How does one go from being a novelist to speech writer to book reviewer for the Washington Post?
I started out as a newspaper reporter and found out that I could take a lot of material, organize it, and write something in the time available. I think my talent is essentially journalistic and I’ve found that I can apply it to various genres. At thirty I started writing magazine articles for the The New York Times Magazine and others. Then I wrote my first book, which was nonfiction, about the White House staff. Then I wrote my first novel about a young man who worked on the White House staff. I’ve published nine novels and I think their strengths are essentially journalistic – good dialogue, fast pace, plots that makes sense. (They have some weaknesses too.) I think that if you can write a magazine article or a book you shouldn’t have much trouble writing a speech. The hard part isn’t the writing, the hard part is keeping your sanity in the political world, which I more or less did in a couple of campaigns, most notably the Carter campaign of 1976, which I wrote about in a book call
