Working

by Robert A. Caro

“But you’re never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers.”

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typewriter; that is why I still do my first few drafts in longhand today; that is why, even now that typewriters have been replaced by computers, I still stick to my Smith-Corona Electra 210.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.

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.

From now on, you do investigative work.” I responded with my usual savoir faire. “But I don’t know anything about investigative reporting.” Alan looked at me for what I remember as a very long time. “Just remember,” he said. “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page.”

When you need to get information from somebody, you have to find some way to get it.

To really show political power, you had to show the effect of power on the powerless, and show it fully enough so the reader could feel it.