by Allen Drury
The Writing Process
Interviewer: Could you talk about your actual working procedure? First of all, in terms of research—How much research-type plotting do you do before you actually start?
Drury: Well, I’ve done very little because, on the Washington novels, a great deal of it has grown out of my coverage of Washington as a reporter. For Advise and Consent I did a certain amount of research, on Senate rules. In A Shade of Difference—House rules, to be sure I had a Parliamentary Procedure correct. I was pretty sure I had it straight from covering it as a reporter all those years but I wanted to be absolutely sure. In A Shade of Difference, although I had covered the UN in a number of cases, for brief periods, I went up and spent a month researching the UN rules and procedures right down to the shade of the carpet in the Security Council, the color of a vase on a table and that sort of thing, to be sure I had it authentic. In Capable of Honor, the convention procedure, I did a little bit of reference to convention manuals, but mostly it was experience from covering it. Now, when I undertake the San Joaquin business, I will go down and read back newspapers and do a lot of factual research on the way things developed there and I’ll have to do more than on the Washington novels.
Interviewer: As far as day to day working habits, how do you like to proceed?
Drury: Well, I seem to get up about eight-thirty or nine and write ’til noon or one p.m. It averages out I’d say about four hours of steady work, reasonably steady—getting up to get a drink of water or to look at the view or whatever one does when one’s writing—anything except getting back to the typewriter. But on the whole it averages about four hours of work. I try to do it more or less like a job—I try to give myself the weekends off. I’ve found that, however, once I start on something with very few exceptions I will carry through on it, I mean, I won’t knock off for a month or two—at the most maybe a week or so. I try to go right straight through and finish it. I’ve found on the whole I’m lucky in this. If I have some problem, if I’m tied up on some point sometimes if I just leave it alone for a couple of days it kind of works itself out and when I get back to it it seems to flow again more smoothly.
Interviewer: Do you set yourself any quota?
Drury: No, it averages roughly five typewritten pages a day, double spaced, which is somewhere around 800-1,000 words a day maybe. And, again, I think the solidity one gets from writing newspaper copy helps there, too. I t helps one learn to write fast.
Interviewer: How extensively do you rewrite?
Drury: Well, I wouldn’t say massive rewrites, but I do a lot of line changes and paragraph detail and that sort of thing.
Interviewer: Do you do that after you’ve jumped ahead twenty or thirty pages?
Drury: Yes, I usually let it pile up to that extent and then I go over it and do it then. And then, of course, at frequent intervals, every couple of weeks or so, I read the entire thing from the beginning to where I am at that point, and many things will occur to me as I go along each time—something occurs to me or some change I want to make. So it’s a continuing process.
Interviewer: Do you spend much time socially with other writers?
Drury: No, not so much other writers. I don’t know too many of them. I suppose if one lived in New York, one might develop more along that line—although I don’t think I would anyway. If I did live there I’d probably steer clear of them because I think the writing community tends to be a sort of a self-cannibalizing community based on what I’ve heard of it and what I’ve read of it. I’d stay out of that atmosphere. Of course, reporters I see when I’m in Washington—I have friends who report there or up on the Hill or at the White House.
Interviewer: What guidelines do you think someone who is trying to learn the art of reportage can follow? What are some of the things that make good reporting?
Drury: First, I think basically, getting the facts straight, and next studying people and learning human nature as much as you can; analyzing why people do the things they do and getting some feel of the human motivations behind whatever is going on.
Interviewer: So that you can evaluate the information?
Drury: Yes, I think so, and in terms of the personalities involved.
Interviewer: How much of this, though, can you use in the actual reporting?
Drury: Well, if it’s just for reporting you can’t use too much of that—it’s more in the area of articles and commentaries on what’s going on—which really basically is the area in which I was involved over the years, rather than straight reporting.
Interviewer: Can you say anything more about general precepts you learned as a reporter, that you could pass on or that you’ve been able to apply to fiction?
Drury: I think that the reporter’s technique for getting a lead, of stating an attention-getter right at the beginning. In Advise and Consent, Bob Munson goes to the door and picks up the Post and says, “Oh, God damn,” and everyone wonders what’s he swearing about, what’s going to happen. To establish your event and then writing it is to take something that happens and then analyze it and develop all the things that surround it and people who surround it are involved and so on. And move on from there to some conclusion of that initial event. And that, I think, is probably newspaper training. And also the technique of having each paragraph as much as possible and each event as much as possible grow out of the one immediately preceding it. And frequently that can be done with a phrase or two. You just link one episode with another. But it keeps, the reader going, it keeps him interested, carries him forward in the story. That also I think is a technique from newspaper training. So that—what you have is not necessarily linear in time necessarily—but a verbal linking together. I was trying to think of a specific example—a paragraph: “Nothing further came that night from the President” and then a space, “Nor should it have,” he thought because … and so on and so on. Just tying in, so that it carries the flow of the narrative forward.
Interviewer: Is reading part of your daily routine?
Drury: Yes, I usually read a little bit every day. I find that when I’m working on a novel, I don’t so often read other novels. That’s one time when I want to stay away from them, with the exception of Seven Days in May; I haven’t read any of these Washington novels which followed Advise and Consent because I didn’t want to be influenced even indirectly or subconsciously, by what somebody else might write about Washington. As I say, my reading tends more and more toward the historical novel.
Interviewer: What historical novels have you read recently?
Drury: Just recently, I came across a reissue of Ford Maddox Ford’s “The Fifth Wife” which is about Catherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth wife. And that’s a very fascinating account, very interesting and beautifully done with much detail. It’s almost like this novel A Man for All Seasons, in the feel of Henry VIII’s England, which you get out of the novel from the great detail he goes into about tapestries and the tactile side of it.
Interviewer: What about straight history? Have you ever read much of that?
Drury: Yes, I’ve read a good deal of that, too. Oh, things like Bruce Catton On The Civil War, for instance, and quite a bit of English history and American, Revolutionary period—anything that’s interesting in the historic area I usually will sooner or later read.
Interviewer: Do you go back to Gibbon? Thucydides?
Drury: Yes, I just finished a history of wars, a book on Greece, I think. The Will of Zeus I think is the name of it. I guess the range is pretty wide, I don’t know. There isn’t much I haven’t at least dipped into.
Excerpted from “An Exclusive Interview with Allen Drury” by John Knoop, which appeared in Writer’s Yearbook 1968, with permission from Writer’s Digest.
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About the Author
Allen Drury is a master of political fiction, #1 New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winner, best known for the landmark novel Advise and Consent. A 1939 graduate of Stanford University, Allen Drury wrote for and
became editor of two local California newspapers. While visiting Washington, DC, in 1943 he was hired by the United Press (UPI) and covered the Senate during the latter half of World War II. After the war he wrote for other prominent publications before joining the New York Times’ Washington Bureau, where he worked through most of the 1950s. After the success of Advise and Consent, he left journalism to write full time. He published twenty novels and five works of non-fiction, many of them best sellers. WordFire Press will be reissuing the majority of his works.
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