I do think that the idea of writer's block can be very self-defeating for most writers because it's taking a lot of things that are not only real problems, but that are manageable, solvable problems if you look at them in an individual fashion, and lumping them under the umbrella of something mysterious and vague, which makes it very, very difficult to address what's going on.

Tom, my husband, who converted to Judaism when we got married, and as a consequence, we were learning about historical conversions to Judaism. Really, every time it pops up, it's very strange.

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.

It's always the case for writers that when there are limitations, you have the opportunity for your creativity really to blossom and to become deeper and fuller and to move in directions that you wouldn't have discovered on your own.

If I don't write every day for one week or even, frankly, one year, I don't really think too much about that.

I think that whether you've just begun writing or whether you've been writing for fifty years - I mean, I'm excited to get there and tell you about it when I do - I think that there's always the challenge of believing in yourself enough to get the work done and not being so taken with yourself that you're unwilling to continue to work on the work.

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.