Halberstam

I ran into the great David Halbsertam once in journalism school and a few times after. In a short lecture, he told us how to write a book. Here is my account http://www.dackman.homestead.com/files/Halberstam.htm (reproduced below):


A Grunt, not a Star, Halberstam Reveals the Secret of His Success

By DAN ACKMAN

Pathfinding war correspondent and celebrated author David Halbertstam told Journalism School students on April 5 [2000] that he remains driven not by awards or glory, but by the "infantry work" of reporting and writing.
Halberstam, author of The PowersThat Be, The Fifties, The Breaks of the Game and 13 other books, attributed his success not to his innate ability, but to his doggedness, his curiosity, and to his willingness to follow his heart. "My success came more from being a grunt than it did from being a star," he told students in James Stewart's Narrative Writing class.
Coming out of college in the mid '50s, Halberstam said he wasn't a top student (though he did go to Harvard, referring to it first as a "school in Boston"), but he knew what he wanted, which was to be a journalist.
As a managing editor of The Crimson, he said he could have gotten a job (as a copy boy) on The New York Times or as a reporter for the Boston Globe. But he sensed that in the wake of Brown vs. The Board of Education, the big story would be about race and civil rights, so he went south. Halberstam took a job on a small newspaper in Mississippi, switching to a larger one in Tennessee about a year later.
This was the beginning of what he called his "12-year apprenticeship" the last six of which were with The Times, mostly as a foreign correspondent. Coming out of college, he says he knew he was good-- "I was quick," he said-- but serving those years in Tennessee made him better. "By the time I got to the Times, I was really ready to go," he said.
The Times sent him to the Congo and later to Vietnam, where he did the reporting which led to The Best and the Brightest, his classic book on the war, and to a fabled career as an author and in long-form magazine writing. He has alternated between books on politics and government and books on sports, most recently one about basketball star Michael Jordan.
His huge success in this field, Halberstam said, is based on his "passion to know." A good book starts with a question, he said. The Best and The Brightest, for instance, started with this one: if the officials in the Kennedy and Johnson administration were so smart and so capable, how did they lead the nation to a war that was such a disaster?
The key, he said, is to pick a question interesting enough to sustain the reporter for two or three years, one which will later sustain the reader as well. It is also critical to find a way to dramatize that question and to "go places where the cameras can't go."
He says he keeps a mental list of people to see, often starting with peripheral figures and circling in to the main subject or subjects. Along the way his knowledge deepens and his questions keep getting sharper. The last question at every interview is a always the same: "Who else should I see?"
Conducting two interviews per day, Halberstam compiles massive quantities of notes, which he later speaks into a tape recorder. He says his one luxury is that he pays someone else to transcribe the notes.
Halberstam said that early in life he probably suffered from a form of Attention Deficit Disorder which steered him away from other fields. He knew his destiny was to be a reporter, so "I knew I couldn't screw up." So far, he seems to have kept the screw-ups to a minimum, and he has been awarded with a two Pulitzer Prizes and roughly 18 honorary degrees. He has sold a fair number of books along the way.
But it's the life that sustains him: "And it has been a terrific life. Each book was a university. That's the best part of it, not the honorary degrees, growing as a person. I've been paid to learn for 45 years.... I find it thrilling."