I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject – skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.
People who think my books are autobiographical which they're not credit me with having a much better memory than I do. I do however have a powerful imagination.
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Imagination it turns out is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing which means in one sense that none of it is true. Yet in the writing and perhaps in the reading some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.
