Andy Dougan asks if Coelho feels that he is guided while he writes, and how he manages the process of writing.

Coelho says there is no divine light when it comes to writing; rather, a writer is guided by institution. Alongside this, a writer's technique must be managed confidently. However, Coelho admits that after killing off the protagonist in the first sentence of The Witch of Portobello, his new novel, he faced a difficult problem. Indeed, he only worked out how to resolve this problem half way through the book. In the middle, then, he found an answer to his stylistic technique of beginning with the death of the Witch.

Although he praises the storytelling in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the writing of the great Russian novelists, he personally finds it difficult to keep track of multiple characters simultaneously. As a result, when Coelho writes, he prefers to focus on a single character.