a question has the most power before we rush to answer it, when it is still making us think, still testing us.

Never judge a journey by the distance.

Because, we assume, these days, you just get in a car, you turn the key, and woosh, you're up the road. Or even now, dare I say, you don't turn a key; you get in a car and you're up the road. And yet with this particular car, it was a five-step process to start it. So how do I let the reader know that?

Im a storyteller; that is what I do. And Im particularly interested in history; and in history of a certain era. But what is interesting for me is how many, how many things you see repeated.

David Corbett's The Art of Character offers a deep inquiry into the creation of character for the novice writer, with valuable nuggets of wisdom for the seasoned storyteller. If you are a writer, it should be on your desk.

It's really important in any historical fiction, I think, to anchor the story in its time. And you do that by weaving in those details, by, believe it or not, by the plumbing.

As Churchill said about the Great War, and he said this in about 1924, that it was the first war in which man realized that he could obliterate himself completely. If you consider the way the whole world was impacted, 18 million people worldwide died, and that is taking into account military and civilian deaths: 18 million people. And it was the whole world, if you will. You know, many of those trenches were dug by Chinese. There are photographs of Chinese looking like they just came from China, with their hats and so on, digging the trenches, right from the beginning.