Zooming Out

On Discipline, and a Caro-esque Writing Process

On a recent swelteringly hot July day, I paid a visit to the New York Historical Society. In a hallway, on the second floor of a grand 1908 stone building, is a special installation celebrating the 50th Anniversary of writer Robert Caro’s most well-known work, The Power Broker (1974). For 1,280 meticulously researched pages, Caro charts the rise and dominance of Robert Moses over the parks and highways of New York and beyond. Moses’s impact on American life is controversial and complicated. The highways that brutally cut through cities all across America are part of his legacy. I recommend the book if you have the time and interest. 

Beyond Robert Moses and The Power Broker, the installation dedicates a sizable portion of space to exploring Caro’s legendary writing process: from idea, to years-long stretches of research, to initial outline, to editing, to publication. This is where I spent my time. It was fascinating to see the handwritten yellow notepads containing his notes and first drafts; the model of typewriter he still uses at 88 years old to slow his hands down enough to match the speed of his thinking. I wanted to read every scribbled page in the display case, and would have, but two noisy women chose this location to have a protracted conversation about comfortable leather shoes and a Margaret Mead lecture (I never caught the connection there – maybe the lecture was standing room only? With a formal dress code?). Still, I took a lot from what I was able to see.

Caro’s writing output is remarkable. So often, I am intimidated by the structure and routines that writers profess to follow. Joyce Carol Oates comes to mind. An insanely prolific writer (So much so that she’s been criticized for writing too much – but that’s probably because she is a woman and this intimidates critics who are mostly men). Oates has published 58 novels. She writes from early morning until 1pm; sometimes she writes 10pm to 3am. She is also a professor of English which presumably has its demands. She is also a person and so probably gets her teeth cleaned every so often. She lives in New Jersey so she probably has a car and gets an oil change after 3,000 miles, if she’s responsible in that way. Point being, she has a lot going on and still manages to publish a book every 10 minutes.

Similar to Oates’s habits, Caro’s installation highlights the supreme discipline he uses when writing. In a bare office, he pins his elaborate outline on a 22-foot long cork board and proceeds to write with a goal of 1,000 words a day. As I viewed his notes and research post-its, I felt small. I can be a disciplined person. I’ve never called in sick to work, never not shown up to something important. But writing requires self-propulsion and a dedication that overwhelms my rigid ideas around routine: either I follow a routine 100% of the time or I miss my target and become an abject failure. Perfect or nothing. The idea of showing up to write 1,000 words a day, every day, come hell or highwater (or teeth cleaning), is daunting. Oates and Caro must be better humans, I think. Superhuman, even.

As I shuffled left to right, down the hallway towards the end of the display, a small item butted up against the edge of the glass case caught my eye. In vertically-oriented text it read: “1971 Planning Calendar” – a pocket sized calendar, spanning 3-months per page, used by Caro to track his word count goal. Leaning in, nose to glass, I observed the day-to-day results of his effort. In bold red pen, I saw 2,600 words on May 27th, far beyond his 1,000 word goal. I also saw 200 words on April 22nd. I saw many zero word days, too – some weekends, others weekdays. Here and there in parentheses Caro wrote the word “lazy” next to his word count – April 14th: “200 (lazy).” On April 7th he wrote “0 (sick).” He took three days off in June for a bar mitzvah. It seems like an entity named Chase came to visit in June which greatly affected Caro’s output. That feels nice and normal. A summertime visit from his son.

This is the kind of in-the-weeds material that I like to see. It’s true to speak of Caro’s dedication and discipline. Our lives are the sum of our day-to-day actions. But it does not work in reverse. I am – we are – not the sum of the actions we take in a single day.  This is a fact that I forget, daily. Seeing the practical application of Caro’s intended routine  spool out over three months, with all its delays and interruptions, made me feel like I could write The Power Broker [SHH, Reader! I feel your skepticism]. More than that, it was a reminder that if there is a day (or three) that goes by where I don’t get through my to-do list – where I can’t seem to make it through even a fraction of what I had intended – instead of feeling like I am lost and behind, I can adjust the aperture through which I measure progress; make it a little more expansive; write the words “lazy” or “sick” in the margins and move on without regret.

Caro is a remarkable writer. And a human. Not a superhuman. The special installation, like most installations, celebrates achievement. It paints an accurate but narrow picture of a man whose rigor is so well known that the term “Caro-esque” refers to research performed at the highest level. He is a national treasure, to be sure. He also got his teeth cleaned and had lazy days (many lazy days, in fact). I’ve never heard of a three-day long bar mitzvah, but I like the idea. To boil it down to the essence, what I am saying, Reader, is that I am basically Robert Caro. July 15, 2024: 1000 words ✔️. July 16, 2024: LAZY.