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Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

Your job as a writer is to find storylines, narrative structures, and characters to show the things that you believe rather than saying them or telling them.

Well I'm not a novelist. I've only written one book and that is a memoir.

Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That's how you focus the world. It's the only reason you should ever try this writing job.

Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.

Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know.

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.