SK: If a detective looked at your browser tabs right now, would they arrest you, call an exorcist, or buy you a weighted blanket? FF: They’d buy me the blanket, interrogate me, then quietly close the tabs and pretend they never saw them. When you’re stuck on a scene, grappling for a metaphorical weapon, do you precision-strike like a sniper, or spray and pray like Trump? Precision-strike. I’ll stare down one sentence until it gasps for air and convince myself that swapping one adjective will fix my entire broken plot. What’s a word you’ve used in a draft that you…
-
-
There is one piece of writing advice that never fails: When in doubt, begin with a sex scene. Then do some writing.
-
I build the architecture, place the doors, decide who enters, and know roughly where everyone should end up. Then the characters discover the plan, form a union, and refuse to cooperate. I call the wreckage organic storytelling.
-
Some of my books are set in Russia. I needed to come up with a lot of Russian names so I basically just plundered Dostoevsky.
-
Egregious shouldn’t be seen in public with any qualifiers such as that two-timing gigolo “very.”



