[NOTE: The below interview is transcribed from an audio interview]

When and where do you like to write? Are you the same-thing-every-day kind of writer or can you write anytime, anywhere?

I have had to transition to being more of an anytime, anywhere writer. I wrote my first novel at the New York society library. During the hours that my preschooler was with his class. There was no Wi-Fi at that library at the time. And there was nowhere else to go on the Upper East Side That wasn’t excruciatingly expensive. So I forced myself to learn how to sit down in front of the blank screen and get some words. But these days, I write almost everything from my room, where I also run my business. And I do this even if the place is a mess, or even if I haven’t eaten breakfast, or if there are dishes in the sink, I’ve just had to learn how to be somebody who can focus on the story. Some days, it goes better than other days.

Do you have any pre-writing rituals or habits before you sit down to write?

I don’t have any rituals or habits before I sit down to write. Except, hopefully, I’ve left myself some clues from the night before. But not always.

I don’t really have strong ideas about whether it does or doesn’t exist, but I definitely get stuck. And when I get stuck, there are some tricks I employ to getting unstuck. One of those tricks is to close the computer and pick up a notebook and a pen. Because a change of venue is important. And if I’m stuck on what happens next in the story, which is pretty much the way you get stuck, I will write down a bunch of things that might happen next, even if they’re not such great ideas. Or if I don’t know what happens immediately next, but I know some other things that are definitely going to happen in the story, then I will write those down. So I might write things that happen at the top of the page, and then start spewing out the rough ideas I have for what’s coming later in the book. And usually by looking at it that way I can figure out what’s missing in the middle. And then I know what to do.

I would say that in financial services, you learn to be very transactional in your thinking. And you know that everybody there is not in it for the art. They are in it for the money and the transactional success. So while I think good writing can be very artistic, I never forget that many people’s thinking is transactional. And I also apply transactional thinking to my decision making about writing. And sometimes this is hard, sometimes you get an invitation to be in a really cool anthology and you want to do it. And maybe it’s even for charity. But guess what, I’m terrible at writing short stories and much better at writing novels. And you sometimes have to separate the opportunity from what it will really do to your schedule. And therefore I turned down lots of great opportunities because I know that they won’t work out with my way of writing or my schedule. So sure, Wall Street taught me how to be efficient in my decision making. And I certainly haven’t left that behind.

What does a successful writing day mean for you? And how do you finish out a day of writing? Do you have a process, or is it just that you know you’ve hit a natural stopping point?

A successful writing day for me is at least 1200 words. But of course, usually I go over that. And then I miss a few days.

So even though my average pace is 1200 words, my calendar is not covered with stickers. But on the day when I have succeeded, I will usually write 1500 or 2000. But I know people who commonly write 7000 words in a day, and I have just never ever been one of them. Every once in a while I can do that, but really almost never. My brain doesn’t go that fast. So I also don’t write my books in a straight line. Because I find that there is a lot of discovery that happens. So when I figure out what the discovery is that makes the book richer, I have to go back and seed my earlier chapters with the nuance and with the motif. Or maybe I’m adding conflict.

So I have to go back and forth a lot. And that makes the front half of the book go much more slowly than the last half of the book. So by the last part, I figured everything out. And it’s easier to write fast.

What is your advice to aspiring writers?

You have to learn to be critical of your work. And I don’t mean critical of yourself. That’s a different thing entirely. But being critical of your work instead of critical of yourself is a necessary skill. And if you can’t figure out how to judge when you’re doing great work and when you’re doing, you know, not such great work, then it’s going to be very hard to be read and to sell pieces if you can’t be your own best critic.