A couple weeks back, the search through Newspapers.com came to its end. Now it’s time for me to sift through those thousands of clippings, get the good stuff out of them, and organize everything. That goes not only for the newspaper clippings, but also for magazine articles I’ve found, paper documents I have from the Garroway family, the hundreds of images I have of documents from the NBC papers at Wisconsin, passages from books, and so many other things. And then there’s the audiovisual evidence – kinescopes, several interviews from the Archive of American Television that I have yet to go through thoroughly, and a couple of lengthy audio interviews with Garroway that I’ve happened across.
All of this may sound daunting, and it is a big task. But it’s helped by knowing that a good many of those clippings, I saved because of only one or two sentences. A good many of them are brief mentions, for instance in an Earl Wilson column or some such. Others are alternate versions of the same wire service story, which I clipped just to be thorough. It’s easy to open a hundred documents at a time in my preview program, transcribe what I need and create a brief citation (which I will finish out later), and then move ahead. The work goes much faster than you may imagine, and it’s splendid busy-work.1
Years ago I developed a system for handling these kinds of huge projects, and it’s much like how, in the days before computers, an author might write individual facts or ideas on index cards, then sort that stack of cards into whatever sequence was appropriate, and then write the manuscript. In my case, I am transcribing the relevant items from each article, in chronological order, into a master document. Once that’s done, I will cut-and-paste those items into the order that seems appropriate for the story I have to tell. Then writing the finished manuscript just becomes transforming those facts and ideas into readable prose. It’s a method that served me well 19 years ago when I was working on my dissertation; once I had everything in the sequence I wanted, it only took me about two days to complete the first draft of my dissertation.2
As I write this in the wee hours of a Monday morning, this master document stands at 123,710 words. By the end of today, it’ll likely have grown to more than 130,000. I haven’t even gotten into the Today years, so this thing’s going to be a monster, maybe even 400,000 words when I’m done transcribing. A whole lot of it will get cut down, because there’s a lot of fluff in there, I know, and the finished manuscript will likely be in the 100,000-word range. But it’s always best to have too much material, instead of having to stretch out too little. As a friend said the other day, first you create the block of marble, then you pare it down to David. (And in my case, that’s certainly apt.)
One more thing that helps any author is a good research assistant. And that, I most certainly have.
This is Gilda3, my faithful helper4. She’s very good at making sure none of my papers go anywhere – that is, when she and her big brother aren’t getting into mischief.5
With help this good, there’s no way I can fail.
- Especially good for distracting yourself from current events in this blazing dumpster fire of a year.
- Another reason it took me only two days: I had completed my obligations at the teaching job from which I had been unceremoniously dumped, so I had the time. Plus, the terms of the new position I’d accepted at another institution stipulated that I had to complete my doctoral requirements before the end of the calendar year. If that’s not motivation, you tell me what is.
- Named for the wonderful Gilda Radner, who herself was named partly after the Rita Hayworth character. Her name therefore gives me happiness twice over.
- She was adopted after the wonderful Junior, whom you see in this post, succumbed to heart problems in January 2019
- If you’re wondering about that black cable that’s twisting through the picture, that’s plastic cable-wrap to protect power cables from curious feline teeth.