You write for two people, yourself and your audience, who are usually better educated and at least as smart.

I always try to make the setting fit the story I have in mind.

Having grown up in Oklahoma when it was one of the last states which prohibited liquor, I grew up with War On Drugs, where every teenager knew who the bootleggers were

The first Chapter Law is, "Don't spend much time on it. You're going to have to rewrite it."

A writer is like a bag lady going through life with a sack and a pointed stick collecting stuff.

I always have one or two, sometimes more, Navajo or other tribes' cultural elements in mind when I start a plot. In Thief of Time, I wanted to make readers aware of Navajo attitude toward the dead, respect for burial sites.

How can you stop writing?