![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "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:
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:
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.
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:
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:
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.
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*claps*
Hurray for the return of the Reasons. Now we can only hope that a certain bestselling author stumbles across it…
I only read TDVC because my mother told me it was satanic, and I shouldn’t read it. Being a contrary all-grown-up daughter…I had to read it.
I laughed out loud at Special Dan Brown reason number 1
LMAO! This is so hilarious I can’t stop laughing. At last, there are people out there who think Dan Brown has really been overrated. And yes, all that you said about him is true…I wish he could read this
!
Right on!
For years I’ve been calling TDVC “Focault’s Pendulum for Dummies.” It’s nice to see someone else see it, too.
Mmmmmm truthy.
I can still say, with great pride, that I’ve never even read the dust jacket on a Dan Brown book. I’ve seen that damn Mona Lisa EVERYWHERE, but I have never even picked up the book out of curiosity.
I do know for a fact that my mother ignoramus of an ex-husband* is convinced the whole thing as fact.
*Note: My mother’s ignoramus of an ex-husband lives in a 10×20 storage building converted into an illegal trailer on his son-in-law’s property. He’s also convinced that Dubya is the Second Coming of Christ, and that I deliberately sabotaged his computer with all that spyware he contracted while surfing for banjo porn. That in and of itself is enough to tell me I DON’T want to read it.
Of course, what really makes the situation sad is that Dan Brown ended up making this demonstration of “even a blind pig can find an acorn now and then” after Garth Ennis’s comic Preacher savaged the whole “preserving the bloodline of Christ” schtick. I guess it says a lot about how few people really give a damn about comics is that I can tell people with a straight face that George W. Bush speeches are heavily edited before broadcast to remove all instances of the exclamation “Humperdidoo!”, and the only ones who get the reference are Cat Piss Men who have the whole run of comics in titanium cases in the hopes that they’ll be valuable one of these days.
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.
I love you.
Dan Brown is rumoured to be publishing his next novel sometime this year,
To which, I think I speak for many when I say, “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Dan Brown makes me sick. And so does J.K. Rowling, but at least Rowling’s ideas were ORIGINAL. Dan Brown wouldn’t know originality if it bit him in his untalented ass.
hey Ms. Clue-Gun, here’s a Clue: pick up some of Ursula K. LeGuin’s works. wordy yes, original my arse.
I Love you also!
And its “as if you read my mind”..I was sitting here NOT smearing my privates with peanut butter and thinking..[picture little stars going round in a circle above my head] “Wow! What if I wrote a book that got as big as TDVC!!! They will say ‘Pequod is the next Dan Brown’!!!!”
And then…I read your reason 101..
The stars crashed around my shoulders making THE EXACT PATTERN LIKE IN THE BOOK IN THE LOUVRE!
with NEW HOPE I decided to write that book anyway..in PEQUODS book Jesus is Bi and has a threesome with paul and Mary, Mary has a kid, JC is found out, decides to “come out of the manger” , and comes out in favor of same sex unions, the Church FRIKKIN knows this and has been HIDING it, and ALL of this is discovered in super secret RUNES in works by RAFAEL and protected by the Knights Templar who secrectly run Microsoft
Bill Gates is JC’s descendant..of course I cant reveal the REST because Danny might STEAL it..but I will give one last ’spoiler’..JC , after “coming out” goes into fashion
and puts out a new line called ‘Revelations’ a daringly ‘naughty’ line..of course he gets crucified in the end but leaves a relic “The Briefs of Turin” which are stained by JC’s second coming.
Aur Revoir
Wow. That is a whole lot of bitterness. I’m assuming most of the people who comment on this are writers or like to call themselves so. I actually found this as I was searching to see if Brown came out with a new book. I’ve read all of his and, although they are pretty much they same, I enjoyed all of them. I think this anger for him comes from your own envy. The book may be as horrible as you say it is, but he had a great idea and made a buck. As much as you may hate to hear this, most people are not that introspective, cultured, “deep” or ….smart. If you all are writers, then you may as well accept, as with most art, that no one will ever value your work as it should be. All artists must accept this. Dan Brown is commercial. It is comparable to theatre vs. film. I must say, even if he used a “crazy” idea about Jesus that someone else came up with, I thought the puzzles were clever. People like puzzles. It’s entertainment.
Betsy-
Or it could just be that anyone with half a brain thinks he’s crap. You do you realise you just admitted you like all his books even though they’re the same, right? Why would anyone in their right mind read the same plot over and over and over- nevermind, don’t answer that.
I got to the end of chapter 1 of “Angels & Demons” and thought: “Wow, what crap!” I enjoy reading pulp, but I at least expect it to be semi-well-written. There’s a difference between great pulp fiction and utter tripe.
Meanwhile, Malcolm Gladwell’s just scored a hit with “Outliers,” a nonfiction book with the premise that most spectacular successes are the result of a little ambition coupled with a lot of dumb luck. I don’t know if he mentions Dan Brown, but TDVC seems like another example–Brown’s fourth cryptogeek techno-thriller, fortuitously arriving at a time when the reading public wanted to buy cryptogeek techno-thrillers. Of course, Gladwell’s own success with “Outliers” is itself an example of this principle–the market is ready for a book that states the obvious point that it’s better to be lucky than good.
And guess what–none of us are Malcolm Gladwell any more than we’re Dan Brown.