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more from larson interview

First of all, I don’t believe in coming and spending six months in a city in a hotel, reading everything as I go. My M.O. is to read far enough into a document or book to think, “This could be valuable,” and then I photocopy it. Or, today, I take a digital photograph. So I make hundreds and hundreds of copies and bring them home. Some will be worthless, but it’s still cost-effective. Then I find the highlights in those things, and I index each document, and each collection of documents, with little tabs, so I know that’s where the best quotes are. And as I’m doing this, I create a chronology, in which everything is tied to specific times and days. The result, before I start to write, is about 100 single-spaced pages covering everything day-by-day-by-day, with little references to each of the indexes of the copied documents. So it might say “Tiergarten,” and then there would be the name of the source and a Roman numeral, and then just a couple of notes about that particular quote, enough to make me remember it. I know exactly where it is; I can go right to it.

This detailed chronology is my secret weapon. Because chronological order is the key to any story. If you simply relate a historical event in chronological order, you have done much more than most historians do. I’m appalled when I read books about things I’m interested in—the Third Reich or whatever—by how many times historians just don’t tell it in the order that it happened. By how much they jump around. It’s so weird. Chronological order is the most important thing. So I have, essentially, a default outline for my entire project. The major events will declare themselves because that’s where the most information is. So when I go through this chronology, there are obvious points where a chapter is going to be, and there are obvious places where I can see that if I end this scene there and jump here, that’s good foreshadowing.

....

A young woman suggested that I come up with a logo. So I told my Web designer that I wanted a logo and suggested Oreos and pencils or something. And God bless her, she came up with the perfect logo. I love that logo. What it relates to is the fact that when I’m working—and now it’s every day that I’m researching or writing—my day starts very early. I make some coffee, half decaf, half black, and I have one Oreo cookie. A bad day is two Oreo cookies. And the pencil is Ticonderoga Number Two. The best pencil ever made. Ticonderoga Number Two Soft. I use those to write passages that are particularly difficult. Using a computer is great; you can spew and rewrite a paragraph 10 times. But there are passages that are too important, too complex, to do that. I have yellow legal pads; I can even tell you which kind: yellow legal pads with a reinforced back made by Tops. So I sharpen my pencils, and what I find is that it almost invariably comes relatively easily because when you write longhand, you’ve got to think about it before you write, because the manual effort is significant. It matters. That really helps.