Quote

I'm used to adapting my novels for feature film - it can be challenging to cut and compress three or four hundred pages into two hours of dramatic action.

Unless you're doing a feature piece, which is going to be longer, and you have more time to get into stuff.

I can imagine there is going to come a time when someone will do 13 hours of a story without breaks.

I don't believe moviegoers don't have patience. Screenwriters are told a scene can't be longer than three minutes, that you have to cut to the chase. Not true!

It can be dismaying, all the same, for a novelist to compare the slowness of the writing with the speed of the reading. Novels are read in a matter of days, even hours. A writer may labor for weeks over a particular passage that will have its effect on a reader for an instant - and that effect may be subliminal or barely noticed.

I'm always amazed by writers who say, 'Oh you know I had a half hour so I sat down and wrote a little bit.' I just need a real big chunk of time to sit down and focus. That's my process.

My work schedule has changed over the years. The one constant is, when at work on a novel, I try to work seven days a week, so as not to lose touch with that world. Within that, I'm flexible on hours and output.

Because I am kind of distracted, I don't tend to sit at my desk 9 to 5. It can be two hours a day, or, when I'm in the final editing stages, it can be 14 hours a day.

I'd rather see a writer write 15 minutes a day than save it all up for a Saturday. A work gets a coating on it when it's not been worked on for a while, makes it hard to break back in.