re both short books by old men reflecting on a lifetime of doing this work, and they’re in quiet conversation with each other about what the craft actually requires. Then pick one long piece from each of the other eight writers and read it twice — once for the experience, once to map the structure. Perhaps ask one of the AI models to edit what you’ve written as if it’s being edited by one of these great writers.
The goal isn’t to write like any of these people. It’s to expand the set of moves available to you. Every writer you study deeply adds something to the repertoire. At some point the moves stop feeling borrowed and start feeling native. That’s when the real work begins.
Note: Article concept developed and orchestrated by Scott Loftesness. Writing assistance from Claude. Image creation by Gemini.