I have prided myself with striving for objectivity, something many literary-minded critics dismiss as impossible. But in Washington, reporters are practically the only people who actually spend time talking to Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, and I find the longer I report in Washington, the mushier and less conclusive my own views are. I like it that way.
Liberals in the US don't have great passions about Margaret Thatcher. Conservatives do. For all the worship that Ronald Reagan elicits in conservative circles in the US, I would venture that Thatcher did far more to reshape British society than Reagan did here. When I moved to Britain, the utilities were state-run. By the time I left, most of that was privatized. Thatcher had broken the miners' union, all but crushed the Labour Party, cut back the welfare state, even flirted with a poll tax. In the circles I ran in, Reagan was mocked as a childish dolt. Thatcher was despised.
I was very conscious of race as I was writing. I was lucky to have spent real time in Portuguese Africa, but I am white and my main characters are white, outsiders at sea in the "Dark Continent."
Thatcher had broken the miners' union, all but crushed the Labour Party, dramatically cut back the welfare state, even flirted with a poll tax. In the circles I ran in, Reagan was mocked as a childish dolt. Thatcher was despised.
For all the worship that Ronald Reagan elicits in conservative circles in the United States, I would venture that Thatcher did far more to reshape British society than Reagan did here.
I hope I will get to novelize my present circumstances at some point. I have some great stories to tell.
Novelists may be able to seek advice from readers and editors, but in the end, it is up to them to get the book right.
I have always had a hard time revising my work as a journalist, which was never much of a problem. You always have editors as backstops. Their job is to perfect your story. Most of them want to be useful.
I am not trying to be young again. But I do feel the need to capture that energy in story form before it slips from my mind, to recount those adventures if not relive them.
One of the great sadnesses of my life, as I take stock at middle age, is the sense that the adventure largely ended by the time I was twenty-five.
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, but usually fiction is just better.
It is simply much easier to infuse life, feeling, and higher truth into a novel than a non-fiction work, to find the license to write truth without being wedded to fact.
There is, in my mind, no higher compliment to pay a non-fiction book than to say it reads like a novel.
I was very disciplined when home - lights out for the girls at 9:00, two hours of writing for me. It was murder on my marriage.
The professions of novelist and journalist are very separate. As a novelist, you are ultimately working for yourself. Yes, you need the approval of a publisher and an audience, but what is valued in fiction writing - style, individual voice, insight - is scorned by the editor who is combing through your newspaper article.
History - the non-fiction version - must inform the fiction to make it truthful; too much of it and your genres are colliding.
