I wake at 5 or 5:30 most mornings, make myself a latte and grab a cookie, write until 10 or 11, go have my favorite meal, 'second breakfast,' or grab coffee with friends, or play basketball. Then, around noon, I begin apologizing via email for the manuscripts I can't get to.

In seventh grade, with some vague sense that I wanted to be a writer, I crouched in the junior high school library stacks to see where my novels would eventually be filed. It was right after someone named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. So I grabbed a Vonnegut book, 'Breakfast of Champions' and immediately fell in love.

Let's get right to it: On page 5 of Paul Murray's dazzling new novel, 'Skippy Dies,'... Skippy dies. If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it's nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pulls off in this hilarious, moving and wise book.

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 desk is an antique with bookshelves built into the side. I've turned the drawer over to hold a keyboard. We live in a 100-year-old house, and I work in an apartment above the carriage house.

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.

My writing regimen is not very regimented. I tend to be a binge writer, working sometimes in the morning and sometimes all night. When I get going I like to hunch over the keyboard until I feel totally played out.

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.

The war in Iraq, the abuse of detainees, electronic eavesdropping, Guantanamo Bay - these things were all done on our behalf and they may turn out in the end to have created more terrorists.

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.

Without sounding overly sentimental about the process, I'd say trying to describe how you tend to conceive of a book is like describing how you tend to fall in love.

I come from a newspaper background, so maybe I'm attuned to current events.

I think I would explode in flames of irony if I were to option an idea that I was satirizing in a novel.

I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.

I've been simultaneously drawn to and repelled from Hollywood for years.

My poems... the ones that start out as jokes become these big ponderous things and the ones that start out ponderous devolve into jokes.

My poetry is the most disappointing thing for me that I've ever written. When I say I can write everything, I don't say I can write everything well.

Often, the fact that I haven't done something as a writer is all the reason I need to try it.

The first seven years that I wrote fiction, I sent out stories and a novel and made a total of $25.

There are some people whose Twitter feeds are works of art. They intuitively understand how much of themselves to put out there.