When you’ve been working on a book like Balanchine and Kirstein’s American Enterprise, the real story of what happened during George Balanchine‘s first decade in the United States, you accumulate a lot of information. To give you an idea of what I mean, below is a screenshot of my Finder window. This is the “periodicals” folder of my dissertation files, showing all of the newspapers and magazines I consulted. And in this frame you can can see all of the clips I downloaded from just one newspaper, the New York Herald-Tribune (published from 1924 to 1966). You actually can’t see all of the clips in this shot – you would need to scroll up and down to see them all! While gathering all of this information is important for the overall research process, when it comes time to write you can’t include every single detail or you’d get in trouble with your editor for blowing past your word count!

Similarly, when you go to look at sources in an archive you can sometimes get really lucky. Almost too lucky! One of my most important sources was one held at the New York Public Library’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division at Lincoln Center, one of the world’s largest archives for dance research. These were scrapbooks collected by Yvonne Patterson and William Dollar, two dancers who worked closely with Balanchine in the 1930s. They kept hundreds of clippings, programs, photographs, advertisements, and fliers about the many projects and performances they were involved with. Many of these items are in quite fragile condition so I felt fortunate to be able to consult them first hand. But as you can see from this screenshot showing all of the reference photos I took, I could have written a whole book just from this one collection if I had used every last bit of info I found! (Most archives thankfully allow researchers to take photos of items like these, so you can gather information efficiently and consult and process them later. However, these photos are for each researcher’s personal reference only.)

My book is going to be over 300 pages long, and has over 1,300 footnotes, so it’s not as all of this research was for naught! But since my editor gave me a word limit of 120,000 words, I had to make choices and leave some details out. But to make myself feel better about having collected all this information, I’ve decided to embark on a special Twitter project for the next few months. You can follow me @jpsteichen to join the journey.

What I’ll be doing is tweeting “On this day…” updates on a semi-daily basis. I got a head start yesterday on the Fourth of July, when I tweeted this:

So starting Sunday, July 8 I’ll be doing more of this, telling you what George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein were up to on any given day between 1933 and 1940, the years covered by my book.  It might seem like a lot of random information–I’ll be telling you when Balanchine and Kirstein traveled and had planning sessions, what high school gymnasiums and vaudeville theaters the American Ballet and Ballet Caravan performed in, and when now-lost ballets were danced for the first or last time. But this is what the research process is all about–finding and making sense out of a lot of small bits of information and sorting through to figure out which ones are most important. And most important, as a writer you then have to weave them into a narrative that makes it possible for a reader to understand why they are important. So I hope you enjoy seeing all of the small bits of data that went into this new story. And there is even more where these came from.

To make sure you don’t miss any “On this day…” tweets about George Balanchine’s career in the 1930s, follow me today @jpsteichen.