Usually, only University of Hawai'i-Manoa writing students get to benefit from the feedback of Ian MacMillan, author of 12 books, including three set in Hawai'i: "Red Wind," "The Braid" and "The Seven Orchids," which won a 2007 Ka Palapala Po'okela honorable mention for Excellence in Literature.

But on Oct. 20, this O. Henry Award- and Pushcart Prize-winner will lead a morning fiction workshop for attendees of the 13th Honolulu Writers Conference.

We asked him five questions.

Q. What do you plan to advise would-be writers at the conference?

A. I always start with the following advice: Be suspicious of anybody's advice. But beyond that, this seminar is about careful and precise description and means of appealing to the reader's senses. The reason we write is to put the reader in another person's place, and a lot of writers assume that the process is routine, when it's really not.

Q. Do you find outside feedback helpful during your own writing process?

A. For me, the writing process is so insular and so much its own little universe that little from the outside can affect it. So, usually I say nothing about whatever I'm writing. I guess I like it that way.

Q. How do you develop the ideas for your books?

A. I start with people faced with some situation or problem. The development after that is not planned out in advance. I like to let the process of writing the novel or story show me how it should advance and finish. When I'm halfway through writing a novel, I still have little idea of how it will end. So there are those moments when all the hair stands up on my arms because I've found out what is going to happen. Again, I prefer it this way. And I think writers who start with outlines for whole books surprise themselves with various discoveries in the process, and end up ignoring or revising the outline.

Q. What other habits do you have that help you precisely describe Island life and bring us into another person's world?

A. Depicting Island life is like depicting life anywhere, but I guess the fact that I've lived in the same house since 1970, in an old, local neighborhood, has made it easy for me to make observations about island life. Writers cultivate habits of observation, so as I tell my students, no writer ever gets bored waiting at a bus stop. There's too much to see. Writers also cultivate the habit of projecting their imaginations into the lives of others. Put these two habits together, and put the writer in Hawai'i, and those habits complete the job. I will say that I was here 30 years before I started trying to depict Island life.

Q. What are you working on now?

A. I'm working on a long novel set in Hawai'i between 1760 and 1824. I've been working on this book for a long time, and it's around 700 pages, the research demanding and time-consuming. I took time off from writing it to do three other books: "The Braid," "The Seven Orchids" and "The Bone Hook," a novel due out early next year from Mutual.