Pubspeaks
Search and Research: The Art of Biography Writing
By Doug Hecox, WIW Member
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Finding a publisher for his chronicle of the evolution of psychiatric treatment in the twentieth century wasn't easy, he said, given the graphic descriptions of transorbital lobotomies his book depends upon.
"[It's] gruesome qualities kept it out of most magazines," El-Hai said, explaining that the only initial interest in an article about Freeman's pioneering lobotomies—the origin of what eventually became The Lobotomist —was Minnesota Medicine , the magazine of the Minnesota Medical Association. The article, which El-Hai had begun to write in 1996, first appeared in October 1999.
For two years, El-Hai struggled to get his article published for larger audiences in magazines with greater circulations. After rewriting the article to highlight his subject's connection to Washington, D.C.—Freeman had practiced at St. Elizabeth's Hospital and was on the faculty at George Washington University, where he performed some of the notorious "ice-pick lobotomies"—El-Hai succeeded in selling a modified version of the magazine piece to the Washington Post Magazine , which published it in early 2001.
The difficulties of writing a book like The Lobotomist , he explained, are those of any biographical work. Finding and organizing suitable source material was at least as difficult as finding a literary agent and a publisher.
Finding and Organizing Research Material
The book took nine months to write, he said, and more than a year to research. Background information for The Lobotomist came from a variety of locations around the United States, and ranged from notes and photos to medical training films that show Freeman employing his gruesome technique in early lobotomies. Though he occasionally shows the films to medical students or to others when lecturing about the book, "It still shakes me up," El-Hai said.
Much of the information—including patient records—came from Freeman himself, or the families of his patients. El-Hai explained that George Washington University had some records from Freeman's days there. However, when he arrived to look through them, he discovered there were 88 boxes worth—of which about 50 he was allowed to review. Realizing the difficulty of Xeroxing that much information, he used a digital camera to photograph the documents he needed.
"I thought for a while about how to organize my research notes," El-Hai said. Rather than rely on the approach he had used for the many magazine articles he'd written, El-Hai decided he would need to create a database. He chose FileMaker Pro, largely because of the abundance of data fields he could fill, and used an IRISPen handheld scanner—which saved him untold hours in Xeroxing and retyping. "The scanner helped input entire sections of books," he said, "and the scanned text went right into FileMaker Pro."
When asked if he wrote later portions of the book first and went back later to complete earlier chapters, he said "I started with Chapter 1, and went clear through to the end." The chronological approach was the preferred route for the Freeman story, he explained, but presented a problem. Freeman didn't start doing lobotomies until he was 40.
"So chapter 1 is about his first lobotomy patient," El-Hai said. "Then I went back to the beginning and wrote about his grandfather [Dr. William Williams Keen] who attended one of the world's first conferences on psychosurgery in Berlin."
Finding an Agent
El-Hai explained that, because he knew very little about the publishing business and even less about finding a literary agent, he simply went to large bookstores to find books on topics similar to his, and looked for the names of agents listed in the author's tribute pages. In this way, he found Laura Langlie—who opened her own literary agency in 2001—and sent her a note asking whether she would be interested in reading his book proposal.
When she agreed, he submitted his book proposal—which, later, she asked him to rewrite. "Substantially," he said with a smile.
Finding a Publisher
After numerous rejections—"some featuring the words 'Yuck' and 'Gross'," he said—Wiley and Sons bought the book in 2002, expecting to see the completed manuscript that fall. He didn't complete it until March 2004. "I went about a year and a half over," he said, smiling. "It wasn't a topic that would get stale, so the publisher didn't get too angry."
"I loved not having to worry about a word limit," he said of his preference for writing books to magazine articles. "I really like writing long." His manuscript was more than 120,000 words, he said. "It was definitely longer than I'd proposed."
Since its publication in 2004, The Lobotomist has been reviewed widely and was the subject of a segment on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross . El-Hai has been interviewed about the book on The Diane Rehm Show , Minnesota Public Radio and To the Best of Our Knowledge on PRI/Wisconsin Public Radio.
El-Hai, a longtime freelance author and essayist, has contributed to The Atlantic Monthly, American Heritage, The Washington Post Magazine and The History Channel Magazine, among others. When not teaching at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, he specializes in writing history-based journalism. He currently serves as executive vice president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors.
For more information about El-Hai, visit www.lobotomist.com/author.htm
WIW member Doug Hecox is a syndicated humor columnist and teaches journalism at American University. He is currently writing biographies of Marshall Berle, the man who discovered the Beach Boys, and Gov. John Osborne, a 19th-century politician who wore the hide of a train robber he'd skinned to his own inauguration.