Getting It Right

                                                                    Milton C. Toby photograph

By Milton C. Toby

Writing nonfiction is, for me at any rate, a very research-intensive pursuit. I learned the ropes from Kent Hollingsworth and Ed Bowen, my editors during a dozen years at Blood-Horse magazine, and they both were sticklers for accuracy in reporting. I took their lessons to heart, to the point that I typically spend at least as much time researching a topic as I do writing about it. Sometimes the ratio of research-to-writing is skewed heavily toward fact-finding.

When the research goes well, the writing usually moves along at a relatively smooth and comfortable pace. When the writing bogs down, on the other hand, the reason often is that I don't have enough information. This is when I stare blankly at my computer screen and envy my fiction author friends who have the luxury of making something up to write themselves out of a corner.

After Dancer's Image was disqualified, owner Peter Fuller put
 up a bill board in a pasture at his New Hampshire farm
proclaiming that his horse remained a Derby winner.
The billboard is still there. Photo by Roberta Dwyer,
copyright 2011, all rights reserved.

If it sounds as if I'm knocking the research skills of fiction authors, I'm not. Many fiction genres require extensive research and my hat is off to authors who can weave a batch of sterile facts into a compelling story. I try to do the same thing with my nonfiction, to make the usually difficult leap from reporting to storytelling. Sometimes it works, sometimes not so much. The balance between success and failure often turns on research help from an unexpected source.

The story of Dancer's Image and his controversial disqualification for a drug positive in the 1968 Kentucky Derby focused on the proceedings at a lengthy hearing before the state racing commission. Without the transcript of the hearing--some 400-plus pages--there were serious gaps in the story and how I could tell it. The problem was that, more than 40 years after the fact, none of the usual sources had a complete copy of the transcript-- not the attorneys involved, not the appellate court, not the state racing commission, not the court reporters.

Working at the Keeneland Library with a deadline looming for my book about Dancer's Image, I found myself trying to write around the gaps in what I knew about happened at the racing commission hearing. The Keeneland Library is a wonderful treasure trove of information about Thoroughbred racing. Director Becky Ryder and Librarian Cathy Schenck are among the most knowledgeable and helpful people on the planet. A few months ago, Cathy was named winner of the prestigious National Turf Writers and Broadcasters 2015 Joe Palmer Award for meritorious service to racing. Way to go, Cathy!

Winner of the Dr. Tony Ryan Award for
the best book about Thoroughbred racing and an
American Horse Publications Editorial Award
for the best equine book of the year.

Another of the librarians, Phyllis Rogers, asked what I was working on. I explained about the Dancer's Image book project. She nodded, said there was "something you probably need to see," and vanished into the cavernous back part of the building reserved for storage. She returned a few minutes later with a battered cardboard file box covered in dust. It was apparent that no one had opened the box for years, probably for decades.

Inside was the complete transcript of the hearing. I was flabbergasted. I had given up on ever seeing the entire transcript and for some reason it never occurred to me to look in the most logical place of all, a library devoted to preserving the history of Thoroughbred racing.

Conventional wisdom holds that writing is a solitary activity, and that's true. Writing this, I'm sitting at my computer in the company of Plumpkin and Sherlock, our two rescue cats. (I count this as a solitary activity due to the almost complete disdain shown my work by the felines.) Effective research, on the other hand, takes a village. For me, The Keeneland Library and the staff are essential parts of my village.

The Review Conundrum

                                                                     Milton C. Toby photo

by Milton C. Toby

Book reviews come with an inherent contradiction that I have never managed to sort out to my satisfaction. We love the good reviews and pass them around shamelessly to anyone who’ll pay attention, while hating and hiding, as best we can, the bad ones. The mostly unspoken assumption is that the author of a favorable review is erudite, intelligent, and discriminating, a literary heavyweight whose opinion matters. A bad review, on the other hand, almost certainly was written by a person residing somewhere south of us on the evolutionary scale, a knuckle-dragger whose opinion can be safely ignored.

But does the perceived distinction between a good review and a bad one actually make sense? Probably not. (I’m ignoring the trolls who surf the internet and post scathing reviews just for the sake of making authors miserable. The trolls truly are the bottom-feeders of social media!)

I enjoy a good review as much as anyone, but the satisfaction is fleeting. The critical reviews, on the other hand, have been far more valuable.

Dance’s Image: The Forgotten Story of the 1968 Kentucky Derby, was an award winner with positive reviews—all except one. In a post-Derby epilogue I summarized the career of Hall of Fame jockey Bobby Ussery, who won the 1967 Kentucky Derby with longshot Proud Clarion and who finished first in the 1968 running. Although Dancer’s Image subsequently was disqualified for a controversial medication positive, Bobby Ussery still thinks of himself (rightly in my opinion) as the winner of back-to-back runnings of the most famous race in the world. I named the other back-to-back winners—it’s s short list—but in the process somehow managed to leave out the most obvious one, Ron Turcotte, rider of Riva Ridge and Secretariat.

The 1968 Kentucky Derby            George Featherston/Keeneland Library photo

One Amazon reviewer who happened to be a big fan of Turcotte’s took me to task over the omission. Getting a fact wrong is the kiss of death for a nonfiction author, and I was annoyed and suitably humbled by the one-star review. But I got over it. The bad review hurt, but it gave me the opportunity to correct the error for the book’s second printing.

A "good book, but . . ." review for Noor: A Champion Thoroughbred’s Unlikely Journey from California to Kentucky, proved to be even more valuable. The reviewer pointed out a couple of minor—but annoying nonetheless—factual errors. The review again gave me the opportunity to have the errors corrected, but it also demonstrated a fundamental shortcoming in my writing process.

I needed an independent fact-checker who knew the minutia of Thoroughbred racing and who was willing to pick through a manuscript with an eye for errors that neither I nor my advance readers noticed. I contacted the reviewer, thanked her for pointing out the issues with Noor, and asked her to check the facts in my next book, Cañonero II: The Rags to Riches Story of the Kentucky Derby’s Most Improbable Winner. She did a great job vetting the facts in Cañonero II and has agreed to serve as fact-checker on a book my agent is shopping around now, a history of racing’s addiction to performance enhancing drugs. I never would have connected with Val if not for a critical review.

In the end, a book review—good, bad, or indifferent—is what it is, one person’s opinion that we as authors can do with as we please.

Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien perhaps said it best:

“Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.”

If you’re an author, how do you balance the good reviews with the bad? If you’re a reader, how important are reviews to your book selections?

Bylines, Books & Blogs

                                                                     Copyright Milton C. Toby

Memories of a first byline, like those of a first love, tend to linger.

My first job out of college found me as the number-two staff writer in a two-person sports department at the Standard, a small daily newspaper in Aiken, South Carolina. We covered the Masters golf tournament because it was next door in Augusta, Georgia; high school sports; the University of South Carolina Gamecocks and the local community college teams; an astonishing number of bowling leagues—and, thankfully, horse racing. Aiken was a major winter training center before the advent of year-around racing, and good horses like Palace Malice still show up there from time to time to recover from a hard campaign.

Early on a Thursday, my fourth day on the job, the sports editor motioned with a hand in my direction.

“We need an article about the horses running in the Belmont Stakes on Saturday, the ones that wintered in Aiken,” he said. The deadline was 10:00a.m., three hours away. I had no clue which horses those might be or how to track down their trainers on the backstretch of a race track that in pre-Internet days was so far away from Aiken that it might as well have been on another planet. My problems were compounded by a couple of obvious shortcomings for a reporter: I had not the slightest idea how to write a newspaper article—I’d heard of the “Five Ws,” the basics of information gathering, but my undergraduate degree was in animal science, not journalism—and I lacked even a basic ability to type.

Against all odds, things turned out okay.

The article with my first byline ran on page 1 that day, albeit below the fold; Greentree Stable’s Ruritania, an Aiken-trained longshot, ran a creditable second in the Belmont, seven lengths behind winner Riva Ridge; and 44 years later I’m still writing about Thoroughbred racing. With the help of www.newspapers.com, a research tool I use almost daily, I tracked down the article. It’s good, not great, but better than it had any right to be.

I left Aiken the next spring for a 12-year run at The Blood-Horse magazine, where I covered racing in the United States and made trips abroad for the Grand National Steeplechase, the Japan Cup, and the Caribbean Classic in Panama. My first of 125 magazine covers for The Blood-Horse was an image of Secretariat’s first foal.

Bill Straus photo

I wrote about racing in Asia (I was at Sha Tin in Hong Kong for Lester Piggott’s last ride) and Latin America during six years living abroad, and I continued freelancing after a return to the States for law school. My eight nonfiction books include national award winners Dancer’s Image and Noor, a biography of the champion filly Ruffian, and The Complete Equine Legal & Business Handbook, which is used in several college undergraduate equine law courses, including the one I teach at the University of Louisville’s Equine Industry Program.

After a break from three years’ weekly blogging about equine law at www.thehorse.com, I’m excited about joining my colleagues, and learning from them, at Horse Crossings. I’ll be sharing my thoughts about writing nonfiction (because that’s what I do, and because editors and agents haven’t recognized the merits of the two novels gathering dust on a shelf in my office), new projects, research, publishing contracts, copyright, finding an agent, racing, and horses.

And, no, I still haven’t learned how to type without staring at the keyboard.