Thinking with your Fingers

Writing in an effective way

Robert Caro is perhaps the best biographer ever and his memoir Working is one of my favorite non-fiction books, especially on audio: he reads it and has a wonderful old Brooklyn accent.

In the book Caro recalls a class with a favorite professor at Princeton. He would write his essays hastily the night before, and the professor always gave him good grades. But at the end of the semester, the professor said to Caro, “you’ll never get where you want to go until you stop thinking with your fingers.”

The advice shook Caro and he is famous for writing his biographies in a painstaking, incredibly detail-oriented way. Power Broker, his first book, took him 7 years. I love this advice because you can feel it so viscerally: sometimes you write things in haste and you can feel that you are creating something that sounds reasonable and may look like a substantive thought but you know it is not truly an important thing to write because your brain is not in it.

The experience of thinking about the purpose of each word you write is much more taxing than whipping off sentences that are functional. But I like to remember that that is the cost of saying something substantial.