What happened with my book MLK: Journey of a King was I was reading a Life Magazine that came out the week after the assassination and on it there’s a photo of him where he looks like kind of, he looks a little discouraged or disgusted. I’d never seen that photo. And inside in the back is a photo essay.
And that photo essay includes that famous image we’ve seen of the men on the balcony pointing. And I’d always seen, I’ve seen that photo a million times but I had never, I had always, I had seen that photo a million times but I had never seen it in context. And certain in my imagination it wouldn’t have been in back of the magazine, it would have been in the front. Okay, it’s in the back.
And the photo, and the photographer who wrote about that moment you know as I read the whole article he said that you know he was in the room, he was waiting to interview him and he heard a sound and he came out and he saw King fall back and it looked like the last word he said was “oh.” And I thought oh, that could have been King’s last utterance as opposed to “Oh my God,” you know something grand.
And that simple oh, I said I want to start with this moment. So sometimes during the research I find where I want to open and then when I found that I said I want to end with oh, that was going to be the structure. I’m going to start with that moment oh and go back through his life and then bring readers back to that moment on the balcony of Lorraine Motel and the last word of the book is oh.
So it’s, I really believe when the student is ready, the teacher appears. I mean, there’s a sort of magic, it’s a creative process even when it’s non-fiction. For some reason with W.E.B. DuBois it came to me probably because I knew he wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote that every chapter would open with a quote from him, where he was in his life. So I really think, I write my way in, in other words.
I know some writers can do outlines, I cannot do outlines. I can do an outline, but the finished book will be nothing like the outline. With my book on reconstruction what I wrote as the first chapter became the first chapter. So yeah, I write my way in and I hit a dead end and I’m like okay this is not working. And the wonder of computers is you don’t feel so bad about cutting because you say I’ll save it and use it later, I’ll save it and use it in another book.
Even if you don’t, but you feel like the writing wasn’t in vain. A mentor friend of mine, Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage, National Book Award winner, he once told me on one of his books that, I’m making it up, maybe it ended up being 30, 40,000 words that he wrote something like 200,000 words for what became 30, 40,000, 50,000 words. So I have long ago accepted that writing is writing and writing and writing and writing.
And you don’t look in terms of the economy of it like you know, I’ve done … if you have to write 30 pages to get a good five pages then that’s what you have to do. And those other 25 pages was not a waste of your time, it was process.