You want the story to be about something, have some deeper meaning, but there is also an emotional, almost instinctual, element, which is, does this story seize some part of you and compel you to get to the bottom of it?

In Brazil, the history of the interaction between blancos and indios - whites and Indians - often reads like an extended epitaph. Tribes were wiped out by disease and massacres; languages and songs were obliterated.

There's a tendency when we write history to do it with the power of hindsight and then assume almost god-like knowledge that nobody living through history has.

I think you get into trouble as an author and a journalist when, rather than owning the gaps, you try to elide them.

Heroes have always served as a reflection of their times, a template of who we are and what we want to be.

The Osage have this lovely phrase: 'Travelers in the Mist.' It was the term for part of an Osage clan that would take the lead whenever the tribe was venturing into unfamiliar realms. And, in a way, we are all travelers in the mist. The challenge is that, as writers, we sometimes want to ignore this murkiness, or we want to write around it.