Today's guest post is by Karen Blumenthal—author of YALSA Nonfiction Award finalists Bootleg and Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different—and a committed researcher. Or, maybe, a researcher who should be committed? Read her post and decide for yourself!
One evening during a research trip to Washington, D.C., I missed the hotel’s revolving-door entry and slammed into a glass wall schnoz first.
While I reeled in pain, the guests in the lobby eyed me as if I'd enjoyed the happy hour a little too much. Embarrassingly, I was suffering instead from a wicked case of microfilm myopia. I had only been researching drinking, not actually doing it.
In writing nonfiction for young people, I know the quality of the research drives the story. But that all-important work, I've concluded, may be dangerous to your health.
Other afflictions from recent research were less painful, but almost as embarrassing:
Quarter hoarding: My obsession won’t make great reality TV, but I have stashed quarters everywhere, in pockets, wallets, and tote bags, and I won’t share them with you, even for a desperately needed soft drink. They’re crucial for parking meters, copiers and lockers for stashing your stuff while you research Al Capone at the Chicago History Museum.
Research fog: An ailment closely related to microfilm myopia, this dense stupor sets in around the fifth hour of reading, especially if you skip lunch to squeeze in more work during a research library's limited hours. As you emerge from the fluorescent-lit haze, jabbering about what you have learned, it slowly becomes apparent that no one you know cares that Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and Penney founder James Cash Penney had similar backgrounds.
Library breath: What is it about libraries that makes your mouth feels like a herd of camels just ambled across your tongue? Spend too much of the day inside one of these important (and low-humidity) places of knowledge and you'll find that your newfound trivia isn't all that will knock people out.
Chronic nerditis: Finding some new gem online can lead to mysteriously intense, heart-pounding excitement that will surely bore your family to death. You mean you can read 1920s magazines online? Find newspapers stories back to the 1850s? Look at a database instead of those fat green Reader's Guides to Periodicals?
Score!
Wait—what? You've never heard of the Reader's Guide to Periodicals?
“Just one more” syndrome: Now this is when things get really ugly. Researching is fun; writing, for me, is difficult. So why in the world should I want to stop searching for good stuff? What if there’s a better anecdote out there? What if I’ve missed a great example? If only the deadline wasn’t approaching!
Of course, the paper cuts and smudges on my clothes from newspapers and fresh photocopies are all worth the trouble when I finally sit down at the computer. Having great stories and specific detail is crucial to writing for young people because the story must crackle and pop, and every idea must be crystal clear for readers who have little experience or context to bring to a subject.
Just try not to get behind me when I take a break at the coffee shop. I may be paying with quarte
rs.
It's my pleasure to share this space with Karen Blumenthal. Her guest post adds to recent discussions about the documentation that accompanies a published work of nonfiction.
Shortly before my first book was published, I attended a presentation by two very distinguished nonfiction writers.
“Here’s how you must do source notes,” I remember one of them saying. “You list the beginning of every quote and then the source where it came from.”
Her words sent my stomach churning and my hands shaking. My pre-publication copy of
Six Days in October was tucked carefully in my bag--and it was all wrong. I had listed my primary sources chapter by chapter as they appeared. But I had not specifically detailed the source of each quotation, or even included specific page numbers. How could I have made such a horrible mistake?
Sourcing nonfiction for a general audience, young or old, is a difficult and tricky business. While I don’t want to footnote every burp and grunt and dot pages with microscopic numbers, like the academics do, I do want readers to know the source, since there can be so many differing views on some subjects. But compiling them is tedious and unpleasant, and sometimes it’s tough to pin down exactly where a conclusion came from.
Some publishers leave the decision to the writer and some dictate a style, like the quotation method cited by the distinguished writer above. Forced to use that quotation-only style once, I found it completely misrepresented where the information came from. In some cases, one sentence may draw on four different sources; other times, a paragraph reflects dozens of pages of reading. Quotations typically are a small part of a narrative.
Sometimes, ego gets involved.
In my most recent book,
Steve Jobs, I wanted to share my research to avoid any perception that I had merely rewritten the best-selling adult biography.
Sometimes the process is messy, with notes getting jumbled up as sections are rewritten or cut and pages are designed. Sorting and correcting them can take days.
And sometimes publishers push back. Lots of detail takes lots of pages, which costs money. More than once, I’ve been asked to trim the bibliography or notes.
For my second book,
LetMe Play, a history of Title IX, I studied the notes of the masters—Russell Freedman, Jim Murphy, Susan Campbell Bartoletti and Candace Fleming, among others. From reviewing their work, I came to appreciate a short bibliographic essay giving an overview of the process for someone who might be new to formal research.
Besides, where else could you share the little gem that before C-SPAN televised Congress, legislators regularly rewrote their remarks for the Congressional Record?
That book involved an unusual number of interviews and primary sources, and the notes are detailed. It felt, at times, that I might be showing off.
But then came the calls. Every year, I hear from a college student writing a senior paper or girls from junior high through high school working on a History Day projects. Over Skype and on the phone, they quiz me. Occasionally, I have to go back to the notes to jog my memory.
The most ambitious of them surprise me. They have studied the sources and from them, found new trails for their own explorations. Their excitement and curiosity is invigorating—and enough to make
those notes feel completely worth the effort.
Karen Blumenthal is the author of five nonfiction books for young people, most recently Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different (Feiwel and Friends, 2012), which was a finalist for the YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults award.
Unforeseen consequences.
I’m sure most, if not all, of us have done something with good intentions, only to see things turn out…not how we expected.
Supporters of prohibition hoped that outlawing “the manufacture, sale, and transportation of liquor” would “forever end drunkenness, reduce crime, and make life better for American families.” (p. 3)
That’s not what happened after the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect. Ordinary people willfully broke the law, smuggling alcohol into the United States or brewing it themselves. Policemen and politicians accepted bribes while gangsters fought for bigger shares of the suddenly-illegal alcohol distribution trade.
In Bootleg: Murder, Moonshine, and the Lawless Years of Prohibition, Karen Blumenthal delves into the history of Prohibition, its causes, and its effects. This makes the book’s title somewhat misleading, since the scope of Blumenthal’s narrative is broader than just bootlegging and gangs. So don’t be surprised when the book begins with an account of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, but doesn’t return to the incident for another eight chapters.
Blumenthal instead explains why Prohibition became law by first discussing the history of alcohol production and consumption in America (did you know that Americans drank more alcohol, per person, in the early 19th century than at any other time in the country’s history?), the temperance movement (which initially advocated only drinking in moderation), and the lobbying and political machinations that led to the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment. Only then does she go into detail about the smuggling, gangs, (lack of) law enforcement, and so on. Blumenthal covers a lot of ground, considering the relatively short length of the book. Bluementhal’s writing is accessible, and the narrative organized mostly in chronological order, which helps all the names and information straight. Most of all, Blumenthal excels at providing context, such as the influence on World War I on the prohibition campaign, giving readers a deeper understanding of the topic. Along the way, Blumenthal also reveals the origins of the words teetotalers and speakeasies, that Al Capone’s brother once worked as a federal agent, how some children and teenagers broke the law themselves while Prohibition was in effect, and much more.
The book’s design is simple but effective, featuring numerous black and white photographs and illustrations. I do wish a timeline was included with the backmatter, which is otherwise extensive and includes a glossary, bibliography and source notes, and an index.
Book source: public library.
Cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire.
Filed under:
Non-Fiction,
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Karen, Good post! Students digging deeper inspired by source notes?! Yay! Seems to me that writing good source notes is also connected to that initial decision - how to best keep track of sources for delicious tangents as well as every little bit of information (every burp and grunt, as you say) during research and writing. Footnoting with Zotero allows me to save expanded notes with my footnotes. It’s so easy to lose track while revising complicated material from a flood of sources.