I can’t believe you pulled this off.” And I said, “You know, I loved writing from that character so much I thought about doing an entire novel from the point of view of someone with Down syndrome.” She was silent for about half a minute, then said, “There’s such a thing as too much genius.” But I think you can pull off anything if you put your mind to it. My agent at the time, after reading the manuscript, called me up and said, “The Thomas character is pure genius. I wrote a book many years ago called The Bad Place, with a character, Thomas, who’s a boy with Down syndrome. How do you gauge the right level of creative risk to take? The challenge is a medicine against boredom. When an idea comes to me, and it seems too big to write, too complicated to convey to a reader, that’s when I’m most energized. On the other hand, doing anything for as long as I’ve done this can lead to boredom, and change-going for something you haven’t gone for before and that you’re terrified you’re going to fail at-is how I avoid it. It’s more difficult to market a book that’s not like the book that everybody bought and enjoyed before. The advice has been not to do that, not to mix genres, not to try different kinds of storytelling, and I understand that. It’s a formula-driven business-if you’ve written one book about a bricklayer, they want you to write 1,000 books about a bricklayer-but I’m constantly changing things up. If I wrote the same book every time, which is what publishers prefer you to do, I would go profoundly nuts. So there’s never been a time when you’ve thought, I can’t keep doing this anymore? I’ve never stopped being excited about books and the potential of them. I realized that you can make what you want of life, and I don’t think I’ve ever stopped feeling that way. And that was plenty of motivation to change my destiny. They showed me the level of success the world offered. Books were both an escape and a lesson that other lives were different. Koontz: It goes back to what books meant to me when I was young. HBR: Where do you find your creative energy and stamina?

Quit or Die Trying by Alison Beard