It's a scary thing for fiction writers, when you're always writing from the point of view both as and for someone who is different.

There seems to be a tremendous desire among many people now to know authors and how they work, to know what's autobiographical and what isn't.

I'm very secretive. I'll write a whole novel and revise it, which might take me two years or more, and the people I know best don't know what I'm writing about.

I remember I had had one woman who had three or four kids, and some of them were having problems. I said, 'Maybe you could go write somewhere else, away from your house.' And sure enough, all kinds of wonderful stuff emerged. She was keeping too much charge of herself because she couldn't stop being a mother when she was in the house. You have to find your own way of letting loose, if you're one of those people.

When I've taught writing to five, six, and seven year olds, it's not very different than talking to an adult writer. They're writers then, and when they get to be young teenagers they're not anymore. You might go and talk to them about writing, and they'll be very self-conscious or will have detached themselves from the group.

The making of fiction takes literally what is suggested by our imagination.

I had never written about what it's like to live the life of a writer, and I had never read a book that combined talking about the life of writing and how you can do it, how you can stand it, how you can emotionally manage it, with the choices that we all make on the page.