Megan McArdle and I don't agree on a great deal about what the world should look like. But we do agree that we don't like Sarah Palin—mainly because she doesn't like us. Dropping her name in a (virtual) room of city-bred eggheads with ovaries is like aiming one nuclear warhead at another. We can't coexist with Palin because we are full of contempt for the choices she is making or has made. Not a great stimulus for insightful debate. Megan and I made a go of it anyway, chatting about Palin's new memoir, Going Rogue, without being too insulting, I think. We touched on the Newsweek cover kerfuffle, the Oprah interview, the crazy-cakes July resignation speech, and the future of the Republican party. Watch:

By way of summarizing and deepening the conversation, let me repeat that part of my bewilderment with Palin is that, while she has every right to enter the free-market space and to write a book that will make her money in the midst of a recession (of which she intentionally made herself a victim), she isn't even pretending to be a politician anymore. It's all celebrity (thank you, John McCain). Her influence, let's recall, is primarily Facebook-based. What's more, she hasn't used her substantial platform to hammer down poles for a political tent under which her followers can gather—or to which her detractors can set fire. No fair!

If she's really interested in politics or policy, or, God forbid, higher office in future, she'd have been better served by writing a "here's what I believe" kind of book (like Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope), rather than a desperate spin job about past events. Obama providing a complicated case in point, I suspect celebrity alone can't carry you to the presidency.

Megan and I also speak at length about terrorism, the Stupak amendment (whose language has since been scrapped from the Senate health care bill scored today), and whether a meatless Thanksgiving is even possible. Check it.

Tags: Bloggingheads, going rogue, Megan McArdle, Sarah Palin

Last week the Wall Street Journal interviewed basically every good living writer and asked them to share tips on sitting down and penning a book. The only clear lesson to emerge from the piece (titled "How To Write A Great Book") is that there is no set step-by-step instructional for writing a great book. That, and writing is hard so famous authors invent their own eccentric tactics to deal with the inevitable torture that is writer’s block.

The best ones:

Nicholson Baker, quasi-conscious writing in the dark:

Most days, Nicholson Baker rises at 4 a.m. to write at his home in South Berwick, Maine. Leaving the lights off, he sets his laptop screen to black and the text to gray, so that the darkness is uninterrupted. After a couple of hours of writing in what he calls a dreamlike state, he goes back to bed, then rises at 8:30 to edit his work.

Junot Díaz, all good ideas hail from the bathroom:

He often listens to orchestral movie soundtracks as he writes, because he's easily distracted by lyrics. When he needs to seal himself off from the world, he retreats into the bathroom and sits on the edge of the tub. "It drove my ex crazy," he says. "She would always know I was going to write because I would grab a notebook and run into the bathroom."

Laura Lippman, color-coding with ribbons:

She assigned a color to each point of view and made a chart with alternating blocks of color. For her novel "To The Power of Three," which had seven different points of view, she bought seven different colors of ribbon and assigned a color to each character. Then she created a grid and strung colored ribbon representing each character between chapters where that character appeared, creating an intricate colored lattice.

Photograph of Junot Diaz by Ricardo Hernandez/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: junot diaz, Laura Lippman, nicholson baker, writing tips, WSJ

Make no mistake, my main response to Sarah Palin's book is teeth-gnashing, because 1) she lies and never admits it. And her death-penalty lie mattered. And 2) she never acknowledges her debt to feminism. But here is a fair point in defense of the book as a memoir, from Ann Althouse responding to Rod Dreher's review on NPR:

She chose to write a personal memoir: What life feels like for Sarah Palin. So it's her "Dreams From My Father." The book Dreher aches for would be her "Audacity of Hope."

 

Tags: Ann Althouse, going rogue, rod dreher, sarah palin's book