“I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.” – Tracy Kidder
John "Tracy"
Kidder turns 76 today, and I thought about him during yesterday’s Veterans Day
activities and while working on a writing project for Research Computing at CU
Boulder. A Vietnam War veteran, Kidder
is very well known in the computing world for the work that won him the
Pulitzer Prize, The
Soul of a New Machine, an account of
the development of Data General's Eclipse/MV minicomputer.
While that is Kidder’s prize winner,
I think his book House might be even
more deserving. Kidder, who lives in
Williamsburg, Mass., said he hit on the idea of writing a book about the trials
and tribulations of building lawyer Jonathan Souweine's Amherst, Mass., home
while following some local carpenters around.
His hundreds of hours of research
and interviews with everyone from the architect to Souweine’s in-laws to, of
course, the builders, shows how ordinary parts of our lives can be brought into
extraordinary focus through a writer’s portrayal.
In an essay, Kidder wrote:
"In fiction, believability may have nothing to do with reality or even
plausibility. (But) It has everything to do with those things in nonfiction. I
think that the nonfiction writer's fundamental job is to make what is true
believable."
Kidder
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