Longhand and a Smith-Corona

From Robert Caro’s Working: Research, Interviewing, Writing (New York: Knopf, 2019). Caro recalls what Princeton professor R.P. Blackmur said to him, after first saying something complimentary: “But you’re never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers.”

“Thinking with your fingers.” Every so often, do you get the feeling that someone has seen right through you? In that moment, I knew Professor Blackmur had seen right through me. No real thought, just writing — because writing was so easy. Certainly never thinking anything all the way through. And writing for a daily newspaper had been so easy, too. When I decided to write a book, and, beginning to realize the complexity of the subject, realized that a lot of thinking would be required — thinking things all the way through, in fact, or as much through as I was capable of — I determined to do something to slow myself down, to not write until I had thought things through. That was why I resolved to write my first drafts in longhand, slowest of the various means of committing thoughts to paper, before I started doing later drafts on the typewriter; that is why I still do my first few drafts in longhand today; that is why, even now that typewriters have been replaced by computers, I still stick to my Smith-Corona Electra 210. And yet, even thus slowed down, I will, when I’m writing, set myself the goal of a minimum of a thousand words a day, and, as the chart I keep on my closet door attests, most days meet it.

If I were teaching a writing course, I’d show my students Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (dir. Lizzie Gottlieb, 2022).

Related reading
“Robert Caro’s Favorite Things” (The Wall Street Journal ) : “Turn Every Page: Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive” (New-York Historical Society) : “Why Robert Caro Now Has Only Ten Typewriters” (The New Yorker )