Dan Brown talks about his book and how he manages the writing process

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.

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“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.