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And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters.

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.

I probably read 100 times more than I write, but that way when I move my characters through it, I know.

When I'm putting a story together, I generally know the ending and a couple of the points halfway through, and I've got sort of an idea about the beginning, and although I do write the story one sentence at a time, when I'm thinking it up, I'm thinking it up all at once.

You've got to internalize the character. You've got to learn the words. These are separate things, but they work together.

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.

I didn't know how to write a novel, so I sort of let it happen in waves. The only way I could write it was to think like scenes in a movie.

When I work on a novel, I usually have one character and a setting in mind.

I write from this tight third-person viewpoint, where each chapter is seen through the eyes of one individual character. When I'm writing that character, I become that character and identify with that character.