On Dan Brown, and Writing. Not a non sequitur.

[wheeler]

"Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas

Comments

[burge]

It's not things that are "unchallenging" that are a pain to read, it's things that are downright patronising. Hence my deep and abiding hate for James Patterson, a writer whose vocabulary wouldn't have challenged me when I was ten, let alone when I had to read one of his books when I was 29. It's the clunking of the sentences and the grating of the similes and the sporadic clang of a metaphor being dropped in with all the subtlety of a falling piano in books like his and Brown's and others.

Sometimes, I can overlook mediocre writing for a good plot, because I'm looking for entertainment. But mostly not. I can also overlook lack of plot for good writing in some cases, but the writing has to be very good, and the central idea( or ideas) in the story has to be really, really interesting.

Don't be ashamed of the scene-setting. Yes, it's a writerly trick - but it's a good trick. Giving the reader a literal sense of the setting through sight and sound and smell &c brings them into the world of your story. I can more easily imagine the smell of polish and the sound of someone running through a closed museum then I can imagine being a septugenarian "renowned curator". And that's why Dan Brown's scene-setting is shit, and why what you're describing isn't.

There's nothing wrong in saying that so-and-so travelled from Aalborg to Zanzibar, just as long as you add a little description to how the journey was: "Untroubled but exhaustingly long", or "an uneventful three days" or suchlike. If you have the characters already established in the reader's head, then that will be enough for them. Well, it would be for me at any rate.