The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  Nietzsche, in 1882, did “10 Rules for Writers,” confining himself to the subject of style. I saw the list about a year ago when a friend sent it from a culture site and instantly recognized and responded to four points. His first rule: “Of prime necessity is life: a style should live.” Yes, what you write must be alive. He said, “The richness of life reveals itself through a richness of gestures. One must learn to feel everything—the length and retardation of sentences… the choice of words, the pausing, the sequence of arguments—like gestures.” This, too, seems to me true though I never would have thought of it in precisely this way. I do something with what I write, always have, that I think is unusual. I read it from the top in my mind, with my voice though I’m not actually speaking. I do this over and over. If I stumble—if something stops me, if something makes me lose the thought I was trying to develop, if my mind wanders or jolts away—I go over it again to figure out what the problem is and how to refigure things to get it right.

  Another: “Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.” Yes, exactly, completely true. It matters that it’s not all dry and only cerebral, it matters that an idea is so real to you and so true to you that you feel it, and try also to communicate that feeling.

  “Strategy on the part of the good writer of prose consists of choosing his means for stepping close to poetry but never stepping into it.” Yes. I’m not even sure in a practical sense what this means but yes, I know what he means. Don’t get too fancy, too show-offy, too obscure, too reaching for the exquisite or unusual. That just removes you from your purpose. It’s a column, not a metaphysical exercise.

  * * *

  My editor said here that you want to see my writing. I don’t think you do. Do you? I am writing all week in that I am thinking all week and making notes on thoughts, conversations, events, observations. By Wednesday I usually know my topic and have begun typing my notes into a file. Thursday all day I write the column, and file about 5 p.m.

  It is my belief that deep down no writer knows precisely what he’s doing and is simply thinking, thinking, thinking—testing a thought and writing it down as quickly as possible so it doesn’t blot.

  Wherever I have lived I’ve always had a desk (in the living room, bedroom, TV room or now in a small home office). The desk is usually covered with pictures, drawings, mementos, quotes. The walls are covered in pictures of friends and people I admire, quotes tacked and taped up and some framed honorary doctorates to impress the stupid, including me, and in a way to impress my ancestors: We did OK.

  I look at the blank screen, the antic blinking cursor, glance at my notes, put my hands on the keyboard and go. I become good at the point my interest in what I’m trying to say overwhelms anxiety about how to say it. Desire to make a point defeats self-consciousness and lets things begin. “The words flow” is not something that happens to me. They never flow. They come out, are not right, are corrected. Or they come out right and are corrected into something inferior, at which point I try to remember what I originally wrote.

  While I work I listen to the news on TV or to movie music, the scores of films. This has been my habit for a quarter century. Why movie music? Because it is meant to help a story along and not be the story itself. If you’re listening to George Gershwin or Stephen Sondheim or a show or opera or album you love it’s too powerful, you’d listen and stop writing. Movie music is moving but doesn’t take you away from your work. All my life I have been moved by movie music—I mean from a young child watching endless repeats of 1930’s and 1940’s movies on “Million Dollar Movie,” broadcast on a local New York television station.

  * * *

  People ask the difference between column writing, book writing and speechwriting. In one sense they’re not different: You’re writing. You’re laying pipe only the pipes are thoughts, as John Gregory Dunne once said. But the best definition of writing I ever heard came from the great historian David McCullough, who said, in conversation, “To write is to think, and to write well is to think well.” You think about what you want to say, you clarify it, question it, then say it.

  A book demands a subject or theme that can be sustained over a few hundred pages. A book allows you to fully play out a thought, explain your ideas, establish a thesis, create a world the best you can. When I wrote What I Saw at the Revolution, my first book, I was trying to capture a whole world, what it was like to be in Washington, in the White House, at a dramatic time in history and see it truly but from the vantage point of an unimportant person, or an unknown one. It couldn’t have been a column or an essay—a world takes time.

  A book has a porous deadline. It’s not due at 5 p.m. Thursday, it’s due next April. This allows you to smooth out your work. Smoothing out for me means getting most quickly and directly to the point. A book is a more finished product but a less immediate one.

  A column is more immediate but in terms of space more confined. You have a given number of words to introduce a subject or subjects and convey your views. Columns are more distinguished by what you leave out. Their immediacy is both a boon and a curse. You’re in the fray, your thought is a provocation, maybe an addition, but you may get it wrong, and so wrong that two days later you’re sitting there with your head in your hands, moaning. When you get it right and you think you’ve added to the conversation, even expanded it, that is satisfying in a way that is hard to explain. But you feel you made a difference.

  A speech is a best-case case for somebody else, said as you think he or she would say it. What you bring as a writer and thinker is what you believe your principal agrees with and believes. You can take chances. If it’s not what they think, they’ll cut it. (There’s a chapter here on the writing of the Challenger speech; it includes a story of taking a chance based on a hunch that turned out to be right.) If you are writing for a president or major political figure, the impact of your work will be broad and deep—the words will be remembered, because everything a president says is historically important and is heard.

  But at the end of the day, it’s all writing.

  * * *

  I want to go back to my early time writing a column on the Internet. As I said, I did not understand at the time that I was joining a pioneer generation of columnists, one whose readers read them only on screens, not in a paper. I was present at the creation of a new way of being a columnist. (At the same time, just after I began, a longtime syndicated columnist welcomed me to the ranks by noting I’d joined the last generation that would be able to make a living writing columns, because of the increasing number of voices freely available on a multiplying number of Web sites and platforms. So I’d be both a pioneer and one of the last of the Mohicans.)

  For perhaps a century a newspaper column was usually 800 or 900 words long, and was subject to strictures and limitation in terms of space and to some degree subject matter. If the columnist pleased or angered readers he would get letters. A reader would sit down, write a letter, find out where to send it, make out the envelope, get a stamp, walk down the street, mail it. It would be a private communication between the reader and the columnist.

  In the new world I could write as long as I liked about pretty much anything I liked, within the knowledge that this was going onto the site of the Wall Street Journal, which is not an antic publication and which, like the Times and other what-used-to-be-called broadsheets, has an appropriate sense of its own dignity.

  But letters were now comments, and they were immediate. If the column went up at 12:01, the first comment was online at 12:04, and would be followed by many more. No one had to get the piece of paper, find the stamp. They just had to hit reply and send. And the comments were public, listed under a column one after another, on comment threads. And more often than not the commenters wrote under anonymous names.

  I had been on the Web long enough to know this in the abstract, but when I first saw the comments under one of my columns all I could think was: Wow.

  What I wa
s looking at was a whole instant community. Hundreds and then thousands of people wrote in to agree or disagree, to say “great piece” and “stupid dumb article,” to add experiences, insights, witticisms. And they didn’t just disagree with me, they disagreed with each other and had flame wars. It was all kind of startling and wonderful.

  I’d been online for a while so my personal email address was kind of out there, and people would write me personally after each column. There was a woman who, early on, wrote to say she hoped I would have a brain aneurysm as that’s what people with views such as mine deserve. This was, in those early days, so surprising to me that I actually wrote back and told her it’s not nice to write someone and say you wish them dead or disabled. She wrote back explaining why I deserved crippling. I actually wrote back, she responded. Fifteen years later we’re still writing. I believe, though she’s never quite said it, that she no longer wishes me dead, and I kind of love her. She’s passionate and sincere—she’s a good woman. She’ll write and say she hopes I have a nice weekend and I’m wrong about Hillary and should be fired.

  There is the man who’d write every few weeks, denouncing my views and vowing never to read me again. A month later I’d write something that got him mad—“I will never read you again.” Months would pass, I’d write something enraging, he’d announce, clearly agitated, “I’m done reading you!” I finally wrote and said he’s going to make himself sick if he keeps reading me, he’s got to stop. He stopped writing. Then a few months later: “I’ll never read you again!”

  In time I would be the focus of email swarms arranged by political groups and encouraged by left-and right-wing Web sites—hundreds and thousands of comments would be launched my way, like arrows at Agincourt. I’d write something critical of George W. Bush and get swarmed with thousands of denunciations and insults; Hillary Clinton’s people would do the same, and Sarah Palin’s.

  * * *

  The new world allowed me to have better, more immediate knowledge than James Reston or Walter Lippmann were ever afforded that there are real human beings out there who are reading your thoughts, absorbing them and responding to them, and who through this come to have an actual relationship with you. It allowed me to have a relationship with them.

  The Web is personal. It is not detached or distanced. It is immediate. You are a person talking to and hearing from other persons. You have a real and actual dialogue going, not some phony conversation in which a politician nods while staged supporters mouth preplanned words but a real back-and-forth.

  * * *

  Some writers know who they’re writing to, some don’t. When my column was no longer only online but went into the newspaper, in 2006, I started hearing from a lot of couples who said, “We read you together in the morning.” This made me happy. It also gave me a picture of who I’m writing to. It’s Saturday morning, the Weekend Journal has hit the stoop. There’s a couple and they’re having coffee in the kitchen. It’s only an accident that I don’t know them, just a matter of circumstance that we’re not friends. They’re involved with life, have many responsibilities. They’re starting the day with the papers, turn to the op-ed page, give me a minute. I tell them what I’m thinking. Sometimes I sort of imagine their disagreement or questioning, and try to address it. I almost want to start with the words “Hi, everyone.” (My friend Kate O’Beirne once told me she’d like it if I began a paragraph with “As I was telling Kate…” I never managed that, but it is a chapter title of this book.)

  * * *

  I want to note a special challenge the Internet presents to both writers in general and women in particular.

  Writers have to proceed through life with an attitude of openness. They have to be available to thoughts, views, sensations. You have to let the experience of life sort of wash over and through you to do your job. But if you are on the net and writing regularly—especially about politics and culture, but not only—you are operating in a highly dramatic, immediate, emotional, partisan and ideological environment. It’s a sparky place full of attack and defend. And you can’t as a writer be so open as you walk forward that the invective and dislike enter your head and heart and disfigure your thinking. You can’t let your critics shape your conception of yourself. You have to try to not let it enter you… while still being open to what people are saying and life is doing. I think this is a big challenge for all writers now.

  So is the fact—this is a stylistic challenge—that irony, the wry aside, and certain kinds of satire have become dangerous for writers. If Jonathan Swift were writing now he’d be pilloried coast to coast as the man who believes we should solve the problem of hunger by eating babies. I’m not sure an H. L. Mencken would survive the new environment of literalism, decontextualizing and cultural correctness.

  I also believe—I have experienced—that the world of public disputation is harder and more challenging for women. One reason is that our culture has become grosser, and so people feel freer to be gross. The other is the special excitement, the particular and odd sense of provocation with which people respond, still, to a woman who puts herself forward to speak her views. Both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin are absolutely correct when they speak of the different, higher bars women in public face. I think of it as almost primordial: When cavemen were sitting in a circle ’round the fire grunting over where to hunt antelopes tomorrow, they probably started waving their clubs in highest anger when a particularly outspoken cavewoman voiced her opinion.

  What women inspire among their detractors on the Internet is often highly personal, intimate, and violative. Every woman in public life knows this. A few years ago there was a regular reader who had my email address and sometimes wrote. I saw after a while that his musings had turned dark: He’d begun obsessing about another columnist in a way that made me uneasy. I contacted her and forwarded the man’s emails, thinking her paper might have some sort of security apparatus. She wrote back immediately. No, she said, her paper offers no protection. A stalker had one night a year before found her home, rung her doorbell and demanded conversation. He was the same stalker, she said, who’d harassed another woman columnist.

  Women aren’t better columnists than men, men aren’t better than women, but when you judge their work it’s not unfair to factor in that women are operating under a degree of difficulty and a host of challenges their male counterparts in general are not.

  * * *

  All columnists both are critics and have critics. My columns have come under criticism in two general areas. The first is that I do not tell people how to think about issues but tell them instead how I think. This is true, and I can only say that as an approach it is in line with my nature and I suppose temperament. When I tell you my view it puts the onus on me—here’s my opinion, here’s why I hold it. I would be embarrassed to feel that I was speaking from some supposed height, lecturing, or imitating a detachment I do not feel. The second criticism is that I tell people how I feel and even write of how they feel, or I believe they feel. There’s truth in that, too, but here’s how I see it. We come at politics and cultural issues, all of us, as full individuals—thinking, judging, weighing, feeling, taking it all in. It seems to me both limited and unrealistic to concentrate solely on the supposed data points and synthetically prepared statements regarding a case when in fact politics is a full-body exercise involving all parts of the human being—mind, soul, intellect, emotions.

  I have been told there are some within my general profession who see my work as feminine and womanly. I hope by that they mean interesting and clear, but perhaps not. There are writers who believe their impenetrability and lack of liveliness is proof of their gravity. “I’m boring because I’m serious.” No, you’re boring because you’re boring. If you were serious you’d be interesting. Here I take the opportunity to upbraid them. I think they should be more serious and work harder—hone it down, make it matter, take a chance—instead of typing whatever enters their little noggins and then swanning about as public personages at sym
posia. I hope that wasn’t too emotional.

  * * *

  I think columnists—probably all writers but certainly columnists—are like baseball players in that they have good seasons and bad. They have hot streaks where they can’t not hit the ball. They have cold streaks: whiff, whiff, whiff. But baseball players know they’re in a streak when it’s happening, because of the stats. Writers only know in retrospect. I could see this as I went through the boxes from the warehouse. Columnists have different seasons in another way, too. Sometimes for a time you’re more soulful, sometimes more indignant or no-nonsense, sometimes fiery or amused. And you’re not in control of any of this and it lasts as long as it lasts, and again it’s only clear in retrospect.

  * * *

  I suppose the columnist who made the greatest impression on me is William Safire of the New York Times, who befriended me when I entered the Reagan White House. He had once been a speechwriter for Richard Nixon, so we had speechwriting in common. He urged me many times to be a columnist. He was more ambitious for me than I was.

  His writing style didn’t make a huge impression on me: It was his own, breezy, occasionally impassioned, more often marked by a light touch. He was sometimes unjust, sometimes scrupulously balanced. What really made an impression on me was Bill himself. He was funny, affectionate, practical about his work, not at all pretentious. He gave me the best advice I ever got as a writer, which is never to feel guilty about how much you read. Even though you’re enjoying it doesn’t mean you’re just having fun—you’re doing what you have to do to do what you do. When I worked for President Reagan and he was going to a battlefield I’d read 20 books about what happened there. People would come to my office, I’d be reading, they’d tap on the open door and say, “I’m glad you’re not busy.” Most of what I read wouldn’t wind up in the speech, but I needed to know as much as possible to write with a feeling of some authority—and I needed to know what I was leaving out, and why. I had to leave it out with confidence, not out of ignorance. Anyway, Bill told me all that was good, and his advice has helped me every single day since 1984.