For centuries, the author of a book has been a revered figure, a symbol of intellectual achievement, wisdom and wit, brilliance and, above all, prestige. Indeed, the book, whatever its contents, has been an item of iconic significance.

It is no wonder that a large percentage of people want to write a book. Some have motives that their composition in the covers of a book, however defined as a physical entity or a cyber product, will make them rich and famous; some see such an achievement as an expression of their persona, their point of view, their record of a life lived, a work of the imagination and the fulfillment of a secret wish for immortality.

Some harbor hopes that they can establish careers as full-time writers in genre fiction, or self-help, or advice to improve the lives of others or on subjects that display their knowledge of cooking, history, politics, religion or whatever has absorbed their interest.

Whatever their motives, their ambition is an obsession and they are willing to take the time and muster the discipline to pursue their dreams of authordom, hoping that the words they compose will be read, contemplated and engaged with by others. It is, indeed, a noble aspiration.

Before the advent of the Internet and the e-book reader, publishing was dominated by a hierarchy of professionals who bought, judged, edited and distributed books through a process of middle men and a chain of brick-and-mortar outlets to sell their book offerings for a profit. For those who, for whatever reasons, were rejected by these professionals, there was always what has been called “vanity publishing,” whereby the author pays for the production of his or her book that rarely, if ever, found its way into the distribution channel.

The divide between the professional publisher and the vanity author on the Internet has disappeared. The two are now on equal footing in the Internet distribution chain, which is surging and will eventually dominate the book business. Now, any author who writes whatever book he or she chooses is on equal distribution footing with the professional publisher on the Net.

The result, which I view as an unintended consequence, is that the floodgates have opened for the wannabe writer of book content and all those who hungered to write a book and see it distributed to a point where the self-published book will undoubtedly outpace the traditional book publishing industry by huge numbers, perhaps by millions.

Consider, too, the vast number of out of print books and the back list books of published authors that will be reincarnated on the net. Ten million available books on the net is not an unreasonable possibility.

It has spawned a huge new industry that covers every area of the book production and marketing chain. There are hundreds of outlets that can convert a manuscript into formats that will fit any platform. Apparently, any book content properly formatted is acceptable to the main e-book and POD retailers. Write a book and it can enter the system in days and theoretically compete with every other book in the marketplace.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of book bloggers have emerged offering reviews, some paid for, presenting themselves as advertising mediums. Once respected and allegedly neutral industry review publications like Kirkus will review any book for a price that will undoubtedly offer some favorable quotes for marketing. Other such sites have sprung up as well.

Promoters of every ilk have emerged with the promise of getting one’s book publicized and getting the author on TV and radio outlets. Social networking “experts” abound, promising to create author awareness on Facebook, Twitter and other open venues on the Net. Every form of promotion will have its “stores” on the net, many providing videos, apps, enhancements, and whatever else can be devised for a price. Determined authors with ample funds will be happy to part with their money in their attempt to realize their hopes and dreams.

Many sites offer free conversions and a distribution deal that takes a piece of sales revenue provided the author pursues his own individual marketing program, many of which are offered on the Net for a price.

Because of the vast volume of self-published authors who have been rejected by traditional publishers, it has become a numbers game, where the outlet who designs the content for sale in the online marketing chain takes a percentage of any sales generated by the author. The truth is that the vast majority of self-published authors will barely sell more than fifty to one hundred books, after his chain of friends and relatives have been exhausted. Thus, the company that produces the formats for distribution has found a way for the individual author to be a freelance sales agent for the company who has put the book into the marketing chain.

The company with the most books under contract can make a fairly hefty living with its battalions of authors out there beating the drum for their book sales. Small sales numbers for each self-published book adds up.

As for the quality of the book offering which, in any event, is subjective, the honest filters of the past will be rare. Anyone can be a self-proclaimed literary critic. Perhaps they will attract clusters of fans but there will be so many of them it will be difficult for a layman reader to make a choice.

The fact is that there is little chance for a self-published author to expect to earn enough to do such work full-time, unless he keeps his day job, has a pension, or is independently self-sufficient. Some might do it. Good for them.

I do not wish to cast any aspersions on the business practice of those who have discovered the benefits of catering to the self-published. It is legitimate and in many ways satisfies the hopes and dreams of the author who can now say he is a published author with his book in a respectable catalogue featuring books by other authors. A novelist can be in an online bookstore with the likes of Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald. A mystery writer can be in an online bookstore with P.D. James and Ruth Rendell. And so it goes for writers on any subject or genre.

This is not to say that there won’t be breakout commercial books for self-published writers. The media will cover them, although some might be contrived or suspect. But even if legitimate, they will be few and far between.

I must confess that although I have been a pioneer in promoting the concept of e-books, I have been stunned by the vast explosion of self-published books. Perhaps this essay has stressed what some might consider the downside of the process.

Actually, the upside is far more gratifying. Writers whose voices had been silenced by the old system now have a chance to present their creative talents to a vast audience despite the difficulties of gaining traction in readership.

They can legitimately call themselves authors and be recognized as such, a satisfaction of great personal import. A press of a button will acknowledge that their work is out there for now and perhaps for all time for their descendents to acknowledge with pride. In some ways, they might consider themselves to have achieved some tiny piece of immortality.

Note I offer no judgments on the quality these ventures only on the virtue of intent and accomplishment. To separate the wheat from the chaff will pose a monumental problem for readers and many talented writers might disappear in the vastness. Who knows how this will play out over time.

Nevertheless, I take my hat off to anyone who can sustain the creative process and find the discipline to write a long form work of the imagination, or can stick with the enormous mental effort to write a book on any subject. In the end, after all the dreams of fame and fortune fade with time, it is the work itself that really counted.

The electronic punditry, with their technological, elitist mindset, is now making noises that the single-use e-readers like Kindle, Nook and the SONY Reader are merely stopgap devices that will one day merge into the tablet, offering immersion reading, like the novel requires, as merely one of a million other ways to gain “information” and fill leisure time.

They argue that a single-use device is inherently obsolete in the face of the multitasking onslaught of the tablet, which packages in one carry-around-gadget everything one needs for the fulfillment of most communication activities from video to gaming to record keeping, scheduling, shopping and most other entertainment and information requirements.

Indeed, it is a powerful argument and is, from a business perspective, profoundly compelling. The convenience and choices the tablet technology offers have infinite possibilities.

Faced with such a smorgasbord of uses, what is to become of what I define as the serious novel? My concern is for the fate of the mainstream novels that offer stories of enduring interest, such as those created by Dickens, Trollope, Balzac, Tolstoy and, the more contemporary, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Roth, et al., to mention just a few of my favorites.

To engage with such novels requires time, effort, concentration, and an openness to reading these stories not only for pleasure but to enhance one’s understanding of the human condition. It would be a pity if other distractions crowded out the pleasures of immersion literature, but the temptation to do so can be tantalizingly seductive, especially to young people who have not been grounded in the enhancements and benefits of reading great books.

Nevertheless, the technology addiction cannot be ignored as a competitor to reading. Indeed, some prognosticators may be right in citing the eventual rise of the tablet as a device of choice for everything under the techie sun, including reading. Perhaps I am being overly protective of the single-use reading device because of my career as an author and my lifetime love of the serious novel, but I cannot deny the threat to reading long-form stories that the tablet presents by its sheer multiplicity of competing distractions.

One may argue, as well, that the printed book, although in a steep decline, still dominates book sales. It could make a resurgence if the tablet begins to intrude on the exclusive e-reader market. I’m not sure that argument is winnable but who knows how the storefront book business might counteract its predicted demise?

There is another threat to the novel that could be even more destructive, and that is the devaluation of reading in general by technology addicts who believe sincerely in the primary importance of greater and greater reliance on electronic devices to navigate through life. I keep wondering how far up the technological benefit scale we can go before we hit a counterproductive wall.

This is in no way meant to denigrate those aspects of the electronic world that have acted as handmaidens to bettering the human condition, expanding our communication universe, organizing our time and finances, speeding up information exchanges, and widening our choice of movies.

Technological advances have enhanced our ability to create a moving record of our lives through video and still photography, helped us connect to people, locally, nationally and internationally, and have improved our research skills and medical diagnosis abilities. It has enhanced our ability to react to events, bring people swiftly together to enlist their cooperation in various causes, air our grievances, and accomplish a thousand other tasks that might have taken past generations days, weeks or months longer to realize.

Such alleged progress cannot be ignored, but neither can the concept of deep, personal reflection, thoughtful concentration, philosophical cogitation, creative imagination and aspects of insight that one can glean from literature which can only be conveyed through the privacy of immersion into a parallel world best dramatized in the imagination through storytelling.

It may seem odd that here I am questioning the survival of the novel in the face of a vast tsunami of novel writers who have taken advantage of technology to post their self-published works on the various online venues. There are millions of them out there pounding away on keyboards, creating their long-form stories, and hopefully making them available to potential readers through the welcoming ease of the Internet.

Whether or not this vast inventory of novels will enhance or multiply readership is an open question since it faces the same competition from the tablet.

Perhaps my speculations cite dangers that are not there. A part of me believes that the novel is an essential tool of human insight and knowledge and will never go away under any circumstances. But there is a part that worries that the relentless march of technology has a negative side that has not yet revealed its true destructive nature.

I have written often about the three questions invariably asked of authors. The first two engender simple and straightforward answers: “When do you write?” A simple answer suffices marking the time of day; the second question is “How do you write?”

Perhaps a bit of embellishment is needed on that one, although many of the writers I have talked with reveal their preference for the computer, with some still hacking away on old manual or electric typewriters or writing by hand. Not that it really matters in terms of quality. I use a computer.

The third and last question is “Where do you get your ideas?”

I have often answered vaguely and politely offering a kind of generic explanation like “I get my ideas from engaging with people like yourself.”

Somehow, I sense that I have never done justice to that answer, although I do have a very specific recall of how I got the idea for each of my many novels, short stories, plays and poems. Still, the most accurate answer is so deeply self-involved and opinionated that it might be severely off-putting and baffling to the questioner. Nevertheless, now that I am at a safe distance from the questioner, I’ll give it a try.

In general, the most powerful ideas come from interaction with people, perhaps a word, a sentence, a gesture, a reminder of an event deep in my past that ignites a spark in the imagination and suggests a narrative, an environment, or a cast of characters. Remember that smell of a cake that set off Proust’s majestic series of novels.

Another path is through information that enters the mind through the vast tsunami of information that confront us at every turn through books, newspapers, magazines, a steady unstoppable stream that washes over us relentlessly. Tolstoy got his idea for Anna Karenina from a newspaper item.

Rarely do these ideas spring whole into the mind. Often, they arrive through the subconscious network of tunnels configured as a spider web in one’s personal zeitgeist. The writer of the imagination climbs the web foothold by handhold, cautiously finding his or her way into a conscious and orderly narrative that deals with the ultimate story question: what happens next?

Getting confused? Let’s plod ahead.

To make the explanation more complicated, my intuition tells me there is even more to it than that. There is an act of will involved. I have learned that a serious full-time career writer of works of the imagination, a category in which I humbly include myself, has in his or her imaginary DNA, or through force of habit, a kind of built-in antenna that is forever whirling around in mind space looking for story ideas.

Because I believe this implicitly, I have deliberately fashioned my life to give me maximum exposure to engage with people and information with aggressive intent. I explore through my personal involvement with other people meaningful conversation that might open doors in the subconscious mind. I tell myself I am listening carefully, perhaps wondering instead what the speaker is really thinking. I tell myself I am observing movement, facial expressions, intonation, hardly knowing if my conscious will is realizing my intent.

In this deliberate hunt for story ideas, I belong to small groups that provide clashing ideas through conversation, argument and insight. For example I am enlisted in a group considering religion, The Bible and the Talmud, a group that deals with innovation, a group that deals with the great thinkers of philosophy and literature, and a small group of Irishmen who meet every month, a rare race of miraculous storytellers. I devour books and newspapers like a hungry lioness searching for prey to feed the pride.

Habit has made this search an addiction which I freely acknowledge, knowing that it is impossible to truly explain the artistic urge and the mysteries of creation. There are those that say that there is a limited number of story ideas available and all stories are just reworkings of these ideas, clichés painted in ever different colors. Perhaps they are correct.

Other fiction authors surely have different explanations on how they get their ideas. Some may require solitude and prefer exploring the sole implications of their own biographies and family histories rather than engaging with strangers and look to the natural world alone for their inspiration. After all, I can only speak for myself.

So, there is my latest attempt to answer that third question. Now you know why most authors and I take the easy way out.

Lost in the conversation of the impact of eBooks is the plight of the mainstream novelist, who writes books that fit no genre category but nevertheless represent the crown jewels of the authorial world, the lynchpin of the trade publishing business.

It is these long form fictional compositions that will eventually be lost in the shuffle during the giant tsunami of material in this non-genre category that is now engulfing the Internet.

The slicing and dicing effect of the Internet and, as a consequence, all of the book venues on the Net, favors books that can comfortably fit into categories. A mainstream novel that defies genre is like an orphan in that environment and must depend primarily on authorial branding, which is especially difficult for novelists just beginning their careers.

For currently well-known and best-selling authors, the advantages are still in their favor, but time and volume could eventually dim their financial prospects as more and more authors of mainstream novels enter the fray through both traditional and self-publishing. There will, of course, be exceptions, but they will be rare.

The old-style branding process of favorable reviews, academia recognition, advertising, interviews, speeches, book tours and other promotional opportunities will, of course, continue for a time, but sooner or later such methods will lose steam to the bookstores on the Net.

The old filtering processes where book sections and professional book critics held sway are slowly losing their power to influence, while the Net has opened a vast, undisciplined, self-proclaimed array of reviewers who offer opinions about the quality of mainstream books that could be sincere and authoritative but can also be suspect and self-serving. None have the power and prestige once wielded by big city newspapers and magazines.

Indeed, the various bookstores on the Web offer a free-for-all of opinion by readers, a forum for anyone to review the merits of a book. In such a forum, there is always the possibility of author or publisher-motivated favorable reviews by friends, relatives or hired guns hoping to promote sales. On the other hand, the possibility of negative reviews by readers can have the opposite effect.

Perhaps I am being too pessimistic, but the fact is that the old rules of the game have changed and the day is fast approaching when the traditional publishers can no longer rely on the old filters and the big box bookstores to promote and sell their wares in large quantities. They will have to find creative ways to promote their star writers on the Net, but considering the volume of competition, it will be a tough slog to make a serious breakthrough.

Some mainstream novels could gain traction in certain circles of interest, but it is doubtful that, as time goes on, they will attract those large reading audiences at a price point that guarantees big advances. I hold open the hope that the creative instincts of the traditional publishers and individual authors can overcome such a financial calamity.

I continue to believe that quality writing and great, beautifully written, compelling stories will find their readers, but then, I come from a different era where I was able to find wonderful and inspiring works through the old style filters. I often wonder how Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Roth and many, many others would have gained traction in the world in which we now live.

Still, we cannot discount college professors in the vanishing liberal arts for steering us in the direction of the great writers and I am hopeful that they will continue to do so. But, I am afraid there will be a slow decline in their ability to make choices among the millions of books that will be available. Indeed, we might well miss the extraordinary writers of coming decades who somehow drown in the vast deep sea of oncoming mainstream novels.

Whatever the future will hold, dedicated novelists will continue to ply their art, many believing, like all artists, that they are enriching the zeitgeist by their insight and story telling, whether or not they will be awarded by money or fame. The self-expression of the true artist is unstoppable and profound.

And many will continue to hope that their work, whatever its worth and quality, will reach a wide and adoring readership and perhaps secretly fantasize that they will enter the cathedral of immortality.

Through the composing and imaginings of thirty volumes of novels, numerous short stories, plays, and poems, I have been wrestling with the mystery of attraction. It has been the dominant theme of my work. You know the kind I mean, the obsessive, magnetizing emotional fixation that goes under the name of love.

Why does one person motivate the kind of heart palpating enormity of overwhelming powerful, all consuming, possessive emotion we call love and not another person?

Celebrated in history and literature from the beginning of human communication, powerful affinities have been recorded, mythologized and analyzed ad infinitum. Still, no one has been able to explain its cause scientifically, philosophically, or psychologically, at least not with enough empirical evidence to prove what causes this state beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Sexual attraction alone and what we describe as lust, passion or other less mysterious motivations do not answer the question. I’m talking about love, true love, the-go-for- keeps love, the finding-the-other-half-of-myself  love, the Romeo and Juliet, Abelard and Heloise, Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde brand of love.

Call it “romantic love” if you wish. Huge industries have been built around the concept in the public culture, recorded in books, movies, and grand opera. It is the lynchpin of most popular stories. It is an ubiquitous and dominant theme in all human history.

Even in the situational aspect, proximity does not explain it fully. Remember the lyric from the musical, South Pacific, “you may see a stranger across a crowded room and somehow you know.” Why her? Why him?

The emotion has not escaped the notice of scientists determined to find some biological cause for this phenomenon. Numerous experiments have been mounted to find some chemical phenomena that act on the senses to create such a magnetic effect. Others have tried to relate it to the reclamation of early child or parental memories, even prenatal causes. There are many theories, none conclusive.

Some have explored biblical clues, the most obvious being Eve’s eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. One assumes that Adam’s bite of the proffered fruit began the natural mating instincts that populated the human race, a semi-mechanical rather than an emotional experience and, therefore, not the love of which I speak. Another biblical example from the Old Testament is when Jacob has to work another seven years for his true love, Rachel, which illustrates the kind of love I mean.

Jacob had fallen in love with Rachel instantly while she was watering her lamb and was at first willing to work seven years for her father before he would allow her to marry him. When the seven years were up, the father married him to another daughter, veiled to disguise her. Despite the betrayal, he was willing to serve yet another seven years to wed his beloved.

As far as I know, nothing beyond the theoretical to explain this phenomena has emerged, no proofs have been established to satisfy explorers of this realm although it continues to occur, like some mysterious affliction in humans and, for all we know, in everything alive. Indeed, it goes beyond the birds and the bees. We do know that among other species, Swans mate for life. Is that an example of true love? Here, again, is the eternal question. Why one swan and not another?

Those of us who have experienced the love emotion will testify to its ecstasy-provoking power, its magic and majesty. The kind of love I am talking about has been idealized and commercialized. It has been crowned since the beginning of time as the pinnacle of feeling, the ultimate melding experience, although it continues to be illusive and, even if it arrives and settles on two people, is often transitory. Perhaps it loses steam because it is not the real thing.

It is the holy grail of emotion, sought after and coveted beyond reason or logic. Many, perhaps most, of the greatest stories ever told are about this kind of love. Without this ideal to chase and describe, many films and novels would be bland and uninteresting.

Indeed, love is one the most recurring themes in life and in fiction and goes back to my original premise. Why him? Why her? Or better yet. How come not him? How come not her? Nor is it gender bound. It happens between men and men and women and women. It is beyond mere propagation.

As the lyric says “somehow you know.”

People are always asking me whether I know the ending when I begin to write a novel. I imagine many writers of fiction are asked the same question.

It brings to mind what one of my friends, Rod Thorp, used to say. Rod and I and a group of other novelists and at least one screenwriter were part of a luncheon klatch that met every month to shoot the breeze and discuss this and that, life in general and the joys and perils of the writing trade.

Among the group during my tenure were Andy Kaplan, Jonathan Kellerman, Sid Stebel, Mann Rubin, Brian Garfield, and Ib Melchior and, of course, Rod Thorpe.

During my six full-time years in LA, it was one of the highlights of my stay and turns out to be what I miss most at my west coast sojourn. Occasionally when the timing is right and I am in LA, I join the group and take my place in its conversations.

We started the group in the late-eighties and it is still going strong, although some of the original founders have been replaced by others. None are retired from the writing game, but then, as we have learned, only something extremely dire and disabling will ever stop a real writer from writing. Retirement is never an option.

Rod, who died in 1999, one of our founders, was truly a real writer. He wrote what are now described as thrillers and they were wonderful novels with great characters, compelling stories and lots of insight and wisdom. His book The Detective was a roaring bestseller, which he wrote when he was just under thirty and became a film with Frank Sinatra and Lee Remick. One of his novels, Nothing Lasts Forever, was produced under a changed title, Die Hard, which made millions for lots of people, although I don’t think Rod ever received his just financial rewards, which is the typical fate of most original writer creators in Hollywood.

One of our group members, the brilliant and prolific Brian Garfield, often regaled us with his Hollywood war stories, particularly about Death Wish, based on his book that became a giant franchise.

Our conversation was often light-hearted camaraderie, but embedded in our exchanges we often offered each other what in hindsight were some golden nuggets of insight and wisdom, the kind that clutches the memory for a lifetime, which brings me back to Rod Thorp. He was the kind of writer that sprang out of working class New York and truly understood the core idiom of that life, which spawned so many terrific fiction writers. He had taught writing and having worked at his father’s detective agency he knew the grit and motives of the secret lives of criminals and dissemblers that gave his characters such heft and emotional truth.

Rod’s answer to that question posed at the beginning of this essay about endings was this: “If I knew the ending in advance I wouldn’t be interested in writing that novel.”

For me, as it might have been for others around the table, he had hit the nail on the head. I, too, could never stick with a long work of the imagination if I knew the surefire ending in advance.

This in no way is meant to be critical of novelists who outline carefully and follow a template to construct their story and proceed to a pre-arranged goal line ending. I’m sure many good novels are turned out using that method.

But for Rod and me, writing a novel is like watching a parallel life unfold. Characters come alive in our imagination, they interact in an imaginary environment. They love, hate, observe, think, talk and act. The novelist must know and report his or her character’s thoughts and what motivates their relationship with others.

To the creator, these characters become real, full-blooded, three-dimensional. The creator knows their mind, their thoughts, their inner life, the complicated clockwork behind their motives as they seek their destiny, perhaps love, money, fame, forgiveness, vengeance, ecstasy, or the thousand other needs of the human self.

Like the life we live in our reality, no one can predict what will happen next. The creator, like those readers who enter his or her parallel world, is just as eager to know what will happen next as he presses on with his story. Sometimes the characters who live in the mind of the writer will do exactly the opposite of what might have been expected when the story began.

They come upon obstacles, detours, make wrong turns, disastrous decisions. As a result, endings change. An apt image might be the creation of the Frankenstein monster, who provides the ultimate unpredictable outcome.

In the end, the writer becomes a slave to his character’s motivations. Like real people they change their minds, their point of view, their emotional responses. They cannot be contrived. If they are, the reader will catch on quickly. So it is with the writer. Without authenticity the story is without truth or substance.

For many who ask this question, such an explanation might seem baffling. For the writer the special reward, as it is for the reader, is “finding out,” discovering how this story will end. The characters, as they follow the intricacies of the plot that is hatching in the mind of the writer must be people who have engaged the reader (and the writer’s) interest or the exercise is for naught. If either the writer or reader knows in advance what will happen the thrill of finding out disappears.

I know this is what Rod meant and I have tried to articulate it to students in creative writing seminars that I have taught and to the casual reader who often asks this question. Some have been confused by this answer. Some have understood without question.

My musician friends tell me that this is how Jazz is composed. Perhaps. I don’t know.

But, after all, there are lots of mysteries inherent in the compulsion to create art, in this case the novelist’s art. Ask an artist why he or she does anything to create their art and they will come up with explanations that often baffle the questioner.

Especially if he or she must answer questions like: Do you know how your novel will end in advance?

It is a strange phenomenon and most authors of fiction appear to confirm it. They are always asked the same three questions. Whether the questions are asked in a formal interview setting or by readers, non-readers, fans, or casual acquaintances in every conceivable social setting . The three questions cross boundaries of country, language, age, and gender.

They are always the same and asked in exactly the same order.  These are the questions:

How do you write? Meaning whether the author writes in long hand, typewriter or computer.

When do you write? Meaning time of day, morning, afternoons, or evenings.

Where do your ideas come from?

Although the repetitive pattern of these questions from all sources in this exact order is nothing short of uncanny, one can find some universal logic in the questions and their order. If one accepts the premise that writing a work of the imagination is an art form, whether fashioned as a novel, a short story, a play or a poem, then what the questioner is really asking is: How does one create the writer’s art?

One might pose this question as well to creators of the visual or musical arts.

The first two questions involve process and are easy to answer. But there is a long stretch between process and that crucial third question.  This is the ultimate secret of the writer’s art. I do not want to sound mystical implying that these ideas are mysteriously channeled into the writer’s mind by some esoteric process of osmosis.

But the fact is that there is something unique about the ways in which ideas become stories that cannot be as easily explained as process. After all, a fiction writer creates a parallel world in his or her imagination. In creating this parallel world he or she deals with the single question that everyone must ponder. What happens next? Who among us does not want to know what happens next? It is the bedrock of all stories, lived or imagined.

Ideas for stories come from an amalgam of life experiences, observations, the chance meeting, an anecdote, a life changing  personal experience like falling in love, being betrayed or abandoned, a memory of  pain or loss, or joy and ecstasy.

They are triggered by books or newspapers read, hearing stories told by friends, relatives or chance acquaintances, by movies or plays seen, songs heard, by incidents buried in one’s past or imagined. They come from dreams, visions, fantasies, memories, olfactory reminders, remembered tastes, traumas observed or experience, an errant look, a brief word, a religious experience.

For Proust, the aroma of a piece of cake inspires a vast tapestry of human folly and striving. For Tolstoy, a brief paragraph in a newspaper inspires the story of Anna Karenina. Hemingway finds inspiration in the story of an old man’s struggle to land a big fish. Faulkner imagines a world inspired by life in a Mississippi County. It goes on and on every creator of a work of the imagination has some idea where his or her inspiration has come from.

While I can’t speak for every writer of fiction, my own experience tells me that most writers can identify the original spark that ignites the inspiration.

Nevertheless, these questions do reveal a clue to the people who ask it and why.  They, too, have the urge to tell the stories that have been rattling around randomly in their brain. They want to extract the fiction writer’s explanation, hoping to find the magic key that will open the way to their own artistic creation.

For the record, I thought readers might like a sample answer to that third question, one that hardly can be articulated in a casual moment. Here is how I got the idea for one of my novels “The Trans-Siberian Express”.

I was having a drink in a Pub in London with a close friend, a British diplomat who was on leave from his post in the British Embassy in Peking in the mid seventies. It was at the height of the antagonism between China and the Soviet Union, and a hostile relationship existed between China and the West.

I had met my friend years before in Washington where he was on assignment to the British Embassy in some capacity that he never defined, but which I intuited had some cloak and dagger aspect about it. I was a young soldier then, assigned to the Pentagon as the only Washington Correspondent for Armed Forces Press Service.

It must be said at the outset that a committed novelist, like a prospector searching for gold, is always on the lookout for an idea that will spark a story. Every observation, every person he meets, every episode in his life, every thought, memory, reflection and cogitation is geared, consciously or subconsciously, to the concept of what will make a story. Everything in the zeitgeist was and is fair game.

Since China in those days was a closed society, I was anxious to hear about his experiences in this world and, after a pint or two, he was happy to oblige. Most of his stories were gossipy. He had played frequent tennis games with George Bush, the elder, when he was a representative in China during my friend’s multiple assignments.

Then it came. The ignition spark. He described how he had periodically hand carried the Diplomatic pouch to Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia twice a month. He explained that his route was to take the railroad journey from Peking to Mongolia and explained how the Trans-Siberian Express was linked to this line and that he had taken it himself from Moscow.

As he described his journey on the Trans-Siberian Express, I became more and more intrigued. He told me it was the longest railroad trip in the world, a 7,000 mile journey through numerous time zones, that it’s original route was from Moscow to Vladivostok, the latter a naval base that was then off-limits to foreigners. He told me that the Russian track gauge was wider than the world standard, and the carriages had to be raised and the new wheels attached to ride the rails outside of the Soviet borders.

He told me that sleeping compartments were assigned without regard to gender and that the food was ghastly and the third class passengers had to buy their food from vendors along the route through Siberia. He told me about the monotony of the Siberian tundra, the various ethnic groups that used the train as it traversed the route and that the train was pulled by giant steam locomotives, the largest in the world at the time.

One must relate this eureka moment to the context of the times and my world as a child growing up in the earlier part of the twentieth century. The train was the principal mode of land travel in those days. Railroad travel was exotic and far-reaching. The celebrity culture was built around trains and boats. Photographs of celebrities disembarking trains was a common media event. Railroad stations were palaces. Grand Central Station in New York City was a work of art, one of the most celebrated structures in the world.

Model trains were the ultimate toy for a boy and department stores featured elaborate displays to hawk these toys. Railroad travel was exotic and romantic and was featured in books and movies. Staterooms were shown as the height of luxury and private cars were the ultimate in luxurious travel. Graham Greene’s novel Stamboul Train and the movie The Lady Vanishes, among many others, offered exciting stories about train travel. I was a child of those times, and when my friend spun his yarn about his experiences on the largest train ride in the world, my head began to swim with story ideas.

The idea had everything, Cold War intrigue, spies, staterooms assigned without regard to gender, the paranoia of the times, the closed world of the Soviet Union and China. The setting that filled my mind was a novelist’s dream, and my imagination began to conjure up a story that would take place around the centerpiece of a journey on the Trans-Siberian Express.

It was a perfect title. It took a year to write the book and it was published by Putnam and translated into many languages. It was also sold to the movies but never made.

It was completely predictable that the e-book phenomenon would spawn various enhancements like video and music designed, according to their creators, to “enrich” the reading experience.

I suppose there are some readers who will welcome having their e-books enhanced by such accompaniments. Indeed, I have known many writers who compose their books while listening to music.

Packaging e-books with musical backgrounds has been announced with much fanfare while video book enhancements have already begun their march into the marketplace.

Alas, I will not succumb to such alleged blandishments. Call me a purist, but as a creator of works of the imagination, meaning works of serious fiction, I consider such embellishments intrusions on the author’s intention and the reader’s reception of this intention.

Boiled down to its essence, the author to reader is a one-on-one communication experience. In telling his or her story, the author has plumbed to the depths of his or her subconscious and conceived their characters to pursue their destinies in a parallel world that grows in the author’s imagination in ways that are often mysterious and unexplainable.

In this imaginative world, the white noise of inspiration already fills the reader’s mental space as organ music reverberates in a giant cathedral. One does not require a musical accompaniment to capture and thrill to the emotional suspense of the author’s creation.  I intend in no way to negate the beauty and power of music, but words, too, have their intrinsic artistic power to speak to the human psyche and the reading experience is a prime example.

Nor does one need a musical accompaniment to feel the true power, for example, of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Melville’s Moby Dick, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and yes, the Old and New Testament and a long line of fabulous works of the imagination created by authors that have enriched our lives and given us insight and knowledge into the human condition. Indeed, one might say that the music is already inherent in the prose and can be heard by the reader with great emotional impact within the author’s composition.

I know this sounds a bit highfalutin and perhaps flies in the face of those who will cite the movies as a prime example of how musical accompaniment embellishes a story line.  The fact is that movie background music is designed as a kind of guide to the emotional high points that manipulate the action on the screen. It is designed to tell you how to feel and anticipate what a movie character is experiencing or is about to experience as the plot unfolds. There is no need for such an accompaniment in reading.

Nevertheless, I do believe there is probably a place for enhanced e-books, especially in the area of young children’s books where moving images and music could be helpful in engaging a child’s interest. I am somewhat tentative in that assessment since my experience with my own children was reading to them without benefit of other sounds except my own voice, which in retrospect seemed sufficient for their rapt attention.

Perhaps, too, musical and reality sounds will be useful in certain genre categories, particularly science fiction and books that are based upon comic book characters.

But the idea of adding anything more than words to the reading experience gives me pause in another area, such as opening the door to adding advertising to e-books. Using e-books as a platform for advertising is a real possibility and, for me, it is chilling.

I well remember going to the movies in London and, for the first time, being trapped into seeing advertising on the screen prior to the features, which I found offensive. I was apparently premature in celebrating the fact that this practice was not then found in American movie theaters.

It is now standard in most movie theaters in America to be forced to watch advertising before the feature is screened, a practice that intrudes on the pleasure of the movie experience. But then, today’s mass-market movies are all about toys, popcorn and selling a captive audience whatever is on offer.

From my perspective, reading has always been both a solitary and sacred celebration of the imagination, a gift of creation from the author to the reader. What worries me is that first will come the music, then the video and once that intrusion is thrust upon us, then will come the advertising. Advertising does, indeed, have its informational uses, but there are limits to its intrusion, especially for the serious and dedicated reader.

Frankly, I don’t want to open a book by a favorite author and be solicited to save 15% or more on car insurance or be pushed to buy the latest cure for acne.

I have always been wary of novelists reviewing other novelists, especially in places that attract serious readers of serious novels like the New York Times Book Review which, despite its diminishing influence, still has an effect on the reading tastes for the discriminating consumer of books.

Perhaps I am uncomfortable with the practice because mainstream non-genre novel writers are, despite loud protests to the contrary, in fierce competition with other mainstream novelists. They compete for attention, notoriety, praise and prizes in a kind of nebulous pantheon of imagined immortality and secretly hope to be part of the literary canon of the future.

Many, not all, believe they are destined for that role and because of that, maintain that they are the true keepers of the faith of literary excellence and taste, and their opinions are sacrosanct. They seem to believe, too, that they are therefore qualified to judge the literary merits of their fellow novelists many of whom, ironically, probably harbor similar ambitions. They are, therefore, contenders and there is a good argument for keeping them out of the critical loop of judging other contenders.

A case in point was a recent review in the Times of a novel by John Burnham Schwartz titled Northwest Corner. It is a sequel to Reservation Road an earlier novel by Mr. Schwartz, which became a fairly successful movie. Apparently, it was a novel that gave Mr. Schwartz some heft as a serious novelist. The review was written by Julie Myerson, who Google tells me is a British novelist who also writes non-fiction and has won a number of prizes in Britain.

That said, I have never met Mr. Schwartz and have never read his novels or those of Ms. Myerson. Thus, my judgments are based solely on Ms. Myerson’s review of the novel in the Times Book Review, which clearly underlines the wariness that I have cited.

The review by Ms. Myerson is one of the most mean-minded, snide, sanctimonious and dismissive diatribes I have ever read in a book review written by one allegedly serious novelist about another serious work. Worse, I don’t understand why the editors of the Times Book Review, which ascribes its own biases to the publication, let it pass.

Since I am a practitioner myself, having written many mainstream novels that have run the gauntlet of reviews from glowing to terrible, and been subjected to the highs and lows of humiliation and praise, I offer this defense, however ineffective, to the novelist victim who goes naked and alone into the harsh jungle of public criticism.

In her review, Ms. Myerson accuses Mr. Schwartz of not working hard enough. She calls his character’s emotional states “lazy and forced” and hates the way his chapters end. She declares his similes and metaphors “clumsy.”  She openly ridicules some, like “hard and cool as a Greek statue” and “hemophiliacs walking through a forest of thorns,” both of which I find rather interesting and original.

She accuses him of bad recall, whatever that means, and composition offenses too numerous to mention here. Worse, she ends her review with this ugly stab in the creative stomach: “If such writing can pass for muscular fiction, what hope is there for authors who spend long hours deleting easy clichés and pointless similes, working hard to create something that feels fresh and startling and true?”

I assume she means herself and her self-crowned works of genius. My guess is that she is suffering from the “how comes.” How come this guy gets to be thought of as a serious novelist whose books become movies while I, a “genius” who deserves such a reputation, fall short?

Moreover, Ms. Myerson’s review sounds like the kind of payback one delivers to a former lover or spouse, which is probably not the case, but it sure sounds like it.

If one proclaims herself the standard bearer of literary excellence and is allowed to spew such invective against another artist in an allegedly serious review publication, one wonders if the editors of this publication have some unrevealed agenda. I am far from a conspiracy buff, but I cannot understand why the editors would choose to publish a review that is so far beyond the pale of what might pass as a negative review. This review was a literary assassination.

When a novelist or any artist creates his or her art, he or she knows full well they are fair game for critics and must learn how to deal with both the pummeling and the praise. It comes with the territory. But then, even torture has its limits.

Nevertheless I cannot believe that Mr. Schwartz’s novel, vetted by a respectable publisher, edited with some degree of attention, written by a serious author and ultimately gaining the attention of the Times editors to be worthy of a review can possibly deserve such a brutal assessment. Something else seems at work here.

In this case, perhaps I should point my sword of indignation at those editors for allowing this murder to occur on their watch. To avoid such accusations in the future it might serve the editors well to cease using novelists as reviewers of other novelists work or, at a minimum carefully vet the reviewer to uncover any personal antagonisms or secret agendas.

Yes, dueling literary figures abound in the history of the literary art. Open contempt, jealousy and outright hatred often brought out rivers of recriminations and antagonisms among authors.  Somehow this example seems different and unsavory.

Besides having been in Mr. Schwartz moccasins on various occasions, I know the feeling of helpless suffering that one must endure at the hands of a vicious self-righteous egotistical public scold.

As for Mr. Schwartz’s novel, because of Ms. Myerson’s so-called review, I fully intend to read it and make my own decision as to its merits.

For more than thirty years people have asked if my book The War of the Roses, a story about the nasty breakup of a marriage with bizarre and fatal consequences, is autobiographical. It is not. I have been married to the same lovely lady for sixty years.

Nevertheless, it is a perfectly legitimate question, since it can be argued that the primary tools used for the writing of fiction are observation, experience, memory and imagination.

A story begins with an idea, triggered by an observation, then grows in the mind like a plant grows in the soil or an embryo develops in the female body. It is perfectly natural for a reader to believe that the story told is based on the author’s actual life’s experience, meaning his or her biographical reality.

Invariably, people will ask an author where he or she has gotten his or her ideas. It is a simple question requiring a complex answer. My usual retort is “from watching people like you,” which leaves most questioners somewhat puzzled.

However, I have gone one step further and spent considerable thought coming up with a more detailed answer which I have written about in a series of essays that can be found in the archives of my website. In these essays I have attempted to trace the origins of the thirty odd novels I have published over the past four decades.

It might be of interest for writers and readers to peruse these essays, for in recalling how I conceived the ideas for my novels, I have discovered insights that I had no idea existed in the heat of composition.

For example, in writing about the origins of The War of the Roses, I seemed to have unearthed its original motivation from my own subconscious effort to rail against the dangers of materialism and how greed and obsessive and overzealous acquisitiveness can ultimately destroy a relationship between a once loving couple.

At the time of the novel’s composition we were living through what was called “the Yuppie” era, meaning that the upcoming generation, which having survived the so-called “change the world” decade of the sixties, were now into showing off the results of what they might have believed was their prosperity making advocacy.

In the seventies, when the book was written, incomes were rising. There was a rush to upgrade, live in a bigger house, buy a bigger car, and show off the trappings of newly acquired wealth and its symbols of luxurious living, like displaying the snobbery of knowing about fine wine, exotic food and the other emoluments of the upper crust life.

Other social upheavals were in the making as well, the explosion of assertive feminism was shaking the foundations of marriage. Success was measured in being able “to do one’s thing” and being true to one’s aspirations and desires without the restraints of  yesterday’s more conservative moral strictures.

The final scene of the novel depicts the main characters destroyed by their possessions, the ultimate realization of the story’s underlying theme.

The novel, by the way, in its last image, tells of the two children of the Roses showing signs of the same greed that destroyed their parents. The moviemakers, perhaps wisely with far less cynicism, came up with a terrific image of generational closure, illustrating the antagonism and unforgiving nature of the couple even on the verge of death.

That morality tale is the subtext of The War of the Roses and may be the reason for the story’s astounding durability both as a book and an extraordinary movie that plays somewhere in the world with astonishing regularity. It has also spun off into another novel The Children of the Roses, numerous theatrical productions in many languages, an Internet phenomenon with a remarkably active and visited website, and is currently under consideration for a live theatrical musical version.

An author never can predict how his or her novel will impact on the public. Some might take years to find its audience. Others will fade into eternal obscurity.  As for The War of the Roses, it has entered the culture as the ultimate divorce story.

No. It is not biographical. Thank God.