Robert Caro's outliner

Posted by Gorski
Apr 16, 2012 at 01:30 AM

However privileged Caro may be now, he’s earned it. He went broke writing The Power Broker, a book no one would have said was a sure thing.

An Esquire profile, http://www.esquire.com/features/robert-caro-0512, has more on working methods, which haven’t changed since 1966.

> Each of the files is labeled in blood-red ink ? Busby, Horace; Jenkins, Walter; The Gulf of Tonkin ? and given a code. (A particular file on the assassination of John F. Kennedy is labeled ASS. 107X, for instance.) Caro’s outline contains hundreds of these codes, leading him directly to the file he will need when he is writing that particular section. “I try to have a mood or a rhythm for a chapter,” he says, “and I don’t want to interrupt it, searching through my files.”

> Only after he has filled and annotated those notebooks does Caro begin to write, three or four drafts in longhand, on pads of legal paper. With each pass, muscle is added to the frame. Finally, Caro feels prepared to give his fingers wings. “There just comes a point you feel it’s time to go to the typewriter,” he says. ... Three or four more drafts will appear out of that battered Smith-Corona Electra 210, each one hundreds of thousands of words, until he has his final draft.

> Even then, Caro is far from finished, crossing out lines and rewriting them, often tearing out paragraphs along the edge of a ruler and taping them into a different place on a different page. There are single pages in his final draft that are three feet long.

> “When I’m doing this, I can feel it,” Caro says. “There’s a feeling about it. You feel almost like a cabinetmaker, laying planks. There’s a real feeling when you know you’re getting it right. It’s a physical feeling.”