Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Why Dan Brown's Writing is Really Bad

Really, really bad.

(via mumpsimus)

3 comments so far. What are your thoughts?

clindsay said...

Yes, he is a dreadful writer. But he IS a good storyteller, which makes all the difference. There are bestselling authors who can't even claim that much. I read the Da Vinci Code, thought the writing was painful, but nor more painful than some of the most rocking good fun sci-fi or fantasy I've read. I allowed myself to just get into the story had some fun reading it. It's a book designed to be read on a plane, then tucked into the seat pocket for the next passenger. (Which is what I did.) Or to be made into a movie. :-)

When I was reading it, my friend was sitting in front of me on the plane also reading it, and every time we came to a chapter ending that ended with something akin to "and his eyes bulged in astonishment" we would thrown M&Ms over the seat at each other.

Anonymous said...

A good analysis I read noted that Dan Brown's line-by-line writing is atrocious, but he has a good grasp of basic potboiler plot structure. So even though the actual thing that happens at the end of Chapter xy is stupid and inane and poorly written, it comes at the right time to build tension and keep things moving.

And as somebody else who read it trying to figure out what had kept it on the bestseller list for so long... yeah. It's bad. It's really really bad. And uncritical readers don't care, which is ten kinds of lame but eleven kinds of true. They get sucked into the decently structured (if poorly written) plot and are interested in the (poorly written) infodumps, and voila! A research-infodumping potboiler.

Ech. But a really high-selling ech... 

Posted by Patrick

Anonymous said...

I couldn't make it past the first few pages. His writing was painfully adolescent. He made a very obvious error about Egyptian mythology, and if he can't be bothered to do even the most rudimentary research I can't be bothered to read his novel.