When author Ann Patchett starts a new novel, she's as likely to be putting on rubber gloves as sitting down at her keyboard.

While most of us grumble at the thought of cleaning the kitchen, the highly respected novelist said she revels in household chores as an opportunity to invent new characters and plot lines.

"I am an amazing housewife," said Patchett. "I'm married to a doctor who comes home at 7 p.m. and I make the house perfect for him. I make a big dinner, scrub the floors and even iron his handkerchiefs."

You might say Patchett, winner of the PEN/Faulkner award for the best-selling "Bel Canto," defies several of the common stereotypes about writers. She doesn't live in squalor, drink too much or scribble feverishly in notebooks.

"The only thing interesting about my process is I write the whole book in my head before I ever pick up a pen," Patchett said. "While I'm emptying the dishwasher, or making the bed, I've got these complicated storylines and characters developing in my head."

Fortunately for her husband, Patchett is currently working in the beginning stages for her next novel so her house is spotless.

"I'm just starting; I'm only doing research but the book might have something to do with malaria," she said. "I'm reading a book about bug bites because I'm very interested in stings right now."

The imaginative part of the writing process is sheer bliss for her, Patchett said, before the pen or computer complicate things.

"It's a very happy time, like staring into a fog. I do not write my way through it. I really work it out in my head."

When forced to finally sit down at her computer, the fun stops.

"That part, for me, is really unpleasant," she said. "I'm so happy making it up and I'm so unhappy writing it down."

Much like "Bel Canto," her last novel, "Run" is a book that deals with time, although in a compressed rather than expanded fashion.

" `Bel Canto' is about the suspension of time," Patchett said. "People give away their watches and the reader doesn't know if they've been there for four hours or five years."

In "Run," except for a flashback in the beginning (and one brief glimpse into the future at the end), the entire narrative takes place in 24 hours.

"A lot of times what I'm doing in one book is a response to something I've done in a previous book," she said. "I either write something I love that I want to explore further in a subsequent book, or I write something that really bugs me and I think `I'm never doing that again — I'm going to do the opposite.' "

In "Run," recently published in paperback, one or another of the characters is always awake, creating a continuous 24-hour account of a family in crisis. The central character, Bernard Doyle, is forced to question his ambition and his values when an argument with his son leads to a car accident and the dramatic intervention of a stranger. Her unselfish act leads to fundamental, unexpected changes in the family's life.

"The book is about how easy it is to hold certain political ideals, but what happens when we're asked to put them into action," Patchett said. "What happens when the politics come into your family?"

Patchett attended Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop. She then won a residential fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., where she wrote her first novel, "The Patron Saint of Liars."

Patchett also did a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, but said she relied very loosely on her background for the setting of the novel in Boston.

"I usually write about places that I have some connection to, but not a huge connection," said Patchett, who lives with her husband in Nashville, Tenn. "I would never set a novel in Nashville because I would become paralyzed by familiarity and I would be too worried about getting everything right."

This seems almost impossible to believe. Her characters in "Run" trudged through the streets of Boston, from impoverished neighborhoods to affluent ones, which she describes with uncanny accuracy.

"I'm a professional imaginer," Patchett said. "That's my job to make stuff up and to make you believe that I didn't make it up."

To find out more about Wendy Fry and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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