Writing a Novel

I enjoy reading well-written books where there are earth-shattering secrets, a race against the clock, harrowing twists and turns, lives constantly under threat. But I don't have an itch to create one.

Like every other published writer in the universe, people I meet at parties inevitably tell me they want to write. They launch into describing their novel or short story or business book idea and I break in gently (I hope) to ask, "When do you write?"

If you want to write a novel, here's what you do: write. Just write, with no worry or care about how it will come out.

This is a tale of perseverance and taking control of one's life. It's a look behind those so-glamorous curtains of Hollywood and New York book publishing, where the real world is totally different from how rosy it looks out front.

When writers say they have writer's block, a normal, unremarkable part of the writing process becomes debilitating.

For me, writing novels is an arachnid process: novels are spun into intricate webs out of the silk in my gut. It's work. It's hard. But, to mix metaphors, it's not all pushing a rock uphill.

The next time you begin conceptualizing your crime story's villain, don't be afraid to mine your own feelings. Down deep, below the surface. It's where the motherlode of characterization, and all the narrative gold that results, lies hidden.

When You Were Mine asks the question "What if the greatest love story ever told was the wrong one?" And in my own life, three years ago, I was asking myself the same thing.

The problem arose when I became more familiar with the Romanovs and the extent of their anti-Semitism. I faced a dilemma. Here was I, a Jewish writer, who had developed deep compassion and even love for my charges.

The words did not merely enter my blood, they grew out of something in me that even I did not fully understand. One of my dear teachers asked me if there was a purpose to my book. My answer is that I don't know. I only know that I found great joy and passion in writing it.

Does durability, for example, constitute an important definition of what is or becomes a literary novel? How does a novel become a classic? Who determines what becomes a classic?

Now, maybe some writers can write to a formula, can churn out books that try to catch the cultural mood, books that mimic best sellers, but I suspect most authors are like me: We write the books we want to.

Between my debut and this book, an entirely different novel and a few other partial manuscripts had languished: unfinished, unloved. No wonder I've always been drawn to stories of other novelists with unpublished or simply abandoned novels.

Well, OK: "Great"? I know, I know: my readers, the novel's readers, will be the judge of that, I hear you saying. But, for me, it had to be that pa...

Can't find the time to write? Life is short. Stop with the angst, already. If you're not writing, you don't really want to. Go find something that yanks your chain. Do that, and leave us writers alone.

I think, like with a partner, when you have the right material, there's a magic click, and you fall in love -- whether it takes six books or sixteen years on one book. Maybe that's how long it takes. As long as it takes to feel the click, and have someone else agree.

People want to write books for a lot of reasons. They want to be famous. They want to make a pile of money. They want everybody from high school to see that they're not a big fat loser after all. But there's really only one good reason to write a book.

Celebrating the New Year often symbolizes a fresh start and a new beginning for each one of us. We reflect on the year past and give gratitude for our...

I'd spent 30 years in a career as cloistered as medicine. And here I was, walking away from it.