Ultimately if you're a journalist, one day you're writing about figure skating, one day a political debate. I loved that about reporting. I like throwing my energies into various corners of the world.

My cure for writer's block is to step away from the thing I'm stuck on, usually a novel, and write something totally different. Besides fiction, I write poetry, screenplays, essays and journalism. It's usually not the writing itself that I'm stuck on, but thing I'm trying to write. So I often have four or five things going at once.

My first book, about Ruby Ridge, was made into a miniseries on CBS in 1996, and since then, I've dabbled in Hollywood, pitched a few things, sold a couple of screenplays and a pilot that I wrote with a buddy from Spokane, flirted with seeing 'Citizen Vince' as a film, and most recently, adapted 'The Financial Lives of the Poets' as a script.

Forget being 'discovered.' All you can do is write. If you write well enough, and are stubborn enough to embrace failure, and if you happen to fall into the narrow categories that the book market recognizes, then you might make a little money. Otherwise, it's a struggle. A gorgeous struggle.

I'm really into the way sound works in film, and I did a little bit of sound design for theater in college.

Regardless of who originally made it popular, any hit song becomes a challenge to the ingenuity and imagination of other musicians and performers.

I've found that in fiction - and this is just the kind of writer I am - I can't really work from an outline. I have a vague idea of the characters at the beginning of the book, and then I have a vague idea of whatever the end of the book will be, but I can't approach creative nonfiction like that.

Neerja' is such a solid film. Everything about the film has substance, be it sound, writing, story, background scores, or direction.