Writing wisdom from a prize-winner

You can learn a lot about writing from people who do it well. In fact, I don’t think you can ever stop learning about writing if you want to keep improving your craft. So I thought I’d share a few insights from Robert Caro, two-time Pultizer Prize winner and author of the definitive, multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. His latest book, Working, shares his process and lessons learned, which Caro discussed in a recent interview with Preet Bharara on his Stay Tuned podcast. My takeaways:

1. Turn every page. When an editor at Newsday assigned him to do investigative work, Caro said he didn’t know how to do it. The editor’s advice stuck with him: “Just remember one thing. Turn every page, never assume anything. Turn every goddam page.”
2. Focus. Caro won’t write a word until he can boil down what the book is about into one paragraph. OK, maybe two or three. But once he’s done that, he posts it next to his desk. “For the next three years while I’m writing I make everything relate to those couple of paragraphs.”
3. Know where you’re going. Another pre-writing exercise for Caro is figuring out the last line of a book. “It takes a long time sometimes to find that last sentence, but if I find … If I know it, writing the book gets easier.”
4. Share a sense of place. Caro wants the reader to really see where things happen, especially places that shape the lives of his main characters. That means spending time in those places himself and describing them in detail. For his first book on Johnson, he moved to the Texas Hill Country. For three years.
5. Relive the experience. You can’t really know what a character saw or felt unless you see it yourself. For Caro, that meant not just going to a place but putting himself in the character’s shoes. He’d heard that when Johnson came to Congress he walked to work, and every morning in front of the Capitol he broke into a run. Caro couldn’t figure out why until he did the same walk at the same time of day, very early in the morning, as the sun was rising. Then it made sense. “All that marble with the heroic figures and the friezes lit up like this blazing white thing…All of a sudden he’s seeing lit up for him everything that he can get if he succeeds in the Capitol. Of course he’s excited.”

Caro is a tireless researcher. He worked on his first Johnson book for seven years before he even started writing. That’s an utterly foreign concept to most journalists; it seems to put him in a totally different category of writers. But I’d argue the lessons Caro shares apply to all writers. We all need to do thorough research. We all need to focus and organize.

It’s totally worth listening to the entire conversation. I can’t wait for the next episode in this occasional series with writers on writing.