Writers like A.S. Byatt are not the kind who simply get an idea and start banging away at the keys. They study, accrue, and consider.

In this interview, the elderly Byatt, still recovering from a recent hospitalization but full of ambition about new projects, talked about her process:

You collect the things and then you study them. And I collect ideas and then I study them. And I collect people’s lives and then I study them. And because I don’t write autobiographical fiction, I need more than one life, just as I need more than one glass ball, all the different patterns, in order to see what is the same, what is different. I feel that about real people and people in books, and people in biographies. It’s the human desire to know things…

Study leads to knowledge leads to more fully realized characters and invented stories that can feel as real as what you had been studying.