Dan Brown’s Writing Routine

"For me, writing is a discipline, much like playing a musical instrument; it requires constant practice and honing of skills."

As the old adage goes: write what you know. But Dan Brown doesn’t subscribe to that advice. Instead he encourages writers to write what they want to know. “I wrote a book called Deception Point about glaciology and NASA,” he told The Guardian. “I didn’t know anything. I took a year and educated myself, which was part of the fun.”

During his career as an English teacher at Phillips Exeter, Brown and his wife were vacationing in Tahiti when he read a book called The Doomsday Conspiracy by Sidney Sheldon. This experience served as inspiration for his future career as a best-selling mystery author.

“The Sheldon book was unlike anything I’d read as an adult,” he recalled in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “It held my attention, kept me turning pages, and reminded me how much fun it could be to read. The simplicity of the prose and efficiency of the storyline was less cumbersome than the dense novels of my school days, and I began to suspect that maybe I could write a ‘thriller’ of…