Being a Writer

Let's talk about your work as a writer. As a columnist for the Washington Post who writes with, I must say, a lucidity -- a simple statement of a problem linked to real people's lives -- I get the sense that a column for you is a form of participation in a national conversation, not unlike the conversation you had in your hometown.

I sometimes joke that, for better or worse, I was trained from a young age for this kind of work. And it is true. I think different columns do different things. Over time, you develop a sense of who your readers are; you know what they're looking for. It's an interesting problem for columnists because you discover over time, because nice people write you letters, that you're speaking for some group of people, that some set of people come to identify with you. Mary McGrory, again, to cite her, said sometimes she thought she was writing columns in certain periods to make certain people feel better, because they felt better knowing somebody who had some view similar to theirs. And that's good, but, again, that's not sufficient, because sometimes you want to challenge people, you don't want to be entirely predictable, you don't want to become a prisoner of the predictability that I get criticized for in my earlier books. Sometimes you want to challenge even the people who agree with you. So that's one tension.

Another tension is how can you be tough and unequivocal and also reasonable. I don't like endless, harsh personal attacks, and yet I don't like a wishy-washy columnist. When you're a columnist up against a newspaper reporter, you're there to present a strong point of view. For me it's been a struggle. I've been doing this now for almost eight years; there's the old journalist side of me that says, "You've got to be fair to both sides." Writing a column is a different enterprise. So I've been trying to learn how I can -- and I'm sure I've executed this very imperfectly -- but how I can maintain the sense that the facts have to be right. People who disagree with you should come to it and at least say, "Well, he's not distorting what I think, even though he disagrees with what I think." How can you do all that and yet still take strong opinions?

The recount of the Bush - Gore fight in Florida will, I think, turn out to be, for me, personally, an important moment. Because I really did get angry. I was very unhappy with what happened. I actually wrote in a column, "Please permit me a personal statement. I'm surprised at how angry I am about this." For me, Florida is when I fully accepted that I was a columnist still trying to tell the truth, still trying to elucidate the argument, but that there was a time when you simply had to say, "I believe this is true, and I'm going to fight for it."

We had Connor Cruise O'Brien here, and we talked about this dichotomy between rationality and passion. He said, "You have to think about the issues, but the feelings precede the thought as it were, and then of course, are qualified by the thought." Does that kind of process go on in your mind in that way, or a different way?

I don't know if I would want to pretend to that profundity. That's a very nice formulation. I probably trust reason more than I trust passion, and that's probably just deep inside me in some way. I'm sometimes suspicious of passion. I guess the word I'd like better than passion might be commitment, or it might even be loyalty, where you're concerned about groups of people, you're concerned about certain conditions, you're concerned about certain values, and those inform your use of reason. And you pray that those personal and intellectual and philosophical commitments don't get in the way of your capacity to reason. That's probably also kind of Catholic, too.

Is writing hard for you, or do your words flow easily?

I enjoy writing, I've always loved writing. I've never regarded myself, and do not today regard myself, as a great writer. I think I'm a clear writer. The essays I'm reading that I like best are Orwell's essays, Politics and the English Language, and Why I Write. And Why I Write is very interesting, because Orwell said, "I wrote best when I really cared passionately about a question, especially a political question."

I find that writing doesn't come with difficulty, but there are moments when I sit down and I'm an inveterate reviser, in that I constantly look at a sentence I write, even after the column is in print, and I say "Why didn't I change that word? Why didn't I change it? Why did I use that clunky phrase?" Even today, before we got together, I had to edit a column with my editor, and we do this over the phone. And right until the moment we hung up the phone, I found myself changing a word here or there. So to get the basic idea down, to get a set of sentences that I like down, is not difficult. Different people have different methods, some people I admire greatly produce very nearly perfect sentences the first time around, and never have to touch them. That's not me. And the process of revision is fun. In fact, my son is in a class where there's a lot of emphasis on writing, and the teacher has asked me to come in and talk about revision. I think what I'm going to do is take a passage of Harry Potter, and talk about what that passage might have looked like five drafts earlier, and how do you get from there to here. So that tends to be the way I like to write.

The other problem with the column is how good is your idea on any given day. And how deep is your well of ideas on days when nothing obvious hits you. Do you have some thoughts, ideas, subjects, you want to write about that carry you on those days? That's an interesting challenge. The good thing about it is people give you ideas all the time either because they know you write a column or because you run into some smart person who suddenly makes you see the world in a way you didn't before, see some event in a different way.

You talk a lot with influential people in Washington on the one hand, but I get the sense that you're also talking, you're out on the hustings, so to speak, listening to average people and what their concerns are, and you're, in essence, trying to mediate these two ...

That's a really nice thing to say. I probably don't do it nearly enough. I do like to go out in the country. In fact, I've traveled somewhat less because I now have three little kids and travel looks a little different when you have kids. It's voluntary on my part; I like being with them. But during the campaign I did try. I tried to get out and around the country as much as is possible. And I do enjoy it. I find it satisfying, like that little Gallup Police column. I'm not sure that column had any sort of profound insights in it at all, and yet I tremendously enjoyed just dropping into the community and listening to the way people talk about politics, and the difference between that and the way we do in Washington. I'm not a basher of "inside the beltway," that is a term used by some people inside the beltway to bash other people inside the beltway. I think it's a phony distinction to some degree, but there is a difference between the way a person, whether inside or outside the beltway, who is not a professional may talk about politics over the fence, and the way those of us either in the media or in politics might talk about the same set of questions.

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