TV and film are very different media with different requirements. In a TV show, you have actors and fellow writers and directors, who are interpreting your work. With a novel, you only have ink, words and your reader.

When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.

Traditionally, people have been adapting novels and short stories forever. Now, they're doing it simultaneously, with an eye towards writing the movie before the novel has even come out or been finished. It's a function of this hyper-accelerated society we live in, where everyone is trying to short circuit the process.

TV and film are very different media with different requirements. In a TV show, you have actors and fellow writers and directors, who are interpreting your work. With a novel, you only have ink, words and your reader.

In some ways, a novel isn't as structurally rigorous as a screenplay or a TV show, which have finite real estate. In a novel, you can more deeply illuminate a character's interior and get away with digressions.

I knew I wanted to be a writer. Where I came from, no one was a writer. I came from Long Island, and everyone became a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer or a teacher or a businessman. I didn't know any writers.

I'm a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy.