Lyndon Johnson Biographer Robert Caro's Writing Suggestion

The other day I was listening to my local Public Radio station and they were interviewing Robert Caro, best known for his series of biographies about former president Lyndon Baines Johnson.  He was promoting his new book Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing and the discussion went back and forth between Johnson's presidency, his early life, and Caro's philosophy about writing.  With me being a history buff and having first broken into a sense of political awareness while still a little kid during Johnson's presidency in the mid-to-late 1960s, Caro was riveting with some of the stories.  But what made this interview memorable was his revelation about writing...

When Robert Caro was in college, he attended a creative writing course in which his professor assigned the students one short story per week.  Being a procrastinating crammer by nature as well as a gifted writer, Caro would wait until the night before it was due, conjure up a tale, and whip up a paper...always receiving a good grade.  But at the end his professor admonished him, saying that he needed to slow his writing down if he wanted to truly be great in the craft.  Later, while working as a journalist, Caro naturally had to write fast and to the point.  But when he set out to produce a book, he decided to write out his first drafts in longhand, which he says slowed down his writing enough to allow more of his thoughts to come through and influence it. That struck me as I had been under the impression that undertaking any lengthy, ambitious writing venture would naturally entail wanting to speed up the writing process...but Robert Caro's comments do make sense, now that I look at it...

I am so accustomed now to writing on a keyboard now that the idea of taking out pen and paper seems to be a challenge...after all, it's a lot easier to edit my spelling, grammar, and word choices in a word processor setting.   But I don't see why I necessarily have to abandon the computer with my writing.  Instead, since the goal is to slow things down, I could develop and employ a writing structure that forces me to pause and reflect on what I am writing and allow ideas that enrich the text to arise from the dark recesses of my mind.  Worth pursuing...