I was listening to a podcast episode of Dwarkesh Patel interviewing Robert Caro for last couple days during commute. For context, Dwarkesh Patel's is the hottest podcast in AI world, but this episode has nothing to do with AI. Robert Caro is a unique writer who spends years researching a topic (one book covered in this episode took 40 years), reading everything to read about the person/topic he is writing about, interviews 100s of people associated. This is grueling work and what motivates such a person to put their life into such endeavors is the reason why this is fascinating.
Came across one segment in the interview quoted below – boiling down the idea of a book into one sentence or at max one paragraph. I had heard this about movies – the story to be told in one sentence. Like “Hollywood superstar actress falls in love with an ordinary bookstore manager” – as the story of the movie, Notting Hill, for example. This idea of a “golden thread” that can be distilled as the core idea and let everything hang together on that thread – that is interesting. What if we can apply the same for other things – what is this Project about? What is this job about? What should our career be about? Can it be distilled like that, to a single unifying purpose? Interesting to think about.
I want to ask you a little bit about writing biography now. One question I have is, you spend 5-10 years writing a single book. Through that process, maybe your editor and your wife are the only people who have seen the manuscript. So how do you make sure you’re on the right track? Because you’ve got to wait so long from when you start to when you get public feedback. How do you make sure that everything’s going to hang together and you’re pursuing the message the way you want to?
Robert Caro
Part of your question is, how do you be sure you’re on the right track? The answer to that is you’re not. But how do you try to stay on the right track? I do have a device for that. Before I start a book I think through what I want the book to be, the whole book. People say, “You mean you think it through to the end?” The answer is yes.
Then you say, “What is this book about?” I sit at that desk sometimes for a long time before I start writing, when I’m thinking about the book, just asking myself in one way or another, “What is this book about?” You’ve got to get it down to one sentence. You say, “You can’t get it down to one sentence.” Then you say, “Yeah, but Bob, you learned you better get it down to one sentence, or three years from now you’re going to be writing and you’re going to be saying, ‘What am I trying to do?’” Before I start a book, I try to get it down to a sentence or at most a paragraph and say, “Really, what is this book about?” I try to make everything hang together around that point.
Comments
Post a Comment