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Politics is a matter of human transaction. I consider absolutely everything political, because all fiction involves relationships between people, and relationships between people always include matters of power, of equity, of communication.

It makes me nuts, the idea that if you put a political struggle at the heart of your book, then it has to be that the author - me - is trying in some way to push my views onto my readers.

I try to think of the social function of fiction as drawing the individual toward larger social and political questions. But I'm also very comfortable in saying that my novel - any novel - doesn't matter as much as larger questions of how we can see justice done.

Now, I'm a failed political consultant. But sometimes fiction has a way of capturing people's imagination in a way that non-fiction doesn't. Conservatives typically haven't written much fiction - specifically political thrillers - over the years to educate, inspire and mobilize people on issues of great import, but we ought to.

Expressing political opinion can be a powerful way to establish a character's voice when writing fiction.

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

My books deliberately provide no answers or messages. I'm drilled in the habit of objectivity and also aware that the steady drip of fiction has more power than facts to shape opinion, so I handle it with caution.

Point of view gets me. If I can feel like a character rather than a reader, I'll read that book.

I generally find fiction without some move to the weird, less imaginative, dull, prosaic. Not all of it, of course, but a lot of it. I suppose it's just a question of taste.