1.
In grade school it is not uncommon for an English teacher, attempting to instill an appreciation for the glories of description, to say, “Get out a pen and paper and describe what I have placed here without naming it.” For example, a banana, a poster of a Cézanne forest, a Bunsen burner.
To honor bygone writing exercises, I offer the following:
It is about three and a half inches long and mostly black. It has a cap that, when removed, reveals a small silver point, out of the end of which comes black ink. There is a window of clear plastic on the body of the object through which you can monitor how quickly said ink disappears. The general shape is cylindrical. Its diameter is less than one centimeter and fits nicely between the fingers of a woman who is 5’4” tall with slightly oversized hands for her height. The decorative elements are minimal, but there are some advertorial ones. These read: “Pilot. Precise V5. Rolling Ball. Extra Fine.”
2.
Pens are often considered a fetish item of neurotics with disposable income, but a Mont Blanc sensibility is not my point. Despite being reliably cash-poor, writer-types are often as particular about their pens as they are about their fonts. (When Helvetica—the trend, the font, the film, the MoMA exhibition—was the rage, Slate published a piece asking writers about their favorite fonts and those queried had cultivated preferences at the ready; Courier, mostly, since those writers who may not fetishize the pen fetishize the typewriter instead.) We care about what our words look like because we somewhere believe that this says something about who we are beyond font or scrawl. We think we can detect gender and personality, childhood traumas, future ambitions deep-seated hang-ups, sophistication and intelligence from the way a person’s hand puts ink to paper. “Real typeface is rhythm; it’s contrast; it comes from handwriting,” says Erik Speikermann in Helvetica, the film. “Poets don’t draw,” Jean Cocteau said. “They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.”
The starting point of handwriting is no doubt neurological, but pens have been, historically speaking, what has gotten us from capital letter to full stop. Hence, the fabled image of writer bent over desk, pen to paper, deep thoughts flowing like wine down the esophagus. The pen’s place in a writer’s self-image is somewhat sacred. For better or worse, I don’t think it’s an overstatement to venture that some are as likely to pony up for pens as for health insurance.
The Pilot Precise V5 with an extra fine rolling ball and black ink is my pen. I grew up with it. My handwriting developed with it. With it, I perfected the signature that appears on the title page of the book I have written in my daydreams and anxiety-induced nightmares. Friends have tried to convert me with pens that have finer points or a perhaps less prosaic shape, ones that are reusable and more earth friendly, or that can survive a change of cabin pressure when flying. Yet I remain firm in my attachment.
I enjoy the simplicity of the Pilot’s shape and decoration. The angles are right angles and the color palette is basic: black and white with a subtle grey belt. Uncapping it to begin writing, the separation of the two pieces of plastic makes a satisfying snap. The pen is smooth, firm, and room temperature between my fore and middle fingers, which are just far enough apart from one another thanks to the heft of it, to feel as though they are not hanging on to just themselves, but to something real. My handwriting arrives in tall, loose, right-leaning lines (everything, ironically, I am not in person, either physically or politically) and the ink takes up residence on the page as if it belonged there, not as if it had been pressed there against its will, as with ballpoints.
Like my preferred working font (Garamond) I imagine that, to others, my pen preference indicates some unflattering personal traits. Pretentiousness, perhaps. Or boringness. Or rigidity. Or snobbishness. I, of course, prefer to believe it is evidence of more flattering qualities. An appreciation of simplicity, for example. Or elegance. Or understatement.
3.
There’s no small amount of vanity wrapped up in handwriting. We place value on the handwritten word even as it dissolves. The old-fashioned letter is now a novelty item that seems romantic, cool, twee, or pointless, depending on your perspective. We look at the inscriptions of secondhand books and at the notes in their margins, wondering why some person who owned the book before us circled the words, “Made love” twice and wrote “light-skinned boy” in the margins. If you’ve ever made a foray into the land of special collections, you know what it means to hold the correspondence of Joe Hill and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn as Hill sat in prison, waiting around to die. You think those letters would feel different if they were typed. You think the intimacy would be lost, not just between Hill and Flynn, but among the three of you and across the years. You think of Edith Wharton writing in bed and tossing the pages of her manuscripts to the floor as she finished them for a maid to collect and order. You think of Lish’s marks through Carver’s stories.
Handwriting isn’t business. It’s personal and it’s a fact: Penmanship is dying. Those schoolbooks filled with your grandmother’s tidy, feminine script resemble terrariums nursing strange and delicate plants. One day will they be more akin to drawers lined with lost insects pinned to linen and labeled alphabetically by their Latin names?
Although its gradual disappearance is a possibility and one we must consider as a time becomes foreseeable when formal thank you notes and credit card receipts are rendered obsolete, we still notice the handwritten word, value it and judge it. I’m no different and won’t lie. If I like your handwriting, I like you better. If I don’t, there is a small part of me who likes you less. For example, I do not like handwriting in odd colors or with a disregard for lines, the hard geometry of the alphabet. This I would have known about you promptly when I was fifteen, whereas now it might take months, even years, to learn. Either way, I cannot name a close friend who commits either sin. This may make me old-fashioned. It may also make me peculiar or obnoxious or a jerk. It may also make me like you.
4.
I was not paid to write this by Pilot Corporate: I come by my enthusiasm honestly, from having picked up other, lesser pens, put them down and left them there. As usual, there was no shortage of experiments on the road to discovery. Pens were everywhere growing up. They were by the telephone and bedside tables. They were on my parents’ desks, as well as on my own and my sister’s. Pens were in my father’s pockets, my mother’s purse, my sister’s hair, at the bottom of my backpack. They were left on the floor and chewed by the dog and they were put away uncapped to leave a stain on the left breast. We are a family of bleeding hearts and I distinctly remember those hearts bleeding ink. Our pens were picked up and put back again even when tapped out. They were discovered later and complained about to whoever would listen because, “Jesus. Where have all the working pens gone?”
They were everywhere because they were with what we wrote. We wrote thank-you letters and notes to one another about who had called or where we had gone and when we would be back. We wrote copious telephone lists and filled in our address books and calendars. My older sister and I composed homework assignments and diary entries and little stories and poems and drawings of horses and dogs. My parents wrote to-do lists and grocery lists and checks. A surface wasn’t a surface if it didn’t boast a Post-It somewhere with a reminder of something our lives required in order to carry on. “Does anyone have a pen?” was not a relevant question. Everyone had a pen because functionality depended on it.
The heavy fountain pen my father kept hidden in the breast pocket of his blazer was the first of the pens I recall with any specificity. With this, the precise, strong-lined print he was taught in architecture school became heavier and more authoritative than under the spill of ink from less substantial pens. It would appear and disappear on his person as mysteriously as a quarter between a street magician’s thumb and forefinger. Occasionally, I would ask to borrow it for a duel of tic-tac-toe, and he would hand it over eyeing it all along, saying I had a knack for losing things already. Sometimes he would withhold it from me for fun, saying I wasn’t prepared for the kind of responsibilities a pen in hand implied. Lucky for him, I had opinions about pens even then and I didn’t like this one: the ink flow was unpredictable, arriving too quickly one minute and not at all the next. He tried to tell me the trick was in the angle, but I didn’t have patience for eccentric pens; if it required a course in “how to,” I was over it.
My mother kept a variety of brands at her disposal, and it was culling through her collection that my education in the common pen began: Bic, Caliber, Papermate, Uni-Ball, Pentel, and Pilot. I learned the pros and cons of each in turn. Bics encouraged my unfortunate fondness for chewing on cheap plastic and were left mutilated in my wake to likely give me cancer in forty years. Uni-Balls were almost what I was looking for but fell slightly on the wrong side of flimsy. I thought Pentels were just plain ugly and that Calibers looked like they were designed for engineers. Not the look I was going for. Papermates seemed alternately sophomoric and reminiscent of the pen handed to you at the drugstore when you need to charge a late night box of emergency tampons.
The Pilot Precise V5 Extra Fine was The One because those were the ones I was always saddest to lose. Its virtues were revealed over time: it said, “classy but not rich,” the weight was satisfying without being overwhelming, the ink flow was solid without being sloppy, and the plastic did not awaken my oral fixation. By college, it was my pen.
5.
I remember learning to write, Mrs. Ozbey standing over me, forcing my recalcitrant fingers into position around the six sides of a number 2 pencil. I would grasp that rod of wood and graphite so intently that when I released the thing my middle finger would be red and dented and my hand would need to shake it out. We were given large sheets of lined paper, the lines of which were extra wide with a dotted line down the center indicating the boundary above which lower case letters were not supposed to wander.
Cursive was introduced two years later. Master this complicated new art, they said, and it would save us untold time in the future. Print wasted precious seconds; cursive was the way of writing we would take with us into adulthood. Even then the idea seemed dated and by the time I was in sixth grade our teachers had stopped trying to make us write in cursive, trying instead to teach us to type. There was a new physical position we were supposed to learn that had nothing to do with holding something in our hands. Our hands should now live this way and over a keyboard. Use all your fingers on both your hands. Yes, even your pinkies. Don’t look down; look straight ahead. This was when screens were black and words were green and those of us being taught to type didn’t understand what was happening.
It wasn’t until college that I accepted my keyboard, not my hand, as my primary writing tool. Only then and almost without noticing, did I switch out the printed word for the typed one. Except, that is, when the process was creative. Then, I kept the partnership of hand and pen intact. I wrote poems in college and I wrote those poems by hand, crossing out and rewriting, switching out words, finally typing up the stanzas, only to continue writing and revising by hand. That was not a relationship or a process (which is it?) I was ready to upend. As if doing so would be akin to cutting in on Fred Astaire when he’s dancing a waltz with Ginger Rogers, the cameras rolling.
6.
I teach writing to college freshman. One of the first things I tell them as I attempt to instill the virtues of the essay is that “Writing is thinking.” This is not lip service, but something I believe: that the more you write and rewrite, the further you push your ideas on the page, the further you push them in your mind and the more deeply you comprehend and understand your thoughts and feelings about the world and your place in it. My freshmen are more than ten years younger than I am and they write—compose and think—exclusively on their computers. Watching toddlers with iPhones, I suspect it’s the only way they’ve ever really known.
With computers, the physicality of the writing process has largely been eliminated. You think a string of words and they appear in front of you; the relationship of brain to hand to keyboard to screen is almost effortless. So many laments and odes have been written about how the new ways we are reading affect us for better or worse, that I sometimes consider how the ways we write have changed and whether this matters. Even our vocabulary reflects this: we don’t technically write any more, but “word process.” The tap of the keyboard is a white noise nearly as familiar as a breath entering my own body and the feeling of a key succumbing to the pressure of my fingers is almost as natural as a spoken sound. Almost. That said, I don’t wish for the time when I thought of writing in terms of the cramping in my hand and the annoyance of running out of ink at the wrong moment. The vague and constant fear that my computer will crash and I will lose everything is something I am willing to live with if it means I have a tool that allows my body to keep up with my mind.
I’m as reliant now on the machine as the next person. There remains, however, an ineffable peculiarity about that duo of hand and pen that I cannot come between. Or don’t want to. I somehow believe that because it was with a pen between my fingers that I learned to write that this is the way I do that best and always will. Fred and I switch off with Ginger these days. He cuts in, then I cut in on him. I type first drafts, then edit by hand, type in the edits, then edit the edits by hand. Of course, it’s difficult to know whether this is a simple cause and effect relationship, since writing by hand keeps me focused and safe from the internet, or whether there is some connection between my brain and my hand that only a pen can access.
As for the Pilot Precise in particular, maybe my thoughts are indeed more confident and clear when a piece of paper is at the mercy of its point. Maybe, too, it is just my idea of a lucky penny. In this way I keep it in my coat pocket. I fiddle with it there throughout the day, taking the cap on and off, clutching it, feeling it between my fingers, pulling it out sometimes to show it the light of day.
7.
An edited history my family’s handwriting lies packed away in the attic. If I went through the bins long enough I could trace two childhoods via a timeline assembled with marks my sister and I once made on paper. Sometimes I even stumble across evidence of our parents’ early days as living, thinking, writing human beings: a short story in my mother’s small script, a handmade book of dog breeds (illustrated and alphabetized) from my father’s Boy Scout days.
If I ever cobble together a family of my own, we won’t have this history of our handwritten words. I remain uncertain how I feel about that. I know I am prone to fits of nostalgia and rose-tinted glasses, and I know too that this is not a habit to coddle, but rather one to hold, examine, accept as part of myself, but then to move past because to do otherwise would be counterproductive. These days I know enough writers, but I don’t know anyone who composes anything by hand more than a note stuck under a glass that says “Rent’s due!” The image of writer bent over desk with pen and paper has been supplanted by the image of writer at coffee shop with laptop and latte. The alternative seems precious. Now when someone looks up and asks, “Does anyone have a pen?” the answer is not so simple. There is a rush to check pockets and bags and, seven times out of ten, it seems, the answer is, “No, sorry…”
I fall at the tail end of Generation X, on the cusp of Generation Y. As it is with cusps of astrological signs, those of us on this generational cusp exhibit characteristics of both X and Y which can sometimes confuse us as to where we fall in the larger cultural picture. This sense of rose-tinted glasses worn with an awareness of the fashion’s irrelevance is part of this cusp, of relating to both the before and after when it comes to the computer age.
Yet the similarities that those of us who were born in the ’79, ’80, ’81 range share with the Gen Xers sometimes seem more profound. We remember the Challenger explosion and the fall of the Berlin Wall in a way that those born in ’83, ’84, and ’85 do not. We also remember a time when computers were not part and parcel of our lives, the way we thought, wrote, communicated. We are savvy with technology and to most we appear self-assured with it, prone to internet addiction and a knack for communicating more effectively over email than in conversation. But not a few of us, I imagine, are quite as fluent as our friends born just after us. In some ways we were outdated before we hit puberty. For this group of us there remains a lingering sense of “this newfangled thing in this brave new world” that we felt the first time when we were six or eight or ten and staring at the black screen with the green cursor blinking at us, as if into oblivion. Though we’ve spent the rest of our lives trying to prove otherwise, the strangeness of this second language persists even as our accents may remain imperceptible to anyone’s ears but our own.
(Image: In reply to @rockbandit, this is my favorite pen. A Pilot Precise V5 Extra Fine. from brandonpapworth’s photostream; Image 2 courtesy the author.)
I am on record, both in this magazine and in my local newspaper, as an enthusiastic defacer of books. Recently I had a new kind of marginal experience that I would like to share: the pleasure of joint, or (as they say in grad seminars) “dialogic” marginalia.
For the last few years, I’ve been telling people that “Angels and Demons” is the trashiest book I’ve ever read (no small achievement). It’s nice to know that Brown has persisted with his style of banality, incredulity and ponderous literary/historical scavenging – without actually having to read his books!
Lousy writing is so much fun!
So instead of spending your time, money, and energy on, say, a terrific yet under-the-radar writer, you purchased Dan Brown’s latest book, read it, made “amusing” comments in the margins, and then wrote an article with the revolutionary premise that Dan Brown is a shitty writer. (If I had been able to write a snarky comment in this essay’s margins, it would have been: Thanks for this invaluable and thought-provoking cultural contribution!)
There is something terribly depressing in this image of the literary intelligentsia sitting on their thrones and ironically reading bad books. Come on, Sam and Dave, don’t give up on literature just yet!
I could likely do something very similar with DFW’s works as well.
While we’re on the subject of poor writing, please let me edit out the word “basically” from this margin note: “I basically haven’t been able to picture anything he’s described.” Thank you.
My friends and I did this in high school with some kind of series aimed at teen girls that revolved around cheerleaders. If you were fourth or fifth in line to read you would cry with laughter all the way through.
Every time I read the banal comments about my own writing, I look at reviews for Dan Brown. And I rage, “How did this man get published and all I get are rejections and criticism about my cliches and grammar errors. Of course, having a sane and dependable proof reader and an editor would help those things… but they also stop my books from being professionally published. How does Brown do It? And how can I convince his readers my stories are at least moderately better?
This article, while not revolutionary, serves a similar purpose as Brown’s novels. I was much more entertained by this than I was ‘Angels and Demons’ and ‘The DaVinci Code,’ particularly David’s “EAT SHIT” annotation.
For 20 years I worked at a publishing house that makes recorded books, and I learned more from about good writing from hearing books read out loud than I did getting a BA in English. And O! Does this piece remind me of those days! We had no choice but to read these things and margin-comments were our way of relieving the agony. What we figured out is that anybody could get anything published if they are persistent enough (and this was in the days before self-publishing on a massive scale.)
I think most people just scan and miss the silliness of so much writing and therefore don’t understand what we’re making a big deal about. I often feel like I’m speaking a different language when I discuss actual quality of writing, even with people who love reading, so I get comfort from stories like these!
And Shannon, it also comforts me to know that there are high school kids care too.
Our favorite person to pick on, btw, was Piers Anthony. There are some people in my city that very seriously wish he’d die so he won’t write more books.
@Zach. No you can’t. Just go and pick up Infinite Jest next time you’re in a book store and think about what you wrote.
First off, great read, I love this kind of MST3K approach to glossing works, hope to see more of it in the future.
Secondly, I thought I’d repost my comment from a reddit discussion going on about this very article. It took me much longer than I planned on investing in it, and I would hate to see all that effort potentially buried under what I can only expect to be a torrent of downvotes.
My response:
People have problems with Dan Brown’s writing because he so consistently and persistently ‘gets it wrong’. And people who do care about things like characterization, plausibility, and intelligent prose are going to have problems with his writing. Most just shrug and look the other way, but others are genuinely concerned that something with so many issues can achieve such unparalleled success.
I don’t personally think it’s a problem to read Dan Brown, and I take issue to people who say “Don’t read this book because it’s bad”, but the problem is when people start throwing all these nonsensical adjectives praising Dan Brown. I have a BA and an MA in English Lit, so I guess it’s fair to say I can easily be chucked in with the book snobs of this world, and though I will admit I’ve read all of Brown’s works for fun, I cannot concede that either his writing style or his books have any value beyond being an in-flight read. At very least his prose is terribly sloppy, to say nothing of his blatant disregard for coherent characterization. A sentence like “Atop a control tower in the distance, the Turkish flag fluttered proudly–a field of red emblazoned with the ancient symbols of the crescent and star–vestiges of the Ottoman Empire, still flying proudly in the modern world” shouldn’t have made it past the first draft stage, much less made it past the editor. As the article above points out, it’s a repetition for starters (we get that the flag is fluttering), but the big problem for a grammarian like me is this:
The antecedents of “vestiges” are “the ancient symbols of the crescent and star”, but since these two terms appear in the parenthetical phrase “a field of red…”, this means they don’t function as part of the grammar of the sentence. So what we really have written here is “Atop a control tower in the distance, the Turkish flag fluttered proudly, vestiges of the Ottoman Empire…” HUH? The ‘flag is vestiges’? Grammatically that’s nonsense. Ok, so the control tower with the flag are vestiges of the Ottoman Empire? That doesn’t make any logical sense, a control tower is not a vestige of the Ottoman Empire. So clearly he meant the ancient symbols are vestiges, but his awkward and broken syntax has rendered the statement illogical and grammatically incorrect.
Doing this once would be fine, but Dan Brown does this a lot, and then makes a lot of money for this kind of writing. But this is his profession. It’s his job (if not to get this right, then at least to try. It’s not like it’s his shtick to flaunt the flaunt the rules of grammar and syntax, if it was I would shut up). If a factory worker messed up like this, and did so consistently, we might not fire them, sure, but we certainly wouldn’t be giving them a massive raise and calling them one of the best workers in the field. Or, if we did, a lot of his fellow workers (and perhaps even a few laymen) might start to wonder just what the hell some people were thinking, and they might take to a forum (like the internet) to express those valid concerns. But again, that doesn’t mean Dan Brown shouldn’t be read, or even enjoyed; people can do whatever they want. But the problems with his prose are alone the reasons why his works will never be compared favorably to Moby Dick.
TL;DR English major tries to explain a potential reason why people take issue with Dan Brown’s writings.
Frankly, the writer sounds like a little bitch, but maybe that’s just me. Like Brown’s writing or not, there has to be better things to do with one’s time.
@T: there has to be better things to do with one’s time
Like calling a stranger a “little bitch”?
@Sly
Infinite Jest is unimpeachable in its totality (and one of the few books I love with no reservation), but Broom of the System has room in the margins for no little snark. It’s the kind of freshman work that should have stayed in a drawer–not because it’s so bad, but because it’s the clearly underdeveloped work of someone whose later talent renders it disappointing in retrospect. Plus there is some real boring shit in it.
Anyway. Writing about Dan Brown on the Millions is like showing a latter-day Adam Sandler vacation home movie at Cannes. Yes, he is a writer of books, and this is a website about books, and there ends the common ground.
What if I wanted to read Dan Brown’s book to learn about history in a fun setting? All the facts in his books are verifiable (especially in the day and age of all mighty Google) so what’s wrong with that?
Please do a similar one on Paul Auster!
DB’s writing is dumb and boring and he doesn’t develop any interesting ideas that are clearly his own. The only thing that makes him of interest to me is that he raises the question of what publishers are looking for and why. Once in a while no-talent hacks rise to fame and fortune for no good reason, they just happened to know somebody and show up on the right day.
@Rastaman426
Reading Dan Brown to learn about history is like those people who read sparknotes on classics so they appear to be well-read. Besides, that’s what Dan Brown does. He skims the surface of history looking for little anecdotes he can adapt into a story or simply boring filler to boost his word count. There are some entertaining history and autobiographical texts by real historians or influential people. You’re better off learning and being entertained by first-handers and people who actually know what they’re talking about. Perfect example: Guns, Germs, and Steel.
And yet, Dan Brown has made way more $ than the author of this article. Oh, and people have heard of Dan Brown’s name whereas nobody knows who ‘Sam Anderson’ is. Lol.
We have three dogs named (from left to right) Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, and The Hardy Boys. Thanks for giving them a shout out on the DEATH MASK page. They’re great dogs and they are not fans of Dan Brown either.
some seriously dickish comments here. i liked brown as a child, but recently listened to Inferno on a long road trip. rolled my eyes so much it was a driving hazard.
Deliciously funny. It reminded me of Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/offense.html
Danikova sounds an awful lot like Manuel from Fawlty Towers.
Thank you for so humorously capturing the ridiculousness of this book! Will you please do The Lost Symbol, too? There are so many great moments in that one, from the breathless students in his Harvard lectures to the female character that he uses every synonym for “fat” to describe any time she appears.
I feel so validated. For my community college Creative Writing final, I used to make my freshmen and sophomores read the first chapter of the DaVinci Code and tell me why it was crap. Now I do it with Stefani Meyer’s Twilight. Thank you for writing this.
“And yet, Dan Brown has made way more $ than the author of this article. Oh, and people have heard of Dan Brown’s name whereas nobody knows who ‘Sam Anderson’ is. Lol.”
Well, that settles it then. Brown’s books have made him very rich. He must be right and Anderson must be wrong, because we all know that money is the final determination of literary quality.
Move along people.
Nothing else to see here.
For being an artisanal pencil sharpener, David’s red pencil doesn’t seep all that sharp…
Both hilarious and sad. The latter, because there are so many writers out there who can write much better than this but do not get to make even a small percent of Brown’s millions. It makes you sad for what this means for our culture, our humanity….. (ellipsis intended).
Anyone read the 50 Shades of Grey books? They are *worse* than Dan Brown
@weasel soup:
I haven’t read 50 Shades, but, in 2012, I did come across this hilarious blog where the blogger did a close reading of them, chapter by chapter, and blogged her thoughts. I found her posts very entertaining and wonder if they might sell more if made into a book. But, that’s not likely to happen, sadly.
http://somethingshortandsnappy.blogspot.com/2012/05/announcing-bad-idea.html
You’ll have to browse through using her labels / categories as it’s not easy to find the posts chronologically.
Apparently, there have been similar deconstructions of the Twilight books online too, though I haven’ read those.
@Ryan Ries
So instead of spending your time, money, and energy on, say, a terrific yet under-the-radar writer, you purchased Dan Brown’s latest book, read it, made “amusing” comments in the margins, and then wrote an article with the revolutionary premise that Dan Brown is a shitty writer. (If I had been able to write a snarky comment in this essay’s margins, it would have been: Thanks for this invaluable and thought-provoking cultural contribution!)
There is something terribly depressing in this image of the literary intelligentsia sitting on their thrones and ironically reading bad books. Come on, Sam and Dave, don’t give up on literature just yet!
LITERATURE!!! ;__;
Yeah, you guys! Why do you have to be so negative? Can’t you be more positive? Okay, so you don’t enjoy Mr. Brown’s writing. Well, lots and lots of people DO enjoy it! They can’t all be wrong, can they? So why don’t you guys write about a book that you DO love instead of one that you DON’T love. Then SHARE that love with all of US, so that we can all enjoy that love, TOGETHER!
If you did that, it would be a really beautiful thing.
Chemondelay
Yes, don’t give up on literature, as in, don’t waste your time on lazy, lowest-hanging-fruit essays like this and instead challenge yourself to find and celebrate a real piece of art.
@ Jenny Bhatt
Thanks for the link! I can in turn recommend the recaps at http://jennytrout.wordpress.com/jenny-reads-50-shades-of-grey/ and http://www.snarksquad.com/category/books-2/fifty-shades too (that’s a lot of recaps, but they’re both great takedowns as well.
I guess I like the schadenfreude of reading about why bad writing is bad…
Seriously, this hit Broadway musical idea of yours sounds amazingly spectacular and I highly encourage you to do it.
LOL Good work The Millions! Spoiler Alert: Dan Brown’s next book is a “Choose Your Own Ending” (remember those) published by Scholastic and sold to unsuspecting middle schoolers….
Sam and Dave.
Love it.
Now I want “Sam and Dave Go To The Opera”
Having gotten over my initial mirth, I am now wondering, rather glumly, about the publishers and editors who allowed so many glaring issues to see the light of day. I mean, really, didn’t someone at Doubleday say, sure, it’s bestselling Dan Brown, but, you know, let’s have someone read the thing before it goes to print. Or, did they just decide that there would be plenty of readers who wouldn’t care for decent writing, so, why bother? Either way, shouldn’t these careless publishers and editors be held just as responsible as the writer for inflicting this stuff on the reading public?
Someone should get a Doubleday rep on the phone/email/Twitter, present them with this marginalia and at least pose the question.
@haints
“They can’t all be wrong, can they?”
YES. They can. They are. They will be. Just because one knows how to read, doesn’t mean one need be thoughtful or even smart. Reading well, however, reading with even a smidgen of critical input, reading with the responsibility to complete the circle of the story that the writer has started—doing this takes more than scanning words with the same attention one gives to a Sharper Image catalog or a copy of Varmint Hunter.
This is the funniest thing I’ve read in a long while. And reading humorous takedowns of prose we know is bad often does more good for me as a writer than reading a good story. I know, it shouldn’t be this way, but by the end of the piece I was thinking that a great craft book could be entitled ‘Just Don’t(…)” – then it could be filled with DB excerpts (and zillions of other authors) and the red and black marginalia from this wonderful duo. Over many years of reading accepted good writing, arguably passable writing, and certain bad writing, I often revisit my own work most effectively and with more confidence (less vitriolic self-criticism?) after reading first-draft-unedited-but-shockingly-published stinky garbage like Dan Brown.
To know you might have a chance of penning a better than average story, a story that might have some legs, a story that proves you have more talent than Dan Brown or your other favorite ham-handed typer, you only have to read his line, ‘Apparently a background in drama could be a versatile weapon.’ If you read that with your mouth full and you don’t choke on your food with a gut laugh and think ‘Holy shitballs, my cat writes better than that when she runs across the keyboard,’ then you haven’t a chance on earth.
Thanks, guys. This was a gas.
PS – @Ryan Ries – I’m pretty darn sure Sam and David didn’t make “amusing” comments. They made amusing comments.
But, there is such a thing as paroxysmal positional vertigo. I have no idea what the book is about…..is it still dumb even though this is a real condition? Not defending the book in any way.
Keep it up. This is funny and righteous. I also recommend: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10049454/Dont-make-fun-of-renowned-Dan-Brown.html
Would have enjoyed The Da Vinci Code SO much more if I’d taken this approach. Instead I just cursed all the way through.
What an indulgent prat Dan Brown has proved to be – I just finished reading – no sorry, skimming, this ridiculous book and I wanted to post a reflection of my anger and sheer frustration that this nonsense could actually be published – shame on the publishers, shame on the editors – you have sold your souls for a few unworthy shekels. Shame on you.
DB sounds like the literary equivalent to Thomas Kincade.
Ah, Mark, my comment was intended as a satire. I liked this piece and was making fun of the “why can’t you just say something positive?” people.
However we have been able to create a fantastic tour of Florence based on the Dan Brown’s novel :-)
I don’t find it ironic that the majority of those who trash Dan Browns novels online are the same people who spend most of their time facebooking, blogging and twittering strangers online also.
They spend so much time twittering about themselves, they cringe at the prospect of celebrating someone else.
Celebrating someone who’s genuinely successful.
To enjoy Dan Brown, you need to have a reasonable attention span and at least an above average grip of the English written word.
In medical school we had a saying “those who can, do, those who can’t, teach”. I guess in this case it should be “those who can, write books that sell, those who can’t, make fun of those who can”
“In medical school we had a saying “those who can, do, those who can’t, teach”. I guess in this case it should be “those who can, write books that sell, those who can’t, make fun of those who can””
Right, because the only way to truly judge the quality of a work is by how much it sells. That’s is why Van Gogh sucked while he was alive, and then suddenly got really great after he died …
Yet another example that a medical degree is no guarantee of intelligence …
Sir!
Per my recent Tweetage, https://twitter.com/MamurphyMaureen/status/498867059980525569 I am Outraged and full of Umbrage that the great name of Mr. Dan Brown has been so sorely maligned by you and that Malignant Sharpener of Pencils.
What next, an attack on the Modern Prophetess of Human Improvement, Amy Chua? My Faithful Biographer Moe Murph will be regularly reporting back to me on the Outrageous Stream of Verbiage and the Attendant Most Impertinent Comments.
Sir, were I but yet Corporeal and not a being afloat on the Etheric Twitter Cloud, I would thrash you both soundly.
Harrrrumphhh!
Senator Kefuaver F. Tutwiller, IV (1823-1913)
Etheric Twitter Cloud
Book? Inferno isn’t a book, it’s an infomercial cobbled together by the makers of tweed jackets and gin.
I just finished reading the book and I found the story enjoyable. I guess I read for an enjoyable story rather than a literary orgasm. I also don’t have a B.A. in English so I don’t pick apart his writing. After seeing your margin notes though I can completely understand where you are coming from. Especially the bit about how you had trouble imagining whatever he was trying to explain. At times I’d just Google the damn thing. Other than that, the flaws went right over my head.
I figure it is a lot like painting. When I see a painting it is either ugly or beautiful, but to an artist they see every brush stroke, colour, technique, etc. and then make their judgement.
A lot of his success did come from how “controversial” his second book was. Since then everyone will pick up whatever he writes now and he doesn’t even have to try.
Since Dan Brown is forever ruined for me and I am amongst literary scholars, enlighten me to a well written thriller with a good story. :) I’d appreciate it!
I just love the pompous BS you hear form the “intellectual” elite. If you were so perfect and incredible a writer, I would assume it would be you and your friend who were making millions of dollars “entertaining” the masses.
You are entitled to your opinions of course, as such perfect writers you both are in your own minds. However, I don’t think many people really care what your opinion is at all. I know I certainly do not (chuckle, chuckle “…”).
Well, well. look at my typo in my previous response. Guess I’ll get ton of crap about that. Oh well.
How did I miss this? O joy! LOVE
TO WES – RE: “Since Dan Brown is forever ruined for me and I am amongst literary scholars, enlighten me to a well written thriller with a good story. :) I’d appreciate it!”
Hi Wes, just noticed this. Sir, you have a wry and funny natural writing voice and I would vouchsafe that many of the “literary scholars” are not as sly and witty as you, so please do not undersell yourself! Given the damage that has been done by our silly comments, may I offer some suggestions below:
a.) The Manchurian Candidate – Richard Condon
b.) The Spy Who Came In From The Cold – John le Carre (accent missing)
c.) The World At Night – Alan Furst (Note: Mid-90’s — I am not that familiar with author but many good words from other readers)
d.) The Third Man and other Stories – Graham Green (The Master — God, what a writer)
e.) Gorky Park – Martin Cruz Smith (Wonderful, best of the “Renko” series)
f.) Lee Child – “The Killing Floor” (Lee Child, Lee Child, unstoppable force, who has addicted every member of the Murphy family. I am ashamed to say I haven’t read him yet and at Thanksgiving, the entire family shook their heads and sighed)
Hope you enjoy!
Moe Murph
Only really, really stupid people–and by that I mean people like you Thomas–equate popularity with quality.
This article made me chuckle. I have never tried to read Brown’s more famous works – I’ve only read ~1/3 the way through Deception Point, at which time my incredulity at the “science” he proposed (I am a professional researcher in the geosciences and get to work a lot with aerospace engineers) in his book, and prefaced it with something to the effect of “all of the technology in this book is possible and real”, caused me to put the damn thing down and never pick it up again. Zero desire. It was just so goddamn bogus. It remains one of three fiction books I have never finished reading, nor do I plan to.
It just wasn’t enjoyable, because it wasn’t believable. This coming from a guy who loves fantasy and sci-fi; for whom suspension of disbelief comes easily. I think maybe you can have a shitty plot, but good writing, or a good plot, and shitty writing, but not both. Maybe the success of bad literature lies in the combination of mediocre plot + shitty writing (+/- controversy?). Perhaps that’s the sweet spot.
I have read all but the latest of Dan Brown’s books and must admit that I enjoyed most of them. Like it or not, he writes books that people read. Recently, I stopped reading a “well-written” book less than half-way through because it bored the hell out of me. I just finished Brown’s first book, Digital Fortress–a complete mess. The mystery here is how this one got published at all. Bad books by established authors are nothing new, but this was his first novel. Who did he have to blow to get it on the market? I want his name and number, because I have a book that’s nearly as bad and going nowhere.
Clark – now there’s a positive approach to discovering bad popular literature. :-)
and DB sells a lot of books !
the obvious seems to have escaped everyone including the publisher of the book and the producer of the movie, maybe even Dan Brown himself, that in the end there really is no book or movie here at all other than the usual travelogue of historical places in Italy. Because if the villain wanted to release this on the world he simply would have done it and THEN announced it if he needed his hubris satisfied. It’s not like he’s Blofeld holding the world for ransom. The book is maybe a bit less pitiful, because it turns out the villain released it a week before he said it would, and it was “only” to sterilize a third of the world’s population. Either way it strains credulity to anyone who even thinks once (much less twice) about the plot.