Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.

Writing is a strange synthesis between the two parts of your mind: the analytical side and the side that knows nothing at all, and you have to allow the dreaming side free rein.

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats's idea of Negative Capability and Kipling's advice to "drift, wait and obey". Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.

I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.