I'm really sort of cautious about being too didactic. To me there are writers that can do that, but I think they drown in that after a while. I do think the job of a writer is to raise questions and nobody likes the questions being asked.

I love factoids. It's hard for me to keep those out. It just takes realizing that it's stopping the character. Part of it is the decision to keep things where you want to train the spotlight. For me, it's the personal side. I always ask, How does the person inside the character relate to this?

Often people who already had an interest in human rights work. What I did notice with all of them, even the people who professed to be interested in human rights, was that activism was somewhat a concept in their mind - a symbolic flag on the quad or something to show how many people were starving in the world. But once they saw their efforts connected to a person, I did see a change.

My sense, and I'm sort of guessing, is that the journalists were being classified by the government as common criminals, and the political prisoners were so resistant to being that. Always keeping [the other prisoners] as murderers, thieves, that sort of thing, which has a certain irony to it, I guess. It's a curious thing.

What really resonated with my students, I think, is that most of the writers we worked with were journalists, and when they saw journalists simply raising questions and being put in jail for that, it did freak them out a little bit.

I'm really sort of cautious about being too didactic. To me there are writers that can do that, but I think they drown in that after a while. I do think the job of a writer is to raise questions and nobody likes the questions being asked.

In many respects most of the books I write deal with well-known people. I think of those books as more about me than about those people.