When I begin writing, I have no idea what my novels are ultimately going to be about. I don't have a plot. I never consider a theme. I don't make notes or outlines.
I have heard of novels started in the middle, at the end, written in patches to be joined together later, but I have never felt the slightest desire to do this.
When I first thought of the idea for 'Sweet Valley High,' I loved the idea of high school as microcosm of the real world. And what I really liked was how it moved things on from 'Sleeping Beauty'-esque romance novels where the girl had to wait for the hero. This would be girl-driven, very different, I decided - and indeed it is.
As you know, I am a novelist, and I really want to write novels. But I knew enough about the Dreyfus case to understand immediately why what happened to Dreyfus was not merely a cause celebre from the end of the 19th century, but an event that could be shown to teach us lessons of the greatest importance for our own time.
It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away.
Readers tell me that my novels are filled with significant mothers. Do I realize this? Do I do it on purpose? The truth is, I don't. I think of myself as a writer of family stories. I write more often than not from a male point of view, and I usually begin by focusing on siblings, spouses, even fathers, before I think about the mothers.
The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies, like 'Jaws' or 'The Godfather.'
My first novel, 'You Must be Sisters,' was started in Pakistan. I've wrote several novels and a TV drama set or partly-set there.
There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.
I started trying to be a writer and failed for years. I tried novels, short stories, sitcoms, movies, plays, anything. And then, to support myself, I had millions of jobs on the fringes of show business.
I have been attacked in Turkey more for my interviews than for my books. Political polemicists and columnists do not read novels there.
My first two novels featured narrators who were aggressively unattached: They couldn't form any sort of genuine relationship. So I had thoroughly explored the geography of loneliness and isolation.
When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.
I read YA novels constantly, so I really want to be in a young adult rom-com, but I worry that I'm aging into the parent role, which is a little scary.
I wanted a picture of Jamaica that isn't in books, and certainly not in novels.
The point about 'state-of-the-nation' novels is not that they should be about the 'state-of-the-nation', but they should be about people.
I've published a couple of short novels in France that I didn't want to publish in English because I loved the characters too much to subject them to American critics who were not exactly favorable toward my work.
I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels.
Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there's a detective and a criminal who's committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find.
I had the feeling that focusing on objects and telling a story through them would make my protagonists different from those in Western novels - more real, more quintessentially of Istanbul.
Terrorists are people, too - they are given to error. Naipaul and then DeLillo do a good job in their novels of drawing this out: I'm thinking of DeLillo's contention in 'Mao II' that terrorists have replaced writers as the people who 'alter the inner-life of the culture.' I thought that was marvellous!
When someone asks me to list the 10 best novels ever written, I always refuse to answer.
In ordinary detective novels you never see the consequences of what happens in a story in the next book. That you do in mine.
When I first started to get into writing, it was via music. I'd generate ideas for songs that would turn into stories, then they'd turn into novels. I was biased toward music.
Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.
I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.
When you write about a Muslim woman, like I did with my previous novels - 'Minaret', for example, which is about a woman who starts to wear the hijab - it sets all the alarm bells ringing.
If you don't like my book, write your own. If you don't think you can write a novel, that ought to tell you something. If you think you can, do. No excuses. If you still don't like my novels, find a book you do like.
Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.
I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.
I've done a lot of books with Asian antecedents to them - some of my fantasy novels have been that way, and certainly in the 'Battletech' universe, there's a lot of Asian culture in that.
Trollope wrote so many novels and other works that they tend to crowd each other out.
I read Claire Messud's 'The Emperor's Children,' I read Joseph O'Neill's 'Netherland' - but to me, they're not 9/11 novels. In 'The Emperor's Children,' 9/11 felt to me like a piece of the plot; the novel wasn't wrestling with what 9/11 meant. And 'Netherland' felt the same way. I liked both books a lot but I don't see them as 9/11 novels.
I've read all of Sarah Waters's novels which have been translated into Korean.
Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.
Of John Le Carre's books, I've only read 'The Spy Who Came In From The Cold,' and I haven't read anything by Graham Greene, but I've heard a great deal about how 'Your Republic Is Calling You' reminded English readers of those two writers. I don't really have any particular interest in Cold War spy novels.
