Mentions personal use of Paddington Bear.

Transcript context

…Now I have a few questions for what I sometimes call the David Brooks production function about you. Obviously, you’ve written numerous best-selling books, been a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, long-standing columnist for the New York Times. How you work is what I’d like to ask about. How would you say you keep yourself motivated? Because I’ve written for many years, and getting up every morning and having to do things, how do you keep that live and active for yourself? I read a book when I was seven called Paddington Bear, and I’ve written pretty much every day since then. People know to get out of my way before I write for two hours in the morning; that’s just how I live. I just do not stop writing. The thing that’s distinctive about my style is that my brain has very bad memory, so I have to write everything down. Then I think geographically. For each column I’ll have 200 pages of notes and then a bunch of things I’ve written to myself, and I lay them out on the floor of my living room in piles, and every pile is a paragraph in my column. The column is 850 words, and I’ll have 14 or 15 piles. I’ll pick up a pile, write it, throw the pile out, pick up another pile of papers. Writing for me is not typing into the keyboards. It’s crawling around on the floor, organizing my piles. And the lesson for my students, which they ignore, is that your paper should be 80 percent done by the time you sit down and type it because writing is about structure and traffic management. If you don’t get that right, everything else will flow badly. If something’s not working, judges have a saying, “That opinion won’t write.” They thought they knew what they believed, but then they started writing, and it just wasn’t flowing. Don’t try to fix it; start over with a new structure. So to me, I crawl. I write by crawling around on the carpet. And writing aside, just learning, keeping on learning through life, there are plenty of obvious pieces of advice, like read books, talk to smart people. What do you feel you can tell us that maybe we haven’t already thought about already, how to keep on learning through life?…

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