Many authors spend days assembling collages to serve as visual aids while they labor on their latest novel. I find it a whole lot easier and great deal more fun to open up The Sims2 — where I can make my heroines and heroes look precisely as I envision them, and where I can not only build that towering castle or isolated manor that's going to figure so prominently in my book, but also furnish it and actually walk through it to determine whether its layout is exactly what I need to make my story work.

And sometimes, if I'm lucky, the process operates in reverse. Recently, I constructed an old Victorian house. When I first began to build it, I had no real purpose for it, other than thinking that I wanted to try out various construction techniques. But the more I designed and redesigned, erecting some walls, tearing out others, adding a gazebo, stream, pond, and landscaping, the more I decided that it would make an intriguing house for one of my novels.

Who would live in it — and what would his or her story be? I wondered. I started imagining all kinds of different characters who might live in the house. I now have several from which to choose.