100 5-Page Chapters

Austin Kleon's blog inspired me to head back to the Ralph Waldo Emerson biography by Robert Richardson.   On C-SPAN's booknotes, Richardson is interviewed about why he constructed the biography in the way he did -- 100 5-page chapters.

LAMB: Hundred chapters, five pages each.

RICHARDSON: In the book.

LAMB: When did you decide to do that?

RICHARDSON: Well, I had a wonderful teacher at Harvard, W.J. Bate, who wrote very great biographies of Keats and then of Johnson, and his advice to me when he discovered that I was daring to write a biography was to write in short takes; if at all possible, to write in short pieces so that the reader feels that he or she is getting somewhere. I mean, that's a big, heavy book. And people have busy lives and they have lots else to do, and if you can sit down and read four or five pages and feel like you're getting somewhere instead of these big 30 or 40-page or 50-page chapters, it makes a book readable that might not otherwise seem so.

 Kleon glosses that nicely:

He passed that advice — be kind to your readers and respect their time — on to his students and other biographers: Write 100 pieces of one to two thousand words on the parts of the life you care about the most, and don’t worry about what order they’re in until you have the pieces.

I love the idea of 100 chapters on a subject.  It feels like a series of ten 10x10s.  In fact, that's roughly how he's organized the book: about 10 topics, (the Student, Divinity, The Natural History of the Intellect) each with about 10 chapters.

An LA Review of Books interview contains details on his method and indexing:

AH: A practical question: Emerson’s handwritten journals took up 263 volumes; the index alone ran to more than 400 pages. How in the world do you keep your notes together?

RR: Organization is a big problem. Emerson took me 10 years. I had two three-ring notebooks for the chronology, which is one page for every three months. The left-hand half was for Emerson’s reading and writing. Tons of stuff from the notebooks and from letters went in here; I added fold-out half pages when needed. The right-hand half was for outside events and works. Then I had three notebooks with notes on Emerson’s writings, arranged chronologically. I had a Xerox file, alphabetically arranged, with pages and chapters and articles and whatnot; then a five-by-eight-inch index card file, eventually three of them, arranged by topic, such as “domestic life,” “Henry Thoreau,” “Margaret Fuller,” “religion,” etc.; then four notebooks called topics one, two, three, four, with elaborate notes on, say Swedenborg, Neoplatonism, Plotinus, etc. Then there’s a notebook called “Want to See” which lists everything you think you need to look at. Finally, a notebook called “Bibliographic Control” (this is the key, what makes the whole mess hold up), which has tables-of-contents for all the notebooks, as well as the Xerox file, the index-card files. Xeroxes of indices of manuscripts in libraries, etc., etc. 

And he describes how he turns from researching to writing:

AH: Can you describe what it feels like to move from the research phase to the writing phase? How do you know when you know enough?

RR: When you start running into the same stuff over and over, it is time to think about writing. You need what Emerson calls “the casting moment,” that is the day or two days when you suddenly see it all and can outline it, hurriedly. Then you start writing, with the expectation that you have done about half the research. You’ll do the other half now as you go. Now it is important to write something every day so you don’t dry up or freeze up. When you are stuck, look at the chronology and it will tell you what happens next.

It really helps to have a couple of real people in mind as your readers, it helps with finding the right tone when you know who you mean to address. And in my case, with Emerson especially, I wanted my readers to sympathize and maybe identify with my subject’s struggles when young, and to see that it is possible to make something of life