WORKING, Robert A Caro

Robert A Caro is the author of vast biographies – inhabitations, really – of powerful men in America. Decades of research go into those books. He even slept rough in Texas to try and understand Lyndon Johnson. This book, several thousand pages shorter than his others, is really just a collection of anecdotes on the authoring of those other monoliths. It’s an easy read and thoroughly charming, filled with interesting and fun stories. But I comb these things for hints on the processes of others.

Right at the end, I get this nugget.

I can’t start writing a book until I’ve thought it through and can see it whole in my mind. So before I start writing, I boil the book down to three paragraphs, or two, or one—that’s when it comes into view. That process might take weeks. And then I turn those paragraphs into an outline of the whole book. That’s what you see up here on my wall now—twenty-seven typewritten pages. That’s the fifth volume. Then, with the whole book in mind, I go chapter by chapter. I sit down at the typewriter and type an outline of that chapter, let’s say if it’s a long chapter, seven pages—it’s really the chapter in brief, without any of the supporting evidence. Then, each chapter gets a notebook, which I fill with all the materials I want to use—quotations and facts pulled from all of the research I’ve done.

WORKING, Robert A Caro (UK) (US+)