You never want to have to give your child bad news of any kind.

I seem to have a talent for writing endings that seem just right to me but that frustrate other people.

I hesitate to say yes - I had writer's block, because I know there are people who've had really serious cases of it, and I've never been paralyzed like that, but I definitely get blocked sometimes. More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.

I once saw John Updike get in front of a crowd and read a story that he'd written in 1958, and I just thought, I can't even look at stuff I wrote a year ago, I can't believe he's doing this.

That's really the essence of what any fiction writer does. Some of it is research-based, but most of it is a really long-term, imaginative, empathetic effort to see the world the way someone whose experiences remote from yours might see it. Not every writer works that way; some writers make a wonderful career out of writing books that adhere very closely to how they view the world. The further I go with this, the more interested I get in trying to imagine my way into other perspectives that at first seem foreign to me.

That's a long way of saying no, I'm always too bound up in thinking about the characters in whatever I'm working on and trying to make good to dwell on characters from previous books.

I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it.