A Kennedy has been making headlines recently. I do not adhere to name dropping nor do I care about celebrities in the media, or about their private lives; but the name brought back images of meeting her cousin.
Three memorable authors I met a decade ago were Pulitzer Prize-winning Doris Kearns Goodwin (whom I liked very much), Dexter Scott King, and Christopher Lawford.
Although the three of them wrote non-fiction books they wrote each book in a different way, in one case, Ms Goodwin started off with a feeling that she wanted to convey about her father and baseball.
In another case, Kennedy knew the low point of his life and what I found interesting was that he described structuring as though it was a whole separate process—just as you might set aside time to consider a particular character, he set aside time to think about structure. Where should the book begin? End? This seems obvious, and yet it’s very different from the organic approach that many people, myself included, use, which is to set a character in motion and see where she goes.
In the case of Scott King, knowing the ending scene and needing to figure out how to get there. I recall he said how as a filmmaker he needs intersecting ideas to get his creative juices going.
Interestingly, all three became most enthusiastic when responding to the question I posed- which authors had influenced them—it reminded me, at the end of the day, then as now what I share with my students; writers are people who like to read. And that’s the best process of all.
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