My process of writing is another crooked path. When I start a book. Let me back up, if I have an idea for a book and I present a proposal, I know I can do this, I’ve got this. They say yes, we sign a contract, I move forward, I say oh my goodness, what have I gotten myself into, I should have done a bunny book, you know, this is so much work. And then I remind myself of something that Bernice Johnson Reagan with Sweet Honey in the Rock said years ago, that you break it down into small steps.
And then the other thing I remind myself is like a mantra, it’s all in the research, that I have to trust the process. That how I open, tone, how I present the material will come to me if I immerse myself in the research, if I surrender to the subject. That’s what writing is, it’s surrendering to the subject and as I tell kids, because I think research gets a bad rap.
I tell kids, I say writing is acting. I say yes, writing is acting. If I’m writing about MLK, I have to become MLK. I said so if writing is acting then research is what? Getting into character. It’s not getting some dry, boring facts together, it’s that getting, what I spoke about before. It’s getting into character, it’s learning what did King, what was he like as a nine-year-old.
You know, what dances were popular when he was a kid. And then when you, like I said I start with the small things. I find in my process when I’m doing a biography I also have to find something about the subject that I can really relate to or something that makes the subject more human. DuBois was tough. Because he was known to be arrogant, as brilliant as he was and as prolific as he was he could be a little arrogant.
And I’ve kind of had trouble, you know he’s not an easy person to like, that’s what I’m saying, W.E.B. DuBois, the scholar activist, you know is not an easy person to like. You can respect him and appreciate and revere him but it’s hard to like him. But as I read about his childhood I realized he was small and scrawny.
He was born in the Victorian era. He was left handed, and that was considered sinister back then. He was poor. At one point his mom had a stroke and it left her disabled and he wrote of times walking through the streets with her limping and I thought he may have been teased, he may have been bullied, he may have been picked on. And I thought maybe that’s why he had a little chip on his shoulder. And I could understand it better and say I can sympathize.
I think for Frederick Douglass when I learned that he played the violin I thought oh, he loved music along with you know, railing against slavery and injustices and for women’s rights that I imagined that right, after his lecture tours which were sometimes three or four months long, maybe that’s how he centered down by coming home and playing the violin.
So I think it’s important to like bring it down, what the museum is doing, bring everything down to a human scale and say I can relate to this person.