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Clearly, I'm drawn to characters with inner conflicts.

So, the combination of looking at lots of different people and how they react to each other and how they relate to each other and waiting for that inspiration is the thing that allows me to keep writing.

When you're a writer, you're always looking for conflict. It's conflict that drives great stories.

As a writer, I have to show complexities. Through my writings, I hope to bring out people in different situations and not just one-dimensional beings.

I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

As a novelist, I have always been interested in how people come to terms with difficult, life-altering events.

Every writer is going to end up drawing from their own experiences in one way or another.

The things I write are combinations of all of the people that have been influences to me.

A novel is a collision of ideas. Three or four threads may be floating around in the writer's consciousness, and at a single moment in time, these ideas collide and produce a novel.