Journalist and 2000 presidential debate moderator Jim Lehrer teamed up with his wife Kate, a novelist, in a joint speech on campus Wednesday. The couple discussed their motivations to pursue writing as a profession and the role that it plays in their lives.

Jim Lehrer, who has written 12 novels, two memoirs and three plays, began by speaking about his childhood. At age 16, he said he wanted to be play professional baseball as a shortstop for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Lehrer said since he was not especially good at baseball he decided to pursue sports writing. He went on to explain that after his sophomore English teacher gave him an “A” on a paper about Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and told him that he was a good writer, he immediately began working on his school newspaper,

Lehrer continued journalism at Victoria Junior College where he helped found the college newspaper, becoming its first editor-in-chief. He said he wrote every story, took each issue to the printer, and distributed the paper as well.

Lehrer added that the librarian at his junior college told him that if he was serious about being a newspaperman he should read books by H. L. Mencken. He said that Mencken’s works encouraged him to later get a job as a newspaper writer.

Kate Lehrer, author of Best Intentions, When They Took Away the an in the Moon and Out of Eden, said she first knew she wanted to be an author at age 11, while reading a novel called Encore, Encore, Susanna Gilmore. She also said since she was “a bad pianist, not a very good artist and didn’t like math,” writing seemed like an appealing career choice. Lehrer didn’t actually write her first book until the couple’s third daughter entered kindergarten. She said at first all she got back were wonderful rejection letters from publishers.

Jim Lehrer noted that both he and his wife came from a generation in which most journalists aimed to be novelists or short story writers, and journalism was simply a temporary career. He reminisced about discussing ideas for books with other journalists and recalled when he came up with the idea for his first novel – a band of Mexican soldiers re-taking the Alamo. Lehrer soon had a published novel that was eventually made into a movie. He decided he and his wife could live for some time on the $45,000 he received for the movie, and quit the newspaper to write novels.

Lehrer discussed his recently completed novel about the Battle of Antietam in the Civil War. He thought of doing this because he and his wife have a house 15 minutes away from the battlefield and have frequently visited it. He got the idea for his two novels involving CIA agents when he met two former agents at a dinner party. Both he and his wife said they get ideas for their stories from varied sources – in fact, Jim Lehrer gave his wife the idea for her latest novel when he gave her an interesting article from a Kansas magazine to whom he subscribes.

Jim Lehrer asserts that he could write even at 5 a.m., “hung over, hung up by my thumbs underwater,” because he has journalistic experience which requires the ability to write eloquently and quickly at a moment’s notice. Kate Lehrer said she tends to have specific times of day when she goes to her office and writes. “My best hours are in the morning,” she said, adding that she normally takes a break in the early afternoon and goes back to her writing before evening.

Jim Lehrer said the transition from news writer to television journalist “was accidental and was very difficult.” He said that he had always thought people in television journalism “were empty-headed and spent most of their time in the barbershop.” His transition began when he quit the newspaper business to write books, and accepted a part-time consulting job at the local public television station.

The station soon asked him to write a proposal for a new news show, and eventually he was in front of the camera on the new show – a television journalist. Lehrer made a point of saying, however, he has only worked in public, never commercial, television.