101 Reasons to Stop Writing

(Disclaimers: One, I made money from the publication of The Da Vinci Code. More precisely, I won a hardcover copy in a magazine giveaway, read it, had a chuckle, then resold it for a couple bucks off retail. Two, I enjoyed TDVC the first two times I read it, when it was called Holy Blood, Holy Grail and later Foucault’s Pendulum.)

You are not Dan Brown. I’m sure you’ve noticed this, unless you happened to wake up this morning with the surviving members of Pink Floyd playing “Money” live in your bedroom. In case you’re still not sure, here are a few other indicators that you’re not Dan Brown:

• Your computer is not made of solid gold, according to specifications on a long-lost page from Leonardo’s Codex Arundel.
• There’s no voicemail from James Patterson offering to ghostwrite your next novel.
• You are not under permanent surveillance by the NSA, CIA and the Vatican, even if that pizza guy looks shifty and Catholic.
• The paper you’re using is not made from recycled hundred dollar bills.
• The CEO of your publishing company doesn’t drop by every Friday to see how the next book’s coming along, and to ask if there are any odd jobs around the mansion that need doing while he’s there.

If you don’t know who Dan Brown is, stop writing. You obviously haven’t set foot in a bookstore in the last four years.

If you are a Dan Brown, and God knows there are probably thousands of you, including a few Dannys, Danielles and Dons, then you should head down to your local courthouse and change your name. Even if you have no intention of writing. The jokes and funny looks will never stop. (If you’re thinking of changing your name to Dan Brown or a close variant, publishers are on to you. Just ask King Stephen, Stephan Kiing and Steven K. Ng.)

If you are the Dan Brown, and you’ve worked your way through the last ninety-eight pages of Google results to get here, I have a couple of Reasons to Stop Writing that only apply to you:

Special Dan Brown Only Reason #1: You Have Nothing to Look Forward To

Nothing you ever write will have the impact of The Da Vinci Code. There just aren’t any ideas that “explosive” left for you to plagiarise adapt to fiction. It was a total fluke, and you know it. You already know that only a quarter of TDVC readers went on to buy your other books. It’ll only get worse. Every literary critic and blogger has their knives sharpened, ready to eviscerate the terrible language, hackneyed plot and bad research/science/philosophy of your next book. Everything you do, ever, will be called “failure” compared to TDVC. J.K. Rowling already has you beat, you’ll never catch her. King, Cussler, Koontz, you’d have to sell another hundred million before they even return your calls.

Special Dan Brown Only Reason #2: You’ve Made Over a Quarter of a Billion Dollars.

You could finance your own global conspiracy for this. Goldfinger would’ve totally kicked James Bond’s ass if he had that kind of operating capital. For the money you’re spending on shredding the crackpot manuscripts/manifestos that are mailed to you every day, you could overthrow the Congo, Dogs of War style. Why write about the Freemasons when you could start up the Brownmasons, and live out your days on L.Ron Hubbard’s yacht?

And while you’re here, Dan, there are a few regular Reasons that apply to you:

• Reason #92: Your Best Fiction is Your Research
  Sure, four books under your belt and editors and reviewers just assume you know what you’re doing. But any reader who can use Google Maps can prove in a minute that you don’t know where Versailles is.
• Reason #37: You’re Writing The Same Damn Book Over and Over
  Just how many global conspiracies can there be at any one time? Is Amazon taking orders for your Jack the Ripper book yet?
• Reason #55: We’ve Heard This One Before
  If I give you five bucks, will you just send me a list of the nonfiction books you’re plagiarising using for research for your next novel, and save me the trouble of reading it?
• Why don’t you just start at Reason #1 and weigh up the preponderance of the evidence.

But this is pointless. Brown’s incredible chutzpah in plagiarising basing a novel on someone else’s (entertaining but ultimately bogus) speculative nonfiction has demonstrated that rivers of undeserved wealth are out there for the enterprising bad writer to exploit. Brown has built a fortress out of sixty million hardcovers, unassailable to the flaming arrows of criticism and the siege engines of copyright infringement lawsuits. If everyone who hated TDVC created a bonfire of derision by soaking their copies in burning vitriol and piling them against the walls, Brown could stand atop the Illustrated Edition battlements and put out the fire with Champagne.

For everyone else, depending on your point of view, not being Dan Brown is a good or a bad thing. There are two schools of thought on this:

• “Gee, I’d love to be Dan Brown. I could drag out all my unsold novels and they’d sell ten million copies each. I’m already trying to emulate him, in my choice of plots, my research, my writing and most importantly my query letters.”
• “I could not live with myself, or even tolerate my own presence for more than ten minutes without choking on my own umbrage. I’d have to issue a press release acknowledging that the only part of the book that’s even based on a verifiable fact is the disclaimer that says it’s a work of fiction, and dedicate my life to walking the streets of this world, handing out refunds to everyone who read the book or saw the movie.”

If you’re in, or leaning towards the first group, stop writing. The “next Dan Brown” is Dan Brown. The outward ripple of interest in religious cryptogeek thrillers crested in 2005. Those unscrupulous hacks who dusted off their manuscripts in time found only the humble pie left uneaten on Brown’s plate, as publishers expensively discovered that one inexplicably successful novel does not translate into a renaissance in literature. Now, writing “the next Da Vinci Code” on your query letter is automatically translated to “Shred Me”.

If you’re in the second group, you can still learn from Brown’s example. The New York Times described TDVC as “[a] primer on how not to write an English sentence”.

Dan Brown is the quintessential example of the Breakout author. He has no fscking idea how it happened. If he had the slightest awareness that TDVC would be successful at all, let alone a top-ten all-time bestseller, why did he write three midlist cryptogeek/technothrillers beforehand? He certainly wasn’t honing his writing talent. That’s why his next book will be more of the same, sans whatever it was that made TDVC a hit. Take out the material that was plagiarised borrowed from other sources, and TDVC is about a professor solving anagrams.

Eventually his readership will dwindle back to the core fanbase of mild-mannered cryptogeeks he was always writing for, who clearly don’t give a crap about factual accuracy or beauty of language. Hopefully his publisher won’t go bankrupt in the process.

It’s an endless cycle. Brown read a Sidney Sheldon novel and thought “I can do better than that”. Now, thousands of wannabe writers are doing the same to him. But the really bitter pill is that one of them will be right. And then I’ll have to change the name on this article.