Researching Politics and International Relations

Robert Caro is an American journalist and historian most famous for his multi-volume biography of the US President, Lyndon Johnson. As a journalist accustomed to working to producing pithy copy to tight deadlines, and a biographer whose monumental studies are the product of decades of research and run to many thousands of pages, Caro’s experience of the process of research and writing is broad and diverse.

Caro recently published a short book on his experience of writing and the research process, entitled Working. Partly autobiographical, it is an entertaining and informative book which mixes anecdote with tips and techniques for research and writing, drawing on Caro’s decades of experience. A clue to Caro’s approach is in the title, Working. For Caro writing is a job, something he must do every day in order to pay the rent. When he is writing books, Caro doesn’t sit around waiting for inspiration to strike, he gets up each day, sits at his desk and writes. This, he notes, is just as important (perhaps more so) when writing books as when producing stories to short deadlines for a newspaper. In an interview included in the book, Caro is asked whether he sets daily quotas for writing, to which he replies:

I have to, because I have a wonderful relationship with my editor and my publisher. I have no real deadlines. I’m never asked, When are you going to deliver? So it’s easy to fool yourself 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 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. I try to do at least three pages a day. Some days you don’t, but without some kind of quota, I think you’re fooling yourself (p.201).

As students and scholars, we do work to deadlines, but those deadlines, particularly for things like dissertations, PhD theses and books, are often long in advance and in some cases movable, as a result it is, as Caro suggests, easy to put off writing for another day while you do something else –  shuffle papers, trawl through the internet in search of another source and fool yourself that you’re working when you’re not.

At the same time while Caro is an advocate of treating writing like a job, he also stresses the importance of working slowly and most importantly, of taking the time to think. He recalls his experience of enrolling on a creative writing programme early in his career in which he was required to write a short story every two weeks. Caro notes that, like many students, he always wrote his stories at the last minute, recalling ‘more than one all-nighter to get my assignment in on time.’ While he was confident in his ability to do this and always got his work in on time, Caro’s Professor told him that he was fooling himself about the amount of preparation and effort he was putting into his work and added, ‘you’re never going to achieve what you want to, Mr Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers.’ As Caro admits, he knew he could write and by writing frantically at the last minute produce the goods but writing and writing quickly at the last minute was not a substitute for careful thought and preparation:

No real thought, just writing – because writing was so easy. Certainly never thinking anything all the way through. And writing for a daily newspaper had also been so easy, too. When I decided to write a book, and, beginning to realise the complexity of the subject, realised that a lot of thinking would be required – thinking things all the way through, in fact, or as much through as I was capable of – I determined to do something to slow myself down, to not write until I had thought things through. That was why I resolved to write my first drafts in longhand, slowest of the various means of committing thoughts to paper, before I started doing later drafts on the typewriter; that is why I still do my first few drafts in longhand today; that is why even now that typewriters have been replaced by computers, I still stick to my Smith-Corona 210. And yet, even thus slowed down, I will, when I’m writing, set myself the goal of a minimum of a thousand words a day, and, as the chart I keep on my closet door attests, most days meet it (p.xviii).

There is much else to learn from Caro’s instructive book, not least about the research process, but when it comes to writing, set yourself a daily quota and don’t think through your fingers are useful first lessons.

Robert A. Caro, Working: researching, interviewing, writing, London: Bodley Head, 2019.