I always told my dad I'd play professional football.

We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.

The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.

I went to Europe three times, I read dozens and dozens of books, I studied thousands of photos. But I always supplemented that research with imagination; research might give you detail, but imagination supplies the direction in which to apply all that detail.

Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.

I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.