Great Art Takes Time

“Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.”

— Søren Kierkegaard

 

 

Some time ago, I watched a really interesting documentary called Turn Every Page, which explores the working relationship between one of my favorite biographers, Robert Caro, and his late editor, Robert Gottlieb. 

Caro is well-known for his painstakingly detailed biographies, each of which takes many years to write. In fact, the shortest amount of time he has ever spent working on a biography is about 7 years. By his side throughout this long, arduous process was Robert Gottlieb, whom he worked closely with for over 50 years. 

If you watch the documentary, it’s easy to see why it takes so long for Caro to write — he truly puts his heart and soul into his books. He writes his drafts in longhand, and afterwards, he still types these drafts on a typewriter, thoroughly making sure that every single line is the best it could be.

When Caro looks for the right adjective to describe something, he would come up with a page full of adjectives, to see which one works best. “There is a mot juste,” he says. “There is a best word. And it’s my job to try to find that best word.”

But it doesn’t end there. When he had his drafts reviewed with Gottlieb, they would often have heated arguments, literally about the smallest details — like whether or not there should be a semicolon in a sentence.

Personally, as someone who has read several of Caro’s biographies, I can honestly say that each of them are masterpieces — they’re really, really fucking good. 

Unlike in most biographies, Caro doesn’t give you surface-level stuff that you can find on the Internet. 

For one thing, the writing itself is incredibly immersive. It almost makes you feel like you’re experiencing everything first-hand, and that’s because Caro would go out of his way to gain first-hand experiences in researching for his books. For example, he didn’t merely visit Lyndon Johnson’s hometown to study his upbringing. He literally packed up and moved there, so that he could accurately depict what life there must have been like for him.

Also, Caro doesn’t merely give you theories. He doesn’t suggest that certain things happened. He gives you cold, hard facts that he doggedly uncovers. Many biographers have suggested that Lyndon Johnson might have stolen votes in his elections. But Caro flatly tells you that Lyndon Johnson did in fact steal votes — because Caro hunted down the people involved, to the ends of the Earth.

Creating great art takes time and thought. The plain truth is that you won’t be able to put out anything of great substance, if you were to rush the whole process, if you were to work it like a machine. More likely than not, you’d just end up creating something soulless, as you rehash the same kind of content.

I used to believe in the concept of “quantity over quality”. It was something I picked up from Ryan Holiday, who used to be my favorite author. As he explained, the logic behind this concept is that if you regularly put out  content, you would occasionally create something great.

But after many same-ish books on Stoicism, I lost interest in Holiday’s work. The books very much feel like what a Marvel movie is nowadays — if you’ve seen one movie, you’ve seen most of the others. And just as the Marvel movies have increasingly turned into Woke cash grabs, Holiday’s books feel more like branding exercises for The Daily Stoic, dusted with annoying right-wing political undertones.

Contrarily, his mentor, Robert Greene, is still a bro. Unlike Holiday who publishes every year, Greene publishes only every few years. With all the time and effort he puts in, the result is always a dense piece of original thinking — a book that is vastly unique as compared to not only what is out there in the market, but also his own past work. Not to mention, it’s always life-changing as well.

There is still value in churning out content regularly, perhaps if you were to do it on a smaller scale, like articles, for example. This serves as your outlet for experimenting with new approaches, and to also just keep your engine running. 

But in terms of crafting great art with coherent, fleshed-out substance and impact — time, thought, and patience are prerequisites that you can’t run away from. 

As I was writing this article, I was reminded of a Hebrew term, dayenu, which means “it would have been enough”. It would have been enough for Robert Caro to only write The Path to Power. It would have been enough for Robert Greene to only write The Laws of Human Nature. Yet, we are fortunate that they went on to create more than one masterpiece.

Here’s something worth thinking about: would you rather churn out hundreds of iffy art that go nowhere, or create just a few that can truly make a difference in the world?

I’m gonna end this article with something cliché, but is nevertheless true — as they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day. And neither is great art. 

p.s. It’s just a coincidence that there are three different Roberts in this article.