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Mark Cohen, professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University, introduced author Allegra Goodman with a story about how he had first heard about her. He was at home having dinner with Goodman's father, Lenn Goodman, now a professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. "He waxed eloquent and with pride about his young daughter Allegra, who wanted to be a writer," remembered Cohen, who then joked, "I'm not sure whether he said it with great confidence or great trepidation."

Whatever her father's opinion back then, Goodman is one of the leading writers of the current generation, said Cohen, who decided after reading "Kaaterskill Falls" and devouring "Intuition" to invite Goodman to be the speaker at the 32nd Carolyn L. Drucker '80 Memorial Lecture.

A 1989 graduate of Harvard University with a doctorate in English from Stanford University, Goodman is a visiting professor in creative writing at Boston University and writes during the daytime hours when her four children are in school.

"She is a writer of enormous talent and virtuosity, with her sensitive and beautifully crafted novels," Cohen said. "She has won effusive praise for her fresh approach to Jewish subjects -- which has set her apart from the neurotic, unsympathetic prose of others like Roth, Mailer, and Bellow."

Goodman's work reaches into different corners of the Jewish world. In "Kaaterskill Falls," Cohen said, her main character is a pious Jewish woman who wants to give free expression to her individual yearnings while maintaining loyalty to the Jewish tradition. In "Intuition," the backdrop is a more secular Jewish identity of figures locked in a struggle to find a cure for cancer.

Goodman's talk responded to two questions that audiences regularly pose to her: "Where does your work come from?" and "How do you do it?" Noting that no rules, formulae, or templates exist for writing novels or short stories, she dealt with her own motivations for writing and how in her work she develops character, plot, and voice, and then revises her work.

Goodman's first motivation in her writing is to recreate a time and place.

"Art is memory work to recapture something lost," she said. For Goodman, one big loss was the family's house in the Catskills, where she spent her childhood summers. Having grown up in Hawaii, where her parents taught at the University of Hawaii -- her father, philosophy, and her mother, biology, as well as directing the Women's Studies program -- the summer house was magical. "It was an extraordinary place because I grew up in Hawaii, and those leafy trees, bulbs, and tulips were very exotic," Goodman said. "I was used to orchids and volcanic soil."

After the family house was sold when Goodman was a teenager, she wanted to recapture those old-fashioned Victorian houses with the slate roofs and the visual landscapes of Hudson River School painters -- especially for her mother, who had spent every summer there from her birth until she got married. "My idea was to recreate it for my mother, who had mourned the loss of this house," said Goodman.

Another impetus for Goodman's writing is the desire to live in new worlds. This was the genesis of "Intuition," about the science of studying cancer, as well as her most recent novel, "The Cookbook Collector," about a rare bookstore and cookbook collecting. "It is a way to take yourself out of your own experience and enter another person or a community imaginatively," she said.

Her third motivation, to do justice to the world, is where her Jewish identity may come into play, suggested Goodman. She remembered as a 7-year-old looking at the volcanic landscape around her and finding a way to put down on paper the beauty she saw. She attributed her vocation as an artist in part to her sense that God was the artist of world, "that something as beautiful as this must have been created by God."

Describing an event in "Kaaterskill Falls" where Elizabeth has what could be described as a religious experience with a Thomas Cole painting of the falls, Goodman said. "In 'Kaaterskill Falls,' I write about art as a way to respond to the world and as a mediation between God's world and our own. When you recognize or see something in art and learn more about that piece or experience, it inspires you."

Although the different literary strands of a novel are often intertwined, Goodman examined them thread by thread in her Princeton talk. The first aspect she spoke about was voice, both of her characters and of herself as narrator. She illustrated the voices of two of her characters in a quite humorous reading from "The Family Markowitz." In the scene she chose, an earnest graduate student is interviewing a woman in an effort to elicit data about her life. He uses stylized professorial prose during his interview with an elderly woman who, in her "querulous voice" (captured perfectly by Goodman as she read aloud), undermines and pokes fun at the pompous academic.

Moving to the voice of the narrator, Goodman observed, "When I craft the voice of my books and my characters I am also responding to the voices of texts I've read. The richest literary work responds to the best of the works of past and present." When she wrote her first novel, she explained that, at the time, she was not reading great Jewish writers but rather late 18th-century and early 19th-century English writers. "When I started my first novel, my idea was that I didn't want it to be about one person and from one point of view, but the 19th-century idea of being about an entire community and the way individuals interlock and conflict," said Goodman.

What she had noticed was that the English novels tended to have set pieces where the entire cast came together. In Anthony Trollop, for example, it was during a fox hunt, and in Jane Austin, at country dances. When Goodman asked herself where her cast of characters in "Kaaterskill Falls" would gather, she decided it would be the synagogue, whose description she shared with the audience of about 100.

Goodman's discussion of voice merged into that of character; her own characters, she said, begin with their voices.

"My characters come from a combination of imagination, observation, and memory," said Goodman. Of the two ways that authors create character, from the outside in or from the inside out, Goodman firmly located herself in the second approach, which she likens to that of method actors in the theater. She gets to know each of her characters thoroughly, including writing a biography of several pages for each of the main characters, delving into childhood, motivations, memories, traumas, career, relationships, and approach to life. "I do a lot of research," she explained, "which is mostly in my imagination."

For Goodman, a character's name is the crucial factor uniting his inner and outer characteristics and serving as a nexus of social and psychological traits. Her mother, she said, was brilliant at coming up with names. "She knew what name a baby would have from a certain generation," said Goodman. But now that her mother has died, she said she has to learn to do this herself.

When she completes the character's biography, Goodman then asks herself, "What does this character want?" Her attempt to answer this question for each of her characters reveals the ways in which they are likely to conflict with one another, and these conflicts form the basis of the novel's plot.

Plots, Goodman said, are the summary of characters' interactions, rendered as plausibly as possible. Before beginning to write, Goodman outlines her whole book, down to the level of specific scenes, but is never entirely sure how things will turn out. "I have a direction but I don't know how I will get there," she said.

Goodman explained her goal when developing plots. "I aim for the particular, the unique, and the limited, never the universal or the general case," she said. She also allows room for ambiguity, but noted that creating an illusion can be risky. "To write fiction is to risk being misread," she said.

The final step in her novel-writing process is revision.

"I begin writing each day by rewriting what I did from the day before to maintain continuity," she said. Once she is done with a novel, she usually revises it once more on her own, then again after comments from other people and from her editor and agent. "I have come to enjoy cutting material," she said. "It's never good to cling to something just because it was hard to develop or because the language is beautiful."

For Goodman, language is simply a tool that is not worth its salt if it does not move the story forward. She leaves beautiful language to the poets, and herself treats words as tools. "I have a responsibility to move forward and not dwell on the sound of my own voice," she said.

After the lecture Goodman responded to questions from the audience. The first was "What do you think of e-books?" Although Goodman said she preferred herself "a book printed on luscious paper with gorgeous colors" and the experience of turning the pages, her primary purpose is to get her work out there. She added that she really likes audio books. "There is one silver lining," she said. "Even as the printed word is threatened by the electronic word, the spoken word is coming back into vogue. It is beautiful to hear actors read the word." She added that her latest work, "The Cookbook Collector," will be available in an audio book running 12-and-a-half hours.

The second questioner wanted to know what Goodman's days are like, given that she has four children, aged nearly 8 to 17.

"I write when my children are at school," she said, adding that as they have gotten older, she can be a little more demanding of others about her own time. "There's a rhythm to these sorts of things," she said. "When you have the end in sight and the last pieces falling into place, it's hard to get interrupted." She added that recently, as a birthday present, she asked her husband to take the four children so that she could finish her book at a nearby coffee shop -- which she did in one seven-hour stint.

Noting that her work had been translated into different languages, the next questioner wanted to know which countries were the most receptive to her work? She responded that different books are popular in different countries, with "Intuition" a best seller in Taiwan, for example, and "Paradise Park" in Israel.

When asked why she specializes in Jewish characters, Goodman responded that she did not think of herself that way. Of course, she continued, she has known many Jewish people in her life, and, she added. "I find the Jewish community in America to be a rich subject: diverse and full of conflict." She added that her writing is also informed by growing up on a tropical island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

As to how she involves others while she is writing a new book, Goodman said she limits her readers to people she trusts. When she was a teen, she would read her work aloud to her parents and sister. "I watched to see who was laughing and watched their reactions," she said.

Sharing her work with others is risky, and she does not do it too soon, for fear of having someone look at her the wrong way and get her off track. "It is a leap of faith when you try something new," she said. "Even my very first reader that I trust the most, I wouldn't tell her how something ended. I want to experience her fresh reaction, and telling her would ruin the experiment."