Author, Author

Got a story that needs more space?

Three journalists turned authors shared their experiences writing books during the Author, Author forum Saturday.

“If you’ve done feature articles or magazine articles, you can write a book,” said Ben Wildavsky, author of “The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World.”

Wildavsky said writers must be flexible as they grow a story idea into a book.

“If you are willing to be open to rethinking where you started,” he said. “You’ve got to believe in what you’re doing … if you care about the ideas, that’s really what’s going to make it work.”

Helen Thorpe, author of “Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America,” has worked as a freelance magazine writer for more than a decade.

Inspired by her own family’s immigration to the U.S. when she was a child, Thorpe followed four undocumented immigrants for five years, as they grew from 17-year-olds into young women. She watched them as they struggled with everyday tasks like getting driver’s licenses and renting movies.

“I grew up with a green card,” she said. “I was interested in what their lives were like.”

Beth Fertig’s book, “Why cant u teach me 2 read? Three students and a Mayor Put Our Schools to the Test,” started as a 2006 radio story on WNYC.

Startled by the low four-year graduation rate for special education students in New York City, Fertig found a student to make the story personal. The student graduated high school at 21 knowing eight letters of the alphabet, and her family didn’t know about her right to an education until it was too late.

“When I met this girl, it was like there was a light inside of her that nobody ever turned on,” Fertig said.

After the story was broadcast, the young woman wanted to help more students succeed. Fertig asked her if she could write a book about her story – she agreed.

“We interview people, we walk away and we’re done,” she said. “I wasn’t done, and I’m still not done.”

Fertig says she still meets with the students she profiled in her book, and takes them to the movies.

“That’s something that you can’t do in daily journalism,” she said.

But she admits she didn’t know anything about book publishing. She found an agent and got an advance for financial support. Her radio station gave her a year off – with health insurance, but no pay – to write.

She treated the book as a job, sitting at a desk and getting the words out every day. She just knew she had more time to go back and refine it.

“I had to think of myself as a working journalist,” she said.

Wildavsky and Thorpe set daily word quotas to keep things going.

Thorpe wrote 500 words a day, and no more. She said it made her excited to get back to the book the next day, and helped maintain the quality of her work. She later expanded her quota to 1,000 words.

“You can’t wait to get back, and your writing is really crisp and clear,” she said. “When you write 1,000 words a day, you write a chapter a week.”

Wildavsky published his book through Princeton University Press. Writers should be open to working with small publishers, he said. It doesn’t pay as much, but Wildavsky said his proposal was accepted within a week.

“Rule number one is to go work for a wealthy foundation,” he said, with a smile. Wildavsky is a fellow with the Kauffman Foundation, which encouraged him to write a book and financially supported his work.

Thorpe had the financial support of her husband during the years she spent working on her book.

“You can’t make a living spending five years writing a book,” she said.

Overwhelmed by five years of notes, she turned to “The New, New Journalism” to learn the systems other journalists have used to organize their notes.

“When I read what other people did, I realized what a disorganized journalist I was,” she said.

She recommended two other books as good examples of the kind of journalism she wanted to do: “Random Family” by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” by Anne Fadiman.