I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.

I write across genres so I see them, more often, as complementary instead of separated by boundaries.

I've left the Church - for many reasons that I've written about publicly - but it's still a large part of my identity, and I still have my faith, if not my Church.

You learn to exploit genre for the more important things - to my mind - like story, character, image, language.

A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets.

The basic rule of storytelling is 'show, don't tell.

As a writer, my main objective is to tell the story urgently - as if whispering it into one ear - and to know the characters intimately.