Working

by Robert Caro

I read this ebook on my phone from the library. A few notes:

Quotas

Every day, Caro puts on a coat and tie. He ends the day by taking an approximate word count, shooting for 3 pages per day. He has no deadline, so he uses these tricks to remind him that he is doing a job. “Without quotas, it’s easy to fool yourself.”

Interviewing

He often writes “SU” (for “Shut Up!”) in his notes during an interview, a reminder to himself to let silences linger, because people need to fill them.

He left a job as a journalist at Newsday to write The Power Broker, about Robert Moses. When the publisher’s $2500 advance ran out, his wife Ina sold their house without telling him. They lived off that money for a while. He felt like he’d never finish.

When he had been working on the book for five years, feeling depressed about his progress, he got access to a place called The Allen Room in the New York Public Library. There, writers (up to 11 of them) could do research, access library materials, and – crucially – keep the materials at their desks overnight.

As he met the other writers – some were heroes of his – they would ask something like, “How long have you been working on your book?” For the first time, his answer (“five years”) didn’t raise an incredulous eyebrow. “Oh, that’s not so long. I’ve been working on X for nine years,” said one author. Another said, “Y took be seven.” Caro says, “In a couple of sentences, they wiped away five years of doubt.”

When he told Ina that he wanted them to move to the Texas Hill Country to learn what LBJ’s childhood had been like, she lamented, “Why can’t you do a biography of Napoleon?”

A Sense of Place

Spend time in the place you want to write about. When the reader understands the loneliness of the Johnson Ranch – 14 miles from Johnson City, itself a town of about 300 people – they will better see why LBJ wanted out of there. And they’ll understand why his bringing electricity to the farms in that area was so difficult and important.