Bryan asked Lawrence Wright:

Your non-fiction works have been enjoyable and practical for me in understanding places I have lived (Afghanistan, Egypt, and Texas). Your previous books have been primarily (entirely?) non-fiction. Have you had the idea for a long time that you would like to do a novel? Have you had characters or outlines of characters already developed that needed to be put into a story or did they come together with the plot?

Lawrence Wright Bryan, we've been walking in each other's footsteps. I've written one other novel, "God's Favorite," about Manuel Noriega's spiritual quest (you'll have to read it). But I've also written seven plays and a couple movies, so I have written fiction in other forms. this book started out as a script I wrote for Ridley Scott, who never made it. I had never really solved the story, and yet it never left my mind. When I decided to write it as a novel, I realized I'd have to do the research that I failed to do on the script. That's what finally unlocked the story.

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