I read 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford again every so often.

Plot is tremendously important to me: I can't stand books where nothing happens, and I can't imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder.

I don't have a day job, so I read any time of day.

I read 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford again every so often.

I guess the main thing I definitely don't enjoy is having a job which involves selling things. You become an author because you think you're good at writing. Not because you love to promote yourself. I enjoy some of it and I've had a really fun few years so basically I have nothing to complain about. But what I don't like is the thought that it's going to go on for the rest of my life.

I've never really understood that whole thing of writers avoiding other writers' novels while they're working on their own.

Mystery, investigation, false leads, solution - we associate that structure with genre fiction, but it exists in our real lives, too. There's no reason why literary fiction shouldn't be able to acknowledge that and make it fresh.