The scholar Fred Kaplan, the writer of “Lincoln: The Biography of a Author,” has drawn parallels between Abraham Lincoln and Mr. Obama, mentioning that they share a mastery of language and “a first-class temperament” for a president — “stoic, versatile, prepared to hearken to completely different factors of view.”
Like Lincoln’s, Mr. Obama’s voice — in individual and on the web page — is an elastic one, by turns colloquial and eloquent, humorous and pensive, and accommodating each commonsense arguments and melancholy meditations (Niagara Falls made Lincoln consider the transience of all life; a drawing in an Egyptian pyramid makes Mr. Obama suppose how time ultimately turns all human endeavors to mud).
The 2 presidents, each educated attorneys with poetic sensibilities, cast their identities and their careers in what Mr. Kaplan calls “the crucible of language.” When Mr. Obama was rising up, he remembers, “the very strangeness” of his heritage and the worlds he straddled might make him really feel like “a platypus or some imaginary beast,” not sure of the place he belonged. However the means of writing, he says, helped him to “combine all these items of myself into one thing comparatively complete” and ultimately gave him “a reasonably good sense” of who he was — a self-awareness that projected an air of calmness and composure, and would allow him to emerge from the stress cooker of the White Home very a lot the identical nuanced, self-critical author he was when he wrote “Goals From My Father” in his early 30s.
Though Mr. Obama says he didn’t have time as president to maintain an everyday journal, he would jot down accounts of essential moments as they transpired. Just like the time at a local weather summit in Copenhagen, when he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton crashed a gathering of the leaders of China, Brazil, India and South Africa as a result of they have been “avoiding me and a deal we have been attempting to dealer that may, in the end, a few years later, result in the Paris Accords.” After the assembly, he wrote down what had been mentioned and what the scene felt like — he knew it was a very good story.
‘You simply must get began. You simply put one thing down. As a result of nothing is extra terrifying than the clean web page.’
Whereas 20 years in the past, Mr. Obama says, he would have wanted a military of researchers to assist him with a presidential memoir, the web meant he might merely “faucet in ‘Obama’ after which the date or the problem, and pull up each contemporaneous article — or my very own speeches, or my very own schedule, or my very own appearances — straight away.” The precise writing remained a painful course of, requiring him to essentially “work at it” and “grind it out.”
“It is a actually essential piece of enterprise that I’ve tried to transmit to my women and anyone who asks me about writing,” he says. “You simply must get began. You simply put one thing down. As a result of nothing is extra terrifying than the clean web page.”
Mr. Obama wrote “A Promised Land” — the first of two volumes about his presidency — a lot the identical method he’s labored on speeches and earlier books. As a result of he thinks the pc can lend “half-baked ideas the masks of tidiness,” he writes his first drafts longhand on yellow authorized pads; the act of typing it into the pc primarily turns into a primary edit. He says he’s “very explicit” about his pens, at all times utilizing black Uni-ball Imaginative and prescient Elite rollerball pens with a micro-point, and provides that he tends to do his greatest writing between 10 p.m. and a pair of a.m.: “I discover that the world narrows, and that’s good for my creativeness. It’s virtually as if there’s a darkness throughout and there’s a metaphorical beam of sunshine down on the desk, onto the web page.”
