I have Stephen King to thank for Robert Caro. I have Robert Caro to thank for shining a beacon on where I am, and where I hope to go.

Truthfully (shamefully), I haven’t read any of King’s novels or Caro’s biographies — yet. I don’t read much for pleasure for long swaths of time. Too busy teaching during the semester and handling our client’s cases when the students aren’t around.

In On Writing, King solved that dilemma for me. When he can’t read, he says, he listens — listens to dozens of audiobooks every year.

Eureka! Although I have almost no time to read during the semester, I do have hours of unspoken-for time every week in the kitchen. (Anyone who’s known me at all in the last fifteen years knows I’m a proselyte for home cooking and clean(ish) eating, so cooking isn’t optional.)

Good timing: I had just been poking around on the Libby app and noticed they had the audio for Robert Caro’s book, Working. Another great writer on great writing! I set about making wild rice-stuffed pumpkin and listening.

Doubt

Caro’s book — a collection of essays, really — about his process in writing The Power Broker and his series of book on Lyndon Johnson reached down into a dark place I’ve been hiding.

Although practicing and teaching immigration law is my soul’s calling, writing about the past souls who made our laws is my heart’s joy.

I remember sitting as a child in my grandparents’ walk-in closet with my grandfather’s old manual Smith Corona typewriter and a stack of onionskin paper in front of me, writing stories, or trying to. If my family couldn’t find me, they always started by looking in that closet.

Now, I have a job that requires me to write. It’s one-third of my job description.

I still can’t believe they pay me to do this.

After many law review articles, I published my first book in 2021. I started on another as soon as the archives opened after COVID.

I fight —wrestle, struggle — to clear time to research and write. Usually, I succeed, a little. I write very early in the morning, take research trips when classes aren’t in session and someone else can cover the cases.

It’s slow going this way. My project is way over my head, like any worthwhile project will be. I don’t know anyone else who writes the kinds of books that the Muse somehow tapped me to write, so I’m groping in the dark with only other writers’ published works as my guide.

My first chapter is unwieldy, unbalanced. My second chapter is worse. I see what I need to do — and wrestle ever harder for the time and space to do it.

I feel doubt that this book will allow itself to be written, or will allow me to write it, or will say what I want to say if it gets written. I suppress the doubt and continue writing.

The discoveries keep me going. The family member of my subject who agrees to talk to me. The box in the archives that answers an inscrutable question. The diary of my subject’s contemporary that treads the same path, clearing the fog that I thought might have obscured the story forever.

Solidarity

In Working, Caro describes similar experiences, similar feelings. How he thought he might never finish The Power Broker, or that it might never be published. How he struggled to earn the confidence, and the stories, of Lyndon Johnson’s neighbors and family members in the Texas hill country. How he painstakingly, even ponderously, combed through reams of documents and found the stories they’d previously withheld, too.

I’d like to have ego enough to talk about my writing in the same breath as Caro’s (or King’s) without blushing (it’s a good thing I’m alone here in my kitchen right now). But it buoys me to know that Caro didn’t always know, either. He knew his work could be good — but not that it could be work. He didn’t set out to write seven hundred thousand pages on Robert Moses; the Muse just demanded it of him. It demanded he sell his house to write about Moses, that he move to the hill country to write about Johnson.

Gratitude

I know each writing journey is different just as each Muse is different. Life shoves unique challenges up against each writer’s gut like a bully in the high school cafeteria.

But I can keep going, keep pushing back, as long as I know that writers I admire — writers who succeeded — had to get up and give the table a good hard shove back in the bully’s direction too.

Those stories, and my gratitude to those writers for sharing them, will fuel at least another year of writing.