Kay Mills

Whether you are writing fact or fiction, you had better love what you are doing because you will be living with it for a long, long time. If it’s a biography you are writing, you are going to have to reveal the blemishes, the flaws, as well as the heroism. If it’s fiction, you have to have some of your characters do things you wouldn’t do or you don’t even like to see them doing

And you have to be able to keep going even when you hit a bad patch. Or as muckracking author Jessica Mitford put it: “Choice of subject is of cardinal importance. One does by far one’s best work when besotted by and absorbed in the matter at hand.”—Quoted in Jon Winokur’s Advice to Writers

Don’t assume that any topic is easy just because you have solid background in the field. And unless you need the money (and often we all do), don’t undertake a book that doesn’t totally absorb you.

My editor on the Hamer book, whom I liked very much and with whom I enjoyed working, was putting together a series of brisk question-and-answer format books on black history, Latino history, and women’s history and could she commission me to do the women’s history one? Sure, I said, since I was in a bit of a dry spell. But writing "From Pocahontas to Power Suits: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Women’s History in America" was harder than I thought because I had to do far more research than I had bargained for. Again, while it got good attention, it was probably my least successful book, at least from my own point of view.

Since then, I’ve had people suggest various books or collaborations and on all but one occasion, I’ve opted not to do them. Among the suggestions made to me was a biography of Senator James O. Eastland, Fannie Lou Hamer’s longtime segregationist foe. It might have seemed a natural but I had no desire to spend several years of my life recreating that of Eastland. Sometime later Christopher Myers Asch, who had taught in Sunflower County, Mississippi—and who had the time to get to know some of Eastland’s heirs—did a fine book called "The Senator and the Sharecropper." I couldn’t have done it.

To be continued