Isak's Blog

Robert Caro doesn’t just start with a detailed outline before he starts writing his books. He starts with a clear idea of how he’s going to end it.

“I can’t write a book until I know the last line,” he said on a recent Q&A podcast episode with C-SPAN.

I’m also a big outliner — but not a last liner.

Caro tells how when writing his first book — ”The Power Broker,” a thick biography about Robert Moses, the most powerful man in New York City — he had finished his research but had no idea how to start. There was too much material. He had no idea how to begin (something a lot of creatives can relate to!).

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. I spent my afternoons this week dethatching my lawn (lawns are stupid) by hand with a rake before having the good sense to rent a power rake for an hour. At least I listened to a bunch of “Butcher’s Crossing.”

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. As an avid user of Field Notes’ pocket notebooks, I enjoyed this 4-minute ASMR video of some dude making very professional-looking pocket notebooks.
2. Loved reading about John Cougar Mellencamp’s performing in a hard-hat minutes with a bandaged head after a fan hit him on the head with a glass bottle, and how the original “Jack & Diane” lyrics were about an interracial couple. I need to read more “33 1/3” books (which this book is not - but it reminds me of the great series.)
3. I like using paper dictionaries more than Google, but I’m going to order one of these old Franklin Language Masters. It’s like a desktop calculator, but instead you type in your word and it returns the definition. So cool.
4. I can’t get enough of “authors recommend books” articles, so this New York Times article with Esi Edugyan recommending two books on my “really want to read soon” list (”Love in the Time of Cholera” and “War and Peace,” a possible Big Summer Book) to read by age 40 is good impetus.
5. I have a half-dozen Library of America hardcover books (the most beautiful books on my shelves, unless you think beat-up hardcovers of Robert Caro are more beautiful). If you’ve admired them in a bookstore, you’ll like this speech about its history and cultural reach. Consider me curious about them printing 17,000 pages of Henry James.
6. “I think discomfort is so important for change for an artist. Otherwise you’d just write the same thing over and over again. New experiences breed new creative work.” Goth Babe absolutely nails how adventures and discomfort are important to quality of life and creativity. After living in a van with my wife for years, I enjoy but struggle with how convenient living in a home is; I even miss - especially miss! - hard days on the road, because they’re the other side of the coin to unforgettable, adventurous days.
7. Both Nick Offerman and David Byrne recommended the movie “Dead Man” on Criterion’s Closet Picks, which Byrne described as being like Cormac McCarthy. (I’m very much the “dude in his 30s who likes McCarthy” stereotype but at least have the less common opinion that “The Border Trilogy” is his best work.)
8. Mailbag: I got a copy of the new Larry McMurtry bio, “Western Star.” Tracy Daugherty’s biography of McMurtry was one of my top reading experiences last year — I read it over a week of afternoons on a hotel rooftop pool in downtown San Antonio, drinking bitter-warm IPAs in the heat after spending mornings on the riverwalk.
9. If you’re curious about using a typewriter for distraction-free rough drafting, I can attest the first half of Joe Van Cleave’s video on incorporating is a helpful system to incorporate them into your writing/editing, analog/digital workflow. (My main use is they’re not connected to the internet, so if I put myself in a room without a screen I’ll actually write.)
10. Last, a STRONG recommendation for Mason Curry’s article on how to be a writer with a day job, some writing after work, before work, during work. I nodded and whispered “yes” to myself throughout the whole thing.

See you on down the dusty trail,

A few weeks ago Austin Kleon wrote that when he wants to get into something new, his first step isn’t to search Google but search his email inbox instead. It’s a personal, searchable archive of people you follow — so it usually turns up good recommendations for your new topic.

I do something similar. Not in my inbox, which is less an interesting archive than a stress-inducing to-do list for me.

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. Minnesota’s afternoon rainstorms have been perfect for reading, writing, and sitting on the couch.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. Funny how we assume the artists we look up to must be so literary, serious, and important compared to ourselves — then learn that’s exactly how they feel about who they look up to! I’m going to have to watch this entire Karl Ove Knausgård episode from BBC’s Arts in Motion.
2. Maria and I loved watching Desk Set last weekend, a 1957 rom-com about a whip-smart reference librarian and the computer engineer replacing her entire research department with a computer. Very funny, and unfortunately timely with AI!
3. I’ve been reading why people like Dante’s “Inferno” so much, so naturally I’ve been listening to Hozier’s “Unreal Unearth” album again and again.
4. “Oh Lord. I could talk about the various ways — in nature, in folklore, things like that — but honestly, the surest one? Spite.” T. Kingfisher on the surest way for him to find inspiration. This is my surest way, too! Austin Kleon recommends it, too.
5. I recently read “The Emerson Circle” and loved learning more about the Transcendentalists, but mostly Margaret Fuller, Louisa May Alcott, and Thoreau. Just in time to watch this new PBS miniseries on the Thoreau! Robert Gross’ book is up next to read.
6. “Well, I don’t have to worry about how to pay the mortgage. I get to write the stories I want to write.” Octavia Butler on the best parts about her success as a writer — the dream! I’m also an early-morning writer; by 5 p.m. my brain’s largely unhelpful and annoying.
7. I read the first Knaussgard book in 2016, and autofiction was this new, interesting genre to me. This week I revisited a LitHub article written by Robert Moor in 2024 (whose new book I’m v. excited to read) about the book “Bjarki, not Bjarki,” a great book about creativity, writing, and autojournalism.
8. Speaking of autojournalism: it’s starting to feel like summer, which means I want to float in a pool, drink gin and tonics, and read Hunter S. Thompson. Van Neistat likes him for his adventures and prose; I love him writing so politically and entertainingly.
9. Literary fly fisherman! I read “A River Runs Through It” in college in two days (molecules, molecules) and loved it. “Ninety-two in the Shade” felt like Norman Maclean meets Hunter S. Thompson. I’d add Callan Wink as a favorite modern literary fly fisherman, a form I hope continues.
10. We forget how much agency we have; you can just email people stuff. I’m not great at taking this advice often but it has worked well for me in the past.

See you on down the dusty trail,

One thing I’ve really enjoyed doing lately is finding articles and lectures and video essays about the book I’m reading. Reading itself is fun — it’s why why read, after all — but I’ve really missed out on how much fun it is to listen to others gush and rant about what you’re reading, too.

If all you do is read the book, you actually miss out on a lot of stuff.