I think another kind of excellence, though, is a personal engagement, where there’s something about this author and that subject where the author has pursued it, not because someone said, “hey, we need a book about the Washington Monument, it’s taught in 4th grade in X number of states, fulfill this mission.” It’s because there’s some kind of personal drive, personal passion that the author has to communicate that, and that’s felt in care.
I was saying, the care of how the author crafts a sentence, Jim Murphy says, the wonderful author Jim Murphy says that any time he changes a word in his books, he thinks of his books as poems, and he starts from the beginning again, because he feels it changes the cadence of his books. I’m not that meticulous. I think of my books really more as symphonies, as compositions, and I really try to feel the unfolding of the melody.
I really do think of it as you state your theme sort of in the overture, and you have these little bit of foreshadowings, and they’re going to weave through and come back and build to a climax, and that’s what I try to do in my books, which is a little different from what Jim tries to do. Susan Campbell Bartoletti, what she tries to do is get as close as she possibly can to sort of that primary source, those individuals that she’s trying to capture. And that’s another personal mission.
It’s not exactly the same mission as I have or Jim has. I don’t think we need to have the same mission. But I think there is, I think you can tell a book that has that glint of the personal. That someone has put their heart and soul in this ‘cause they really wanted to bring this gift to their readers.
I think you can tell those books that have that personal stamp. I think it’s not different from fiction. You can tell a finely crafted novel from one that’s more formulaic. And formulaic novels serve a purpose, just as formulaic nonfiction does, but I don’t think it’s that kind of excellence. So I think the personal quality is… and I should add here that the personal quality can be reflected in many different ways. One of the things is attention to how you write.
When you’re writing nonfiction, too much nonfiction has basically serviceable prose. In other words, in the mind of the author, what matters is the content. So they’re basically getting you to the content in an okay way. They’re sort of adding the bricks and then you have a wall. I think an author who pauses to really look at why is it this word and that word, why is it the cadence of that sentence against this sentence?
When I wrote my biography of Robert Kennedy, one of the challenges I had is Robert Kennedy was so defined by his place in the family that I did not feel I could begin the book with “Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on…” because that would be as if he was an individual. So the way I wrote that first page, he is not mentioned until the very last word on the first page. The page is about his brothers.
And because you need to feel how overwhelmed he was by the family that surrounded him. So I think you can feel… you may not notice it, or when Tanya Stone published Almost Astronauts, readers may not notice that all the photography in that book is black and white until women blast off into space, and then it becomes color. That, it’s not like you can put that on a checklist, but you feel the liftoff.
You feel how women have now taken flight, and how that would be different from a book, even a book that had color throughout, where it was kept in the same key. So that’s a kind of care, a kind of love, even, that I think comes through in books that have that personal crafted quality.