Students and other emerging writers often ask me, “How, precisely, do you write a novel?” I suspect they think, as perhaps I did myself once upon a time, that there exists somewhere a hermetically sealed room, guarded by hydras, in which Real Writers have placed, in a locked chest in turn submerged in a shark-infested…

There comes a moment — often many moments — as one writes a novel, when it all seems quite hopeless. A moment when the writer desires nothing more than to emit a loud raspberry sort of noise, and fall into a swoon on the nearest soft surface. And thus, you find me. Oh, I’m still…