Bob Woodward  On Writing


WRITING TIPS

I think one of the biggest assists you can ever give yourself for somebody writing news is to sit down and tell an editor or colleague or your mother or your boyfriend or girlfriend what the story is. "I'm writing a story about this, this is what it is." I think there is a tendency in an interesting way when you communicate orally, to use the inverted pyramid and say, "You won't believe what happened, I saw somebody murdered on the corner of the street," then you would say that. Or, to tell orally in the narrative fashion, which I think is perfectly acceptable for a newspaper or a magazine and certainly for a book, and just write it out in narrative form, and then find some way to summarize it at the beginning. But I think the narrative and oral style are very helpful. Another thing I have practiced, because I'm not naturally or even unnaturally a good writer, is to get something down fast. If you have to write a story, and it's gonna be, say, 20 paragraphs long, get a first draft. Even if you haven't filled everything in, even if you're not sure. I think the people who make the deadlines a problem for themselves are people who try to artfully do a perfect first draft. And I would say there's no such thing as a perfect first draft.

WRITING STYLES FOR BOOK AUTHORS

I think a big mistake lots of authors of books make is they think in terms of chapters. And I'm gonna cover this in this chapter and this in that chapter and so forth. And I've written six books now. And I have never really had an outline. And I certainly have never had chapter titles or chapter concepts. What I try to do is take a subject, like in my last book, the Pentagon and the military and the Bush administration decision-making on the Panama operation, and the war in the Gulf, and tell a story. And say, who are my important characters, what are the important things I know, and tell that story. And the story begins. Often I try the classical approach of beginning in the middle of things, and set the scene, the characters, the basic dilemma, the basic tension, and then go back and explain how this began, and then pick up the story and finish it.

THE LEAD

Well, the classic example would be the husband who comes home, and the wife says, "What happened today?" and he said, "I got fired." That's the lead. And often, the lead is reducible to "I," a verb, something happened, or direct object. And I think we talk that way. And often it's just best to write the story the way you tell it.