Kay Mills

But First--Going from Journalism to Writing Books—

“If you stay in the safety zone all the time, you’ll never know about your strength, you’ll never know yourself at your most brilliant.”—Composer and scholar Bernice Johnson Reagon

Journalists often have trouble writing books. We look at our subjects too narrowly, we're confined by the need to source everything, we sometimes aren't able simply to extend our arms and wiggle our fingers and push the boundaries of our writing outward. That was the warning I got from an editor when I was about to take my first book leave from the Los Angeles Times. He was right. But fortunately for my soul, I didn’t listen and plunged ahead.

The first book I wanted to write—not the first one I actually wrote—was a biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi civil rights leader. But publishers weren’t interested in the civil rights movement anymore in the early 1970s when I first made my proposal. They also said books about black women wouldn’t sell (Toni Morrison and Alice Walker hadn’t proved them wrong yet). But I still wanted to write a book. I knew I had one in me. So I turned to the old adage that you write what you know, and what I knew was the situation women faced in the newspaper business and why that mattered.

I got that book leave and I traveled around the country, interviewing people about the history of women in the newspaper business, the lawsuits that helped change that picture, and the expanded news coverage that women were bringing into the media. A Place in the News: From the Women’s Pages to the Front Page was published in 1988 and was well reviewed in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and other papers across the country. No one had pulled all this material together before. But not long afterward, my mother told me I had too many people in the book. She, too, was right. She didn’t say it, but there were too many names. (At least they weren’t as complicated as those in a Russian novel.)

So, lesson #1—Just because you have a ton of great material doesn’t mean you have to use it all. And if you are writing a book, you should find ways to tell the stories without constantly quoting people. My book, well received as it was, had too many “she saids” in it. I don’t mind that as much now because I felt I needed repetition to document what women had done or had been told they couldn’t do, but I probably could have done that with fewer examples.

To be continued