The Caro Method

I read The Power Broker two summers ago. It’s a thick book—over 1,200 pages. In order to make progress, I had set a goal of reading 25 pages a day and would wake up early in the morning to make time for it. It’s a jaw-dropping account of Robert Moses’ rise to power and influence over the physical shape of New York. Robert Caro, the man behind the book, and his process for researching, interviewing, and writing are just as intriguing.

Here are some of the core principles of his work process:

Go deep to dig up the universal. Caro spent 50 years (!) writing about two men: Robert Caro and Lyndon Johnson. The Power Broker took him seven years. He published the first volume on Lyndon Johnson in 1989 and at 88 years old, is still writing the final volume which he started writing 14 years ago. By obsessively researching every corner of these men’s lives, Caro sought to crack the code of how political power operates, how it changes who acquires it, and the impact it has on the people who don’t have any.

Turn every page. Caro would read every single document on an issue he was researching, spending weeks sifting through 40-page-long bills, correspondence, and other excruciatingly dry documents. He’d inevitably get bored, and wonder whether he could really afford the time of going through the ten boxes of documents sitting on his desk. That’s when his mantra would kick in: “turn every page”. And that’s how he’d often end up finding what he was looking for.

Keep probing. Caro interviewed people to the point of annoyance. He’d often go back and interview the same person over and over until he got what he was looking for. It wasn’t just a matter of fishing out the one little missing detail. It was a matter of gripping the reader by making them feel like they were witnessing the scene through the eyes of the hundreds of people he interviewed. He got there by asking one question again and again: “If I was standing next to you, what would I see?”.

Slow down. To this day, Caro doesn't write on a computer. He writes his first draft longhand and then types it up with his old Smith-Corona typewriter. This process dramatically slows him down and allows him to “think things through”, as he puts it. In a recent interview with the New York Magazine, the reporter asked Caro if he’d heard about Google Docs. He hadn’t. “That’s amazing,” he said. “What’s it called? A Doc?”.

Make it sing. What do The Iliad and The Power Broker have in common? Caro revealed in an interview with the Paris review that he drew inspiration from Homer’s “catalog of ships” to give a rhythmic edge to what would have otherwise been a boring list of expressways. If you want to get your point across, make it sing!

On Keeping a Journal