When I was writing my first novel, I smoked cigarettes. And when I think about what it was like to smoke, I remember exactly the feeling of sitting in front of my big old computer in that little room where I wrote my first novel.

I used to act in television commercials when I was a kid and a young adult.

I'm most connected to myself when I'm alone in a room, moving my hand across a page. That's when I feel most like me.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

I found myself doing so much public speaking, more and more and bigger and bigger.

There's nothing confessional about crafting and shaping a story out of a lived life. In fact, it's quite the opposite - the writer has to be able to transcend the life, to see it as if standing outside of it, in order to be able to make something of it. There's something enormously satisfying and gratifying about crafting something, taking all that chaos and giving it shape.

If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt; it has to be creative.