Historical fiction is a collaboration between the time in which it's written and the time that it's writing about and the far future, when we don't know what people are going to think about yet.

I tend to think of writing as a more collaborative project than I think some people do.

Maybe one of the reasons that I don't ever experience myself as having writer's block is I don't feel that I need to be producing every minute of every day.

A novel is a way to rethink and rewrite and re-envision the past, and also a way to speak to people who haven't been born yet about what we think about right now.

A lot of people have come up after Brookland and asked, "What happens to her at the end of the novel?" and I will very politely say, well, here are the two possibilities.

Trying to talk through and figure out new answers really helps me figure out more about what I'm doing - and what we're all doing.

Nobody thinks that there were never mechanical horses in the world. Everybody knows that there aren't really golems.