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She took time to answer questions before and met with students, including some who have a paper due on her most recent novel, Manhattan Beach.

�I�m happy to help,� she told them.

Egan also is the president of PEN America, a writers� organization that fights to defend freedom of expression in the United States and around the world.

How much has your work as a journalist played into your fiction?

Journalism has been very helpful for research. It�s been a way to learn about things I want to learn. Researching two stories for [The New York Times Magazine] � led to a novel called The Keep. Doing certain articles forced me to acquaint myself with youth culture and a different age group�s approach to technology in a way that I never would have in my real life. If I didn�t have the experience of doing these very intensive research pieces, I don�t think I would have been able to write Manhattan Beach, which required the most phenomenal amounts of research. As a journalist, there�s a strange way in which you can go from being completely ignorant to quasi-expert.

You show such empathy toward your characters�even the ones that seem the most reprehensible. What is the importance of empathy in writing?

I feel like that is actually the job. If I can�t do that, then I can�t really write about someone. What brings me in is always curiosity. Empathy and curiosity are very closely linked. Curiosity about someone else�s life is asking the question of what it�s like to be them. My job as a fiction writer is to answer that question. If I�m unable to, I can�t do the job.

People often say �I didn�t like the character.� I don�t think that means they don�t want to have dinner with that person, I think what they mean is, �I�m alienated from that person, I cannot connect enough with that person�s mindset to care what they do.� That�s a failure on the writer�s part. If someone says �I don�t care,� that�s my failure. The only way to make someone care about someone else deeply is to show them the world of that person. Once we�re inside someone�s mind, the decisions they make, no matter how loathsome or reprehensible, should seem like the right decisions.

Who would you identify as your literary antecedents?

There are certain books that I hope are part of my literary DNA, books that I really studied, thought about and return to so much, even if there�s not a direct stylistic influence. I�d include The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and the House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. Then there are the Greek tragedians, and Shakespeare, that I hope are in there acting upon me.

What is your process?

I tend not to start with characters or story, I begin with a sense of atmosphere. That is my portal into fiction. No matter how many ideas I might have about things I might want to write about, if I can�t find that portal in, if I can�t find that sense of atmosphere to pull me into the story, those ideas aren�t going to go anywhere.

I find thinking to be useful in some portions of the fiction writing process, but not at the beginning. I write by hand, on legal pads. The closest way I can look at it is like improv. I�m just guessing. I�m looking for something that feels organic that you can follow. Later, I write endless drafts �

Your books are all so different from each other. How do you shift modes and styles to make them that way?

What draws me to writing is curiosity. I�m eager to have an experience I haven�t had before. The thing that is most threatening to me as a writer is the feeling of familiarity or repetition. If I feel like I�ve done something before, my reaction to that is somewhere between horror and nausea. I don�t like that feeling.