The plots of Dan Brown’s novels have so many turns that even the author has to make sure he can keep it all organized. “Anybody who writes a thriller needs to have a plan. There’s a great saying that the thriller writer who starts a book without knowing where’s he’s going is just lying,” he said. “And certainly these books are very complicated. One way I sort of battle, trying to keep it all straight, is to write every single day, just to keep it fresh. If I go through two sleep cycles (without writing), it starts to evaporate. And, of course, I also have what looks like a detective’s chalkboard in a police station. We’ve got the pictures and the yarn and the notes and the sticky notes, all that on my wall trying to keep it straight as well.”
Brown’s “The Secret of Secrets” has been published last week, a 650-page thriller and mind-bender from the author known worldwide for “The Da Vinci Code,” “Angels & Demons” and other million sellers. Brown again combines suspense, philosophical digressions and travelogues, along with codes and puzzles and secret societies as he dispatches favorite protagonist Robert Langdon to Prague and ensnares him in a deadly, international race for the key to ultimate wisdom — what happens when we die. Besides Langdon, the Harvard symbologist who has found adventure and trouble everywhere from Paris to Washington, D.C., Brown has brought back love interest/noetic scientist-in-distress Katherine Solomon and a New York-based book editor with a very real-life counterpart. “Jonas Faukman” is an anagram for Brown’s editor at Doubleday Books, Jason Kaufman, who has worked with the author for more than 20 years. Author and editor are good friends, they say, although that didn’t keep Brown from subjecting Faukman to abduction and other un-literary experiences in his latest book.
“I always enjoy getting manuscripts from Dan and seeing where he’s going,” Kaufman told the AP recently. “I have to ask him not to tell me in advance what he has in mind. He always finds new ways to surprise me.” Brown also spoke about how he decides on his subjects, his evolving thoughts on mortality and why Prague is the perfect setting for a few conspiracies.
How do you go about deciding what to write about?
It’s no secret that I like to write about big topics and there really is no topic that is bigger than consciousness. It is the lens through which we see ourselves. And so the real challenge was how to make a concrete urgent modern thriller about something that’s so ethereal. About eight years ago, my mom passed away about the time that I was thinking of writing about consciousness, and I started asking myself, “What happens when we die?” and if you’d asked me eight years, ago, I’d say nothing It’s full stop total blackness. Over the course of the eight years that took me to write this book and all the conversations that I had with philosophers and physicists and noetic scientists, I’ve come out the other side with a totally different mindset. And in fact, it sounds crazy. I no longer fear death.
Before you worked on this book, did you consider yourself an atheist? An agnostic? How would you have described yourself?
I grew up Christian, Episcopalian, but I moved away from the organized nature of religion. I’ve always been spiritual and sensed there’s something else, but I’ve also been skeptical and said, “Well, that sense of there’s just something else could just be wishful thinking.” It could be because it’s so hard to imagine that there’s nothing else that we just sort of say, “Well, I sense there’s some thing else.” And now I do sense there’s something else. And that is from an intellectual standpoint. I have not had a religious experience, a spiritual experience, an outer body experience, or near death experience. This change of mind comes from looking at the science that is happening right now in the world of physics and noetics.
Some people talk about the creative process, so to speak, as almost a religious experience, that moment the idea comes to you, whether it’s the right phrase or a piece of music.
It’s called flow, a muse. Certainly, we writers have that experience of, “Ah, I’ve got it. It’s just flowing through me.” I have certainly felt that. Not every day, unfortunately. There’s a lot of trial and error, but that is the feeling that creative people are always looking for. My mom was a professional musician. I was brought up to be a musician. I thought I would be a musician. I still play piano every day. I studied music composition in university, and I’ve had that experience also with music. That sort of muse moment when something flows in, it’s different between writing and music. Writing sort of feels like finding the right Lego piece to put in. You say, “Ah.” It’s almost like doing a jigsaw puzzle. You’re like, “Got it. It fits.” And music is a little bit more fluid. It’s like making a big brush stroke. And the melody just sort of flows in and finds its way to your hands, and then it exists.
The cities you set your books in are so important to what you do. Do you have a kind of wish list? Like, “I need to set a book in this city.”
I mean, there are a few of them that I won’t mention because I don’t want people running out, and they’re sort of off the beaten path, kind of like Prague is. I like to use location as a character. I want to make sure that, whatever book it is, it could only be set there. “The Lost Symbol” could only be set in D.C. because it’s about the symbology of D.C. “The Da Vinci Code” could only be set in Paris because it is about the Roseland. “The Secret of Secrets,” about human consciousness, could only be set in Prague. It’s been the mystical capital of Europe since Emperor Rudolf II (in the late 16th-early 17th centuries) brought all the mystics and scribes and alchemists to Prague. And as a character, Prague is perfect for Langdon. It’s full of secret passageways and cathedrals and monasteries and all, that’s his world.
Puzzles and mystery and passageways, that’s just endlessly fascinating to you? It’s as interesting to you now as when you were 10 or 20?
I don’t know what that says about me, but yeah, I still love secret passageways. You talk about that “aha” moment. It’s kind of the same thing to say, “Wait, there’s something here that you don’t see and now you see it.” It’s the same kind of sensation of “aha.”
Associated Press