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The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen.
Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.
That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It's the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical - in my case, anyway - but also quite detached.
I had always thought that the idea of love at first sight was one of those things invented by lady novelists from the South with three names.
History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.
Most novelists I know went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I certainly did.
I really think more fledgling novelists - and many current and even established novelists - should get out into the real world and cover local politics, sports, culture, and crime and write it up on deadline.
'Shun security,' I advise aspiring novelists when they complain to me that they are stuck. 'Get disoriented. Maybe your agonizing writing block isn't agonizing enough. Your enemy is comfort.'
All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.
Many first-time novelists end up rewriting their first two or three chapters, trying to get them 'just right.' But the point of the first draft is not to get it right; it's to get it written - so that you'll have something to work with.
![Image: Orzetto at it.wikipedia [CC-BY-SA-3.0], from Wikimedia Commons](https://cdn.quotesgram.com/img/91/12/1164584582-Screen-Shot-2012-11-07-at-1_54_37-PM1.png)
