Life is not a dress rehearsal.

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

Any setting can potentially acquire this vividness. It slowly arrives during the period of research, until it is as immediate to me as my own real surroundings.

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

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

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

Forget the boring old dictum, 'Write about what you know.' Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.