| Author | Message | ||
     Frank (Frank) Username: Frank Registered: 09-2008 Posted From: 213.158.199.83 |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/6194031/The-Lost-Symbol-and-Th e-Da-Vinci-Code-author-Dan-Browns-20-worst-sentences.html Follow link and smile knowingly. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.122.108.128 |
'Teabing reminded', oh, that's not so bad. 'her precarious body' That's ok. 'Leonardo’s surname was not Da Vinci' - but everyone calls him that! But no, a lot of these sentences are bad. I'm just always loathe to jump on the Brown-bashing bandwagon. So what; a guy is selling books. | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
Strangely hypnotic that... like being gut punched with every second word. | ||
| Kate (Kathleen) Username: Kathleen Registered: 09-2009 Posted From: 93.96.181.75 |
Nowhere near as entertaining as John Norman... ------------------- I wondered what could be the status of women on this world, on a world where there were such men. I am a brunet, with very dark brown hair. My eyes, too, are dark brown. I am lightly complexioned. I am some five feet five inches in height and weigh about one hundred and twenty pounds. I am thought to be not amply but excitingly figured. My name was Judy Thornton. I was an English major and poetess. I knelt before barbarians, nude and chained. | ||
| Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.176.105.47 |
He might be selling books, but he can't string a decent sentence together. There's an inherent wrongness that people who cannot write are selling books while those who actually are talented struggle to sell anything. I normally rail against the snobbery against the popular that sometimes sneaks through on this board, but Dan Brown is a shit writer. His books are unacceptably badly written and I'm certain he's signed a deal with Satan and that's the only reason his books sell. It would also explain the constant church bashing in all his books. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 218.168.188.75 |
How can a body be 'precarious'? | ||
| Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.176.105.47 |
"'Teabing reminded', oh, that's not so bad." Who or what was he reminding??? It makes no sense to just say Teabing reminded. Using the name Teabing is bad enough. Although it could be an anaagram of the person he's plagiarising that particular book from. | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
Teabing is an anagram of Baigent as in one of the co-authors of the "non-fiction" and much more entertaining 'The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail'. Isn't Dan Brown clever!! Actually I have it on good authority he co-writes these books with his wife... they must have a whale of a time. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.5.1.140 |
Alas, like Hollywood, it's not about talent/ability/artistry, but about the idea. If you think it's bad in publishing, Weber, it's 100x worse in Hollywood - illiterates signing big deals because they penned a script that had only one thing going for it at all, a good concept; but amazing screenplays never read, totally ignored, because they had a "softer" story. It's the way it's always been, however.... | ||
| Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.176.105.47 |
He can't even do a good anagram - if you're going to anagram Baigent for a character in Europe then use Gabinet - it could be a passable French surname. It's better than Teabing... | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.5.1.140 |
"Teabing was having Bing Tea with Gabinet under a big net when..." | ||
| Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.176.105.47 |
a beating occurred | ||
| Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.176.105.47 |
I'm disappointed at you Craig. Missing the most obvious anagram of the lot. | ||
| Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.176.105.47 |
If anyone here has actually read the book, why were all these Europeans (modern and ancient) leaving anagrams in modern American English? Incidentally - Da Vinci code is now one of those books you can guarantee EVERY second hand book shop has AT LEAST 10 copies of. That says something about it's quality that people just don't want to keep it. | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.171.129.70 |
I've never read more than the opening page of any of Mr Brown's novels. They're bad but not funny. If I'd bought one I'd've flung it across the room. Then I'd've gone and stamped on it. And kept stamping. I do think the criticism levelled at him is fair, because - unlike JK Rowling - he intended from the first to write mammoth-selling books, tailored to the lowest common denominator. As such, though, he means almost nothing to me, except for the fact he's setting a standard others then aim to reproduce... The Lost Symbol of his new book's title must surely be the dollar sign. And I'm sure he's found it by now... | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.171.129.70 |
To be fair (oh, do you have to be, Mark?), the 20 examples of Brown's duff prose are culled from about 500,000 words. Even the best writer will drop a clanger along the way, and it will especially look so if someone's hunting out phrases to take out of context. Sigh. I had to be fair. | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.171.129.70 |
Mind you, 'Teabing reminded' and 'her precarious body' are kind of funny. One has to ask, though: where was his editor?! Kind of reinforces the point I made in relation to e-books and self-publishing, that if the pros aren't doing it properly, the amateurs sure as shit aren't going to be. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.4.249.84 |
I'm disappointed at you Craig. Missing the most obvious anagram of the lot. Just like a toddler grabs his rattle back from daddy, giggling and shaking it around all proud like....  | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.122.108.128 |
Heaven forbid that Brown should plan to write a bestseller! How dare he! ;) We are overlooking something; there are hundreds of shit books out there that DON'T sell. In that Bradbury speech he said he has never felt envy about an author, just the desire to share the same shelf as them. That's lovely. I do envy authors, but not the likes of Brown; I envy ability not success. And you know? However Brown got there he put the work in. Just imagine he's your kid, or your dad, and wish him well. If when I'm old my youngest came to me and said he'd written a doorstep bestseller about the hunt for Atlantis or whatever I'd be over the fucking moon... | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.171.129.70 |
Yeah, that's fair enough, Tony. And I agree with you. I suppose part of me objects that there's nothing of art in Brown's work: it seems cynical. Like Simon Cowell's pop stars. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.157.174.15 |
Well, I pulled open my mum's copy of Da Vinci at random a while back and found laughable phrases aplenty. "The moon crept in through the window and danced on the carpet." "The ceiling overhead was..." And my favourite: "The late professor was dead. His corpse lay on the floor..." So he's dead, then, is he? | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
Tony, using that same argument would let everyone from Mills & Boon to Jeffrey Archer off the hook. Dan Brown sucks... | ||
| Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.176.105.47 |
Brown didn't get there because he put the work in. You can tell by how bad his writing is. If he'd put the work in he'd be able to write a coherent sentence that passes most, if not all, rules of grammar. He's sucking Satan's big fat ballsack and that's why he's a bestseller. Either that or he's got the best publicity team on earth. Maybe Carlsberg do do literary agents... Apologies to those across the pond who won't get that one. | ||
| Frank (Frank) Username: Frank Registered: 09-2008 Posted From: 213.158.199.83 |
Tony - I understand what you mean, really, I do. But this is not about envying Brown for his success, I'm sure he's a likable chap and most of us would get on with him, but it's about taking an art form and rubbishing it with lazy writing. Sometimes it's not even that. Brown used to teach writing classes. I'm positive he would have rejected any of those lines as highlighted on the original link. But perhaps even more important to his publishers and his readers, the book, as Weber pointed out, does indeed seem to get jettisoned rather quickly after people have read it. Maybe before they've read it. I have actually read The Da Vinci Code. I still have it. I never throw books away, no matter how bad. That's unthinakble to me...anyway, I digress. I read DVC and it really is bad as the critics state. It's awful. BUT I read it with a kind of child like wonder at it's terribleness, and believe it or not, enjoying the hilariousness of the story. People have said some pretty bad things about the movie version, but to be honest, Ron Howard managed to elevate it several levels above the material it clearly was. I've read plenty of writers who sell ridiculous amounts of their work, and I've been proud to do so because of their ability and talent and wonderful skills as artists. Quality is quality no matter how many or how few copies it sells. Crap is crap no matter how many or how few copies it sells. But Tony, I agree with what you said about imagining he's your kid and that he's just written a doorstep bestseller. But surely the most hardened of critics would say that. Sometimes not even the critic cum parent would dare admit their child just produced something lacking the basest of qualities. Rutger Hauer once told his daughter who was going into films not to, simply because she wasn't good enough. Perhaps Dan Brown's mum should have said something and saved us the trouble of this thread. Then again, it'd only be somebody else. Shaun Hutson is even better than Brown. I may not like what he writes, what he stands for, but I'm sure there's more of him involved in his work than there is of Brown. Maybe? | ||
| Frank (Frank) Username: Frank Registered: 09-2008 Posted From: 213.158.199.83 |
PS: Tony, try and try as much as I have, I can't access your paintings on FACEBOOK. | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
"Quality is quality no matter how many or how few copies it sells. Crap is crap no matter how many or how few copies it sells." Well said... and for great literature to survive at all in these changing times it is up to all discerning readers to make their voices heard. Dan Brown's writing sucks... and so does he for his cynicism, plagiarism and failure to co-credit his missus. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.240.106 |
Dan Brown plays the game well. That's all it is, you know: a game that nobody wins - not readers, not writers, not publishers. | ||
| Frank (Frank) Username: Frank Registered: 09-2008 Posted From: 213.158.199.83 |
Zed - surely the publishers win, or are we referring to something other than the sound of the opening and closing cash till up and down bookstores the breadth and width of the land? Christ, that was clumsy writing, too many conjunctions. Maybe there's hope for me yet? | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.240.106 |
Short-term the publishers make a lot of money; long-term they destroy themselves. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 129.11.77.197 |
Like the economic world in general. | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.171.129.72 |
Or cancer. | ||
| Frank (Frank) Username: Frank Registered: 09-2008 Posted From: 213.158.199.83 |
Ah, I see. Destroy themselves spiritually? If so, I don't think they care. Destroy themselves financially, I think that would definitely make sense. | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.171.129.72 |
No one's saying Brown's evil. Just that his books suck. And really suck. He makes Agatha Christie look like Hemingway. | ||
| Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.176.105.47 |
I'm saying Brown's evil. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.122.108.128 |
Christie is actually good. Brown sucks. But he did NOT push himself upon us; we should take him out of the equation, because at the end of the day it's the publishers and the editor and the readership he has that governs his success, not him. And you know what? Good luck to him, I think he did 'work' for his success. I won't be reading him, btw; I just don't feel he does any harm (if anything he gets folk picking up books, looking at what else there is on the shelf around him). | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.122.108.128 |
And Rutger was a meany saying that; especially as he sucks himself. Er, so to speak. | ||
| Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.176.105.47 |
Rutger Hauer is the best thing in at least 2 of the best films of the 80's. The Hitcher and Blade Runner. His Guinness adverts were class as well. The only thing I've seen him in that I didn't like was the Kirsty Swanson film version of Buffy. If someone with his level of talent sucks then we need a whole new vocabulary to describe Dan Brown. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
All that Knights Templar crap has been a guaranteed bestselling formula for more than a century. It was so lucrative in the 1930s that Dashiell Hammett parodied it in THE MALTESE FALCON. What's amazing is that every fucking book that recycles the same nonsense manages to convince its readers that this is the inside story, the exclusive truth, and by buying it the reader will join an elite who know. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
'Rutger... sucks himself'. Tony, are you spying on my dreams? | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.240.106 |
Ah, I see. Destroy themselves spiritually? No. Read what I typed again, and extrapolate. In the long-term, they destroy themselves financially. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
Like the bankers. That's why money has to be surgically removed in huge quantities from the NHS, housing, education and social care budgets so it can be given to the bankers so they can award themselves more nice fat bonuses. They drink our blood. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.122.108.128 |
In short; the Brown stuff doesn't bother me. Er, unless I step in it of course. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.4.255.217 |
I've never read Brown, but I'm surprised my celebrated hatred of some movies hadn't included yet THE DA VINCI CODE, which I think I despised many times more than THE MIST, than DONNIE DARKO, than WATCHMEN, than PHANTASM... I so utterly and totally detested THE DA VINCI CODE as a film, that I must have totally repressed it, like some tucked-away Lovefreudian nightmare.... | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.240.106 |
The film of THE DA VINCI CODE would have been great if Lucio Fulci had made it in the mid 1980s, with loads of nudity, gore and monsters. | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
Rutger Hauer is a great actor who was stymied (think that's the word) by his tough guy looks and "foreign" accent. People assumed he was no better than a poor man's Schwarzenegger when in actual fact he scorched the screen with his acting ability in a whole raft of movies - namely: 'Soldier Of Orange', 'Spetters', 'Eureka', 'Nighthawks', 'Blade Runner', 'The Osterman Weekend', Flesh And Blood', 'The Hitcher' and on TV 'Escape From Sobibor'... after that, sadly, it was all downhill for the big man.  Perhaps he just wanted to spare his daughter the same mistreatment as an artist he himself suffered in the Hollywood machine? | ||
| Frank (Frank) Username: Frank Registered: 09-2008 Posted From: 213.158.199.76 |
Zed - I've extrapolated, Mr Bear with a sore head. I understand. Just clarifying (: | ||
| Chris_morris (Chris_morris) Username: Chris_morris Registered: 04-2008 Posted From: 12.165.240.116 |
>> The film of THE DA VINCI CODE would have been great if Lucio Fulci had made it in the mid 1980s, with loads of nudity, gore and monsters. Zed, that's genius. I wholeheartedly agree. | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.171.129.72 |
Or if Steven Spielberg had made it with a big shark in the 1970s... | ||
| Chris_morris (Chris_morris) Username: Chris_morris Registered: 04-2008 Posted From: 12.165.240.116 |
Or zombies and a shark. Oh wait. Fulci actually did make that one. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.122.108.128 |
Funny thing is, there are writers who are considered good writers who actually really grate on me. Anyone here like Ben Elton? Nicholas Parsons (Ulp - I mean Tony)? Nick Hornby? I think I'd rather read Brown than any of them. I quite liked the Dav Inci Code movie. Wasn't keen on the one after though. | ||
| John Llewellyn Probert (John_l_probert) Username: John_l_probert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 90.199.0.149 |
>> The film of THE DA VINCI CODE would have been great if Lucio Fulci had made it in the mid 1980s, with loads of nudity, gore and monsters. Zed, that's genius. I wholeheartedly agree. Of course! Although being at heart an anglophile I would have preferred Ken Russell in full The Devils blaspemous iconography mode. Audrey Tatou being defiled by incense-burner wielding demon nuns on a cross filmed through psychedelic filters while Tom Hanks stared in horror at his arms elongating into snakes as Ian McEllen quoted passages from the Bible while sitting naked and precarious on top of a huge purple blancmange. Oh let me behind a camera & the world will never forget it  | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.122.108.128 |
Someone - Jim Crace - just did a live review of the current Brown. These were the responses I liked, the two nay-sayers; 'All well and good, but the self-congratulating better-than-everything-I- deign-to-cock-a-snook-at Crace reminds me of TV critics - ie they gotta be superior, moralising, know-it-all posturers. The digested read of Crace: seems to be an bitter, joyless cove; likes to sneer. And I hate Dan Brown.' 'What on earth is the point of this patronising, snobbish exercise? Its a page-turning thriller with no intentions to be anything but. Try picking an actual target next time.' And, as someone else pointed out, Brown must be into the writing (however bad, and I think it is) as he's earned more than enough money but is still doing it. I value writing as art and fun, and the only thing I dislike is when it's trying to nudge itself into a clique or some 'hierarchy'. I reckon Brown is writing for the fun, and oceans of folk seem to agree; really, they wouldn't read it if it was as bad as people say. Another thing I agree with is this; that people are looking for awe in these things because they are so starved of it in all the other corners of society. Surely this is to be cherished, this search. | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 82.4.18.104 |
My problem with Dan Brown isn't really that he is such a bad writer (I could ignore that) but the dishonest way he has gone about achieving his fame. In that respect he is rivalled only by Jeffrey Archer. 'The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail' is a cracking read worthy of M.R. James in its intricacy. In fact the story 'Canon Alberic's Scrapbook' (1895) was inspired by the same antiquarian mystery unearthed in Rennes-le-Chateau that forms the core of that book. I don't personally agree with Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln's final hypothesis but have checked the facts they base it on and a real unsolved mystery does exist there (local and much less earth-shattering I believe but no less fascinating for that). Dan Brown has hidden it beneath an avalance of bullshit. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.122.108.128 |
He can sing, too! http://www.danbrownbio.com/excerpt.html | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.122.108.128 |
And TAUGHT ENGLISH.  | ||
| Protodroid (Protodroid) Username: Protodroid Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.152.202.166 |
That articles does have a sneering tone (God, am I in the middle of a bad sentence?). Okay, so Brown is bad, but then 90% of everything is bad. | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 82.4.18.104 |
I didn't think it possible for me to dislike DB any more than I do. But the following statement: "He could have been a Barry Manilow if he wanted to,” has disturbed me to my very core... I think Weber may have been right - this guy does suck Satan's big fat ballsack!! | ||
| Protodroid (Protodroid) Username: Protodroid Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 89.19.91.137 |
I think Weber may have been right - this guy does suck Satan's big fat ballsack!! Surely a crusade against bad writing should lead by example? | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 82.4.18.104 |
Like I said, I can ignore bad writing (by not reading it) but not dishonesty. | ||
| Steve Jensen (Stevej) Username: Stevej Registered: 07-2009 Posted From: 82.0.77.233 |
I can now bring you an exclusive excerpt from Dan Brown's unpublished follow-up to The Da Vinci Code: Robert Langbrown, erudite scholar, Renaissance Man, psychic chef and Professor of Stuff at the esteemed Open University, concluded his lecture by pointing one of those stick-things...oh, what are they bloody called? Ah yes, a baton. Right, here we go: Professor Langbrown pointed his baton at the painting he'd borrowed from the Hermitage. "And that is the secret symbolism within Damien Hirst's Birth of Venus." One of his students spoke up. Or possibly down; he had a precarious body so who knows? "But why would a secret society member, the guardian of arcane...um...secrets leave clues in his paintings so that any moron could solve the mystery? It doesn't make sense." Langbrown nearly fell onto his Nobble Prize for Litwritcha in shock. He ran his fingers through his luxuriant hair, dislodging bits of steely grey dandruff. Before he could reply, his partner Sophie Jesus-Bloodline, a French woman from France, languidly walked obliquely into the room. "'Allo, Professor Sexy," she whispered with a wink. Some of the spotty students laughed. Langbrown blushed reddishly, and flashed a sheepish smile so that his face looked, not like a sheep, but like Starsky and Hutch's car. In truth, Langbrown was a sexual magnet for women. Not that women are made of metal, but you get my drift. They were drawn to him like iron fillings, moths to a flame, lambs to the slaughter, and some other clichés which I found on Wikipedia. Though his hair was thinning and his body was small (but wiry), he could still pull the birds. Later, in the privacy of their hotel, Langbrown would cup Sophie's small, firm, round, pointy breast bosoms which looked like pink satsumas in his hairy hands while she caressed his legs, which resembled two pieces of Kentucky Fried Chicken... Editor's note: The chapter ends with Langbrown and Sophie hanging off a cliff after falling victim to Pierre Dastardly and his sister Cruella Love-Interest. | ||
| Frank (Frank) Username: Frank Registered: 09-2008 Posted From: 213.158.199.79 |
 Case closed, me thinks. | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 82.4.18.104 |
LOL I only had to read the first few paragraphs of your story Steve to tell you were a talented writer whereas I can't read a single sentence of DB without wincing. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 82.38.75.85 |
Steve, that's brilliant. I really wish I could write fantastically funny stuff like that. | ||
| Steve Jensen (Stevej) Username: Stevej Registered: 07-2009 Posted From: 82.0.77.233 |
Thanks, Caroline. Though some would argue that my 'serious' writing is far funnier.  | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.122.108.128 |
Well I dipped into the new Brow over the weekend and it feels like we're making fun of nothing. He writes like a lot of such writers, it's just not my cup of tea. Maybe we can lay into Mills and Boon soon; they've been round for years and aren't great literature either. We'll look great slagging them off. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.122.108.128 |
It feels like we need to know we are clever so slag off someone doing well. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.122.108.128 |
'BROWN over the weekend' | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.110.231.36 |
There's anger, Tony. Huge advances to bestselling authors led Random House to break up the Net Book Agreement and put every independent bookshop in the UK out of business by starting a discounting price war. How many full-time writers of fiction do I know personally? Maybe three. How many former full-time writers of fiction do I know personally? Maybe thirty. It's rapidly ceasing to be a profession for anyone but a millionaire elite. Very few of whom deserve it. Mills & Boon publish on a write for hire basis – I don';t know the terms, but I'd be astonished if any of their writers were getting multi-million pound advances. Every £5 million advance paid to an author represents potential advances on more than 10,000 other books. 95% of professional writers would be below the minimum wage if they wrote full-time. So they don't. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.110.231.36 |
That should have been 'more than 1000 other books', sorry. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.122.108.128 |
Like I said; be angry at the publishers, not Brown. It just sounds like it's him and his prose we are attacking, not the publishers or the stores like Asda. I agree with you completely if it's they you're attacking. | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 82.4.18.104 |
Cynical hacks like Brown are just as culpable as the money-grubbing publishers imho. And once again I'm not attacking his "prose" but the underhand way he has gone about his career. Why couldn't he have just been happy with knicker flinging middle-aged women adoring him (still trying to get my head round his alternate career as a Barry Manilow wannabe)... | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.23.233.247 |
This argument would be ok IF BROWN WERE SELF PUBLISHING. Right; a) Brown's prose sucks b) He gets a lot of money. We agree. I say; a) Don't read or buy Brown. b) He doesn't make us. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.23.233.247 |
This argument would be ok IF BROWN WERE SELF PUBLISHING. Right; a) Brown's prose sucks b) He gets a lot of money. We agree. I say; a) Don't read or buy Brown. b) He doesn't make us. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
I think it's OK to mock bad and unoriginal writing that makes truckloads of money, where it might be cruel to mock bad and unoriginal writing in the small press. Recognising that certain types of patronising cliche are commercially viable is a necessary part of the critique of commercial publishing, whereby massive resources are poured into the promotion of books that represent a lowest common denominator of taste and literacy. The runaway success of a really poor novel represents the avalanche of promotion backing it. The money spent on getting displays of it to fill bookshop windows, on selling massively discounted copies as loss leaders to establish the brand, on creating a wholly fabricated media 'buzz' around the book. If the book is poor, that helps to demonstrate what is going on. Dan Brown is to today's charity shops what Harold Robbins and Jackie Collins were to the charity shops of the 1980s: a mountain of shelf fodder after literally millions of readers have got halfway through a book and got rid of it. At the height of the J.K. Rowling craze, her US publisher canccelled a multi-book contract with a much more well-respected fantasy novelist (also female) because she wasn't Rowling. The corporation decided that it made more sense to cancel the second writer's series (which was doing very well) in order to pour even more millions of dollars into the promotion of Rowling. Dan Brown is benefitting from this process to the tune of an incredible personal fortune. His crummy writing is a committee-driven exploitative strategy. By all means let's mock the bloodsucker. He's got it coming. | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.93.21.74 |
"Well I dipped into the new Brow over the weekend and it feels like we're making fun of nothing. He writes like a lot of such writers, it's just not my cup of tea." Which writers are you thinking of, Tony? "Maybe we can lay into Mills and Boon soon; they've been round for years and aren't great literature either. We'll look great slagging them off." Again, which have you read? I'm not familiar with them and so can't judge them. My own view is that no genre is innately contemptible, and certainly every one with which I am familiar has been graced by good writers or better. | ||
| Steve Jensen (Stevej) Username: Stevej Registered: 07-2009 Posted From: 82.0.77.233 |
Perhaps part of the adverse reaction to Dan Brown's success is due to the rather frightening march of so-called progress: all around us, we see smaller shops being closed and/or being subsumed into what are effectively conglomerates. Similarly, we now see authors who may have no need of even more cash being rewarded for their work's marketability - not quality - while 'smaller' names see their advances cut 'due to the economic climate', a climate which has its origins in the follies of big business in the first place... Writers are being 'pushed' to conform - not only by bully-boy blitzkrieg tactics from the likes of Amazon & co, but in terms of the nature of their literary output; I know talented writers who're relentlessly churning-out dreadful pulp novels which are entirely beneath them. But their publishers tell them: 'This is what sells...' So the criticism Dan Brown receives from fellow writers isn't merely snobbery - we're just exasperated...and worried that those who calls the shots in the publishing business seem to have forgotten that writing is an art. And yes, I'm naive, of course...after all, everyone has to make a living. It's just that I'd hoped that people who make their living in the arts actually valued talent over merely paying the bills. | ||
| Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.176.105.47 |
I'm not a writer but I'm still slating the talentless fool | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.4.229.186 |
There is a basic false assumption at work here, I think: that this "lowest common denominator of taste and literacy" would go for anything else. Ever. Me, I doubt it. So, knowing the wider public likes fast-food... fast-food it is! Why lament? The existing books being published - Dan Brown's oeuvre does not = more readers everywhere else. | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 80.163.6.13 |
Problem is also when you spend so much money marketting to people who read one book a year... | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.170.178.206 |
I was being quite flippant about the Mills and Boon, who I don't mind. I think I'm saying there are books on the shelves of Asda I've dipped into that just don't feel like books to me but rather a basic idea with words giving it a readable shape. They have a chilly feel to them, a sort of two-dimensional quality. They've seemed more skilled than Brown but have a sort of flatness about them, which I find as offensve as bad writing in a way. It just feels we should be complaining about these authors too (or rather the process in which they got there) than just Brown. I'm not keen to scapegoat when the target is bigger than that. | ||
| Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.176.105.47 |
I know what you're talking about Tony. But just becasue someone like - say - simon kernick is selling in ASDA and writing better books stylistically than Brown but which don't register a jot in your memory ten minutes after you put them down, it does not excuse Brown for his horrifically bad writing or his publishers for publishing him while good writers are struggling to get by. We know there are a lot of bad writers out there and some middling writers but Brown is at the deepest end of the shit trough but at the peak of the cash mountain which is unfair on all those writers out there who actually bother to put some effort into their writing - rather than ripping off old ideas like Brown does. | ||
| Frank (Frank) Username: Frank Registered: 09-2008 Posted From: 213.158.199.79 |
Tony - I think Joel summed it up best. And I think you have a point about the publishing houses. But I have to agree with Weber most of all (aghast as I am at doing so  ), because it's about devoting oneself to producing something admirable, something which might pertain to art, if not art itself. Brown isn't stupid, he's purposefully chosen, technically and stylistically, to go for the lowest level of writing to attract readers. He DOES know better. He's not amateur, but he writes like one by decision. And I don't think that this is a case of snobbery. I mean, think about it for a moment, everybody on this board is a self-confessed horror writer, and horror is the most maligned, and degraded of all genres. We of all people know what real snobbery is. And in this business a lot of it has nothing to do with the actual 'writing'. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.157.22.201 |
Thing is, I try very hard with my writing and have precious few little books I really love (it seems to decrease with age) but I still think Brown the man isn't the problem, and still don't hate him. Maybe that's the end of the matter, when agreement can't be reached. Maybe it's no bad thing. Brown is all that's the big subject here by default; it could just as easily be some other author. I dunno; maybe I'm like Hammett; if there's a crowd after someone, no matter what he's done, I'm with him. | ||
| Frank (Frank) Username: Frank Registered: 09-2008 Posted From: 213.158.199.71 |
Tony - fair enough. |