Pubspeaks
One Writer’s Process: Notes from Steve Vogel’s October 23rd WIW Pubspeak
The Pentagon: The untold story of the wartime race to build the Pentagon—and to restore it sixty years later
By Taryn Carrino, WIW Membership Coordinator
The Pentagon: The untold story of the wartime race to build the Pentagon – and to restore it sixty years later, began as an assignment that an editor once gave Steve Vogel – write an article on a 20th Century transformative moment. While fulfilling the assignment, Vogel found that the characters drew him in and the story stayed with him. And, after 9/11, seeing parallels between the race to build the Pentagon in the early 1940s and the race to rebuild the structure after the September 11 attack, Vogel thought, there is a story here, a book to be written.
In 2003, he wrote his proposal. Shortly after, he was given a one-year leave of absence from The Washington Post to write the book. Vogel set aside two months of that year to complete the interviewing process and four months for document collection.
The first step of Vogel’s process was to do the research – and his first priority was to locate and interview those involved in the initial building of the Pentagon who were still alive. Fortunately, he located Robert Ferman, executive officer of the project, and S. Thomas Stathes, the war department draftsman who drew the first drawings of the Pentagon. When he found the draftsman, living locally in Silver Spring, Md., Vogel said that he felt like he had found “the Holy Grail.” He was now finally able to ask the architect in person, “Why the five sides?” to which Stathes replied, “It fit.”
Vogel transcribed all of the interviews himself and told the audience that, as an author, “interviewing and transcribing is the best thing you can do. Become familiar with their words.”
After completing the research, Vogel turned to the task of document collection. Invaluable sources were the Pentagon’s depository, the Corp of Engineers, Fort Belvoir and the Secretary of Defense Historian’s Office. Telephone transcripts provided him with detailed information that allowed him to recreate conversations between characters.
The best advice Vogel received, in regards to the writing process, came from Steve Coll, former staff writer for The New Yorker and previous managing editor of The Washington Post, who suggested the “paint by numbers method” for organization, a method outlined in a panel discussion, “Organizing and Writing Your Investigation: From Narratives to Books,” at the 2003 IRE Conference (to order an audio tape of the method go to http://www.ire.org/store/tapes/DC2003.pdf). Coll told Vogel, “Take everything, interviews, all documents, and transcribe them to create a synopsis. Then create an index as a cross reference so that you can find everything later.”
Vogel took Coll’s advice and made a detailed outline or storyboard, a road map for the project, which allowed him to visualize transitions and see how each scene would lead to the next. “This way,” he said, “each day, when I sat down to write I had a list or index of articles that related to what I was working on for that day.”
To stay on track, Vogel said, “My rule was to write three pages a day.” Each night, he gave his wife, who is also an editor, those three pages to edit so that he had something concrete to work with the next day. Regarding revisions, Vogel said that he “wrote in a linear fashion,” except for the last chapters. He said that often as the story progressed, his “three pages a day” turned into four or five.
As to the promotion and marketing of his book, Vogel did not use blogs, but decided to use the traditional route, which included radio and television appearances on NPR’s All Things Considered and Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and a web site. To learn more about Vogel’s book, check out www.thepentagonhistory.com.
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