How I Finished Barack Obama?s Biography

?After two and a half years of research and a year of writing, I could at last see how I might make it to the end of the manuscript that would become Barack Obama: The Story. On the morning of Sept. 14, 2011?a few days after interviewing President Obama at the White House?I turned to the hard-paper artist?s pad that I always keep next to me on my desk as I?m writing and scratched out a day-by-day plan for the final 40 days to meet my deadline. I never miss deadlines.

Even then, as the book neared its end, I was getting new information. I never stop reporting until the book is going to print. So in this sprint to the end I was adding things here and there to Chapter 9, reshaping Chapters 16 and 17 to accommodate new information, and finishing the second half of the 21,000-word Chapter 18, before spending another week at the end in a last round of fact-checking and polishing. ?Forty days virtually nonstop, from 6 a.m. ?to 10 p.m. many days, with one day off to play golf and watch football, and two days away to give speeches in Fond du Lac and Milwaukee, Wisc.? In those 40 days, I finished two chapters and polished the rest. I wrote the final paragraph on Oct. 23, a Sunday. I have written 10 books, and the feelings at the end are the same every time: exhaustion, relief, joy, and somehow surprise?not emptiness but shock that the work is over.

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