Dan Brown

From Dan Brown's Q & A with the Wall Street Journal's Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg:

WSJ: What are your hopes for [The Lost Symbol]?

Mr. Brown: After "The Da Vinci Code" was published, people came up to me and said they hadn't read anything since high school or college, but that they'd now rediscovered the fun of reading. I hope that happens again.

WSJ: Do you ever suffer from writer's block?

Mr. Brown: No. I've got four refrigerator-size boxes of pages that didn't make it into "The Lost Symbol." I probably wrote ten novels' worth of material for this book.

WSJ: How much fact checking do you do?

Mr. Brown: The research is multi-layered. I'll go to a place that I want to write about as often as three times to make sure that the descriptions are exactly right. You can't always know from one or two visits which detail you are going to want to include. And I'll talk to the building's historian or specialist to make sure that what I've got is correct. Nobody reads the manuscript before it goes to the publisher. But my publisher has fact checkers, and you go through a very high level of scrutiny. That said, I'm weaving facts into a story of fiction.

WSJ: Has wealth changed you?

Mr. Brown: ...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue