Good Work Takes Time
Even in an age of instant gratification and “fake it till you make it,” some creators quietly do their work, however long it takes.
In January, when I finished reading Isabel Wilkerson’s 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns, I was amazed. I also had questions.
How, I wondered, does someone write a book like this? As the subtitle (“the epic story of America’s Great Migration”) suggests, The Warmth of Other Suns is an epic book. It’s epic in every sense of the word. It is iconic, painting one of the defining portraits of the Great Migration. It is unbelievably well-researched. It is a gripping story, describing the journeys and the families of three Black Americans, Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster, in the kind of detail that can only come from thousands of hours of interviews.
The book is also epic in the sense that it manages to weave together moving narratives and revealing anecdotes with the “hard” stuff -- the facts, the research, the data, the history -- in a way that often reads like a novel. Most significantly, it’s epic in the sense of having changed how millions of people understand what Wilkerson describes as the “first mass act of independence by a people who were in bondage in this country for far longer than they have been free.”
How does one write a book like The Warmth of Other Suns? That prompted my second question: What happened after Wilkerson wrote it?
In the years after Warmth hit bookshelves, it didn’t seem like Wilkerson had been publishing constant bombshell articles or hot takes in newspapers and magazines. She didn’t appear to have become a full-time pundit or Twitter personality. She hadn’t published another book.
It’s sad, and embarrassing, to admit the extent to which these meaningless metrics had warped my expectations. I had been conditioned to assume that bestselling authors must be constantly seen and heard on cable news, social media, podcasts, and all the different platforms that shape our minute-by-minute political and cultural conversations.
This admission reflects how self-centered the modern media age can make us. Well before Warmth was published, Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting. In 2015, she was awarded a National Humanities Medal. Over the past decade, she had been writing and speaking regularly. But because I hadn’t happened to stumble across her more recent accolades and material, I simply assumed it didn’t exist.
How did Wilkerson write The Warmth of Other Suns? And what happened after she wrote it? Both questions have now been thoroughly answered, and my reasons for asking them thoroughly dismantled, by the publication of her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
In Caste, Wilkerson demolishes the comforting notion that America is a mostly free and meritocratic society with lingering pockets of racial prejudice and discrimination. She shows that America is, and has always been, a race-based caste system in which “caste is the bones, race the skin.” She explains that “caste is fixed and rigid. Race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the United States.”
It is a powerful, troubling, enlightening, uncomfortable, and necessary book. (Reviewing Caste for the New York Times, Dwight Garner called it an “instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”) It is also of those books that makes you think as you’re reading it, Writing this book must have taken a lifetime!
And there was the answer to my second question. What had Wilkerson been doing in the decade since she published The Warmth of Other Suns? She had been working.
Because good work takes time.
On its face, that’s an obvious statement. Intellectually, objectively, we all recognize that the time it takes to do something is… however much time it takes to do that thing.
Yet our current information environment of instant gratification and unlimited content obscures this basic, and universal, truth. It’s hard to accept that good work takes time. That good work takes work.
The speed of our news, the constant connectivity of our technology, the attraction of our distractions, and the shrinking of our attention spans combine to make it seem almost inconceivable to spend years, or decades, on a single project. It’s a notion that has been reinforced by movies and TV shows that can funnel a lifetime of work into three-minute montages of lawyers preparing cases, scientists working in labs, athletes lifting weights, investigative journalists working late into the night among stacks of newspapers. Viewers always see the end product: the dramatic court hearing, the vaccine, the victory, the exposé. But we rarely see the work.
Once we take a step back from these learned expectations, the real story becomes immediately clear: Of course epic works like The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste take time.
Wilkerson recently explored this topic in an interview with journalist Anand Giridharadas. Caste may have taken 10 years, but as she tells Giridharadas, The Warmth of Other Suns took 15. Fifteen years. That’s nearly 5,500 24-hour news cycles. This exchange says it all:
Giridharadas:
There has been this quickening of the culture, this increasing reactivity in the culture, this feeling that you have to constantly be putting things out there. And you have gambled your career and your vocation on a completely opposite wager that it is the slow work, the long research, these two masterpieces that you’ve written that changed the conversation from the moment they landed. Can you talk about that kind of faith in the intellectual slow food of your books in this very fast age?
Wilkerson:
The Warmth of Other Suns took so long -- it took 15 years -- that I often say, if it were a human being, it would be in high school and dating. That’s how long it took me. It’s the nature of the work, especially narrative nonfiction, that it cannot be done quickly. If you’re really trying to get inside the hearts and minds and experiences of people, you have to spend time with people. You have to be on their time schedule in terms of where and how they feel comfortable sharing sometimes the most painful or intimate aspects of their life experiences, and there’s no way of rushing it. You’re on their time schedule. You’re on the time schedule of the human heart. So it just takes the time that it does. There has to be this faith that, if you feel that it’s important and you feel that this is what you’re called to do, then it will work out in the end. There’s no guarantee when you start, no guarantee whatsoever. And every time you start it feels like you’re jumping off a cliff into the unknown and you just hope that it will work.
I go in completely open because I don’t know what I’m going to be in for. For The Warmth of Other Suns, I essentially had this casting call, you might say, of interviewing 1,200 people. By that I mean auditioning people. I talked to a lot of people. Did not spend as much time with each of them, clearly -- it’s 1,200 people. But it was an effort to try to find the three people through whose life story the range of experiences of the Great Migration would come through. It just took the time that it did.
It just took the time that it did.
I’m currently engrossed in Parting the Waters, the first book in Taylor Branch’s America in the King Years trilogy, which chronicles the civil rights movement through the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. On his website, Branch introduces these books as “my major life’s work.” He planned to finish the series in three years, he writes, but ultimately “the project consumed 24 years of wondrous obsession for me.” Good work takes time.
In November 2009, Lin-Manuel Miranda tweeted that he had “spent the entire day working on one couplet about George Washington.” Hamilton didn’t open on Broadway until January 2015, more than five years after that tweet and seven years after Miranda started the project. Ron Chernow had previously spent six years writing the biography that inspired Miranda to write the play. Good work takes time.
Robert Caro’s first book, The Power Broker, took seven years; the first manuscript was one million words. Then, in 1976, Caro began working on the initial installment of The Years of Lyndon Johnson series. He is still working on the fifth book in that series. Good work takes time.
How much time? As the mental conditioning coach Trevor Moawad puts it: It takes what it takes.
Some creators like Wilkerson, Branch, and Caro will make the promotional rounds when they publish a new book, but you probably won’t see them chattering on cable news or engaging relentlessly on Twitter or hosting podcasts or publishing weekly columns (or email newsletters…). They’re busy doing their work. Others, like Miranda, somehow seem to be everywhere, all of the time.
Yet no matter how they approach their craft, what they do, and what we know them for, is built on a foundation of years of steady, often anonymous, almost always unglamorous, work. Work that is inherently precarious. Work for which the return on investment -- of time, money, effort, focus -- is never guaranteed.
That’s worth remembering in this era, when politicians and presidents shamelessly say they’ve done things that they never did and never intended to do, when corporations publish statements proclaiming anti-racist commitments without making fundamental changes to how they operate or who they hire or what they advocate for, when entire generations have grown up on self-idolizing social media platforms with assurances that we should “fake it till we make it” and hone our “personal brand.”
It’s worth reminding ourselves that even in this era, even today, there are master crafters quietly, doggedly, determinedly doing their work, however long it takes.