I’m fascinated by glimpses into writers’ processes and motivations. Here are a few quotes from Robert Caro’s book, first about the importance he places on good writing:
Rhythm matters. Mood matters. Sense of place matters. All these things we talk about with novels, yet I feel that for history and biography to accomplish what they should accomplish, they have to pay as much attention to these devices as novels do. (p. 192)
How he outlines a book:
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. (p. 197)
How he does research:
First you read the books on the subject, then you go to the big newspapers, and all the magazines (…), then you go to the newspapers from the little towns. (…)
Then the next thing you do is the documents. (…)
Then come the interviews. You try and find everybody who is alive who dealt [with the subject] in any way in this period. Some people you interview over and over. (p. 194-5)
How he thinks of people:
You try to learn as much about the people as you can. I try never to give psychohistory… It’s as hard to understand someone you’re writing about as it is to understand someone in real life, but there are a lot of objective facts about their lives and actions, and the more of them you learn, the closer you come to whatever understanding is possible. (p. 201)
Finally, what motivates his research:
It had to do with that something in me, that something in my nature, which, as I said earlier, wasn’t a quality I could be proud of or could take credit for. It wasn’t something that, as I missed yet another deadline by months or years, I could take the blame for, either. It was just part of me, like it or not; the part of me that had hated writing an article for Newsday while I still had questions - or even a question - left to ask; the part of me that, now that I was writing books, kept leading me, after I had gotten every question answered, to suddenly think, despite myself, of new questions that, in the instant of thinking them, I felt must be answered for my book to be complete; the part of me that kept leading me to think of new avenues of research that, even as I thought of them, I felt it was crucial to head down. It wasn’t something about which, I had learned the hard way, I had a choice; in reality I had no choice at all. In my defence: while I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is. And finding facts - through reading documents or through interviewing and re-interviewing - can’t be rushed; it takes time. Truth takes time. But that’s a logical way of justifying that quality in me. (p. 112)