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Male critics and men in the publishing industry want from their women writers what they want from their wives. I'm interested in presenting characters that are more challenging, threatening, complicated and unpredictable.

I write characters. Some of those characters are women.

I like strong female characters. I try to write them as role models for young girls.

I believe writers need to be chameleons, or like Meryl Streep, who can play all sorts of characters. A good writer should be able to cross gender lines and people of all social classes. So for me, writing from a male point of view would be a great challenge, that I would look forward to taking on.

I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting.

What I really want to do is create great roles for women. And I'm not talking Nicholas Sparks romance. I think women's roles have gotten ghettoized in these sort of places... I'm thinking women in action, comic books, or like the Tony Soprano of women. We need some complex roles.

Just like how male actors get to play varied characters, I would also like to play characters that people don't normally see female characters portraying on screen.

I wanna create a character that's really memorable... like Julia Roberts did in 'Pretty Woman.'

I've been playing with this idea in my mind that the hero's journey that we're all taught as screenwriters may resonate more specifically for male protagonists and maybe even male viewers.

I love working with male actors, and I think there's a tendency to write really interesting characters that would work solely alongside men where they would be in a man's world and have to deal with that, and it creates a lot of interesting storylines. For me, it's kind of circumstantial, but I definitely enjoy it.