Writing is hard. Writing books is harder. So as a mere plebeian author interviewing Dan Brown for the first time, I needed to know: After you’ve sold 200 million books, does it get any easier?

“It’s the same process. It’s identical,” Brown says on a video call from his home library in New Hampshire. “Your characters don’t care how many books you’ve sold; you’re still facing the blank page. What becomes more challenging is you put an enormous amount of pressure on yourself and say, ‘Listen, there’s a certain number of people who trust me.’ If you can get somebody to spend 10 hours with your words, you better deliver.”

It’s safe to say that Brown has repeatedly delivered. A master of the brainy, twisty thriller, Brown’s 2003 novel, “The Da Vinci Code,” is one of the bestselling books of al

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