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All of my characters are a little bit based on people I know in real life. You know when you do that you have to change the character a little bit in case your friend or your relative reads the book, because you don't want them to know you wrote about them... They might get mad.

In the old days, I just could not leave characters alone. Now I just try to keep the ones that still have something in the way of stories to tell.

I'm not one of these 'the characters write themselves; the story just fell out of me' kind of writers. Wish it was like that.

I try to talk about things I know about. But my characters are more of a combination of people or how I imagine people would feel.

Part of me becomes the characters I'm writing about. I think readers feel like they are there, the way I am, as a result.

I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.

As a novelist, I tend to know significantly more about my characters than I do about my friends.

In real life, people are constantly saying one thing and doing another, but if you write your characters that way, the story becomes too hard to follow.