Organizing your research: now with no paywall!
A now free post about boxes, folders, and creating order from chaos - including stories about Robbie Williams, Stanley Kubrick, and the phenomenon of folie a deux.
Hello subscribers, free and paid. I’m still getting my bearings here, figuring out what to put behind the paywall and what to make free. I’ve decided to take a leaf out of Tim Lott’s Substack, where each month free subscribers get one hitherto paid post, so you can see what’s going on back here.
Every other post will be for paying subscribers - at least one a week - plus access to the chat and the comments, etc, where I try and answer as many questions as I can.
So: this post was motivated by Curtis James, Dave Lee and Ally Farrell all asking me versions of the same likably practical question.
Curtis asked: ‘What’s your version of Kubrick’s boxes? Do you have a system you use for tracking and then reviewing those seeds of ideas?’ Dave reiterated the question, and Ally wrote, ‘When you go down a rabbit hole, how and where do you document everything in an organized and structured way?’
Organized and structured are words close to my heart. You should see some of my family members’ laptops. It’s like someone blew up a library. But not mine. Life is chaotic enough without your screen being a cacophony of horrifically overlapping folders.
If people don’t recognize Curtis’s Kubrick reference, here’s a two-minute clip from my film Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes. I got to be the first person to look through the thousand boxes Kubrick left behind. I originally called the film Citizen Kubrick, but I changed the title because of concerns it might perpetuate the myth of Kubrick the crazy hermit. But if I was on a search for his Rosebud, this clip shows that maybe it wasn’t inside a box, but was the box itself:
Anyway, back to how I organize my own research. I thought the easiest thing would be to show you some screenshots.
My main screen is as minimalist as possible:
And that’s basically it. I can watch the sunset over the Pacific unencumbered by pandemonium. Inside those two folders are many more folders.
Each one is its own clearly labeled rabbit hole. Some blossom into stories, but about half end up leading nowhere, the research tailing off as my interest wanes. I’ll write soon about how to know when it’s time to give up on something – but, in short, I’m always searching for mystery, something unexpected and dissonant, something to be curious about.
But sometimes I have to reluctantly abandon some research that has real potential, including one I’ll detail now.
It began when a friend sent me an incredibly disturbing BBC documentary called Madness In the Fast Lane. It was about two Swedish sisters, Ursula and Sabina Eriksson, who were spotted one day standing on the central reservation of the M6 motorway. When the traffic police tried to help them, something horrifying happened. They leapt into the path of oncoming cars. And that was just the start of it. Anyway, the documentary tells that story.
In the end the sisters were diagnosed as suffering from folie a deux – shared madness.
That was already fascinating – the idea that psychosis might be contagious. But it got me thinking about something else.
My friend, you see, had sent me the documentary just as QAnon was emerging. It was, as it happens, Robbie Williams who first told me about QAnon. He called me up and asked if I thought there might actually be a cabal of Hollywood pedophiles secretly torturing kidnapped children. I asked him to elaborate, and he explained that many people on YouTube were convinced that Hollywood A-listers were deriving their energy from ingesting a hormone called adrenochrome, which they’d obtained by oxidizing the fear of children they had imprisoned in their mansions. But Robbie was unsure: “Some of them are saying that I’m one of torturers,” he said. “And I know that part isn’t true. But that doesn’t mean the rest of it isn’t.”
I love Robbie – how he’s simultaneously a believer and a skeptic.
In fact I’ll write a post soon about whether we, as nonfiction writers, should aim to be like him, at once credulous and rational, and how to avoid tipping too far in one or other direction. That’ll be a good post!
Anyway, I thought maybe an idiosyncratic way to explore QAnon would be via a story about folie a deux, QAnon being its own kind of contagious madness. So I created a folder.
After that I let my mind wander. I learned about other incidents of suspected folie a deux, and gave each one its own folder inside the main one:
And so on. This part of the process can feel weirdly like starting a small business. Inside each of those folders are many more folders. The Quaid one, for instance, contains a folder of news clippings - Randy And Evi Quaid Are Both Showing Signs of Paranoia, etc. Had we had an email exchange, that would have its own folder. Had I interviewed them, there’d be a folder containing the audio, and the corresponding transcript, and then another document with my selections from the transcript – any dialogue that might have the slightest chance of making it into the finished story. Had I met them in person and I’d noticed interesting little details inside their house, I’d have made notes about that straight onto my phone. That way they’d be waiting for me on my computer. They’d get their own mini-folder too, alongside any photographs I’d take on the journey.
To get even more in the weeds: When I interview someone, I use an app called Voice Record Pro. If it’s for a podcast, I’ll use the very good Zoom recorder the BBC gave me.
Until recently I transcribed my own interviews. It was VERY time-consuming, but I did it because transcription services don’t capture the silences, the ways someone says something, those tiny but often very revealing details. Also, listening back to the audio can spark ideas for the next part of the journey. Whereas a big block of text? Not so much.
However, when I told Ira Glass that I always listened back to the raw audio, he was amazed. He made fun of me a little, telling me I was “the only true artist” among them. So I tentatively gave up on that, and now I do what everyone else does – I use one of those inexpensive AI transcription services, in my case Rev.com. And it’s FINE! You can always listen back to parts of the interview whenever you like anyway.
So by now I have all this raw material, all in different folders. If at some point I think, ‘There IS a story here’ I’ll create a word document. Then I’ll paste it all in. I’ll use different fonts or colors so I can easily remember where each element came from. This is to make sure I don’t accidentally plagiarize someone, and that I’m giving proper attribution, and so on.
I think of writers as being like sculptors. This is my big block of marble.
Then it’s time for the part I enjoy by far the most – the quiet, solitary, detailed work of chipping away at it, whittling it down, turning it into the very best version of itself. In fact, to be honest, everything else I do is in service to that.
By the way, if you’re wondering why I abandoned the folie a deux story, it’s because I couldn’t get anyone to talk to me. No one responded to my interview requests. With this kind of writing, we can’t do second-hand reporting. We can’t re-tell a story that someone else has already told. Actually it’s okay to do that a little, I think, if it’s a fun tangent of just a few paragraphs (with attribution of course). But in general our ambitions have to be way higher. We need scoops, access to incredible people who’ve never talked before. We’re trying to write the best nonfiction books ever! We’re trying to break new ground.
But I can’t deny that with a bar that high, it can be VERY frustrating: you spend ages trying to find a story you want to tell, which is a nightmare in itself, and then if you don’t get the access, you can’t tell it anyway.
I suppose one way of looking at it is this: if you buy a lottery ticket do you want to win £10 or the jackpot? Because on the occasions everything comes together, it’s SO worth it.
Ok, see you on Monday paid subscribers!