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I quite like the element of surprise, and as much as I have my ideas, I always appreciate ideas that come from other people as well, and I love the mystery of not knowing.

I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time.

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.

I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned.

I like it when you have something happening by coincidence. Just something in a book is enough. But I prefer a fragment of an image so you are far more free to bring in elements of your own.

I like it when I can hear directly from the writer: what they're seeing, what they're envisioning, and what their intention is.

I like it when stories are left open.

I like surprises.

For me the end of a book is just as exciting as it is for a reader.

One of the things I love, and I'm a voracious reader as well as a writer, is books that surprise me, that are not predictable.