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I wrote my first piano piece when I was in 4th grade.

In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood - I made it into a mystery story.

I started writing songs when I was real young, when I was 3 years old. The piano spoke to me - I don't remember when I wasn't playing piano. My second grade talent show was the first time I performed my own thing. I dressed up as Dracula and played a song called 'Monster Rock' that I wrote. And I won.

I've wanted to write a ghost story for years, and my main aim was to write the most frightening ghost story that I could think of.

I can only write a book like 'The Tin Drum' or 'From the Diary of a Snail' at a special period of my life. The books came about because of how I felt and thought at the time.

My first novel, 'John Crow's Devil,' freed me up to write about the past, and 'The Book of Night Women' freed me up to have a book totally based on voice and being very spontaneous.

I loved all ghost stories. So I guess it was only a matter of time before I wrote one.

I got the writing bug in the fourth grade when a poem of mine was published in the school newspaper. Music criticism came a little later, when I was in high school.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

The first time I tried to write was when I was 14, after I got an electric guitar. I put a song together, and it wasn't that bad! The writing came natural to me.