I never discuss a novel while I’m writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.

Koontz is describing a common creative discipline: protecting the fragile, private momentum of a work-in-progress. By refusing to “discuss” a novel mid-draft, he avoids the premature sense of completion that can come from summarizing or explaining an idea—talk that can substitute for the harder labor of execution. The remark also implies an awareness of how external feedback, expectations, or even casual conversation can distort an emerging story before it has found its own internal logic. In this view, silence is not secrecy for its own sake but a practical method for preserving desire, focus, and imaginative intensity until the book exists on the page.