Tony Horwitz worked for many years as a reporter, first in Indiana and then during a decade overseas in Australia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, mostly covering wars and conflicts as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. After returning to the States, he won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker before becoming a full-time author. His books include Baghdad Without a Map, a national bestseller about the Middle East; Confederates in the Attic, a national and New York Times bestseller about the Civil War; and Blue Latitudes, a national and New York Times bestseller about the Pacific voyages of Captain James Cook.

Where do your ideas come from? Do you just stumble upon them?

Yeah, in my case, I do just stumble on the idea. I know there are people who consciously go out and look for book ideas. Mine tend to arise from left field while I’m looking for something else. All of my books generally begin with strange encounters of one kind or another that kind of lodge in my mind and then I gradually begin to think, Hmm, that might be the starting point for a book, which I guess partly reflects my technique or lack of it. I tend to wander into books, and also previously into journalism, without a clear idea of where I’m headed. And that’s how I like to operate. So my book ideas begin as just a general idea of something I want to explore rather than a fully formed book proposal.

In your last three books you reconstruct the past and retrace history through these journeys. How did you decide that would be your technique?

Again, there really wasn’t a conscious plan or decision. I was really still a working journalist when I wrote Confederates and just essentially stumbled into this story that I wanted to tell, and I ended up taking a book leave from my job [New York Times reporter]. I was really exploring the past as a journalist, a reporter with history as my beat. The last two books perhaps have drifted more into some kind of hybrid between past and present. Most of Confederates takes place in the present, but it’s using the past as a jumping-off point into the present. I think I’ve gradually moved more in the direction of really exploring the past, not as a traditional historian but getting deeper and deeper into what happened back then rather than my own antics in historical places or exploring memory of the past, which are the two things I really worked with in Confederates. So it’s just been a sort of natural drift rather than any careful plan. A Voyage Long and Strange is in many ways a sequel to Blue Latitudes – I don’t know if sequel is the right word because it takes place several hundred years earlier, but maybe a companion piece, exploring the same theme but in a different century and in a different hemisphere.

Is it more difficult being a nonfiction writer than a reporter or vice versa?

There’s a lot of overlap between being a newspaper reporter and a book writer. I think if you substitute research for reporting, you’re doing much the same thing. You’re going out and gathering as much material as you can, trying to determine what the truth is and then figuring out a way to tell the story. But there’s obviously a lot more freedom as a book writer. As a journalist you’re really trained not to use “I” in a story unless it’s absolutely necessary. You’re supposed to be objective and you always have to get the other side of the story. You’re under none of those obligations when you’re writing nonfiction in book form, particularly the kind of books that I do where I’m in them. So, in that sense, I would say that it’s easier. What’s much harder, of course, is that it’s a marathon compared to the sprint of daily journalism where you typically spend only a few hours on a story, sometimes only a few days. At the Wall Street Journal I was lucky enough to spend weeks and occasionally months on a story, but still it’s nothing like the stamina required to do a book. I do sometimes wish I could write something for tomorrow’s paper instead of for spring 2012. There’s the instant gratification of daily journalism and the feeling or the illusion that you might be changing things at times.

Next Page »