Goodreads asked Jonathan Safran Foer:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Jonathan Safran Foer There wasn't any one "idea," but a number of disparate starting points: an affair discovered on a cell phone (which originated in a television project I was writing several years ago); an earthquake in Israel (a curiosity born from an afternoon spent at the Geological Institute in Israel), notes to actors in a future depiction of a family (a short story I'd been working on for as long as I can remember). I have yet to write a novel from a plan, but instead work on what interests me, blindly, until a plan emerges. So it's an inefficient process. Much of what interested me over the past few years didn't have a place in this novel, and so sits in a "castoffs" folder on my computer. But some of what interested me, without having any obvious purpose, ended up changing the direction of the book.

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