When I completed my doctorate in Sociology at the University of Virginia in 2007, I was planning to find a teaching position and build a career in the company of scholars. But life had other plans, and I traded a future of teaching (which would have been awesome!) for nonstop adventures as a writer.
As a historian and biographer, I am fortunate to have very little experience with writer’s block—those dark nights of the soul that bedevil novelists, poets, and screenwriters who depend on their imaginations to keep them going. Tethered to my sources and grateful to the wizards who continue to improve MS Word, my primary challenges (after most of my research is done) are with organizing digital and paper documents, remembering where I stashed URLs and websites, and when to make the transitions from chapter timelines to outlines to drafts. Typically, I research and develop timelines and outlines for 6 months before tackling the first chapter. Mysteriously, chapters tend to end at about 8,000 words. I don’t argue. Setting a low bar of 500 – 1,000 words per writing day and allowing for revisions that might consume half of my allotted writing time (3 – 4 hours per day, mainly in the morning), I can knock out a chapter in a week and a half, two weeks tops.
That said, I am convinced that reading novels has benefitted my nonfiction writing in ways known only to my subconscious. In pretending to be a novelist, I often visualize the events I am describing as scenes in a movie, and I find that a well-chosen verb is worth its weight in adjectives and adverbs. My motto is, “Don’t beat readers over the head with what you want them to understand.” Instead, lead them gently to the only possible conclusion, and summon the prose to let them enjoy the journey.
In adopting what might seem like an unorthodox approach to history and biography, I take a cue from one of the greatest storytellers of our time, David McCullough, who once quipped, “No harm’s done to history by making it something someone would want to read.”
So, I found a community of scholars not on a campus somewhere, but with people who share my interests, the characters who populate my books, and of course, my readers.
I am fortunate to do this for a living. Thanks for dropping in.
Michael