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They say that journalists are writing the first draft of history. What happens when a professional journalist writes a novel set inside the second or third draft of a historical moment?

Our special guest Jeffrey Frank is a senior editor at The New Yorker magazine and has worked as a journalist at The Washington Post.

He's written a number of novels, and his most recent work, Trudy Hopedale, is a satire set just months before September 11, 2001--a bittersweet reminder of how much our lives have changed since that relatively carefree time.

Today Frank explains his research methods in my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson's mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
The pre-2001 setting seems so quaint and tragic in your book, as the readers know that politically, the whole world is going to take a darker turn after the story concludes. How did you choose the key details you needed to evoke this historical moment without writing a history book? In other words, how do you research and pick the historical details of your novel?

I reminded myself what a person like myself would have read and thought about (and also said, "Oh, yeah, there was that!").

There was an awful lot of coverage about shark attacks in Florida, and also the story of Chandra Levy, the congressional intern to Gary Condit.

But I didn't use all that much of it—it wasn't necessary; and as I wrote the book, I was aware of a dark backward movement from the future (if that doesn't sound too pretentious); it was unavoidable.