MF: Let's talk about your writing habits a bit. What prompted you to switch from typing your novels on a laptop to writing them out longhand with pen and paper?

NS: Well, I noticed that when I was stuck and I couldn't get something going, the thing that always worked for me was to walk away from the computer, pick up a pen and start writing. And since there seems to be something about the pen that worked for me, why not try writing a whole book that way.

So I tried it, knowing that I could always change back to the old system.

What I found was that the quality of the first draft was higher. Because I'm a very fast typist, if an idea comes into my head I can slam out several paragraphs of material before I've had time to think about it. My fingers can kind of get ahead of my brain. When writing with a pen it's much slower, so the material has to stay resident in my brain for a little longer while I'm writing it out. During that time a lot can happen. I can think of ways to improve that sentence; I can rearrange things in my head; or I can think better of it altogether and decide not to write that sentence or paragraph at all. I liked that about it, and I found that liked editing with a pen better too because it's faster to cross a word out than it is to backspace over it. I like the physical engagement of it - I'm moving around more with the pen than I am when I'm just locked into one position at the keyboard. So there are a number of advantages to it and no disadvantages that I can detect.

MF: Do you have a specific writing routine that you adhere to?

NS: I pretty much get up every morning, have my breakfast, and then try to get into my work space before anything has happened that's going to distract me, annoy me, or get my brain on the wrong track. I'll pick up the 10 or 15 pages I wrote the day before and read through them and edit them. By the time I'm done with that I've kind of gotten back in the swing of the chapter I'm writing.

At the end of a day, I like to stop in the middle of a section - not at the end - because it's easier to get going again. If you stop at the end of a chapter, it's harder to restart. Then I'll write another 10 or 15 pages of new material. That's pretty much my production schedule.

MF: What do you do when you're not working?

NS: I find that most of writing takes place in the back of the mind, while you're not consciously thinking about it. So what I've found a long time ago is that after getting some pages banged out in the morning, I need to go do something for the rest of the day that's going to occupy my thoughts and consume my attention that's completely unrelated to writing. If I do that, I find that the next morning when I go to my work space I find that there's stuff sitting there in my head ready for me to write down.