#1565 Ten Things about Writing a Book
2023-09-18 00:50:24
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Hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson. Across from me, my good friend Dr. Lindsay Trevinsky Lindsay, congratulations you finished your second book.
Thank you. I still have some edits and a few rounds of page proofs and copy edits and all those things, but the main substantive work is complete and that is very exciting.
This book is about Mr. John Adams.
It is, although it's actually really.
One of the questions that was posed to me as I was writing this book is, Is this a book about John Adams as president? Or is this a book about the presidency through the lens of the John Adams administration? And it's really a book about the presidency. Because one of my not to give too much away. But one of the things that I came to realize as I was transitioning from Washington to Adams is that Washington was so unique in his Washington-ness that no one else was going to have that same experience. And so whoever came second was almost the one who was actually creating the experience for everyone that would follow.
And so that second person is really quite essential to determining what the presidency experience would be. Once he left, George Washington becomes the first president the.
Constitution is not particularly explicit on just what that is going to mean. So he creates a set of tentative norms, and he retires adamantly after two terms. Suddenly, the heir apparent, as he called himself John Adams, becomes the second president of the United States. And I think you're saying he has to decide whether he will continue and deepen those norms or break with them in a different direction. It's the second presidency that will determine how deeply embedded these norms go.
Yes, and also to what extent it was going to be possible for anyone else to uphold those norms? Because, even though Washington was criticized at the end of his administration, he was so unparalleled in his stature that he wasn't really questioned. In the way that most politicians were and are. For Adams, it was trying to figure out, how does this office work? If you're not Washington? What do you have to do? what can you get away with, what can't you do?
What additional things do you have to take on? And that, in some ways, was almost as unprecedented as Washington's experience. Because the only model he had to follow was Washington's, and sometimes, when he followed Washington's example, he was criticized because he wasn't Washington.
So this book is tentatively titled.
Making the presidency John Adams and the precedents that forged the republic.
You say it's done, of course, my first point in our ten things about writing a book is it's never done when you think you're done. In some sense, you're only getting started. Because now others will read it, copy editors will look at it, maybe challenges will be made, clarifications will be required, footnotes will be adjusted, illustrations need to be chosen and hunted down, and permission granted for them. Sometimes the publisher will want to change the title, they also have their own pacing, their own schedule of when to release books.
And so how long do you think it will?
Be before this book is actually in bookstores. Well, we have settled on a date sometime in August of 2024, so it is under its final round of review right now. The final, final version needs to be in in December. That will go to copy editing and then page proofs, and then it will go to printing and it will be out in August.
My goal was always to have it out before the election of 2024, but also before, like the Real Mad Dash in October. So I'm hopeful that October, that August, gives people some space to think about these very important norms and precedents. Especially the peaceful transfer of power, which is really the culminating element of the story.
Talking with Dr. Lindsay Trevinsky about the exciting news of the completion of her second book, this one on John Adams. I suppose the next one has to be on Jefferson, right?
No, so I think I've shared this with you. But initially, this book was going to be a comparison of Adams and Jefferson. And looking at their cabinets, I started writing it and realized I really didn't want to write the Jefferson piece, and I dropped it.
That's partly because I had written an article already for a scholarly journal, The Journal of the Early Republic, about Jefferson's cabinet. And I kind of felt like I had said all that I really wanted to say. So to push it more into half of a book was going to be a stretch. One of my points not to get ahead of ourselves and I will delve into this. But you're going to spend a lot of time with a book and it's really, kind of important that you like it. And if you don't want to write it, it's going to make the process a lot harder. I think that Jefferson is very important, I think that he is incredibly influential and really shapes the political landscape for 50 years and shapes what the United States is going to be.
So I could talk until I'm blue in the face, about his importance, and while he's valuable. But just because you think something is important doesn't mean you want to spend several years with it. And I think that's a distinction. My first point in our 10.
Things about writing a book is when you think it's over, it ain't over, I assume you agree with.
That, yes, there's always more to do. And you know, even once you actually finish it and it is printed, then you discover errors. Of course, because no matter how many rounds of copy edits it goes through, something is always going to slip through the cracks. And what? I have tried to think of it as that's a good thing to start with for the paperback version, do you have the second one? Yes, my second one is. The only way to learn how to write a book is to write a book. And the reason I say that is because you could ask 100 authors how to write a book. And they would give you 100 different answers, and those 100 different answers might still not work for you. Everyone's experience is very different.
Everyone writes in a very different way, everyone needs different things, everyone processes information differently. And so the only way to really figure it out is to do it. And my guess is, even if you do it, when you do it again, it's going to look a little different. So I think people's, you know, styles and what their workflow continues to evolve as they get.
More used to the process? What do you think? Agreed? Of course, I meet lots of people, and I'm sure you do, too, who say, I'm going to write a book. And I always. I'm very polite, and I'm always very positive and encouraging. But behind my face, I'm thinking, Sure, try it, go ahead, see what that looks like, because it ain't easy.
And writing a book is something most people have never done. And when you do it, you suddenly realize, Oh, there's structure, there's research, there's style, there's length, there's balance and pace. There are all these factors that you have to build into it. And it doesn't. It's not like writing a three-page memo about something, because you have to sustain an argument through several hundred pages. You don't want to repeat yourself unnecessarily.
You don't want to contradict yourself, which can frequently happen. And I don't. Maybe this is, I'll ask you, because I think it's important, and maybe this eliminates some of this. I don't think people really know necessarily what the book is until they write it. You have an idea, but as you're writing the book, it begins to. It's like a kaleidoscope. All these things are moving around. And then it sort of it suddenly comes into clarity at some point, and you're, Oh, that's the book I'm writing, definitely.
Well, I think it.
Also depends on how you like to write. So do you prefer to do all of your research and then sit down and write, or do you research and write as you go? Well, that's my number two.
Thanks for.
Setting it up if you wait until you've done all the research, you may never write. The only way to write is to start writing, and because revising is so much easier than writing. But the only way to start writing is to write and write what you know. So I don't necessarily write page one to page 450..
I write the thing I know. So if I were writing about John Adams, the thing I know best about John Adams is the correspondence with Jefferson in the retirement years. So I might start there to get my confidence, to get a feel of it, to get to know the Adams-Jefferson dynamic better, to try to feel my way through it. And then, on the basis of that, I might go back and pick up his childhood, or pick up his education, or pick up Abigail, and so on. But I don't ever start on. He was born on such and such a date, and he died on such and such a date.
I think you have to let the book kind of not only teach you what it wants to be, but also to teach you how you're going to go about it. So I research as I go, keeping in mind that we're writing about things we know you're not writing about Apollo 11 because that's not your field. If it were, you'd have to do a hell of a lot of reading. But you already knew an enormous amount about the early national period, about Washington and Adams and Jefferson, and the emergence of the parties, and so on. So yes, of course, you do research, but you're doing. In my case, I'd be doing specific research for specific passages or chapters.
How do you work well? I think you really hit on it.
So I always start with what we call secondary literature, so the works that are already out there about the period of time. And that's useful for two reasons one, it's helpful to know what other people have said. Because if you're going to say the exact same thing, then really, what's the point in spending many years producing the same words? But also it gives you a sense of the narrative arc, so even if you don't know exactly how your story is going to unfold in the pages. You kind of know where the starting point is, you know where the finish line is, you know some of the main kind of key moments in between.
So I always start there, so you're right, you already kind of have a sense of the story-ish before you begin. And then I research and write as I go, so I will research a section and then I will write that section.
And that was new for me with Book two, because Book one many, many years before it came out. It started as my dissertation and dissertations. You're really taught to do all of the research and then write. And that's partly because of, like, funding and how the structure of the P.h.D. program works. It doesn't make sense to write a book that way, and I discovered that as I was writing the dissertation. Because you for, even if you take phenomenal notes while you are researching. You are going to forget things, you're going to forget something that you found, you're going to forget something that you learned, you're going to forget what you wanted to say.
And more importantly, there are going to be details that you don't know to look for. So maybe I'm researching and I'm coming up with everything I possibly can about this particular week in John Adams life. And then I realized, Oh, this meeting took place in this one particular room, and I have to figure out, do I have any sense of what the room looked like? And so you end up doing these little details.
So I found it almost like you were doing research twice, because you'd have to go back and refresh yourself and then do all these other little questions. And so it ended up taking so much longer than with book two. I just researched a section and wrote it, researched a section and wrote it, and I also enjoy that process so much more. We need to take a short break. I'm.
Talking with Dr. Lindsay Trevinsky about her second book. We're all so excited for you and proud to be associated with you, as long as you continue to want to associate with us. Now that you're going into the Empyrean Presidential Historical scholarship, we'll be back in just a minute. This is today's episode of Listening to America.
Welcome back to this special edition of Listening to America. I'm talking with Lindsay Trevinsky about her second book, now completed in summer of 2023, coming out about a year from now. In the summer or early fall. I'm guessing that as you wrote this book, you sort of knew what you liked. You knew the historians that have worked on this, the biographers, secondary and tertiary studies. I'm guessing that then you thought, Oh, well, he was wrong.
I mean, I thought that was right, but that was just wrong. And you realize that every historian is sort of walking off the edge of the Grand Canyon. Most of the time, we're taking the fragments of history and trying to develop a plausible argument or a plausible narrative. And things that really worked for us, maybe in our early 30s. When we come back to look at it in a rigorous way, we think, Oh, that wasn't analytical enough. Yeah, I think so.
I also think a lot of it depends on the history you write, depends on the questions you're asking. And our own particular lens for how we see something, colors, how we interpret information and how we assess evidence, and what we take from the story. And that's actually, I think, a good thing. Because it does mean that as we go forward, there's always something new to say because someone's going to bring a new perspective. And so what I was finding in a lot of the, I think, is good history. But they were not asking some of the same questions that I was asking. And if you asked those questions, I think you got slightly different answers than what they were potentially producing.
And then there are some people that I felt like really had just inherited or inhaled, or embodied the sort of status quo line about John Adams. And as I was reading, I often felt like they didn't actually really get a sense of who he was. And if they had dug a little bit more into some of his private letters, they would have had a much better sense of who he was as a person. And I think, offered a little bit more of a well-rounded approach.
Well, you know that John Adams was always a good man, sometimes a great man. Not infrequently mad as a hatter, or whatever we want to say, by way of quoting Dr. Mike.
He was always a honest man, he was often a wise man, and sometimes he was absolutely out of his senses.
Is that true, you know? The conventional wisdom on Adams is that he was an incredibly good and decent man of extraordinary importance in the revolution, but not a great president. And he was tripping on his own feet a lot. And that the Adams personality, the Adams character, turns out to be a great strength and a great weakness.
So I think what a lot of times people miss is they may come out to be much more dour than he was. He had a sense of humor, he had a real sense of self-deprecation and was pretty honest about it. He was witty, he was funny.
He enjoyed things he, I think, had a very good sense of himself, which I think people often miss. He knew when he was being rash and tried really hard to fight it and put sort of impediments in his way to ensure that he contained that rashness. Which actually led to a lot more, I think, political gifts than people thought that he had. And that's one of the contributions I'm hoping this book makes is that he actually was much more politically savvy than people think he was.
Yes, I'll be eager to see that and I trust you and I think that it, you know, what you're saying is so important. That a new generation of historians looking at something we all thought we knew so well. But asking a different set of questions, or putting a slightly different lens on that material often discovers things that suddenly pop and become. Maybe a new orthodoxy. And then sort of the structure of scientific revolutions, that the paradigm shift may come from your work.
All right, so let me give another one. Dr Johnson, who's one of my favorite figures in literary history, said A man can write at any time if he will set himself doggedly to it. And my third suggestion on our list of 10 is that if you only write when you feel like writing, you will never write a book.
You have to be able to write when you're sick, you have to be able to write when you're in a bad mood. You have to be able to write when you're fighting with your spouse, you have to be able to write when you're anxious. If you're going to write a book, you have to write not only when you're in the zone, but most of the time when you're not.
It's one of the things that I think makes it a challenge, the challenge of it is that it's. I mean, it looks so different from most people's other work, that does not to say it's harder, it just looks different. It's very rarely a nine to five job.
You're not going into an office and clocking in or clocking out. Most people know roughly what it looks like to be a lawyer or a doctor, or a teacher. But writing is going to look really different for everyone, and you know, like, let's say you're writing so this book. The contract was for 120,000 words, including foot notes. The manuscript currently is way past that, and I'm waiting to cut it down.
But so let's say, let's say best case scenario. It is 120,000 words, which will kill you because you have to kill off chunks of very important material. Yes, you have to kill your darlings, you have to kill your darlings. For me, if I'm like, in the flow and I'm having a nice day and I'm not under deadline. I love to get up and write like 1,500 good, solid words. And then in the afternoon record podcasts or have meetings or phone calls or emails or whatever.
Under deadline, I can go up to 4,000, but either the quality towards the end is going to taper off and or I can do literally nothing else. Like last time we spoke, I was, you know, devolving into British slang because my brain was mush. I do get extra punchy when I've done nothing but write, so let's say you're doing that. That requires an intense amount of, and I'm not saying this to be like, you know, self congratulatory. But it requires a lot of dedication to sit down every day and do that, and to block off that time and to protect your schedule. Especially if you can't say, Oh, I'm going into the office, or, you know, oh, my boss is expecting me.
So it's really easy for people to ask for part of your time. Or can you come do this? Or, you know, because you don't have a boss, because you don't have a set number of vacation days. Oh, can you stay and do that? and you can, but then the words have to come somewhere else. And especially because it's not just like for a week, it's for a very long time.
So it's the sustaining that I think is the challenge, Robert Piercing wrote. Zen and the art.
Of motorcycle maintenance, kind of a 70s classic of the road. And he talks about gumption traps. That. On any big journey, even a metaphoric journey, like writing a book, you will hit these barriers where you might give up. You might think I have nothing to say, or everything that needs to be said has already been said. Or I'm a lousy writer, or I'd rather save my friendship with Louis than sacrifice that to the finishing of this book. Or I've got writer's block, or I've. Just my health is no good. And Piercing says, If you're going to complete any journey, you have to be able to work through those gumption traps. How many times in the course of writing either of your books, have you felt why? Why am I even doing this? I mean, this is just this is hard, and my confidence comes and goes.
I'm not, you know, I don't know that I can finish.
This you must have moods. Oh, I definitely have moods, and I have moments where I think the words are crap. I don't so much with this book, but with the cabinet as I was going through the page previous. I think because I had been with it for so long. I reached a point where I didn't think it was saying anything new, it wasn't contributing anything, which I was wrong, obviously, and I got out of that moment.
But you do have those moments just where you kind of wanting, well, I don't want to say give up, because I never want to give up. But where you're just not sure that you can actually complete it, that you're not sure you have the energy, you're not sure you have the stamina, you're not sure you have the ability to turn out the words day after day. Which brings me to one of my points, which is that I think there are two things that you need in order to take on a project, you need to. And this kind of circles back to where we started with Jefferson. It's not enough to like the subject, you have to think that it's important, you have to think that it is contributing something, and it is worthwhile to put the book out. Because on days where you're tired of the subject. The commitment to try and get your argument. Or your contribution out into the world will help sustain you. And on days where you're not sure if it is a contribution, if you like the subject, that will sustain you.
So I think both of.
Those things are really important. That's why I could never write about Hamilton. Because although I greatly admire Hamilton and think that he was essential to the founding and that his point of view must be given all due respect. I couldn't spend four years with Alexander Hamilton, I just couldn't. My heart's not in it, my heart's not with him.
Your heart has to be in it and you have to think that it's an important thing. And you know, Lindsay, I'm sure you see books that are written by people who write a book every two years. And at some point, when I read their fifth or sixth book, I think they're just kind of calling it in, they're doing a good job because they've mastered their craft. You don't get the sense that this really gets to the heart of what they want to say to the world. And I think you have to be able to maintain that, or then you're just a journeyman.
I think that's really well said. I'm actually, I won't name any names for the moment, but I'm currently reviewing a book that is exactly that. And there's just no passion in it, there's no passion for the subject. And it comes through because there's no argument, there's no contribution. And I think there is value in retelling a well-known story if you can add nuance or flair or something to it. But I just, it's just law, and it's because there's just no.
Passion for the subject agreed. So give us another from your list of 10 things we should know about.
Writing a book, so I think it's really important to get feedback on your writing early. And often, a lot of people, I think, make the mistake of drafting an entire book and then giving it to someone to read. And for me at least, that would be a huge mistake. Because if you get feedback early and often, then you can correct mistakes before, or correct. You know, tendencies that you have, or an argument or something before you've written the whole darn thing. But it also, it gives you a much better sense of your own strengths and weaknesses, and your own ability to read your work. So one of my points is going to be writing community, and I'm going to get to that. But I have several writing groups where we share chapters and proposals and any writing that we're working on. And as part of that, usually, in our like introduction email, we will share questions that we have. And for me, it's a really good opportunity to say here are my concerns about the chapter. Or here's what I was trying to accomplish. Here's where, I'm not sure I did that, and it's almost a way to test. Is your reading of your work in sync with how others are going to read it. And either way, that's a very useful answer. If you're a bad judge of your writing, that's useful.
If you're a good judge of your writing, that's also really helpful to know. And so, I think getting feedback early and often will actually make the book much better in the long term and will make the long-term editing easier.
If you've done more work as you go. So what you're saying, however, is that you need to make yourself really vulnerable. You need to put out your mind engaging with a subject and your prose style as you have developed it over time and your research skills. And then you're going to let people that you trust give you feedback. And when they do that, however kind people want to be, they can't help but say, You know, that didn't work for me. Or I think you're full of beans. And to do that, to expose yourself in that way, of course, you're going to be exposed when the book comes out anyway, but to expose yourself in that way is not at all easy. No, it's not, and I mean, I think.
That I would rather know early on what the problems are before it's in print. So for me, I would rather get that feedback while I can still do something about it. Once, you know, once the book is out, there's not a whole lot of editing that you can do, but I think that also it is important. I mean, all writers have, you know, their own insecurities and their own egos about things. But I've had a couple of very, very tough editors in my life, and I, as a result, have developed, at least with my writing, a very thick skin. There's almost nothing anyone can say that's going to hurt my feelings about my writing. And as a result, I just think it's made me a better writing, a better writer. Because I look for, I want, I seek out feedback, I want to make it better.
Usually, I'm not that nervous about it. Because I think that if someone has taken the time to engage in a good faith way with your work, that's an act of love, that's an act of.
Service. And I try and take it as such. The last book that I wrote had an editor that was, I thought, ungenerous by the time it was over. And I. You know, you work through the process and you have to have a thick skin and it's valuable, even if you disagree with it and so on. But when it was over, I wrote him an email saying for other people and I love that role. And I can tell you that I would never write to another artist or writer the way you have written to me. Because I think it's important to realize that this is not just Chet GPt knocking out prose, this is your soul, your soul is in this manuscript.
You're saying that. I, Lindsay Chervinsky, one of 340 million Americans and one of several hundred thousand historians, have something important to say about John Adam. And you have made real sacrifices for this. This is not an eight to five job, and you could probably list your sacrifices in your diary. You don't have to tell us what they have been. But you know that there are some things you now need to attend to that you have neglected. Yes, maybe beginning with your dog, Quincy, but there are sacrifices. And so you put yourself out there and you hope that anyone who's trying to help you make it better understands the fragility of that.
Yeah, no, that's right, and it is, you know.
Writing these words is we can love it, and it can still be a sacrifice. And so good editors are tough, are constructive. Point out what is working because that's useful as well, but are never mean in that they are. They're not sarcastic, they are not cruel, they it might, it might be tough love, but it, they're not cruel. And I myself, when I'm editing work, if I can feel myself starting to get sarcastic, it's usually a sign that I'm tired or frustrated. And it's time to go take a walk and then come back. Because it doesn't do any, it doesn't help. And it will only make it harder for the reader or the writer to take your feedback and implement it. Because it's going to get their defenses up. Good editing is constructive, but is not mean.
I don't know where we are five or six into this, here's another one. This is the best time in the history of the world to write a book. Because you have cut and paste, because you can go to Gutenberg and pull whole paragraphs out of books. Because you can print and revise, because you can do spell check and grammar check, and so on. That what I do when I'm writing, and you tell me how you do it. If I'm writing about Jefferson, I'll say, well, Jefferson arrived in Paris on, and then I'll put X in the manuscript, because I just don't know. Sometime in 1784, but I don't know if it's August or October, and then I'll say. And he sent his enslaved man, James Hemings, ahead to, And I'll put Rouen, or was it Orleans? and I'll put an X, and then I'll say. But when they got to Paris, they stayed at the Rue de Lafayette. An X, and then every hour or two, I just stop, go to my shelves, pull out stuff, go to Wikipedia, fill in the Xs.
If you put all the Xs in the things you don't actually know in writing about John Adams term. And then had to go to a research library, as you would have in 1970, think of how much harder it would be to write that book.
Oh, absolutely, I mean, especially with the subjects that you and I are dealing with. We are so blessed by the editorial projects of the individuals that are mostly on founders online. For people, that's a national archive site, which is amazing and has all of these resources available online, but there's more. But all of the editing projects, all of the digitization efforts. These books that I've written would have taken twice, if not three times as long. If I actually had to go to all of the archives and I had to sift through all of the microfilm. I do have to do it for some people, but it does make it a whole lot easier.
My daughter is finishing up a dissertation on the Tower of London at Oxford. She's about a month or maybe six weeks out. And during the pandemic, she lived here in my basement in North Dakota. She found the records of the Privy Council of the reigns of Elizabeth and James I in the 19th century. These Victorian scholars. That must have had an enormous amount of coffee and discipline.
These documents are written in English secretary hands, so it's not all intuitive, there are many cruxes and other problems. And they transcribed 40, 50, 60 volumes worth of material, which now have been digitized too. And so she is the beneficiary not only of that Victorian scholarship, because if she were doing it from scratch, imagine what that would mean. And she's the beneficiary of the digitization of culture. As are you, you could probably do 85 of all that you need to do at the room you're now in.
Yeah, and I did do a lot of it, I probably.
Bought too many books? One of the paper collections that was so useful to me was the Theodore Sedgwick Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Those have not been digitized and they are so full of amazing content, so I was really grateful to have those. But a lot of it is available online and it makes doing this type of work, if you like, working from home, which I do.
It makes it much easier. We need to take another break. I'm talking to Lindsay Trevinsky 10 things about writing a book, this is Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson. We'll be back in just a moment.
Welcome back to Listening to America Lindsay again. Congratulations. I can't wait to see your second book. I met you through your first one, so I saw your book on Amazon.
I was looking around. I've got 20 books or so on George Washington. There's only one with a green cover, though, there's that I see the green cover usually on the couch behind you.
I've got 20 books on Washington, maybe 10 or 15 books on Adams, 350 or 400 on The Hero of the Revolution. Thomas Jefferson Oh, there was a snort, great.
There's karma. So anyway, I can't wait to see what you wrote. But I was looking around for books on the early national period, and suddenly your book came up, I ordered it. I thought I thought at first like, the cabinet, um, we'll see when I was delighted, and so we talked. And here you are, and now you've written a second one.
And you've been since I met you, you've your career has been meteoric and it's rise, and I'm just so pleased for you. And I know you get lots and lots of feedback from people who enjoy this podcast. So I think Adams is more in need of revision than others. I think we got locked into a certain view of Adams and a largely dismissive one. Um, that, you know, we all get it that he was a great man. But we all kind of smirk when we think of John Adams. And we kind of gravitate, if we can, to Abigail.
I think what you're doing is is, as you say, it's more really about the dynamics of the emerging presidency than it is per se. John Adams It is, although I.
Will say, So, you know, I came away from the first book. I wouldn't even necessarily say that I really liked Washington. I had incredible respect for who he was and his contribution. And I'm fully aware of all of John Adams flaws, and I do my best to address them in an even-handed manner in the book. But I really like him, he's just really human and accessible and funny, and his flaws I find very endearing, and I find a lot of them particularly relatable.
And I just, I really like him and so it's been a pleasure and I'm part of the reason I think that that is. And you alluded to this is we have his correspondence with Abigail. I don't know how we would feel about Washington, how it would change our thinking if we had his correspondence with Martha, which she, of course, burned at his request, and Abigail requested that John burn theirs, and he was disobedient.
Thank goodness, but because we have that side of him, we just know him so much better. And that's, I think, really, where often the best of him comes out in those letters, and so he's. It's just been a joy to spend time with him. Let me give you a chance for another.
Anti-Jefferson Cheap shot To what extent is Jefferson responsible for the historical?
Demeaning of John Adams, a not insignificant part. I do discuss this in the epilogue. It's a couple of things, it's both. It's the fact that Jefferson and Hamilton both spoke out and wrote against Adams in real time and then over time, as well as the party dynamics.
The fact that Hamilton is really associated with the Federalists and Jefferson is associated with the Republicans, and then the Federalists kind of crumbles away. Adams doesn't have a constituency and so it's easy to write him out, and I think those are the reasons.
So 10 things about writing a book give us another.
So I think it's very important to have writing community. I mentioned that I have a couple of writing groups and I also have a couple of friends who are also writers. And sometimes it's sharing chapters, sometimes it's just sending a text message saying, like, Oh my gosh, look at this passage I found. Or I absolutely hate this section, or I cannot do it today, or whatever it is. Having someone because this way of living, in this way of working is weird.
Having someone who knows what that looks like, who can commiserate, who can encourage, who can help you with a sentence when you need sentence help is, I think, really essential. It's sometimes said of Jefferson.
That he was a man alone in the room with English language. And that he was happier with a piece of paper in front of him and a good pen and some fine ink than he was in any other way. Because he liked to be alone, he also could control the discourse, and, of course, if ever anyone very, very, very carefully controlled the discourse, it was Jefferson. I would put Washington even behind him, and Adams way less. Adams is sort of writing.
You get the sense that he's just writing to write and he may suppress it later, but he's not holding back. Yeah, I think that's right. So what else is on your list? When you're in the zone, when you really have it, you get up. I don't know if this happens to you.
You almost pound the table and get up and it's a triumph. You're, like, Rocky at the top of the steps and you think that was good. It doesn't happen very often. Does it happen to you? Yeah, I think that when you're this.
This really requires being acutely aware of your own writing, and when you know if you're, if you're really in tune with your own writing. And you've gotten feedback and so you know how things are going. You know when a sentence is really good sentence, you know when you've, like, nailed passage. And there are times when you're just like, yes, and you're just very pleased with yourself because you've got something. Or if you figure out, like a passage that's been plaguing you and you've been trying to figure out how to say it. And you don't know how to tell the story. And it's so frustrating and all that. When you finally figure it out, it's that same.
It's the reason we actually keep doing this again and again and again, and the spend four years on it. Because that feeling of victoriousness when you write a sentence that you love is exhilarating.
So how do you maximize the number of instances where you're writing that well?
I do best when I write almost every day. I think that writing from, at least for me, is a muscle. And so I can tell. Even if I've gone a week without writing, it starts to feel flabby. And so when I get back into it, it's a little bit of a challenge. I do better writing in the morning than I do in the afternoon.
I like to try and set myself up with a little bit of what I'm going to dive into the next morning. So it doesn't need to be a half of a sentence or a paragraph. But even if just a couple of notes about where I want to start next, it kind of gives you a running start. I try not to go past where I am when I have time. I try not to push past the 2,000 words because I know it will make the next day worse. I have a couple of tendencies with my own writing that I try and stay on top of and try and make sure that I'm not sinking into and things like.
That I've gotten a lot of advice, and I give advice, mostly that I'm passing on from other writers. The best advice I ever received was right in line with what you're saying. It was from Warren Larue of Reno, Nevada, he said. Always park on a hill.
So at the end of the day, start a sentence or start a paragraph that you know how to finish, so maybe you're going to write about. Adams breaks the silence with Jefferson on January 1st, 1812. You know how to write that one, so you start January 1st, 1812 and then you go to sleep or go play, he said. If you do that, then the next day all you have to do is finish that sentence and you're off and running.
Whereas if you just have a blank screen in front of you, you spend a lot of time thinking, now, what now?
What? uh, where am I? Does that work for you? Uh, it does. I think the best advice that I've received is you mentioned this as well. Um, the best advice I've received is good writing is not good writing.
It's good editing the way that I interpret that is for my own purposes. Staring at a blank page is very daunting, it's daunting for anyone because it means that there's nothing there. So do whatever you have to do to not have a blank page. And then you can actually start working on what it is you want to say.
So if that's an outline, if that's a couple of bullet points, if that's whatever, it's whatever is required to get you over that hump is, I think, really quite essential. And not expecting that your words are going to be brilliant really lowers the pressure. My writing really shifted once I stopped looking at it as though it was this is going to counterintuitive. Once, I stopped thinking of writing as creating a great art, and instead I thought of it as my job. Ironically, I think actually my my product has improved, but if I instead of saying, like, Oh, I need this inspiration to create this brilliant product.
It's like, No, I need to write a thousand words today, because the more you write, the more, the better you're going to be at it. And so once I stopped giving myself excuses, I think I got a whole lot better.
From the corollary to the idea of always park on a hill is what you said earlier. Write every day, or nearly so. Because when I find if I, if. For some reason, I just came off a river trip on the Salmon River, I was gone for three weeks. You spend a day, you know, putting out fires and taking care of email and getting things arranged and seeing where you are. And then when you start, it's like, almost you're starting the book over again. But if you write a little every day, the momentum keeps you creeping forward and your confidence is higher.
It's hard to do with a busy life. You travel a fair amount, too. Luckily, of course, we can work on the road now, thanks to the visualization of culture. But when I leave a project for a while, it's like cranking up an old lawnmower to get started again. Yeah, it gets rusty.
Another from your list of 10 things about writing a book.
So the last thing that I would say is whatever. You need to keep yourself grounded as a human, whether it's exercise, whether it's friendships, whether it's relationships. In my case, it's my dog. You have to maintain those things, you have to maintain for all the sacrifices you are going to make, and you're going to make a lot of them.
You need some something to tether you to this universe. And I think the best thing that I've ever done for my writing life is have a dog. Because Quincy needs daily exercise, he has a routine. So I can't stay up until three o'clock in the morning because he's going to wake me up the next morning and say, Excuse me, mom, I'd like breakfast. He wants company.
He wants attention, he's very good companion, he lets me write, but he also will stop me. Sometimes if I've been sitting for too long. And it's helpful to get up and stretch. And he also doesn't care if I've had a bad day or a good day and is very excited to see me regardless. And so I think that whatever it is that grounds you and balances you, you have to hold on to that because otherwise I think you will actually go.
Mad? So your husband? At any point, you don't have to answer this question if it's too personal at any point. Does he say I'll be so happy when this book is done? Yeah, I mean, he's one of the.
There's some of the best advice that I've ever gotten. Life advice is, you know, make sure you marry someone who is supportive and understanding of your goals, who understands why you have to work hard, why you want to work hard. And so he is extraordinarily supportive of the project and actually will, actually will read it at this point and give me feedback, which I am extremely grateful for. And most of the time, he's very happy for me to go off and do my work and he works incredibly hard, so it works fine.
But there are times, especially like on the weekends, when I'm getting towards the end and I'm trying to hit a deadline. And it's a seven hour, seven day a week job and I'm not taking any days off. And I start to become a little bit nutty, then he's like, be really great if you could take a vacation, because I start to get a little nutty. So it's not so much that he's tired of the project is he just wants me to take care of myself and be a little bit calmer. And so that requires, you know, some sleep and some hobbies, things like that.
And so he was very happy. I took some time off once I wrapped up this project.
Well, I'm, of course we're doing this on sort of a zoom technology. And I can see you and you look camped, your hair is combed, you have a beautiful. I think it's kind of a library behind you.
When I finish a book, there are 250 books scattered around the floor and around the tables. And it stacks. And some of them are broken open, and some are with pages bent and notations and post-its, and a stapler holding the pages open. And something. My mother came in after my last book and said, You want me to, you want me to take care of this for you, like, you want me to clean this house. I said, No, no, no, no, but you seem to be organized.
Well, you can see what's.
Behind me, which shows up on television, per our conversation. So what's in front of me is very rarely as tidy it is at this point. It's actually fairly neat, although there's a lot of wires and lights and cameras and things like that. When I'm writing, I tend to have a lot of extra stuff.
There are glasses of tea and water, bottles and snacks. The last couple of days that I was writing, my husband would just bring me down food every couple of hours. Just like, bring me food and put it next to me, bring me another water bottle, put it next to me. Once I was finishing my formatting, I had a special bottle of wine that I was saving to open. Once I sent in the manuscript, so as I was finished formatting my email, he brought me a glass of wine.
So then I started to accumulate dishes and just kind of like crazy in that way. But I always try and keep the behind me clean.
Because I need it for media stuff. This is not a green screen of an orderly living room, it is not, it is actually my library. So kind of simple, easy questions.
I assume you do not.
Write on a yellow pad longhand I don't, but if I'm really stuck on a passage, I will actually pull out. I hate the yellow, but I pull out the white legal pad and I will actually write it out by hand if I'm really stuck. If I'm stuck on how to organize a chapter, I will organize that by hand, too, because I think the process of organizing by hand just clears up the brain. So I still.
Resort occasionally to handwriting. Another piece of good advice I offer to others, I think it's good advice is I incessantly outline? I almost outline three times a week. So if I'm writing a chapter on Jefferson and France and I might be 35 done with it, I start all right. Jefferson leaves. Boston was going to go with Abigail, but he didn't.
He arrives. There wastes a lot of money getting into Paris. I outline the whole thing over and over and over again, because it keeps my head clear and I change my trajectory a little bit as I go on. Do you do anything like that?
Um, I am always looking forward to the next thing I do. Outline I think outlining is very important. Per our earlier in our conversation, my outlines will sometimes change as I'm writing.
Sometimes I will think a chapter is ending at a certain place and I will be wrong and it will actually end somewhere else. Sometimes I think the book is going in a certain direction and it will go in a different direction. So they're not firm, they're not like in cement. But I will outline, um. And I also am usually having an eye on what's next because I find that very motivating. The next chapter, the next project, whatever it is, having the next thing in mind helps me keep going.
So it's not something some people would find that very stressful, and it would, you know.
Be a burden. But to me, it's encouraging, sort of a lightning round here as we close. Um, are you young enough to work exclusively in electronic space? No printing?
So until recently, I would have said no. I print out chapters to edit. um, I can edit op-eds, I can edit shorter pieces on purely electronic. I cannot edit chapter length.
However, I recently received, my husband gave it to me as my birthday gift. It's called a Remarkable and it is a tablet that you can write on, it's a it's a slimmed down version of a tablet. So it doesn't have email, it doesn't have all that, it's just basically PDFs and docs and things like that.
But the writing actually feels like paper and pen, and um, I edited most of my book on that because I was able. It was much easier to take on a plane than all these chapters that were printed out when I was traveling, and it really revolutionized my editing process and was really wonderful. So now I am almost exclusively, um, online. Interesting.
Um, I'm old enough to still.
Love to waste paper? Um, I, I will work all day, print the chapter, maybe go to a pub or a coffee house, read it, make a bunch of corrections, come home the next morning, fill all those corrections in print again, print again. Um, it's an inefficient process. But compared to typing it in 1975, um, it's true. We are making strides.
So tell us again the working title.
Making the presidency John Adams and the precedents that forged the republic.
So how likely is that to survive as the title?
I think it's pretty likely the press has approved it, the marketing team has approved it. Um, I don't have a cover yet, so I it's not up on a, you know, on Amazon, but um, they're working on the cover now with that title. Now, of course, it's still changed.
They could look at it with the cover and decide they hate it, but I would say it's probably like 85 locked in.
LINDSAY A thousand congratulations. It's an enormous achievement, especially now that you're such a public figure. So the pressure is on. You're not some some shy academic in an ivory tower, you're out there as a public historian and a public intellectual.
We're so pleased for you, we look forward to it. thanks for being with us. We'll see you all next week for another important edition of Listening to America.
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