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Every book is like starting over again. I've written books every way possible - from using tight outlines to writing from the seat of my pants. Both ways work.

I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.

I write in a very peculiar way. I think about a book for 25 or 30 years in a kind of inchoate way, and at one point or another, I realize the book is ready to be written. I usually have a character, a first line, and general idea of what the book is going to be about.

But I've been at writing long enough now to know that every three or four books I have to start a new direction.

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

With each book you write you have to learn how to write that book - so every time, you have to start all over again.

I write in a pretty straightforward way. I kind of sit down at page one and start writing.

I definitely don't write with any kind of 'message' or 'lesson,' probably because when I was a child, I used to run a mile from books like that.

I wrote my first 30 books as a teacher. I would read to my classes, and they'd give me feedback. I was trying to role model.