When I write a book, I don't have a plan or an outline. The characters move the action, and the action develops the characters. When I write a book, I become an actor, really, taking the role of the person who is speaking or acting at the time, and so their reactions to whatever they see are my reactions.
Writing history and biography for kids calls for special skills that can only be acquired through practice and that are different from those required for an adult audience.
Anyone writing a picture-book biography of Lincoln has a different set of responsibilities from someone writing a biography for sixth-graders, say, or from a Lincoln scholar writing an academic book on Lincoln. Each of these writers has a different audience and different goals. That's obvious.
I try to find clues in the documented record - from the subject's own testimony, from the testimony of other people. When you're writing a biography, you're trying to understand your subject in the same way that you try to understand one of your friends, and that effort at understanding is always very imperfect.
I'd like to ask Eleanor Roosevelt what she regrets most, because I think that might reveal something that I didn't catch on to while I was writing my book and, hopefully, that would start a conversation.
Digging up new information and speculating on it isn't your primary purpose when you're writing a biography intended for young readers, unless you find compelling evidence that departs from the accepted wisdom. A biography for young people calls for the demanding art of distillation, the art of storytelling, and your responsibility is to stick as closely as possible to the documented record.
Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.
And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
The way I feel about every book is this: you don't finish it, you abandon it. All of my books have in some sense failed, otherwise I wouldn't write another one. If I wrote the perfect book, I wouldn't have to write again, and I wouldn't want to. That's not true for everyone, but it's true for me. I could walk away then. But so far I haven't managed to do it.
There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism's problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance.
When I write I just keep a waste paper basket handy in case I am experiencing a block.
When you write a novel you have to live with the characters for a long time. So I prefer short stories. I never wrote anything more than 250 pages.
These people that write books on how to succeed and how to think positively make millions because it's something that doesn't occur naturally.
Hillary Clinton doesn't know how to counterprogram Trump, if you will. Hillary doesn't know how to go out and write her own narrative of the day. Hillary doesn't know whether to focus on herself or to criticize Trump or to go after Crazy Bernie. She doesn't know what to do. And the press doesn't, either.
I mean, I don't care what Drive-Bys write about local issues and all that. But I'm talking about this kind of stuff, national issues of great importance. I do not believe.
It is true that the Drive-By Media is not spending a lot of time covering the Donald Trump Middle East trip. The reason is, they don't want to write or televise any of this because it's in such stark contrast to the pictures they've been painting of Trump. It's so incongruent. It's so inconsistent. In addition to all else, it is the protection of the Barack Obama legacy.
If I had the ability to influence people all over the world just by speaking or writing, one of my objectives would be find out how America became special and then tell everybody.
Here's the point - and Jonah Goldberg reminds us of this. He wrote a blog post that was titled "The MacGuffinization of American Politics." Do you know what a MacGuffin is? "'In a movie or book, 'The MacGuffin' is the thing the hero wants,' Ace writes." So in the Maltese Falcon, for example, the hero wants the Maltese Falcon, but there's always somebody trying to stop the hero from getting what he wants.
How do you think we have the home mortgage deduction? We have it because way back when it was determined that the American dream equaled home ownership. And everybody knows that the vast majority of the American people will never be able to write a check for a house. You have to finance it.
It's easy to be pessimistic. Nobody needs to be taught how. You don't need to buy a book on it. You don't need to go to classes to learn how to be pessimistic. But you do read books on how to think positively, and people who write them become very rich because it takes effort.
We've defined decency down now that we look at the entertainment value of it, whether the acting is good, the writing is good, the story is good, no matter the depravity, we'll watch it.
There hasn't been anybody else write a Constitution like Madison. There just hasn't been, because that person hasn't existed anywhere but here.
I read every screenplay that was being sent to the other directors. None were being sent to me, but I was reading what others were choosing and what the best writers were writing.
I think writing for a world one has invented can be infinitely more interesting than writing for the world we've all inherited.
Every songwriter lives to have at least one song that a cab driver who asks 'You write anything I know?' will recognize.
