Fourth, as hard as it may be, try to stay upbeat. "A recruiter will smell desperation," Degnan says. "Stay confident."
Finally, Degnan says, be sure to follow your heart. "Don't get caught up with what your friends are doing. Think about what you want to contribute over the life of your career." Linda Tischler
People probably wonder, "How do you keep from getting bored doing these books?" But I never feel bored for one minute, because I'm always learning something new. I picked Lyndon B. Johnson because I wanted to know how national political power works, and he understood such power better than any president or politician in the second half of the 20th century. Each book focuses on a different form of power, and the third volume is about legislative power. Learning how the Senate works was amazing. When you get to be 40 or 50, having the opportunity to learn something new is absolutely thrilling. I can't stand the thought of doing the same thing over and over.
I didn't know the project would take this long. I originally envisioned it as three volumes. I thought that I would do a few interviews about Johnson's life in the Texas hill country where he was raised and that would give me the color I needed -- probably a chapter or two. But when I went there, I was fascinated by this world cut off from the rest of America. Coming from New York, I didn't understand it at all. I realized that I had to move down there. My wife and I ended up spending the larger part of three years there. Tracing the development of Johnson's ambition became a big part of the first book.
With writing, I've found that pacing is very important. I used to write for as many hours as I could sit at my desk, but I found myself throwing out most of what I would write in the last few hours. Over the years, I've learned how to make myself quit after five or six hours. I think that the best piece of advice I've heard about writing was from Hemingway: Always stop when you know what the next sentence is.
I've never felt bad about the length of time spent on the project, because I think that it's worth devoting my life to -- or at least a lot of years. It's so important to believe in your work. I'm not simply writing a biography of Johnson; I'm explaining to generations to come how political power works, how it shapes all of our lives -- and the realities behind it that are not taught in school. It's something that people ought to know.
A former newspaper reporter, Robert Caro has spent the past 27 years chronicling the political evolution of former president Lyndon B. Johnson in a four-volume biography. Master of the Senate (Knopf, 2002), the third volume, took 12 years to research and write. It won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Caro is currently working on the fourth and final volume.
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