Douglas Brunt

My parents had the plan for my life from the moment my mother tested positive with me. Looking back now, I'd say the hard turn for me was when I left school after the eighth grade to play tennis full time and study some with a travelling tutor.

A tennis racket lurks in my earliest memories like a sick relative who had come to live with us. When I look at my baby pictures, there it is, resting in my crib in the place of a rattle or chew toy.

The main influence on voters should be a series of robust debates among the candidates. It's a free country, so this is a tough problem to solve, but I'd love to see an election season with zero political ads, and all voters had to decide based on watching four national debates over the two months leading to election day.

Style matters, but the real force of writing is ideas, not style.

Three hours of creating is taxing on any brain, and you should stop there. Some days, you may stop without any words at all. It's much easier to write new stuff the next day than to go through painful deletions of a day's worth of crap you already wrote.

The important thing is to write when your brain is at its best. Work edits or do outside reading with the rest of the day.

I've been pretty damn happy since 2001. More apparent danger than real danger for me, and even the apparent danger hasn't kept me from feeling warm, safe and loved. I've found love and a partner to raise three children that I'm glad to have brought into this beautiful world.

In September of 2001, I was living in the West Village of Manhattan, working from my home for a tech start-up.

There used to be a few 'Great Santinis', but now there's many 'Great Santinis'.

I do like Pat Conroy, and 'The Great Santini' is an iconic book.

Spend more time working before you write page one. Then, the story - at least parts of it - will feel as though it is writing itself.

Adverbs lead to overwriting. Try taking them out and reading your prose again to see how it sounds. Simple and less words are more powerful.

With tennis, if you're very good at a young age, you don't even go to your prom. You're down at some tennis academy in Florida where you're on the court 8 hours a day. It's brutal.

When the kids are down, I have a drink and watch 'The Kelly File.'

Dad met Mom in 1983 during the lead-up to the 1984 games. She was an Olympic downhill skier. In those days, the winter and summer games were held in different cities but in the same year, so there was more intermingling of winter and summer athletes at social functions.

Washington isn't utterly dysfunctional.

D.C. is a small town with some big-town features.

Don't write more than 3 hours at a time. I write three hours in the morning, 9 A.M. - 12 P.M. Other people are best late at night.

A comparison of the average professional baseball salary to the national average salary over the last one hundred years shows that for the first fifty years, 1920-1970, baseball players held a steady multiple of about 3.4 times the national average income.

'The Means' is about power. I have access to political insiders who helped me write a portrait of the real day-to-day in politics, which turned out to be crazier than Wall Street.