I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.
I find coming up with a title the hardest part of writing a novel.
Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.
I only did about one novel a year while I was working full time, but since 1993, I've averaged two and a half books a year.
I think there's as much violence, in a way, as a scene with two women having a cup of coffee in a Ruth Rendell novel - in terms of emotional violence and the violence you can inflict with language - as there is in the most graphic kind of serial killer/slasher novel you can think of.
I can write for a long time on one novel and not get tired.
The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the 'messages' in a novel are put there by the reader. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's how literature functions.
I try to keep each different book different from the last. So 'Sag Harbor' is very different from 'Apex Hides the Hurt;' 'The Intuitionist,' which is kind of a detective novel, is very different from 'John Henry Days.' I'm just trying to keep things rich for me creatively and for the readers who follow me.
I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
I love bookstores and booksellers. In my novel 'Dirty Martini,' I thanked over 3,000 booksellers by name in the back matter.
I knew I'd have to go to work in real estate or something else or I could never finish my novel.
I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.
All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.
In our own state, we came up with, I think, what was a very novel approach to closing the gap on the uninsured. To harmonize medical records - which was a major step in getting costs out of the system.
I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read.
The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.
Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.
I've often described my book 'Anno Dracula' as 'literally, a vampire novel' - in that it battens on to other novels and sucks their lifeblood, transforming as well as feeding off them.
My experience of fiction was, in the beginning, so exploratory. I wasn't sitting down to a desk at Yaddo with a month, thinking I have to have a draft of a novel.
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.
With '44 Scotland Street' I found myself having to work out how a daily novel works, and it is completely different to a conventional novel.
Everyone has early fiction fantasies, but it wasn't until my second child Betsy was born that I allowed the urge to write a novel bubble up.
Expertise and judgment in the art of lending for novel ventures must be reacquired.
Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can't. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what's going to happen in each chapter and each scene.
I was writing 'Outlander' for practise and didn't want anyone to know I was doing it. So I couldn't very well announce to my husband that I was quitting my job and abandoning him with three small children to visit Scotland to do research for a novel that I hadn't told him I was writing.
My first book was an adult novel, 'Down Among the Gods,' published by Virago, and I've written poems as well, a slim volume of poetry.
There are hours when I must force the novel out of my mind and be interested in the children.
Writing a novel that crosses genres is a risk, but one well worth taking.
Just because it's got a gun doesn't make it a crime novel, and just because there's a horse doesn't make it a western.
What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that.
Certainly 'The Judgment of Paris' was the novel in which I found my own voice.
It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.
Over a four-month period, I sat down and wrote every day. And then there was a novel, and all of a sudden, there were agents and offers.
It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.
