Maya Rao is a journalist and the author of Great American Outpost: Dreamers, Mavericks, and the Making of an Oil Frontier (PublicAffairs, April 2018). In addition, she is a staff writer at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Rao’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, Awl, Philadelphia Inquirer, Houston Chronicle, and Longreads, among others. You can follow her on Twitter at @Mrao_Strib.

EB: How did you start writing in general and nonfiction in particular?

MR: I grew up writing my own novels. I was nine years old. In spiral-bound notebooks. 100, 200-page novels. As I got older, I realized that when you are writing novels you are sitting in a room by yourself. And I realized if I wanted to interact with the community and tell real-life stories, I should be writing nonfiction. So I veered into that direction, and now I have been reporting for a dozen years. The dream of writing a book always stayed with me, I was just looking for the right topic. After all my reporting, I learned that there are so many interesting things in the world, I just can’t even imagine going back now and trying to make anything up.

EB: I completely understand. There are so many incredible real things in the world, why spend time making stuff up? It seems unnecessarily hard to me.

MR: Right! Exactly.

EB: So you have achieved your dream of writing a book—congratulations! Can you talk a bit about how Great American Outpost came about? How did you finally realize you had found the right topic? I know the book started as a series of reported articles for newspapers and magazines, but when did you realize it had the potential to be a book?

MR: At the time I became interested in North Dakota, there had been a lot of media attention on it. But it was all written by people who came for a couple days or a couple weeks, and then left. And they were all constrained by having to write in a certain short-article format. I felt that this topic was too nuanced, too complicated, to fit neatly into a short article; it really demanded a book. I wanted to take some time to see how this subject could work as a book, and a book written by someone who had spent a long time there. I wrote a longer piece for The Atlantic,which helped get a book deal, and after that I was able to go on leave from my job and spend some time out there really reporting.

EB: I really appreciated that when reading your book—I feel like you can often tell when a writer has just dropped into a place for a long weekend versus when they’ve really spent months or years in a place. It reads differently.

So, you primarily work as a reporter and you write in the short article format regularly. What was it like to switch gears? How was writing a book-length work different than writing a newspaper article? Did you approach the research and reporting differently?

MR: The biggest difference is people can open up in a more meaningful way when they know that what they say or do isn’t going to be published somewhere in the next week or the next month. There is a lag time of two to four years, from when I first started talking to someone to when they appeared in the book. I actually had to keep reminding people that this is going in a book; some would forget that. And that time lag really helped. For example, with Danny the truck driver. A lot of oil workers are not supposed to talk to the media and could lose their jobs over it, but if you have a long lag time of a couple years, chances are they won’t still be working for the same company by the time the book is published. That allows me to protect people better against any kinds of negatives that would come from talking to me.

The other thing that I found is that writing a book involves much more uncertainty. You’re trying to get the best material possible, but you are just observing and seeing what happens and can’t come in with a rigid agenda. When you’re writing an article you have to come in with a more specific idea of what you need to do because you’re on a shorter timeline.

But while writing the book, so much of it was about being willing to be completely surprised and switch directions. I had to accept a degree of uncertainty that came with the whole topic.

EB: That makes a lot of sense. Was there something in particular that especially surprised you while researching? Was there anything you hadn’t expected to write about that caught you off guard?

MR: There were just so many things! A major characteristic of the Bakken oilfield at the time—and in turn, my book—was being caught off guard.

EB: [laughter]

MR: Just so many things, I couldn’t even put everything in. But one thing, for example, going into it, I didn’t expect Danny the truck driver would be my main character.

EB: Oh, really?

MR: I interviewed other people in his position, and they seemed like a better fit at first. And so I had to continue to keep interacting with people to figure out whose stories would be the most compelling in the end. But I didn’t expect to use Danny as my main character right away.

The same thing happened with the oil rig supervisor I wrote about, Nevin—I didn’t necessarily expect to use much from him, but then after a year of knowing him, I learned that his rig was going to get shut down due to the crash in oil prices. And I knew I had to be there for that, because it was going to be this dramatic event that explained this whole oil price crisis really well.

Also, often I would have no idea that someone I had been talking to had some incredible criminal record or scandal in their past. That was really common.

EB: I know! There were so many moments when I was reading that I was shocked—you’d think you’d know this one character and find out all these things were going on underneath. I gasped out loud several times.

MR: I actually didn’t put every instance in because it would have grown repetitive.

That’s a big reason why I am glad that I was able to do the book. That element of surprise, of twists and turns, is hard to follow when you’re just doing an article. That level of weird moments is harder to entertain when you are on a limited timeframe.

EB: So true.

MR: Even just really small moments. I mentioned in passing that a truck stop fry cook had a warrant for his arrest—he had four DUIs—and I had known him for a year before I learned this. When he told me I remember laughing so hard I cried because it was not at all expected given the way he presented himself I learned that often the reasons people gave for why they had come to the Bakken—to get a better job, to make a lot of money—were these generic reasons, but as I got to know them, the real reason they were there would emerge. Sometimes the real reason was unsavory.

EB: I have to say that your ability to get to know people is incredible. I was so impressed by your immersive research and investigative approach to this topic and how you really embedded yourself into the Bakken community. Sometimes I don’t know why I choose to write nonfiction because talking to strangers is really scary for me. Do you have any tips on how to get strangers to talk to you? And how to feel comfortable approaching and talking to strangers?

MR: I’m not a naturally extroverted person, but a lot of times I think people would talk to me because they saw that I was willing to listen and did not react with much judgment. They saw I was there a lot and taking the time to live and work in the oilfield, that I really wanted to understand it. I don’t think there is a special technique except to be willing to listen, hear people, and spend time there. And I was willing to meet people any time, anywhere. Oilfield schedules run 24 hours a day, and you would never know when or where you would need to meet someone. At one point, Nevin’s rig was going to use this amazing technology to walk the oil rig several dozen feet over to the next well, and it was set for one in the morning. You can’t control the time period of that, so off you go, down a dirt road at one in the morning. If people had just gotten off work and wanted to relax in a bar, I would meet them at the bar. I just tried to meet people where they were at.

EB: That’s great.

MR: Though, of course, some people refused to talk to me—to get the ones who did it is kind of a numbers game. Out there many people are not allowed to talk to reporters, but there was also a hesitancy to talk to reporters because people feared some liberal, anti-fracking media exposé.

EB: So some people outright ignored you?

MR: Of course! Many people never returned my calls—but that is pretty common. When I compared notes with other reporters, they had the same problems. Getting someone to talk there is difficult, especially over a longer period of time. I feel so fortunate that with Danny he did usually return my calls and was willing to engage with me over a longer period, but I had to work around his schedule and be aware of the fact that he could be fired for talking to me, so I couldn’t really abuse that privilege. You have to be flexible.

EB: So we’ve talked about you as the interviewer, but what about you as a character?You flit in and out of the book as a guide to this “edge of the world” place. How did you decide how much of yourself to include in the book? It’s obviously not a memoir, but you are clearly more present in Great American Outpost than, say, Katherine Boo in Behind the Beautiful Forevers.

MR: That’s a really important question. I knew that I had to be there in some fashion, because you have this place that, for most people on the outside, requires a lot of explaining. You have to translate what is going on. You have to be that voice that explains what is surprising or troubling or weird. But, in earlier drafts, when I had more of myself in there, I found it slowed down the narrative too much. It didn’t quite work. So in the end I pulled out a lot of myself, but I knew I needed to have at least some first-person narration for the reader.

EB: I really appreciate the moments where you showed up, because the oil frontier world is not a world I know much about, so I liked when you were there to hold my hand a little bit.

MR: There may be other books I write where it isn’t necessary to do that. It depends on the topic.

EB: So, in general, what do you find most challenging about writing nonfiction? Is it researching, reporting, the actual writing, seeing your work out in the world?

MR: You can go to a journalism conference and sit in on a seminar and they can give you very clear-cut suggestions: this is how you report, this is how you develop a beat. It’s very standardized; you are representing an institution. And whatever the quality of your work, people will read it, and you still get paid. But when you’re writing a narrative nonfiction book, none of those things are true. It’s messy and unpredictable. There isn’t really one way to do it, and even if you try to follow rules, it doesn’t work. The Bakken in particular is a very unpredictable place, but I think this applies to many subjects people write about. Things come up and you have to figure out how to deal with them on the fly. You are not guaranteed an audience. You’re much more out on your own. Someone can’t tell you; you have to learn from experience.

EB: And even after you’ve written one book, I hear it doesn’t necessarily get easier. A writing professor of mine always says that you only know how to write the book that you just wrote.

MR: Haha, exactly. You have to be independent-minded and have a lot of faith in what you are doing to make it through those inevitable moments of uncertainty.

EB: And what do you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction?

MR: Immersing myself in a very unusual circumstance and coming out of that with a stronger sense of how the world works. From spending time in the Bakken, I got a better sense of reading people, of understanding this part of America that, frankly, I think a lot of journalists don’t understand. I’ve spent most of my life on the East Coast, and I think a lot of journalists and writers can get stuck in a certain bubble, and they don’t know people not from their own background. And being in the Bakken really forced me to read things and understand things in a different way, and I think I came out of it with a much stronger understanding of human nature. And loved getting to meet people that I otherwise never would meet.

EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow non-man writer?

MR: When thinking about how to convey the worldview and value systems of many people in the oilfield, I drew inspiration from Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s succinct, authoritative descriptions in Random Family of how her subjects looked at poverty, crime, and motherhood. I returned to this paragraph time and again as I wrote passages about how it was preferable to take a dangerous job for more money than a safer job for less, and how people in the oilfield rarely blamed Wall Street, the government, income inequality, etc. for their problems. From Random Family:

Since there were few real options for mobility, people in Coco’s world measured improvement in microscopic increments of better-than-whatever-was-worse. These tangible gradations mattered more than the clichéd language of success that floated blandly out of everyone’s mouth, like fugitive sentiments from a Hallmark card. Girls were going to ‘make something of themselves’ as soon as the baby was old enough; boys were going to ‘do right’ and ‘stay inside’; everyone was going back to school. But better-than was the true marker. Thick and fed was better than thin and hungry. Family fights indoors–even if everyone could hear them–were better than taking private business to the street. Heroin was bad, but crack was worse. A girl who had four kids by two boys was better than a girl who had four by three. A boy who dealt drugs and helped his mom and kids was better than a boy who was greedy and spent the income on himself; the same went for girls and their welfare checks. Mothers who went clubbing and didn’t yell at their kids the next tired day were better than mothers who did.