Robert A. Caro

"Short autobiography about author's processes of researching, interviewing, and writing his books"--

Researching, Interviewing, Writing

Working

Maria Buitrago

Interviews: silence is the weapon, silence and people's need to fill it-as long as the person isn't you, the interviewer. Two of fiction's greatest interviewers — Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret and John le Carré's George Smiley—have little devices they use to keep themselves from talking, and let silence do its work. Maigret cleans his ever-present pipe, tapping it gently on his desk and then scraping it out until the witness breaks down and talks. Smiley takes off his eyeglasses and polishes them with the thick end of his necktie. As for myself, I have less class. When I'm waiting for the person I'm interviewing to break a silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write "SU" (for Shut Up!) in my notebook. If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of "SUs" there.

You have to ask yourself, Are you making the reader see the scene? And that means, Can you see the scene? You look at so many books, and it seems like all the writer cares about is getting the facts in. But the facts alone aren't enough. 

CARO: The boiling down entails writing those paragraphs over maybe... I can't even tell you how many times, over and over and over. The whole time, I'm saying to myself, No, that's not exactly what you're trying to do in this book.

 So it's easy to fool your- self that you're really working hard when you're not. And I'm naturally lazy. So what I do is-people laugh at me-I put on a jacket and a tie to come to work, because when I was young, everybody wore jackets and ties to work, and I want to remind myself that I'm going to a job. I have to produce. I write down how many words I've done in a day. Not to the word— I count the lines. I do it as we used to do it in the newspaper business, ten words to a line. I do a lot of little things to try to make  me remember it's a job.

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