Oh, how I wish I could tell you I’d dis­cov­ered a sure­fire way of orga­niz­ing my research. Sad­ly, I can’t, because I haven’t. I try, but…well…the moun­tains of mate­r­i­al I amass can be just so hard to wran­gle, espe­cial­ly for a nat­u­ral­ly dis­or­ga­nized per­son like myself.

If you peeked into my office today you’d see that a long table has been squeezed in next to my already-over­sized desk. Stacks of books and note-filled ledger pads cov­er both. As for the floor, you can just bare­ly see it for the piles of pho­to­copied documents—newspaper arti­cles, mag­a­zine pieces, let­ters, eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny, diary entries, scrap­book pages, trav­el logs and more. Sounds like chaos, right? But there is method to my messi­ness. All these mate­ri­als per­tain to the life of Buf­fa­lo Bill Cody (my lat­est bio­graph­i­cal sub­ject), and every pile rep­re­sents a divi­sion of his life—“childhood in Iowa,” “child­hood in Kansas,” “child­hood after father’s death,” “involve­ment in Civ­il War,” “Lulu Fred­eri­ci,” and so on. If you pawed through any of these piles (and I’d have to yell at you if you tried) you’d find the doc­u­ments’ mar­gins lit­tered with my com­ments, ques­tions and nota­tions. Some are almost entire­ly yel­low from my zeal­ous use of the high­lighter. Oth­ers are com­plete­ly cov­ered in sticky notes. If pos­si­ble, I like to phys­i­cal­ly have the source from which I’m quot­ing. This explains the piles. It also explains why a trip to, say, the McCrack­en Research Library in Cody, Wyoming results in huge UPS bills. I copy every­thing I can. I ship it all home.

Those afore­men­tioned books also relate to Cody. Titles include all three of his auto­bi­ogra­phies, as well as mem­oirs writ­ten by his friends, fam­i­ly, busi­ness asso­ciates, and per­form­ers in the Wild West. While I don’t use high­lighters on these (most date from around 1900), they are rid­dled with col­or-coor­di­nat­ed tabs, book­marks and yes, more nota­tion rid­dled sticky notes.

And then there are my notes – hun­dreds and hun­dreds of note­cards. These are dropped into an accor­dion file, again arranged by top­ic. When I’m ready to write, I pull them out, shuf­fle them around, and lay them out in the order the infor­ma­tion should be pre­sent­ed. It’s a bit like that slid­ing tile puz­zle. But it’s amaz­ing how many new con­nec­tions I dis­cov­er with­in the mate­r­i­al by sim­ply shuf­fling those notecards. 

The clut­ter doesn’t stop here. I also use a wall-sized cork­board to lay out the book’s big scenes — those moments I want to come in close on. These scenes, also writ­ten on note­cards, are tacked onto the board in order of their appear­ance in the book. On the back of each note­card I jot down the sources where facts and details for that par­tic­u­lar scene can be found.

Con­fused yet? I also use col­ored note­cards to help me keep track of the story’s “char­ac­ters.” For exam­ple, when writ­ing The Fam­i­ly Romanov I used white note­cards for all infor­ma­tion relat­ed to Nicholas and Alexan­dra, as well as the kids. Lenin and oth­er rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies were assigned pink note­cards (I thought it was fun­ny at the time); Rasputin was yel­low, while work­ers, peas­ants and sol­diers were assigned green cards (no pun intended).

One last step. While draft­ing, I jot sources abbre­vi­a­tions in the manuscript’s mar­gin. At the end of the day’s writ­ing, I go back and add these mar­gin cita­tions to my mas­ter list.

And does all this keep me from los­ing attri­bu­tions? Hard­ly. Inevitably, I lose things. This results in either one of two actions. Either I waste an entire after­noon search­ing for a spe­cif­ic quote, or I end up remov­ing it (or sub­sti­tut­ing it) from my text. Frus­trat­ing? Yes. But I’ve come to accept it as part of the process… at least part of my process.

Peo­ple ask if I ever use research help. I can’t imag­ine it. Research is so organ­ic. I nev­er know where it’s going to lead, or what’s going to spark my curios­i­ty. The ques­tions I ask about a sub­ject stem from the research. In fact, research begins the research. What I mean is, only after I’ve done a fair amount of explo­ration on a sub­ject do I begin to under­stand what it is I real­ly want to research. For exam­ple, I hadn’t con­sid­ered includ­ing the lives of work­ers, sol­diers, and peas­ants (much less first hand accounts of their lives) until research led me to Rus­sia.   I’m con­vinced that if I don’t do all the research myself, I’ll miss that vital some­thing that changes the course of the work.