Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.

But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.

Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children--children lie all the time.

But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.

'I have this thing for generating character-oriented plots, where you look at a character and say 'What's the worst thing I could do to this guy?' I've found t…

I was a Navy officer writing about Navy problems and I simply stole this lovely Army nurse and popped her into a Navy uniform, where she has done very well for…

I wanted readers to be genuinely unsure as to whether she's telling the truth or lying. It meant making her partly sympathetic, and partly unsympathetic, which…