Listen to the criticisms and preferences of your trusted "first readers".

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

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

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

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.

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

Life is not a dress rehearsal.