MEG WOLITZER

When I wrote 'The Interestings,' I wanted to let time unspool, to give the book the feeling of time passing. I had to allow myself the freedom to move back and forth in time freely, and to trust that readers would accept this.

My being a writer and playing Scrabble are connected. If I have a good writing day, I'll take a break and play online Scrabble. My favorite word as a child was 'carrion,' before I knew what it meant. I later created crossword puzzles, which was a lot about puns, and how words would create these strange, strange things.

Good writing is good writing, and I'm so happy when I read it.

I've always been drawn to writing for young readers. The books that I read growing up remain in my mind very strongly.

In 'The Interestings' I wanted to write about what happens to talent over time. In some people talent blooms, in others it falls away.

I really love Scrabble. I played it with my mother growing up. We took it everywhere with us. We didn't know then about the two letter words. Who knew that AA, or more controversially, ZA, or QI were words? We were a games family generally.

Both my mother and I have close groups of friends that include other writers, and these friendships are very important to us.

If you've written a powerful book about a woman and your publisher then puts a 'feminine' image on the cover, it 'types' the book.

'Charlotte's Web,' which I read sitting on my mother's lap, was the most emotional experience: that was when I made the leap from seeing how to untangle words to realizing how books both contain and convey strong feelings.

I think everyone is always measuring themselves against other people to a certain degree; it happens automatically, and it's hard not to be this way at least some of the time.

I sometimes feel as if ideas for a novel kind of pop up like numbers in a bingo tumbler, and then they're ready to go.

Some people are uncomfortable saying what they feel.

People say, write what you know, but it's really, write about what obsesses you. Write about what you're thinking about all the time.

Novels can be a snapshot of a moment in time, or several moments in time, and as a reader, that's what I really like, and as a writer, it's what I'm drawn to also.

I think my writing changed when I put 'the' in front of my titles. It had more command.

As a novelist, I feel lucky that I can traffic in nuance. I'm more interested in looking at how things change over time, at how people try and sometimes fail to make meaning out of their lives.

I love guacamole and think about it a lot when I'm supposed to be thinking about language.

I think listening to music from your youth is as powerful as a scent passed beneath your nose.

I don't write autobiographically.

I do want to say the process of writing a novel is riddled with self-doubt and self-loathing.

When you're writing, it's so absorbing. It's like a drop cloth goes over you, and the world outside falls away, but you do have a miniature version of the world, your own world, that you actually have some control over. I love to work.

'Pleasure' is a word I think about a lot, as opposed to 'entertainment.' They are very, very different.

I believe that sometimes, when we talk about books, we're talking about the big picture - how they're relevant.

We all would love the idea of people getting what's coming to them in books and in life, but sometimes the trajectory is a little more complicated than that.

We all want to write the kind of book that we want to read. If you put in the things that you are thinking about and create characters who feel like they could live - at least for me, that's the way I want to write.