72395873289

asking.
Once you’ve done your research and reporting, how do you begin to write?
I sit down with my notebooks, which are narrow, spiral pads. I go through them with a red felttipped
pen, underlining the things I think I want to use. I then take out a pile of blank sheets of paper
and I start to index all my notes.
Why index them?
Well, the organizing principle is, “How would I find this piece of information or quote if I want to
use it later on?” I don’t want to be stuck when I’m writing the piece because I can’t find a certain
crucial piece of information.
I start with Roman numeral one, page one, and record whatever happens to be on that page. The
index will run for pages and pages— the Breytenbach index ran to over three hundred pages—all of
which I put into a loose-leaf notebook.
Is your index as detailed as the index at the back of a book?
More so. I’ll have a heading of “Bosnia,” and then subheadings: “Serb-Muslim relations,” “Drunk
on History” . . . It gets very detailed. It is generally the case that if you pick a random sentence from
any one of my books and ask me where it is in my notes, I can go back to my file and find it for you in
two minutes.
I also make a separate index of my notebooks: “Notebook number one has the following topics in it
. . . Notebook number one has the following interviewees in it . . .”And I make a list I call “Nifty
Riffs,” of things I want to make sure I include in the piece. That can run to five or six pages as well.
You do this on a computer, right?
No, I do it all by hand, which I don’t recommend. It is a totally insane process that takes weeks and
weeks. It is stupefyingly boring. And by the end two things have happened. First, I know the material
by heart. And second, the information bores me silly. I’m bored with the material in a way that I will
never stop being bored with it. I’ll never be interested in the material in the way I was when I was
coming up with it.
At that point I have what I call “Double South Pole Writer’s Block,” which is a situation when my
eyes are magnetized south, and the blank page is magnetized south, and everything else in the
universe is magnetized north. I find myself wondering things like, “ Gosh, videotape cassettes! How
do they work?” I am physically unable to sit still in the chair, I can’t focus on anything. This goes on
for weeks.
How do you get out of this state?