Ann Coulter has written a new book - Godless: The Church of Liberalism. TownHall has published most of chapter one. In what I suspect will be the first of several interviews to be noted in this blog, I found interesting her explanation of how she writes:
When I was writing High Crimes and Misdemeanors, the magnificent writer Joe Sobran gave me the greatest advice a writer could ever get. I called him in desperation, because I was pulling my hair out trying to write the Whitewater chapter. I explained to him that the reason Whitewater was so hard to write about was that the financial transactions comprising Whitewater were incredibly complicated—and they were complicated for a reason: to hide what was really going on. After I whined for about five minutes about how impossible this made it to explain the scandal, Joe told me to write down exactly what I had just said to him—in fact, to write the entire chapter like I was writing an e-mail to him. I did, and the Economist (written by the only economists on earth who liked Hillary’s health care plan) described it as one of the clearest explanations of the Whitewater scandal out there.
So now I write everything like I’m e-mailing one of my friends—often a friend I’ve been arguing with about whatever I am writing. I think the writing is better, and it’s a lot more fun.
Also, I noticed that when I e-mailed my friends asking them to explain some point of law to me so I could put it in my book, I’d get a lot of convoluted jargon that read like an 18th-Century legal brief. But when I sent them an e-mail casually asking, “Hey, what do you think of William Ginsberg [Monica Lewinsky’s attorney]?” I would get back some of the most beautiful prose ever written. So I recommend to all writers that they write like they’re sending an e-mail to a friend—or enemy, for some really punchy writing.