JANET FITCH

My mother was an enthusiastic chef but wildly disorganized, and often preferred purchasing yet another jar of mace or chili powder rather than having to hunt down its last incarnation.

The elegance of a really good screenplay, I admire it. I can't do it.

A terrific exercise is to take a paragraph of someone's writing who has a really strong style, and using their structure, substitute your own words for theirs, and see how they achieved their effects.

A cliche is like a coin that has been handled too much. Once language has been overly handled, it no longer leaves a clear imprint.

I write every day... I never get ideas unless I'm actually writing. Ideas I get in the shower don't do me any good.

I send all my short fiction to 'Ontario Review' because Joyce Carol Oates is associate editor there, and I think she's fantastic.

When you're a little kid, you are small, your life is small - and you're terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder.

As a middle-aged woman who has had some luck as a writer, I'd like this profession of author to remain a possibility for young writers in the future - and not become an arena solely for the hobbyist or the well-heeled.

Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

A figure in Los Angeles politics for five decades, my mother nevertheless had had her fill of talking to people by the time she came home at night.

My house is modern, but I like my writing room to be old fashioned. I write on a little wooden secretary desk.

While out on the perimeter, women discovered the freedom of badlands. They were curiously free to invent, without having to liberate themselves from the forms and rewards of the cultural norm.

Your protagonist is your reader's portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you're creating. They don't have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering.

I was into the music scene, but I was also a bit of a perfectionist and very hard on myself... very dark in that way.

I started writing when I was 21. I was going to become an historian. And then I realized there was more to the world than just the past. I didn't want to spend my life in the library.

My father gave me Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' when I was in junior high; my junior high, angst-filled soul responded to that.

My mother never met a gadget she didn't like. There were tube pans for baking the angel food cakes my father could have after his first heart attack, and Bundt pans and loaf pans and baking pans and grilling pans.

My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers. Every two weeks, he'd take me to our local branch library and pull books off the shelf for me, stacking them up in my arms - 'Have you read this? And this? And this?'

My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers.

As an undergraduate, I had not studied literature - I was a history major.

As a person with terrible handwriting, I love the computer. I've waited all my life for the computer.

I'm particularly fond of the Mulholland Fountain, at Riverside Drive and Los Feliz Boulevard, when it turns colors at night.

Nineteen is as alive as 40-plus. I can vividly remember 19 and how I saw the world.

Crime novelists do really well with Los Angeles.