Author to Authors: Take a Chance

To me, there's richer territory to be tapped by parachuting smack down into the middle of a world completely foreign to your experience-because then you have to learn it from the ground up. It puts you and the reader on the same side of the table, both asking, What the hell IS this place? There's nothing quite so electrifying as writing what you don't know, because in the course of writing it, you come to know it intimately. My father, who fled Germany during WWII, used to say, "No native English speaker ever approaches the immigrant's peculiar love of the language."