Adam Hochschild - Statement About Writing

Statement About Writing

In 2012, Hochschild was given an award for his work by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He and the other writers receiving awards at the Academy’s annual ceremony were asked to write short statements about their work, to be part of an exhibit of their books and manuscripts. His statement is as follows:

"In my next life I intend to return as a novelist, but in this one, lacking the ability to invent characters, I go looking for them in the real world. But that relieves me of having to pass the hurdle that novelists generally face: is their work believable? As the critic Christopher Benfey once wrote, ‘One advantage of writing nonfiction is that it doesn’t have to be plausible; it just has to be true.’ And so I’ve found my raw material in life itself, sometimes in the present, more often in the past.
"I’m particularly attracted to writing about times and places when people felt a moral imperative to confront evil: whether in bearing witness to the prison camps of Stalin’s Soviet Union, battling apartheid in South Africa, exposing the forced labor system that King Leopold II of Belgium imposed on the Congo, working to end slavery in the British Empire, or resisting the madness of the First World War. I’m working now on a book about American volunteers and journalists in the Spanish Civil War. Getting to know some of the men and women who took part in these struggles has taken me to the ruins of gulag camps in the Russian Arctic, to townships, villages and miners’ camps in various parts of Africa, and to the libraries and archives where diaries and letters of people from earlier times can be found. Those journeys in time can be just as moving as the ones in geography: what a thrill it was to page through the small, leather-bound pocket notebook that an abolitionist organizer took with him on a stagecoach trip to Scotland in 1792, filled with accounts of those he met and with admonitions to himself. People sometimes ask me if I’ve ever used a research assistant. Are they kidding? Why would I want to give away to someone else the pleasure of doing such exploring?
"If there is a special new technique of writing history, I certainly have not discovered it. All the lessons I try to follow are very ancient ones. Read widely; 'Read,' G. M. Young, the historian of Victorian England, once said, 'until you can hear people talking.' Try like hell to be accurate. Remember how much you don’t know. Write in a way that will make your reader keep on reading.
"Is there any profession I would rather have? There isn’t. As a writer you get to insert yourself into other people’s lives. You get to travel in time. And, unlike those in all sorts of other lines of work, from ballerinas to quarterbacks, you never have to retire."