Wide Wide Blog

I’m not sure how many of you reading this have ever tried to write anything of significant length, let alone anything like a book. What’s it like to write one? My first inclination if you ask that question is to recommend you see a doctor, or at least lie down until the urge to write a book passes. But if you really want to know what it’s like, let me see if I can provide some insight from my own experiences writing about history and the people who made it.

First off, do you need any specialized training? Not necessarily. Some people benefit from a degree program or courses in writing history. But I’ve read some really well-done pieces of history written by people who had no formal training in the historian’s trade, and in some cases they didn’t have a degree. By the time I got into a degree program, all it did was help me refine what I’d learned from years of reading the works of historians I admired. If you look at what the pros do and learn from their methods, that’s an education in itself.

Before any of it begins, you have to figure out if your subject is something you can live with for a long time. You may not realize it, but the subject, be it a person or something else, will become your constant companion in a way you may not appreciate at first. It’ll happen not just in the interviews you conduct or the research you do through old newspaper files or in archives, but in the quiet moments. You’ll be driving somewhere, for instance, or out mowing the yard, and in those moments when your brain is sort of freewheeling you’ll catch yourself thinking about your subject, fitting together the pieces in your head or making sense of something. I drove to the supermarket a couple hours ago and, sure enough, at some point came thoughts of the writing I was doing earlier this morning about Garroway’s role during the run-up to the first Today program.

That’s why your choice of subject has to be done with care. In a sense, you’re adopting a new friend or family member for the next few months or years. Is it a good fit for you? There are stories of biographers who get all excited about the subject of their next work, only to get 50 or 100 pages in and realize they can’t stand the person they’re writing about. You’re talking about a major investment of your time, money and effort into a project, so why make it something you’ll dread?

In my own case I’ve written one biography already and am currently working on this one, and in both instances I’ve been fortunate to discover subjects who have worn easily and with whom I have shared some common elements. Ben Robertson was a fellow South Carolinian who had a hundred interests and whose circle included several people with whom I was already familiar, notably Ed Murrow. The more I got into his work, the more I felt I understood him, and it became easy for me to explain him. As for Dave Garroway, my almost-lifelong fascination with him has driven me to find out more about him, to go past the droll figure you see in the kinescopes and try to find the man himself. I have found things that are disturbing, certainly, and other things that made me sad. But I have also found a man of a hundred interests, a man with whom I would love to have had a conversation, and a man who was something other than what some of the cartoonish accounts would have you believe. And, again, the more I get into his story, the more I feel I understand him somehow.

Now that you have a topic…is there material? Google may well be your first friend, or even Wikipedia (although, as always, use that with caution). If you find an article on your subject, look at the endnotes. Sometimes a source note will tip you off about the availability of archives, or where that person’s papers might be. For Garroway I not only located two archives that had some of his papers (both of which had versions of his uncompleted autobiography project), but I also happened across the NBC papers at Wisconsin, which are vital.

If you’re fortunate, you can find some people to interview. With this I’ve had only limited success. Many people who worked with Garroway are now gone. Others may not want to talk (I’ve thus far had no success making contact with his family, for instance). But some television pioneers have given extensive interviews. The most notable (and valuable in my case) has been the Archive of American Television. I’ve located close to a dozen interviews with people who knew Garroway and worked with him, and they lend priceless insight into the man.

Another resource that’s been invaluable has been online newspaper databases and publication collections. This includes free resources like Google Newspapers and paid databases such as Newspapers.com. In those you can find all manner of items large and small, from obituaries and news stories to daily television listings, and everything in between. Even the gossip columns are useful, even if they’re not quite reliable, because you can get a feel for the moment. As always, you must treat newspapers as the rough first draft of history, but with care you can find items you wouldn’t find anywhere else, and sometimes you’ll find a key piece of evidence to debunk a myth or two.

If you have a good library nearby, spend some time there. Even a local library will have a few books that will provide some information on your subject area, and larger libraries may have periodicals that go back a ways. A large university library is a potential gold mine. With many libraries freeing up space by moving some material to off-site storage, this may require some advance coordination. But libraries have helped me find many articles, some of them obscure, that have lent a ton of insight.

The most expensive option is to buy whatever materials you can find – books, recordings, old magazines, artifacts, and so forth. Used copies of books can be had fairly inexpensively (unless it’s something truly rare). And even eBay can surprise you, not only with books and magazines and wire service photos, but occasionally there’s a true surprise or two (for instance, it’s how I found my “11:60 Club” membership card, along with four letters Garroway sent the fan whose name was on the card).

Once you’ve gathered your material, what do you do? To some extent, you have to sift through it and let things ferment. You also have to make sure you understand the documents and fill in the information you need to understand the information in context – in context of the times, in context of the larger picture. For instance, you can’t really write about Today unless you understand something about how television programming worked in the immediate postwar era, or unless you understand about Pat Weaver’s concept of “Operation Frontal Lobes,” or so forth. The same is true for personal matters; to write about Dave’s mental health struggles, you have to make sure you’ve sought good sources to help you understand depression and addiction and so forth. You have to be careful to let the information help you build a conclusion, not start with your conclusion and work backwards from there. You’re writing a history, not a tract.

And then at some point, you have to get started. I have found the best thing to do is take the task in bite-size servings. For instance, I’ve set myself a goal of writing about 200 words each day. Each day I’ll choose a document or two from the files, read through it, and try to write something from that. I then place that day’s writing into an appropriate point in the narrative. If you do 200 words a day, after 30 days you’ve written 6000 words. I’ll let you do the math, but you can see how it adds up.

(Note that the above paragraph does not really apply if you’re on a tight deadline. In that case, my approach is “type up all your notes as quickly as possible, cut-and-paste them into order, and then write the connecting words you need to string them together.” That’s how I wrote a doctoral dissertation in a big hurry when I was told “your next job depends on defending by X date” and “your committee chairman is about to retire and really wants to finish this up.” Deadlines are incredible motivators.)

Now, how much to write? That’ll vary depending on your subject and how much information you can get, but you also have to remember that not everything you come across needs to be in the book. It’s better to overwrite and edit things out than end up with a manuscript that’s too brief. For the Garroway book I’m looking at the 85,000-word range: long enough to provide a detailed portrait, but not so long that it overstays its welcome.

When you get your first draft done, it will need review. What works for me after the first couple of on-screen reviews is to get a paper copy of the manuscript (I send out for this, since paper and ink cartridges can get pricey) and then mark it up with a pencil. There’s something about a physical copy of the manuscript that gives me a different perspective, and lets me find little things I missed the first few times around.

After that initial revision, it’s important to get some outside views. If you have a couple people you really trust, let them look through it. You don’t want people who will automatically say “oh, that’s great!” – you want somebody who will look at it impartially, who will not be afraid to call out inconsistencies or errors or other areas where you fell a little short. Remember, the goal is to make the manuscript stronger.

Once all that’s done and you’ve polished it? Then it becomes a matter of getting it published. If there’s an academic angle or an alumni-related tie-in, sometimes a university press might be interested. Other times, a small specialty publisher is your best hope. You can even go the self-publishing route. But unless you’re extremely lucky, or motivated, or have a good agent, don’t count on the big publishers beating a path to your door.

Sure, on occasion I have dreams of a major publisher picking up the Garroway manuscript, of getting some kind of really good contract and having a full publicity push and maybe even ending up on some morning programs talking about the Dave Garroway story. But I am just as quickly reminded of how unlikely this is. Besides, what’s the real motivation behind this project? It’s not fame, and it’s certainly not money (although I do hope to at least recoup a little of what I’ve invested in all this). It all comes down to telling a story that needs to be told. Somehow, this story went untold for so long, and through circumstance it’s ended up in these hands. My goal is to tell it. And if we can tell it honestly, with insight and compassion, then that will be a reward in itself.