Everybody likes to win. I don't care if you work for a small plumbing company or the most successful company in the world. There's a special flavor to winning.
It's really important in any historical fiction, I think, to anchor the story in its time. And you do that by weaving in those details, by, believe it or not, by the plumbing.
Making up characters and places and plots, unlike fixing your plumbing or doing dishes, is anything but practical or rational. I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right.
The basic thing is to be humble, and pretend you're a bartender in the tavern of life. Don't get too comfortable and don't really listen to anybody else. Don't stand around with a bunch of writers and talk about writing. You know when you see plumbers at a plumbers convention, usually they're not talking about plumbing: they're talking about whatever it is that two men happen to talk about. They're talking about sports, their wives and children. I just tell my students, don't talk about writing too much, just go out and do it. Find out whatever you need to get to the mainland.
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