Although the first character to appear in the book is Rocco LaGrassa, the jeweler, he was the last character the author created. Scibona quotes Sigmund Freud saying that "the point of trauma is you never had lived completely through the experience, which is why you live it over and over, thus trapping yourself in it."

That statement fits nicely with the way Scibona wrote his book. "I didn't want to impose structure. It comes directly out of the characters' experience. I was trying to learn the book. It's like parenting, although I have no kids yet. You play this game of giving a child a lot of authority and trust to make decisions, but create circumstances of order to go with it."

Scibona scrupulously avoids making decisions for his characters. "If you make their decisions for them you rob the reader of the ability to be involved with them. Often, students say they prefer the criminal in a story but find the other characters less interesting. Maybe that's because the criminal makes up his mind to do something."

Even though he teaches writing classes, Scibona is doubtful that anyone can be taught to write. "You can save people a lot of time, though. A workshop can hold up a mirror to you and describe what you're doing to yourself. This is what the book is about. The novelist needs to know that. He's a citizen of the world he has created but may not yet know what it means or what it is really about."

Scibona considers "the best writing teacher to be less a scold and more of a companion. He should talk you through what you're already thinking. You don't want to take the sharp edges off a novel. You want to exaggerate it, to make it more strange than it is. You need a tolerance for what is inexcusable while you're writing it."

If Scibona writes while hiding his eyes from what he considers the one flaw of the book, he fails to realize that what seems a flaw is "indisputably true. Wrongness has a hard core about it. With my character, Mrs. Merino, I always tried to smooth out her undisciplined edges. Then I realized this is who she is — and she dissolved into a completely different character."

Scibona gets inspiration from reading other novels, but not in a way that would cause him to write a book or a story like it. "Reading a long form novel gives you self-absorption," he said. "So, the day after that kind of reading experience, I can just let it rip."

Many times, second novels represent a huge test for the novelist, especially if the first was a bestseller or an award-winner, because the novelist loses confidence that he can do it again. Sometimes they wait so long that they never write again, such as J.D. Salinger, "Catcher in the Rye," or Harper Lee, "To Kill a Mocking Bird."