Of death, my father has always said that the best conditions are the ones in which you have plenty of time to prepare - to say what you need to say; to arrange your estate - and the ones in which you get to choose, or at least have some knowledge of, how and when it might happen. One can't elude death, but one can have a good death.

Witing is essentially interior work, and many writers are interior personalities. Having a job forces you out of the world of your work, and into the one in which you get to observe people. Yes, you can imagine all this, but as a fiction writer, you can never observe enough the rhythms of how humans move through the world. A job demands that you structure your time much more carefully. You learn how to be resourceful, and that in turn provides a certain intensity of focus.

Many writers hate the shilling process, and I understand that. However, it's really the only thing about the publication process you can somewhat control. You can't affect reviews. But you can try to find your book an audience. One of the problems with the book publishing industry is that their publicity efforts tend to be spent on people who already read, and know how to discover, literary fiction.

If you start asking how do we make life meaningful and life never ends, then you get into sort of these terrible sort of metaphysical quandaries and it gets really, really bleak looking.

When you want to be a writer, you think that actually getting published will make you feel somehow more real to yourself. But it doesn't. And nor should it. If publication is the pole around which your entire identity pivots, you're in big trouble. I'd also add that many wonderful books by brilliant authors get ignored or overlooked, and that poor sales aren't (necessarily) a measure of your abilities.

As with editing, I think my strength as a writer is structure. It's not a skill that's much discussed when we discuss fiction, or not as much as language or character development anyway, but it's the first thing I determine before I begin writing - not just books, but anything. I think I know how to pace a narrative well. I think I'm aware of repetition, that I try to create different kinds of sentences as often as I can. Those are all things I learned from magazine editing.

I think I'm a reporter's editor. Being a good reporter is a specific skill, one I admire and don't possess myself - I appreciate people who know how to ask the right questions, who are excellent researchers, who know how to assemble information, and I enjoy working with them to shape their information into an article. Good reporters tend to be receptive to editing, and to a more collaborative form of writing in general, and you always end up learning more from how they work than you expect you will.