
Writing fiction is a form of wish fulfillment. Writing is such an immersive process that one of the byproducts is that the writer is immersed in the world he or she creates. I don’t believe there’s any way to write fiction honestly unless you are capable of and willing to transport yourself into the story to the point where the world and the characters are real to you for the time that you are writing. (I know some writers who say that the experience extends further for them.

My novel The Journey Home has multiple inspirations. The strongest of these was the romance between my mother and father that lasted more than six decades. I’ve been trying for years to come up with a story that captured the spirit of their relationship, and I’m hoping that I was able to do so in this novel. At the same time, though, I had another very strong inspiration. I wanted to write a Novel with Food. I’m fairly serious about food, and I have always been fond of fictio

Writing fiction isn’t like competing in the Olympics in terribly many ways. This is, for the most part, a good thing, as my training regimen falls a tiny bit short of Olympic standards (actually, it’s just this side of couch potato standards). One way in which they’re similar, though, is that, like many Olympic participants, writers get extra credit for degree of difficulty. I’ve always shot for a certain degree of difficulty with my novels. In When You Went Away, I tried to