How long did it take you to get your book published?

I got the book deal 18 month after I started the blog

Would you recommend any books on how to write?

I’m now reading a very interesting book “A Novel in a Year” which is a one year writing workshop for beginners or for people who are suffering during the journey of writing their novel, written by Louise Doughty.

What’s a typical writing day?

I usually save 4-5 hours a day for writing, I start at 3 am & end at 8 am. Most of this time of course gets wasted staring at the ciling or out of my window. But this is the time I force myself to sit at my desk for the purpose of writing

Do you think more young writers will be “discovered” because they write popular blogs, as you did?

A lot of them have been discovered because of my book, as it showed the publishers that you can be a blogger, you can be young and still be a best seller author

How would you describe what your book is about? And of course tell us why it’s so great?

My book is talking about a girl who is about to be thirty, she is going through this process that we call “living room marriages ” and faces a bad suitor everyday. The general idea is showing the pressure that women get from the society to get married before reaching thirty, which is the expiration date of Egyptian girls. I guess it was successful because it spoke out about a problem that all girls face but no one usually talks about. It also does that in a satirical way, which is very popular in Egypt today.

Are you still looking for a husband? Or are you less interested, now that you’re a popular writer?!

I’m not allowed to “look,” just to “wait.” Well , it’s not my first priority anymore, but I would like to have children one day and getting married is the only way to do that.

Do you think you have become a symbol for Egyptian women? For Arab women? Even for women all around the world?

I hope so. A lot of Egyptian and Arab women wrote to me saying that my story gave them hope, that they also can get power by speaking out about their problems and that my success story showed them that there are other important things in life than just being married.

How much research was involved in your book and how did you carry it out?

It was just from what I see and hear in my everyday life. I didn’t make much research to write it

Is your book going to be translated into other languages?

It was already translated to Italian, German, Dutch and English. There is a Polish offer, but the negotiation is not over yet.

Do you live entirely off your writing? Or do you have another job?

I work as a pharmacist, but my main income is coming from writing now

When you started your blog, did you want to write a book, too? Or did the publisher come to you with the idea?

When I started my blog I had no idea that a person like me can be a writer and have a published book. Writers were over sixty with thick glasses, grey hair and most of them had to be dead for the last 10 years before people start to buy their books and call them writers. The offer came from the publisher who saw a new audience reading new stuff and he thought that this might be a good idea. Thank God it was.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you at a book reading or on book tour?

People asking to take a picture with me but warning me that they are not looking for a bride so I’d better not get any ideas.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?

I always dreamed about writing teenage novels but there is no market for this kind of novel in Egypt.

How long did it take you to get your latest book published?

Two years. America in an Arab Mirror was published in April by Palgrave Macmillan in New York.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

Yes, books like these are helpful: On Writing by Stephen King, Break into Fiction, First Draft by Buckham and Love, and of course the classic, The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.

What’s a typical writing day?

I teach during the day so the only time available is either early in the morning or late in the evening. The best time is in the morning, especially when I wake up after a good night sleep.

Plug your book. How would you describe what it’s about? And of course why’s it so great?

America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature, 1668 to 9/11 and Beyond deals with Arab-American relations, cross-cultural communication, and cultural understanding in general. The New York Times published a good review of it on April 21, 2011. My interest in Arab-American encounters in history, literature, and the arts started over a decade ago. The accounts of Arab travelers to America have always fascinated me. I widely researched the topic and had opportunities to read papers on it at Princeton and Dartmouth where I greatly benefited from the comments and the questions posed by colleagues in the field of Arabic and Middle Eastern studies. A question that was raised by a Princeton Arabist after one of my talks on the topic was whether Arab writings on America could be regarded as a case of Occidentalism, a counter-Orientalism of sorts. In some ways this book is a reversal of what Edward Said described as the West’s Orientalist view of the East. One could say that its stories are an Arab way of saying, “We, too, can subjugate you, Westerners, to our tourist, voyeuristic gaze.”

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?

If the question is about “favorite lines” instead of “favorite sentence” then I would mention, without hesitation, the evocative lines uttered by Macbeth upon receiving the news of his wife’s death.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth Act 5, scene 5

What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?

But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. — Khalil Gibran

The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind. — Khalil Gibran

Who’s the greatest stylist currently writing?

In Arabic I must mention Yusuf Idris, the greatest short story writer and playwright. In Arabic he employs the different register of modern Arabic and the very evocative expressions of the everyday spoken Egyptian colloquial. In my opinion he, not Naguib Mahfouz, should have received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Outside the Arab world one can mention Gabriel García Márquez.

Who’s the greatest plotter currently writing?

Dan Brown.

How much research is involved in your book and how do you carry it out?

The most difficult part was to hunt for the bits and pieces of Arab travelogues about America, specially the older narratives such as Father Elias al-Musili’s account about his visit to Spanish colonial America in 1668. At times I had to travel to different countries like Syria, Morocco, and Tunisia to look for sources.

Do you use other media, like music or art, to get yourself into the mood to write? Or to open up your creative faculties?

I believe that to get yourself into the mood to write, you need to surround yourself with beauty, and this can range from a beautiful painting hung on the wall in front of you through a piece of music to the scent of your favorite perfume. I like the scent of incense and I believe that the scent of sandalwood burning slowly and the taste of Arabian coffee with cardamom can do wonders to your mood. Beautiful works of art can inspire you to create other beautiful works of art. I read once that Tolstoy, inspired by a beautiful painting, was moved to write one of his evocative stories. Beauty engenders beauty.

What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?

I have two answers, one serious and the other is not. My first answer is: The best idea for marketing a book is really to write a darn good one. My second answer is: Create a big controversy about your forthcoming book.

Could you live entirely off your writing?

No.

Did you write other books before you were published?

I wrote several books in Arabic and English. They are literary studies and anthologies of literary works.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you at a book reading?

That was during a public talk in a community center in a small town near Boston. The guys in charge of videotaping the event had a fight with each other and they took their equipment and left in a huff.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?

Each chapter is produced in a different medium : Chapter One is on CD; Chapter Two in print; Chapter Three on video; Chapter Four is a painting of a scene in the book. For the conclusion you will have to dial a phone number and someone will sing it to you.

You’ve written in many different genres, including television and the novel. What are the most important differences in the actual process of writing?

I signed my first contract as a screenwriter when I was 19 and wrote something like 100 hours of tv-fiction since; I published one novel, last year, and I am writing the second. So, I am not sure I am equally qualified in the two genres. Having said that, the most obvious difference is the collective aspect of filmmaking and the very solitary act of writing literature. A screenplay does not exist until director, actors, photographer and the rest of the crew have turned it into a movie. Screenwriters can either resent or indulge in this lack of responsibility. Or be ambivalent about it, which makes for some interesting relationship issues with the director. A novel, instead, is your very own piece of work, you are the only one responsible for the final result, you are both the captain and the ship. I always liked the teamwork aspect of screenwriting but since I started writing novels I can’t say I miss it – I guess this means I was more ambivalent than I realized. And oh, the pleasure of taking hours, days even, to find the perfect turn of a sentence. No film producer will ever allow such a waste of time.

How long did it take you to get your novel published?

It’s almost embarrassing, how fast it went. A common friend (also in the publishing industry) recommended my manuscript to Mondadori’s chief fiction editor. Two days later he (the chief editor) phoned me saying he had read the first 100 pages and asked me to please not sell it to other publishers until he was finished. This was a Thursday afternoon. I wish I could boast about the cool answer I gave him,“I can’t guarantee this, I have to consult with my agent” or the like. The truth is, I was left speechless. The following Monday at 9 am he did call me; he’d finished the book during the week end and wanted to publish it. It’s the kind of story you’d never put in a script, it’s so tacky.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

I’ve read very few books of the sort. I enjoyed “On Writing” by Stephen King. It’s unpretentious, down-to-earth. King comes out as a very decent human being, surprisingly normal – well, at least until he discloses that, in order to able to write, he has to listen to heavy metal. I recently read a great book by Israeli master Abraham Yehoshua, it’s a series of interviews and conferences he held in Turin, Italy. I am not sure it’s been translated in English, the Italian title is “Il lettore allo specchio” (The reader at the mirror), it’s published by Einaudi.

What’s a typical writing day?

I am a working mom, I have two kids, a life partner, a house, Italian standards for cooking and eating (that means high). What all this means is that I have no schedules, no rituals, just one rule: write whenever you can if you can. You never know which family crisis/household need/unmissable-episode-in-the-development-of-the-adorable-careers-of-your-genetic-material shall happen next moment, requiring your attention and disrupting your concentration.

Tell us about your novel. And of course tell us why it’s so great?!

The backdrop of my novel “Eva dorme” (‘Eve sleeps’) is the 20th century history of South Tyrol, a province in the far North of Italy inhabited by a German-speaking ethnic minority. That’s where the Dolomites are. Hikers, skiers and climbers from all over the world visit it every year. Very few people, however, know about its turbulent history: the traumatic way in which it was torn away from its homeland Austria and given to Italy after World War 1; how Fascism occupied it and set about ‘italianizing’ it (people were forbidden to speak German in public, for instance); the bloody years of terrorism and state repression in the 60’s. Quite a typical European story, you might say. The main difference with places like Ulster or Euzkadi is that the escalation of violence – which in the bloodiest years nobody imagined would end anytime soon – was defused in the early ‘70s by an enlightened political compromise between central State and local politicians. My main character Eva, a 40something woman in today’s prosperous South Tyrol, is the fatherless daughter of an unmarried woman – not an easy condition in the rural Alpine society of the 60’s. As a little child, Eva gets a taste of what it might mean to be loved by a father when her mother falls in love with Vito, a soldier sent – like many others – from Southern Italy to fight the terrorists. As an adult, in today’s complicated Italy, Eva takes a long train ride all the way down from the Alps to Calabria – the tip of the ‘boot’ – to find out what happened to the only man who ever treated her as a daughter. It’s basically a story about fathers, fatherless-ness, fatherlands and what identity means. And also about bewilderment: the bewilderment of a community coping with a collective trauma (losing the Homeland); of young men in uniform asked to shoot at and sometimes torture (that happened too) civilians with very un-Italian names like Gudrun or Günther; of a fatherless girl who as an adult asks herself whether the taste of fatherly love she was briefly granted was for real or just an illusion.

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?

This is a tough one. There’s the incipit in Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities”, especially the third sentence: “There was a depression over the Atlantic. It was travelling eastward towards an area of high pressure over Russia and still showed no tendency to move northwards around it. The isotherms and isotheres were fulfilling their functions” Ah, I love it! What are human dramas after all, as long as isotherms and isotheres go about fulfilling their functions…

Who’s the greatest stylist currently writing?

This one is easy: Alice Munro. How, how does she do it?! I read and reread her books trying to capture a glimpse of the secret of her style, effortlessness, depth, gigantic understanding of the human condition. I am not an admirer of Alice Munro: I am a believer.

Your novel focuses on specific events in Italian history and, I understand, much of it is based on fact. How much research is involved in the book and how do you carry it out?

My book has a very political side to it, especially in the way it challenges Italy’s ingrained unwillingness to face the uncomfortable truths of its past. The terrible political, social, moral mess Italy is in nowadays has a lot to do, in my opinion, with a national identity very much based on denial. Also, the more I researched the more I found out links between the very local history of terrorism in South Tyrol and the wider picture of post-war Italy, especially the terrorist bloodbath of the 70’s and early ‘80s. This means I couldn’t risk making blunders on the facts, they were too controversial. Historical research had to be very thorough, and that’s how I tried to go about it. On the other hand I am a novelist, not a historian, so history books were not enough for me and I felt I had to speak with real people. I interviewed many retired military men from Southern Italy who served in South Tyrol in those years; cooks and chefs in the then booming tourist industry (Eva’s mother is a cook in a luxury hotel); old people in general who remembered those bloody times. Researching my book had a very moving, unforgettable side to it: all the German-speaking South Tyroleans who thanked me, an Italian, for showing an interest in their forgotten, unacknowledged story.

Once you base something in a real historical period, do you feel limited as a writer in the things you can do with your characters?

Oh, but I love limitations! Writing about a character belonging to a world which is not my own is so interesting. You have these limitations given by the customs of time and place, and you set about exploring the possibilities. Plus, this helps you find the bottom-line feelings we all human beings share, regardless of where or when we live. What can be more interesting than that?

What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?

I guess a good start is to write the best book you can, to the best of your abilities, then find the best possible publisher interested in it. After that – I suspect – things are no longer in your hands.

What’s your experience with being translated?

There’s a lot of ambivalence at being translated: it’s obviously a wonderful thing if your book crosses the national borders (even more so those of a minority language like Italian) but then the final text will not and cannot be in your control. You can check it in the languages you speak (I can’t thank enough my German and French translators for their aplomb when they got back from me manuscripts covered with scribbles), but at the end what you need is a leap of faith. Having said this, the first time I listened to my novel being read aloud in a foreign language I got goose bumps. It was like seeing your child being turned into, say, a Chinese, and yet still totally being the individual he’s always been.

Did you write unpublished novels or plays before you were actually published?

Somewhere in my hard disk there’s a collection of unpublished short stories. They’re in English because the years when I wrote them I was travelling in Asia most of the time and only rarely spoke Italian. I sent them to a handful of publishers, received four rejection slips, gave up (I know, four rejection slips are supposed to be too few to give up but still…). Shortly after that I had my first baby, priorities changed, time passed… Rereading them now I must say I am relieved they were never published. On the other hand, I’m happy I wrote them: they were an important stepping stone in developing my style. Which raises a question: can you develop your style in one language and then end up writing novels in another? Well, that’s what happened to me, but I’d be interested in the opinion of other bilingual writers.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour?

Being on a book tour is, in itself, a strange thing. Writers are supposed to be introspective people, undaunted by the years of loneliness needed to write a novel. Then, when the book is out, they are suddenly expected to turn into entertainers. That’s pretty strange, I find.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?

Nothing would be weirder to write than my autobiography.

You’ve had a career in medicine that most doctors would envy and success as a writer that few memoirists or novelists attain. How do you manage both careers so well?

I think there is no separation between the two. My identity, beyond that of being a father, a son, a citizen and so on is completely that of being a physician, of having the privilege, the honor, the calling to serve. I am old-fashioned in that sense, and get much satisfaction from this sense of serving the profession, honoring its ideals, celebrating its grand history (in novels or memoirs), and in repeatedly professing my faith in the “Samaritan function” of being a physician (to use the late physician Robert Loeb’s term). I resist the definition of the writer as somehow separate and divorced from my day job, as if it were akin to leaving work and performing burlesque after hours. I do subscribe to the notion as a form of research, exploring the truth. Having said that, I feel that the writing (no different than, say, the music if you are a musician, or the bump and grind if you do burlesque) has to stand on its own, has to work by the standards of the discerning literate reader for whom I write. He or she cares little, I suspect, what degree I have behind my name (and I don’t put M.D. behind my name on my books). Writing has to work by the standards by which writing works.

How long did it take you to get your first memoir published?

It was my fictional story, Lilacs, in the New Yorker in 1991 that led to my getting a contract to write, My Own Country. It came right after my five years at a small hospital in Johnson City, Tennessee, where, in a town of just 50,000 people, as an internist and infectious diseases specialist we were looking after nearly a hundred people with HIV infection, an unexpected number for that population. It turned out there was an explanation for that mystery, and I wanted to tell it. I go the contract to write it in 1991, just after graduating from the Iowa Writers Workshop. I actually wrote the book while working full time in El Paso at the teaching hospital at Texas Tech. I wrote it in my nights and weekends and it took four years.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

So many good ones. A new addition is Francine Prose’s Reading like a Writer: A Guide for People who Love Books. John Gardner’s books, The Art of Fiction and Becoming a Novelist are still so precious, as is Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings. But truly the most important thing to do is keep reading and keep writing. It is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.

What’s a typical writing day?

Given my day job all these years (which I love and which is who I am), writing for a set amount of time every day is not going to happen. Something that really helps is that I have a secret second office, without even a sign on the door, where I escape a few half days a week to write. It is a great source of peace and gives me time to be reflective and write. Of course, I also do a lot of writing at nights, early mornings and over the weekend, and sometimes that is hard on my family.

“Cutting for Stone” is an epic of two orphaned Ethiopian brothers. How would you describe its themes?

I think the themes are epic themes – of love and loss, success and failure, life and death. And how medicine and a career in it can save you or destroy you. And how love redeems us and seems to be the only thing that lasts.

Where did the idea for the novel come from?

All I had at the outset was an image of a beautiful Indian nun giving birth in a mission hospital in Africa, a place redolent with Dettol and carbolic acid scents, a place so basic, so unadorned, that nothing separates doctor and patient. You know what I mean: no layers of paperwork, cubicles, computers and forms–just a line of patients stretching out the door. That is all I had. I did not know the whole plot or how it ended.

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?

No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place….Isaac Babel. I love Babel and the quote says it all. Period.

What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?

Flannery O’Connor’s description of a face being as round and innocent as a cabbage.

Who’s the greatest stylist currently writing?

Goodness, that is hard. I admire so many for so many reasons: John Irving is a masterful storyteller, an architect of stories, and how to construct a plot, not to mention incredibly original and funny. Ondaatje does miracles that are hard to even explain – they just manifest as you read. Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez . . . so many. As you can see, I am partial to the epic and multigenerational story – a life or several lives playing out on a large canvas.

Your earlier books examined issues like AIDS and the abuse of drugs and alcohol by stressed physicians. Do you think someone who lacked your experience as a physician could’ve written successful books about these subjects? If someone had tried, how would their books have differed from yours?

There were and are many books written about AIDS and about physician abuse of drugs and alcohol, which is actually a more widespread issue than is generally known. I think that these issues can be addressed in many different ways, and sometimes a book works. Against my initial inclination, my editors urged me to make myself (and my experience as a physician) a character in the book to make the subject and the story compelling. With some trepidation, I did so – and it worked. Much of a book’s success can often be due to timing and I have been lucky with that – shortly after My Own Country came out, another physician wrote a story about AIDS, about his own struggle having contracted HIV in a needle stick. But despite great publicity and coverage, it did not do well. America had by then lost interest. I happened to be luckier with the timing.

What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?

Tell a good story. Have a fabulous editor. The two go together. (My editor was the marvelous Robin Desser). Short of that, it is all witchcraft, and God knows if the book tours and PR and all the other things we do make that much difference. If you have a good story, then you can pray that a word of mouth is created. If any of us really knew the answer to your question, we’d patent it and sell it!

What’s your experience with being translated?

I’m delighted that Cutting for Stone has been translated into as many languages as it has been. I have worked closely with some translators and have been impressed by the questions they ask and the ambiguities in my own writing they found. But since I can’t actually read a translation, it is a bit hard to say what has happened in the process, or if it has succeeded or been even better than what I originally wrote.

Did you write unpublished books before you were actually published?

No. I have been very fortunate to have a contract for each book before I began.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour (apart from being asked to answer these questions)?

I have had two people turn ill at two different locales when I read a scene about a vasectomy. I suppose it could have been something they ate, but I took responsibility.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?

That would be revealing my deepest, darkest secrets. You’ll just have to wait and see.

You had a career in medicine before you published. But for how long
before you became a professional writer were you interested in writing?

I knew I was a writer at age seven. I wanted to apply to journalism school as a teen, but my father — a very practical Chinese-American parent — warned me that writing was no way to make a secure living. As an obedient Chinese daughter, I followed his advice and went to medical school instead. But a few years into being a doctor those old writing impulses reasserted themselves and while I was home on maternity leave with my sons, I wrote my first novels. A few years later, I realized that I really could make a living as a writer – and I’ve been one ever since.

How long did it take you to get published?

I wrote two practice manuscripts before my third was accepted. That was CALL AFTER MIDNIGHT, a romantic thriller that was published by Harlequin/Mira books. I wrote romances, and then wrote a thriller HARVEST, which was my first really big bestseller. I’ve stuck with thrillers since then.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

TELLING LIES FOR FUN AND PROFIT by Lawrence Block is my favorite advice book about the craft of writing. It’s funny, it’s snappy, and it’s spot-on.

What’s a typical writing day?

Breakfast, coffee, exercise, and then four first-draft pages. Only when I’ve written those four pages do I call it a day. It usually takes me all day to produce those four pages.

You have a new book out soon, “The Silent Girl.” How would you describe what it’s about? And of course why’s it so great?!

When a dead woman is found on a rooftop in Boston’s Chinatown, the only clue are two mysterious hair strands that come from a non-human primate. The key to the mystery lies in the ancient Chinese legend of the Monkey King, a mythical creature who may — or may not – be lurking in the dark alleys of Chinatown. I love this story because it draws from my own Asian American experience and weaves in all the fairy tales my Chinese mother told me while I was growing up.

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?

I’m traveling at the moment so don’t have the book in front of me, but it’s the first sentence from GONE WITH THE WIND (paraphrased): “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it…” At least, it’s the one sentence that has stuck with me through the years.

And you remembered it correctly, even on the road, by the way. What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?

The battle scenes of Helm’s Deep from Tolkien’s THE TWIN TOWERS. Or maybe it’s just that the book was such a beloved favorite that I still remember the horrible description of the decapitated warriors’ heads flying over the battlements.

Who’s the greatest stylist currently writing?

An impossible question! Let’s just say that I’m very much enjoying the creativity of Markus Zusak’s THE BOOK THIEF.

Who’s the greatest plotter currently writing?

Another impossible question! But I do think that there’s a reason that writers such as Grisham and Connelly and Deaver are so successful — they know how to keep the plot rolling and unpredictable.

Your books have a technical aspect to them, given that some of the most popular are about a homicide detective and a medical examiner. How much research is involved in your books and how do you carry it out?

The amount of research varies with each book. Sometimes, I need to look up only a few details. But other times (such as with my space story GRAVITY) I may spend months doing site locations, talking to experts, or reading textbooks. When it comes to police facts, I do occasionally visit Boston PD. I also have cops I can consult with. But let’s face it, crime novels are not really all that tied to reality — things happen on a very short time scale, and in fiction, detectives don’t have to wait months and months for lab results to come back.

Where’d you get the idea for Detective Rizzoli and Examiner Isles? And how did you go about building the characters?

They popped up of their own accord. Really. It’s odd how that happened. Both started as secondary characters who weren’t supposed to appear in more than one book. So I didn’t spend much time thinking about who they were, and they ended up developing on their own, without much attention from me. By the end of their first books, they had grown into real people, and it all happened completely organically. To this day, I believe that they gave birth to themselves.

What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?

Write another book. And another.

What’s your experience with being translated?

More than half my income comes from outside the US, so those foreign translations are very, very important to my success as an author.

You’ve sold 25 million books, so I assume you live entirely off your writing. How many books did you write before could make a living at it?

I was finally able to make a living at this business after my novel HARVEST, which was my 10th book. Before that, while I was just writing romantic thrillers, I never could have supported myself.

Did you write unpublished books before you were actually published?

Yes. Two unsellable romances. I’m glad they were never published because they would be very embarrassing today.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour?

I was on book tour the morning of 9/11 and was on my way to the airport to catch a flight when the driver’s radio carried the first news reports of the Twin Towers. I arrived to find the airport in chaos and everything shut down. I ended up spending a very sad, very shell-shocked week in a Seattle hotel.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?

Years ago, I had the idea for a religious thriller featuring a man whose job is to investigate “miracles”. I was advised that there was no market for religious thrillers. Then came THE DA VINCI CODE. Oh, well.

Before we get to writing, here’s a virtual reality question. How soon will governments and corporations be able to control our behavior with virtual reality? And how?

Children play video games for more time per day than they watch movies and read books combined. Video games are becoming more “immersive,” that is, closer and closer to virtual reality, each year. Whether or not governments will use the medium to “control” us is up for debate, but there is little doubt that the next generation of lawmakers will look to virtual reality first and other media second when shaping laws, creating entertainment, and conducting commerce.

How long did it take you to get this book published?

From start—phone call from an agent suggesting I write a book—to finish—book available in stores–the process was about three years.

What’s a typical writing day?

I wake up early, drink coffee, and get my best writing done between 7am and 10am, and typically put in another few hours in the afternoon. Some days are longer days on which I pound the prose for double digit hours but those are the exception, not the rule. It’s a marathon, not a sprint…

Plug “Infinite Reality.” How would you describe what it’s about? And of course why’s it so great?

Infinite Reality is a survival guide for anyone seeking to understand how the virtual revolution is changing life as we know it—for example psychology, religion, education, entertainment, relationships, and business. For the past fifteen years, Blascovich and I have been running experiments to understand what happens to the mind inside virtual reality, with the idea that “someday” the technology would be a part of the average person’s daily life. It turns out “someday” has arrived. Children between the ages of 6 and 16 spend over 8 hours per day using digital media, and Internet addiction is quickly becoming a rival to substance abuse and gambling. Infinite Reality gives readers the tools to understand what Virtual Reality is and how it will affect their lives.

What’s it like to co-write a book?

The great part is being able to bounce ideas off one another and to have another person who is a highly invested editor. In our penultimate edit, Jim and I sat side by side and read OUT LOUD every single word of the book, and then argued over prose, grammar, and content. We averaged about thirty minutes per page. Needless to say it was a grueling month.

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions”. In the late seventies when William Gibson is setting the stage for the virtual revolution we are experiencing today, he really captured the essence of virtual reality. Today there are many people who prefer their “hallucinations” to the physical world.

You’re a fan of Gibson’s “Neuromancer.” Some people say his sci-fi fiction “invented” the internet and cyberspace. Is that true? Did fiction-writing actually lead to all these subsequent scientific developments?

Neuromancer was without a doubt what inspired me to become a scholar of avatars. Gibson’s unprecedented vision of cyberspace redefines what it means to be human—mortality is optional, people can transform their gender, age, and identity at the drop of a hat, and the notions of pleasure and pain move beyond the flesh. Indeed these themes are pervasive throughout my research and throughout our book Infinite Reality. I first read it in high school, and like many Stanford students I force to read it in my courses, I didn’t really “get it”. It’s a challenging read on the first try, and some of the big ideas take a few reads before they grab hold. I didn’t pick the book up again for about a decade, in my fifth year of graduate school, where I was floundering without direction in my research, running cognitive psychology experiments and then designing computer programs that mimicked thought. But before dropping out of academia altogether, one job advertisement in particular resonated with what I had read in Neuromancer, and I decided to give university life one more try. I took a research position at UCSB studying avatars. Since then, Neuromancer has been my crutch. Large government grants have been awarded to me for building and testing Gibson’s ideas. Academic papers are improved by Gibson quotes that sum up the big ideas of the research. PhD students walk out of my office with a copy when searching for dissertation topics. Undergraduates who can’t imagine the world without the “cyberspace” Gibson predicted (or perhaps facilitated) grumble about using it as a textbook in my lecture classes.

Is there any other sci-fi fiction author whose work seems scientifically well-informed to an actual scientist like you? Can you recommend a book?

Yes—the book “Altered Carbon” by Richard Morgan is a must-read for anyone who wants a vision of the next avatar revolution. Gibson describes a world in which digital technology transforms humanity. Morgan has a different take and focuses on a world in which humans have conquered biology and can “occupy”—that is transport their personality into—“off the shelf” bodies.

Do you use other media, like music or art, to get yourself into the mood to write? Or to open up your creative faculties?

All Black Sabbath, all the time.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you while researching the book?

I was at a meeting at a Fortune 500 corporation, discussing virtual reality with the head of their research division. Without warning at our 8am meeting she showed me two devices which were designed for “teledildonics”—virtual sex between two people who are not in the same physical place. We examined and discussed two “his and her” devices in which people can intimately touch one another over the Internet.

You’re about to become a father. When your daughter is in college, how will virtual reality have changed the way she lives and studies?

Imagine the best teacher who ever lived—for example Einstein for physics or Vonnegut for writing. Now imagine a digital avatar that looked like him, had his personality, had all of his knowledge, and was verbally and nonverbally responsive to questions and confused looks. Now, think about a digital MP3 song. It lasts forever and can by copied infinitely for free. So my daughter, like every other student, will be tutored one-on-one, by the best teacher who ever lived.

Will she still be reading books?

She still will be reading words, but a “book” will likely be a distant relative of its paper ancestors. Reading will be interactive, with words and images changing based on your reactions, and there will be a lot more “showing” and a lot less “telling”.

How long did it take you to get published?

My husband is a screenwriter and he made it look very easy – most of his films seemed to make it to the big or small screen, and the word count for a screenplay was enticingly small (lots of lovely white spaces on the page). So I thought “If he can do this, I can!” I spent five years writing screenplays before realising that it was hard, and that I was a spectacular failure at it. One of my screenplays came very close to being green-lit. I decided that if this wasn’t produced, I’d write a book (which was what I’d always wanted to do, really). It didn’t get made, so I sat down and turned the treatment into my first book, Dead Lovely. It took three months. And another three before Faber and Faber bought it. So, my first answer is that it took me years to get published. My second is that it took three months.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

The only books I’ve ever read on writing are screenwriting books. Initially, I read everything I could get my hands on, but the only one I remember is How to Write Screenplays That Sell by Michael Hague. This book helped a great deal with structure, plot and characterization. It’s probably because of my background in screenwriting, and the lessons I learned from this book, that my novels have three acts and are easy to adapt into screenplays.

What’s a typical writing day?

Mostly I work at home in an office in the attic. I get the kids off to school, answer emails and do admin for a while, then settle down to a few hours writing before they arrive home again. My husband works in the office next door to mine, so we often yell strange things to each other through the walls like “Can you dissolve a body?” If I have a deadline, or if I’m really motivated by an idea, I can work all day and all night. My husband and I are pretty flexible and work well as a team, giving each other time off from domestic duties if one is on a roll. About three days a week, I head into Glasgow City centre, where I’ve rented a desk space in a studio. I missed having colleagues and life around me, and I love being shamed into productivity by other hard working people.

Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?

Bloody Women is about a woman who’s about to get married to her Italian fiancé and leave Scotland to live with him in Tuscany. Before leaving her home, she decides to meet up with her ex-boyfriends to tie up loose ends and make sure she’s doing the right thing. Problem is, her exes all wind up dead, and she gets the blame. The book was fun to write and I believe it’s fun to read. It’s also pretty dark, looking at bi-polar disorder and a nasty-pasty serial killer.

How much of what you do is:

a) formula dictated by the genre within which you write?
My one aim has always been to avoid formula. When my agent suggested I write a sequel to Dead Lovely, I agreed but soon felt restricted by having the same setting and the same characters. I wrote the sequel – My Last Confession – and tried hard to write something very different from the first book, but I haven’t wanted to write another one. All the books I’ve written since – five in all – have been stand alone.

b) formula you developed yourself and stuck with?

At the same time, it’s hard to avoid writing in a certain way. I almost always start my books with the last scene. I also vary point of view. Except for my teen book, Amelia O’Donohue is So not a Virgin, which is all in first person, I play around with point of view all the time. I’m not sure if I’ll always do this, but it certainly suits my style.

c) as close to complete originality as it’s possible to get each time?

The biggest complement I’ve ever had is that I’m original. I don’t try to be original, as this can have the opposite effect. But I do like to ignore all the rules I’ve ever learned and just do what feels energetic and different.

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?

I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas (T S Eliot). Just love the image. It scares me.

How much research is involved in each of your books?

I don’t think of myself as a thorough researcher – I never go out in my car and sit at a certain spot for hours to take it in. But I do talk to relevant people (e.g. a psychiatrist for Bloody Women, a Kidney specialist for The Donor) and use the internet a lot. I worry about some of the things I search for on Google (How to break into a car, how to kill someone in a steam room etc).

Where’d you get the idea for your main character?

Catriona in Bloody Women is a mixture of me and of people I know, as are all my female protagonists. The elements of Catriona that are not me include:

She’s Scottish.
She’s a TV presenter.
She’s bipolar.

The parts that are me include:

She’s in love with someone from another country.
She decides to meet her exes before tying the knot (I did this! I took my poor husband-to-be along with me, wee soul. None of my exes was murdered though.)

Do you have a pain from childhood that compels you to write? If not, what does?

I’m number twelve in a family of thirteen. This gave me a ferocious survival instinct and a competitive nature. The way I coped with the scary crowd was to hide myself away. This, combined with chronic asthma as a little one that sent me to hospital for weeks on end, got me in the habit of living inside my own head for hours and hours every day and I have remained that way ever since. I’m sure all these things set me on the writer’s path.

What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?

Social media marketing like blogging and using facebook and twitter. I’m just starting to get my head around all these things, but they definitely make a difference. Book trailers are also useful. I’ve just had a good one made by Blether Media for my teen book.

What’s your experience with being translated?

My books have been translated into numerous languages. So far, I’ve had little or no contact with the translators, which is a shame, because – next to me – they are the people who are most intimately acquainted with the text. I often wonder what the translations say (could be anything!) but I can see the shape and rhythm of my writing just by glancing at the page.

Do you live entirely off your writing? How many books did you write before could make a living at it?

I’m a full time writer now, but it’s a life lived in constant fear. Each book is your last shot. I had deals for four books before I left my job as a social worker. Even then, it felt like a frivolous thing to do. I hope and pray I can do this forever – it’s the best job in the world.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour?

Met this really weird guy called Matt Rees in Germany. Apart from that, I read the first chapter of Bloody Women at a book festival in a posh suburb of Glasgow recently. The passage involves Catriona identifying the severed penis of one of her ex boyfriends. It was supposed to be funny, but no-one laughed (just wriggled uncomfortably in their seats). Afterwards, no-one bought the book.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?

I’d love to write a book called Glasgow: Men’s Quarters, where the city has been divided into men and women. I’ll never get it published because I’ll never write it – my radical days having been overshadowed by saxophone lessons and a desire to live in a large farmhouse in Tuscany for six months every year.

How long did it take you to get published?
I got a deal with my second book, which I finished about seven years after starting the first. Between the two enterprises there was a bit of a gap, though.

Would you recommend any books on writing?
I never read any books on writing when I was starting out. That was probably a mistake. The best book I’ve seen subsequently is Master Class in Writing Fiction by Adam Sexton (published by McGraw Hill). You’re supposed to read a particular novel before each chapter, which is a good approach.

What’s a typical writing day?
Someone once said that the writing life involves brief intervals of creativity punctuated by long intervals of staring into the fridge. That about sums it up in my case. That said, since becoming a father three years ago, I’ve had to cut down on the fridge time.

Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?
The Einstein Girl is a historical novel inspired by the relatively recent discovery that Albert Einstein had a daughter in secret. It’s set in 1932, on the eve of the Nazi assumption of power, when Einstein was poised to flee Europe for America, and unfolds as a psychological mystery. I was inspired to write it because, in the course of my researches, I began to see some fascinating parallels between Einstein’s intellectual obsessions and his highly unusual private life.

How much of what you do is:
a) formula dictated by the genre within which you write?
b) formula you developed yourself and stuck with?
c) as close to complete originality as it’s possible to get each time?
In sketching out a book I’m guided more by instinct than anything. I think that’s something writers develop over time, and which becomes sharper the more they write. I don’t think I’ve ever adjusted a story because I don’t see it conforming to a model. More likely I’ll adjust it because I don’t find it satisfying or compelling enough.

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?
Did I mention that when I was fifteen I took it out of my pants and whacked off on the 107 bus from New York?
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint.
If you are going to indulge in rhetorical questions, make them good ones.

What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?
Humbert Humbert’s description of Dolores Haze in ‘Lolita’ (“She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock.”)

Who’s the greatest stylist currently writing?
Don DeLillo or James Ellroy

Who’s the greatest plotter currently writing?
Tom Wolfe

How much research is involved in each of your books?
It varies. I did 18 months research for The Einstein Girl. Typically it’s about six months, and usually involves a visit to the main locations. It isn’t just about accuracy and background. Research gives me ideas and helps me shape the story.

Where’d you get the idea for your main character?
I agree with those people who say ‘character is plot and plot is character’. I usually start with a premise and then try to develop a character who can exploit the potential of that premise to the maximum.

Do you have a pain from childhood that compels you to write? If not, what does?
I stumbled into writing thanks to a cocktail of creative frustration, naivety and a nasty lung infection. It was never a compulsion. I write now because I enjoy it (when it’s going well) and because I’m unlikely to excel at anything else.

What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?
If you find out, please let me know.

What’s your experience with being translated?
Good translators don’t just translate well, they write well, giving your book a voice as distinctive and pleasing as your own (or more so!). In my experience, good translations make a big difference to the reception of a book – and you know you have a good translation if the foreign reviews go out of their way to praise the writing or the style. However, it seems to be largely pot luck as to whether you get a good translation or merely an adequate one. Recently, I think I’ve be particularly lucky in Germany and Spain.

Do you live entirely off your writing? How many books did you write before could make a living at it?
I started making proper money with my third book, but it’s been very up and down since then. Now that I have an expanding family to worry about, I’m looking to broaden the scope of my activities. The sale of vital organs (my own) is not ruled out.

How many books did you write before you were published?
One.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour?
I’ve never actually been on a book tour. I live in hope.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?
There are plenty of lame ideas in my Ideas File, but the weird ones are actually the more promising ones.

The computer gave me some kind of message about a “Flash” that had “crashed.” I’m old enough to remember the sputtering rockets of Flash Gordon in the 1950s series that was rebroadcast on the BBC in the early 1970s when I was a kid. That image held off my sense of powerlessness and frustration for about a half minute.

Then I went nuts and hit myself in the head. Yes, full fist to the side of the head. As I watched the little dial on my screen telling me the computer was “still working on it”….on and on. Hit myself in the head six times.

Then I decided that it was stupid to be so frustrated over a computer. (I haven’t hit myself in the head for a decade, and that was when I was divorcing my first wife, so I consider it to be far more excusable, though no less daft.) In fact, I realized that this Flash-crash might actually save me from the attention-deficit disorder known as “writing a blog” and “having a profile online.”

I’m told these things are good for an author, to build a public awareness of his work. But what would happen if I didn’t do them? Suddenly I faced the prospect of (a) getting my computer fixed, or (b) never filing to my blog or updating Facebook or Red Room or Goodreads or Crimespace or Twitter ever again. I like to prevaricate, so (a) seemed quite possible.

My pal Alex Ruehle, a journalist at the Munich newspaper the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, recently published a book about his six months spent NOT going online. To sum up: it was quite hard for Alex to function in the modern world without going online, and he described to me the palm-sweating tension when his mind, his body, his entire being urged him to give up and check his email.

In my case, eventually my internet provider informed me that the modem they had installed only a few days before in my apartment was entirely inappropriate. Inappropriate because it didn’t work and never would. “I don’t know why our technician did that,” the fellow from tech support said. I knew: he was trying to save me from ever going online again. Bring in the modem and we’ll give you a different one, they said. One that works.

Secretly cursing them for figuring out my problem, I went down to the phone company’s office in a somewhat shady neighborhood behind the bus station, like a junkie looking for his score. Why am I doing this? I told myself. Do you really want to go online? You have a perfect excuse for resigning from the whole thing. Next time someone says “Do you tweet?” You can just say, “I would. But my computer doesn’t want me to.” I even reversed into a one-way street, so I could break through the iron-clad system of No Entry signs behind which the phone company barricades itself. I broke the law—just so that I could go online again. What’s wrong with me? I thought. I’m sick.

I plugged in the new modem. My blog item posted. My Facebook page zinged into life (suddenly I had 900 friends again—did you miss me?) And thus I resumed the true battle against being online. Because not having online access is a kop out. I need to face it every day, to test my resistance. Like an alcoholic who keeps a bottle of gin in the kitchen to gather dust, it shows that I’m strong.

I know this for sure, because when I’m between drafts of a novel I feel the old madnesses creeping up on me. The dark resentments whose origins I can’t quite nail down. The tension around the center of my chest and the heavy breathing and the tight jaw and the voice in my head telling me this isn’t fair, whatever it is. The flickering fantasies penetrating my mind when it lacks the focus that otherwise keeps it calm.

My wife sees all this before I do, at least consciously. “Maybe you ought to work on something else while you’re waiting to start a new draft,” she says, gentle and delicate, as if she were waiting for me to respond with an angry “I’m all right, dammit.”

I have to take a break, you see, because writing a novel requires for me at least 10 drafts. Read a book 10 times straight and see if you don’t get bored with it. Or really pissed off.

So when I get through a draft, I take a week or so before I get back into it. As the end of the draft approaches, I start to fret about that week. I can’t take an actual vacation, because I always tell myself that I don’t know precisely when I’ll reach the end of the draft and therefore I can’t book a trip in advance. I try to line up some reading related to the subject of the book, but sometimes the books turn out to be duds or I’m done with them in a day and a half.

This time, as I take a break between drafts of my novel about the Italian artist Caravaggio, I find myself sweating it out in the desert heat of Jerusalem. Enervating, indeed. I’m already a little fevered in any case, because I’ve been deep in the psyche of Caravaggio, who was both a brilliant artist and a duelist with an explosive temper.

In fact, when he wasn’t working, Caravaggio was liable to get into tavern brawls and raging arguments with everyone around him. That suggests I’m not alone in my frenetic between-drafts mental state. It’s a good job I can’t carry a rapier around Jerusalem.

I used to think that perhaps I just wasn’t that nice. My theory was that when I’m writing, or when I’m on a book tour talking about my books, I’m a very pleasant fellow, but take away the dope, as it were, of creative writing and I turn into the clenched up ball of resentments and violence that I used to be as a teenager.

I don’t think that any more. I’ve done enough meditation and other self-examinations (I won’t go into them here, but they’d all sound very new agey, I expect; never mind, they’ve been great for me) to know that the “real” me only emerges during periods when I’m working. My concentration at those times is deep. It’s as though I’m listening to my self, without judgment, just as one does in meditation.

When I’m not working, it’s harder to hear the voice of my self. I’m more likely to pick up other sounds, the psychological noise pollution that comes with minor confrontations on the road, annoying emails, vague slights from acquaintances.

So this time I’m writing a play about Gaza, before I go back to my Caravaggio novel. You might think Gaza isn’t a place to find peace, but I’ve always enjoyed a deep concentration whenever I’ve been there. To bring that concentration together with the tranquility of creativity ought to keep me sane until it’s time to get back to my novel.

Either that, or the next time I post to this blog it’ll be from a jail somewhere…