I've always thought flight was fun and wanted to write about flight, and I knew a lot of househusbands who were having a really bad time with it. I thought flight might perk up a marriage here or there.

I'm never going to write a whole paragraph describing what a living room looks like.

Nursing demands vigilance about people. The sights and smells that a patient offers, their movements and their offhand comments all contribute crucial information to understanding what they need. Training and experience heighten one's ability to see what needs to be seen.

Until I became a nurse, no one had ever asked me to sign a book contract. I had been writing for decades, read thousands of books, and even worked in publishing for 10 years. Who knew that nursing would be my break?

I could imagine that a character could do almost anything at any time, and that was the freedom of the whole thing. But keeping track of what was plausible for certain characters [was the challenge].

Fiction demands structures and recognizable shapes. Big surprises only draw attention to the writer's hand.

A story is built on characters and reasons.