I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.
Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.
After closely examining my conscience, I venture to state that in my historical novels I intended the content to be just as modern and up-to-date as in the contemporary ones.
As well as writing novels and doing short-order journalism, I am also the full-time carer of my husband, who has Alzheimer's. Each day feels like a race that must be run.
I started thinking about the endings of novels not because I think endings are so important, but because I think they're actually not as important as they're sometimes given credit for.
I like to believe my suspense novels marry the strong characters from my romance writing past, with the twisty, clever plots of my mystery writing present.
If you write a book about a bygone period that lies east of the Mississippi River, then it's a historical novel. If it's west of the Mississippi, it's a western, a different category. There's no sense to it.
When I write a novel, every word is mine. I welcome suggestions from my editor, but in the end, I make all the final decisions.
I started blogging in 2006 when I had sold my first novel but it had not yet been published, in those anxious months in between while I learned the whole process.
The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.
I once tried to write a novel about revenge. It's the only book I didn't finish. I couldn't get into the mind of the person who was plotting vengeance.
The bane of my existence is the synopses that publishers request for a new novel or series. That's where I'm really producing fiction - my final book never ends up looking like the synopsis.
I’ve only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel.
I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.
A surprising number of teens I meet in rougher schools around the country find refuge in novels and creative writing. It's not always the usual suspects either, the high achievers.
Writing my own novels in the '90s...I never imagined that in ten years, science and rationality would require explanation and defense in a world rocked and ruled by religious fervor.
'The New Jedi Order' was a pure publishing project: a single massive story - virtually one huge novel spread across multiple volumes - told by a succession of authors.
I've never felt powerful enough to write a true political novel, or deeply knowledgeable enough to draw a character like, say, Tolstoy's Prince Kutuzov.
Plot is tremendously important to me: I can't stand books where nothing happens, and I can't imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder.
I've had three novels published, and I was working a little bit in theater in Ireland. I wrote one film script just to see what it would turn out like.
I binge write. I think it's because I started seriously writing by participating in National Novel Writing Month, an online-based challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days.
