What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?

Humility.

This spring, I’ll have been doing this for 20 years, making my living by reporting and writing, and it isn’t getting any easier. The better I get, the harder it gets. I try as hard as I try so I can to be better than I actually am.

But maybe that’s not quite what you mean. In that case, this: Writing isn’t typing. Typing is just typing with your fingers what you’ve already written with your head. And writing is structuring. The right structure lets words work. Words work not because of how they sound but because of where they sit.

What’s been the biggest surprise of your writing life?

That I’m writing about politics and politicians. My journalism entryway was reading the all-star sports section of the Boston Globe as a boy. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a sportswriter, and I was, in the beginning—covering college basketball, covering recruiting, covering Major League Baseball. But before long, I decided I wanted to think about other stuff, too, and so I covered small towns in New York and business and courts in Florida and ultimately earned my way onto the enterprise team at the St. Pete (now Tampa Bay) Times. Even then, though, I really pretty seldom wrote about politics or politicians. I had a lot to learn when I started at POLITICO five and some years back. Still do! Always will! But I guess that’s also just the thing. Write what you know? No. It’s the other way around. The job is to do what you need to do to know what you need to know to write what you need to write.

If you had to choose a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be?

I don’t know—a beaver?

Unfussy worker. Structure, structure, structure. Keeps growing.

What’s the single best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?

I’m struggling to come up with just one thing from just one person. But from Terry Egan and the late Mike Levine at the Times Herald-Record in New York … to Mike Wilson and Kelley Benham and Tom French and Lane DeGregory at the Times in Florida and Bill Duryea at the Times and still at POLITICO … to good pals, competitors and peers like Ben Montgomery, Tom Lake and others, a composite of lessons learned, I suppose, might be this: Report, report, report, to earn the right to take charge, to make choices, to run a rope from post to post, stretched taut, taking and using what serves the story and moves it forward, from beginning to middle to end, while unsentimentally leaving behind what does not.

Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for POLITICO and POLITICO Magazine, where he mostly writes about the president and the people who want to be the president next. A winner of awards from the American Society of News Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Press Foundation, his work has been anthologized in “The Best American Newspaper Narratives,” “Out There: The Wildest Stories from Outside Magazine “and “Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists.” A native of the Boston area and a graduate of Davidson College, he lives in North Carolina with his wife, two daughters, two dogs and a guinea pig.