NotitiesWorking
Robert A. Caro
In "Working" deelt Robert A. Caro zijn inzichten over het schrijven van biografieën en non-fictie. Hij reflecteert op zijn eigen schrijfproces, inclusief de uitdagingen van grondig onderzoek en de balans tussen deadlines en kwaliteit. Caro benadrukt het belang van empathie voor zowel machtigen als machtelozen in zijn werk.
There are also a few things I’ve learned or discovered, or think I’ve learned or discovered, about the writing of biography and indeed nonfiction in general that I’d like to share or pass along for whatever they’re worth to other writers and to readers interested in nonfiction. And here also are a few things I discovered about myself along the way—starting with a long-ago Election Day in the very tough political town of New Brunswick, New Jersey, when, a wet-behind-the-ears journalist fresh out of Princeton, I found myself “riding the polls” (I didn’t even know what the term meant when I was invited to do so) with a very tough old political boss—and about what I wanted to do with my life and my books (which are my life): how, for example, a row of tiny dots on a map helped lead me to the realization that in order to write about political power the way I wanted to write about it, I would have to write not only about the powerful but about the powerless as well—would have to write about them (and learn about their lives) thoroughly enough so that I could make the reader feel for them, empathize with them, and with what political power did for them, or to them. (Page 0)
Tags: Geel
Note: powerless
When I decided to write a book, and, beginning to realize the complexity of the subject, realized that a lot of thinking would be required—thinking things all the way through, in fact, or as much through as I was capable of—I determined to do something to slow myself down, to not write until I had thought things through. That was why I resolved to write my first drafts in longhand, slowest of the various means of committing thoughts to paper, before I started doing later drafts on the typewriter; that is why I still do my first few drafts in longhand today; that is why, even now that typewriters have been replaced by computers, I still stick to my Smith-Corona Electra 210. And yet, even thus slowed down, I will, when I’m writing, set myself the goal of a minimum of a thousand words a day, and, as the chart I keep on my closet door attests, most days meet it. (Page 0)
Tags: Geel
It’s the research that takes the time—the research and whatever it is in myself that makes the research take so long, so very much longer than I had planned. Whatever it is that makes me do research the way I do, it’s not something I’m proud of, and it’s not something for which I can take the credit—or the blame. It just seems to be a part of me. Looking back on my life I can see that it’s not really something I have had much choice about; in fact, that it was not something about which, really, I had any choice at all. When I was a reporter, I blamed this feeling on the deadlines. I just hated having to write a story while there were still questions I wanted to ask or documents I wanted to look at. But when I turned to writing books, the deadlines were no longer at the end of a day, or a week, or, occasionally, if you were lucky in journalism, a month. They were years away. But there were deadlines: the publisher’s delivery dates. And there was another constraint: money—money to live on while I was doing the research. But the hard truth was that for me neither of these constraints could stand before the force of this other thing. It wasn’t that I was cavalier about the deadlines. As it happened, I was lucky enough to have a publisher who never mentioned them to me, but they loomed in my mind nonetheless, as I missed them by months and then by years. (Page 0)
Tags: Geel
I tried to write The Power Broker without dramatizing this human cost. I would start outlining the next chapters, to go forward without the East Tremont chapter, and it was as if something in me would rebel, and I would sit there for hours, fiddling with the outline, knowing it was no good, knowing that if I went forward, the book behind me wouldn’t be the book it should be, and my heart just wouldn’t be in the writing anymore. Lack of discipline, you might say. Lack of discipline is what I said. But, looking back now, I have to accept the fact that in deciding to research and write that chapter—as in deciding to research and write so many chapters that it would have been possible to publish the books without including; indeed in doing the books as a whole the way I have done them, taking so long to do them—there really was no choice involved; that I didn’t really have one. (Page 0)
Tags: Geel