Tom Ruprecht is the author of George W. Bush: An Unauthorized Oral History. He also writes for The Late Show with David Letterman.
Q: What is your preferred environment for writing?
A: I have a writing routine that I follow religiously. Every morning I go to my local Starbucks and get a venti skim latte. I take a small sip and angrily throw it in the barista's face. I sit down, open up Dave Barry's column, and plagiarize it word for word. Then I send it to the two or three newspapers that don't syndicate his column and make myself a tidy profit.
Q: What punctuation mark are you fondest of?
A: I really dig the ampersand. It not only looks classy, but it also always makes me think of M & M's. Yes, I consider M & Ms to be very classy.
Q: What punctuation, spelling, grammar, style, or usage error annoys you the most?
A: There's a person in the Graphic Department at my show and she consistently leaves out commas that I have clearly included in my scripts. This omission causes me untold headaches in the edit room as I'm working on pieces with little time to spare. Just yesterday she left out a comma that really made a mess of things. Well, today I wrote a script that simply required her to make a graphic that read "AWESOME SPEECH." What did I receive from her? "AWESOME, SPEECH." I really think this woman is trying to drive me crazy.
Q: If you weren't in your current line of work, what would you be doing instead?
A: No one on their deathbed ever wishes they'd spent more time at work . . . except for strip club DJs. So that would be a vocation to seriously consider.
Q: What drove you to write?
A: I basically had no life when I was 15 (sadly, very little has changed), so I spent way too much time hanging out in bookstores for someone who should have been enjoying his first encounters with girls. One day I picked up Woody Allen's book Side Effects. I read the first story and distinctly remember thinking, "Wait, maybe this could actually be my job! Sitting around and writing funny things." Substitute the word "mediocre" for "funny" and that's what I ended up doing.
Haa! That was great.
Posted by: Catherine | April 14, 2009 at 10:07 PM