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How He Does It: Robert Caro Explains His Research and Writing Process
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So far, Robert A. Caro has published 4,816 pages of detailed, riveting history in five books–the first about New York’s master planner Robert Moses (The Power Broker), the next four about the life and times of President Lyndon Johnson (The Path to Power, The Means of Ascent, Master of the Senate, and The Passage…
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The Story of Bill Nack’s Classic Farewell to Secretariat
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I wrote this brief tribute after Bill Nack died in 2018. When I think of Bill Nack, I want to call him one of the great sportswriters of our time. But he was really one of the great writers, in any field, of our time. The reason is threefold. First of all, he was…
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John McPhee’s Step-By-Step Approach to Narrative Nonfiction
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No one in our time has contributed more to nonfiction narrative–stories that are true–than John McPhee. And he has lessons to teach. McPhee is the writer for The New Yorker and creative writing professor at Princeton University. His books include the Pulitzer-Prize winning Annals of the Former World (a trilogy on geology and geologists), A Sense…
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How to Be Creative, One Step at a Time
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How does creativity happen? Is it, as some would say, a mystical process somehow connected to muses and gods? Or is it a process of grinding, getting up every day and working on the pieces so you can eventually put those pieces into a meaningful whole? This is, of course, a false dichotomy. It’s…
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Follow This Day-by-Day Guide To Write Your Book (Not Just During NaNoWriMo)
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The first piece of advice that all writers get is to “write what you know.” By the time we have decided to write for an audience—to share thoughts, voluntarily, with anyone who will listen—we have developed a whole storehouse of experiences and memories, thoughts and feelings, hopes and fears, and insights and ideas. The…