One (Extraordinary) Man’s Writing Process

I’m a fan of Robert Caro. I have been ever since I read his first book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, a book so good that I’ve recommended it time and time and time again. One of the best I’ve ever read, all 1,344 pages of it.

I am now reading–listening to, actually–the first volume of his currently four-volume biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power. Like his book on Moses, this one is long, long enough to capture both the early life of LBJ and the lives of the many people LBJ crossed paths and sometimes swords with. More than a few of those people merit a biography themselves, and Caro obliges, writing entire chapters on their lives in order to set up and make sense of LBJ’s interactions with them. Caro’s approach needs to be read to be understood.

As I’ve read Caro, I’ve also watched interviews of him on CSPAN and read what I could find online to uncover his writing process. How does he manage all the information that fills his books. I just found this description from the April 1990 issue of Texas Monthly that sheds light on that subject:

. . . One wall of the room was lined with bookshelves and files, and just above the desk hung a large corkboard displaying the twenty or thirty sheets of paper that form his outline.

The outline is the key to Caro’s working method. “I’m determined to think through the book from beginning to end before I start it,” he told me. .’First I make a very short outline, just a page or two. Then I start filling it in with transitional sentences and key thoughts. You’re really writing the book without the details at that stage. Then what I do is I go through the notes and fill in the details. Let’s say I have a hundred and fifty pages of notes dealing with a particular incident-but of course I don’t; I have nearly a thousand. Anyway, you give a number to each interview. You go through all your file folders, and you index everything in it to that outline. And the outline keeps growing until you’ve got the entire book-an entire wall, twenty or thirty feet long, covered with paper. There it is. And then you come in one day, and you look at it, and you have to start writing.”

I rarely write from an outline, but then, I’ve never written anything as long or as well-developed as Robert Caro has. I long to do so. If imitation is a form of flattery, I think I may need to flatter Mr. Caro to that end.

The Passive Voice Discussed by Someone Other Than Me.

Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy has two worthwhile posts about the passive voice. Enjoy:

“The supposed sins of the passive voice (part 1 — misidentification)”

and

“The supposed sins of the passive voice (part 2 — when the passive voice is better than the active, or at least as good)”

I agree with most everything in these two posts, but I want to stress two things. First, as Volokh says:

It seems . . . that passive voice is indeed often bad, for three reasons: (1) It tends to be less engaging, (2) it usually adds a few more words and some extra grammatical complexity, and (3) it sometimes obscures who’s actually doing something. “The dog was bitten by the man” is an example of passive voice bringing less verve, and requiring more words, than the active. “Mistakes were made” is the cliche example of passive voice as obfuscation or barrier to analysis.

Second, the most important point, the one I stress every time I talk about the rules of English with my students, is this: You are the boss of your writing. You’re in charge. Thus, you can break any rule in A Writer’s Reference if you do it purposefully and intelligently.

On another note, I must stand up for Strunk and White The Elements of Style*. Volokh quotes Geoff Pullum of Language Log, who casts a disparaging word in the direction of the little book or at least its advice on the passive voice (though, having read Pullum’s post before, I know he’s not a fan of the entire book). I disagree for two reasons.

First, the book lays out grammar and punctuation in an engaging style, one that will hold the reader’s interest from start to finish, unlike most books on grammar and punctuation. And because the reader will actually read the book, she will come away knowing much more than she would had she bought a thicker, boring guide, one of those “longer, lower textbooks–books with permissive steering and automatic transitions.”

Second, as I’ve written elsewhere, The Elements of Style is worth all the other grammar and usage guides if only to read and re-read the introduction. Strunk’s advice to “Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!” ring in my ear every time I write or revise. Oddly, Pullum criticizes even this advice. He’s wrong, of course. Writers–student or otherwise–need constant reminders to omit needless words, even when they know which words are needless.

White’s paragraph describing the reader as “a man floundering in a swamp” is a description of audience I use again and again to help my students understand their job as writers. And so, contra Mr. Pullum, I recommend you get “the little book”!

*For reasons I outline here, I prefer the 3rd edition to the 4th.

A Punctuation Conspiracy

Law professor Eugene Volokh, of the eponymous blog The Volokh Conspiracy, posted today on punctuation rules. A self-described “descriptivist,” he writes that “descriptivists don’t deny there are rules — they just say the rules are dictated by “the will of custom, in whose power is the decision and right and standard of language.” He then goes on to discuss one of the two punctuation rules that befuddle my writing students throughout the semester–be they freshmen or seniors:

1. Place commas and periods inside quotation marks, e.g.,

The Court’s answer to this was “no.”

Seems simple enough, but it’s apparently not. I’ve stressed this little rule semester after semester, and yet . . .

This rule has a corollary:

2. Place all other punctuation marks outside quotation marks, unless they are logically parts of the quotation. I have seen some departures from this where semicolons or question marks are involved, but my sense is that those departures remain rather rare exceptions in modern legal publications.

The Court’s answer to this was “no”; but two years later, the Court changed its mind.
Was the Court’s answer “yes” or “no”?
The Court’s response was, in essence, “Says who?” [The question mark is logically part of the quotation.]

For what it’s worth, I’m a repenting prescriptivist.

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