Historical tends to be my bailiwick.

[ The Nightingale ]ended up being a huge undertaking - a daunting amount of research on a subject that many people know intimately, a country I had not yet been to when I first started planning the book, an entire war.

I have to admit that WWII France was not at all on my radar for Kristin Hannah.

All life's a risk, that's what makes it interesting.

I do not often follow my characters off on tangents or change my story on a whim. I have an outline which I follow quite sternly...for a good long while. Then it turns out in some way to be insurmountably wrong and I am forced to re-think every component. Usually at this point I throw hundreds of pages away.

I read a ton of fiction - historical, contemporary, literary, commercial, I love it all.

[I am more than happy to invite my five favorite fictional characters.]Roland Deschain from Stephen King's Dark Tower series. There's a whole world about Roland left to know. I've got questions. He'd have answers. So pour him a glass of wine.