Would any be surprised if the eighty-three-year-old Robert Caro adheres to the familiar and writes his manuscripts out in long hand before typing them out on an electric typewriter? For the typing, he uses legal paper, triple-spaced. This way, Caro has ample room to edit and re-write his text before having to type it again. It is the same method that he has used since he was a rookie reporter fresh out of Princeton. I think there are two things to look at here: First, the importance of editing; and, secondly, the issue of workflow.
Over the course of my career I have developed a much deeper appreciation of editing as part of the writing process. When I was I younger I labored under the delusion that good writers managed to produce a quality manuscript of any length on almost one draft, and that editing was a monotonous drudgery that the rest of us had to endure. Numerous drafts discouraged me because I treated them as a sign of my weakness as a writer. To me writing seemed to be an art that you got or did not get. Then one day, about ten or so years ago, I saw a panel on C-SPAN or Book TV panel discussion on the editorial process. One of the panelists was Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, one of my favorite books. Egan confessed to producing over eighty drafts of her book. That was liberation!! An award-winning novelist needed eighty drafts. It is at that point that I came to understand that editing is a vital part of the process that requires all the diligence, patience, and practice of writing itself. Caro reinforces this belief in Workingby emphasizing that editing is as an essential part of writing, not a separate task. Writing, in other words, is a demanding craft. And I felt vindicated when he stated that the final version of the printed page bore almost no resemblance to the very first triple-spaced typed draft. There are samples of this in the fly pages at the start and end of the book.
I have always been very interested in the workflow of authors and historians. There is something fascinating to me about how others arrange their research and writing. Whether it’s a high-tech use of several different computer programs or writing it all out by hand, I always feel I learn something by a discussion of workflow. Let’s be honest, we all think we should be more productive and efficient when it comes to writing, and I am always hunting for tips and tricks.
Richard Nixon used to sketch out ideas on yellow pads of legal paper, and I have always wanted to look at that them to see what that looked like. Shelby Foote, author of the three volume Civil War: A Narrative, professed to write in an old-fashioned feather quill pen. That sounds tedious, assuming it is true. On the scarier side of the spectrum prolific historian Forrest McDonald claims that he wrote in his birthday suit. One of my mentors in graduate school was a student of McDonald and had known him quite well. And, if the stories are to be believed, McDonald was quite a wild character, so that seems plausible. For those of us with a more modern bent to integrate the latest technology, there are many websites by academics describing how to utilize various word processors, bibliographic compilers, search tools, and note-taking programs. My preference is to use Scrivener and Zotero.
I am not going to dump my MacBook for an electric typewriter, so I cannot say that I got any specific tips from Caro’s workflow. What his example clearly demonstrates is that each writer has a very customized and personalized workflow, and we should each do what works best for us.
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