— The Da Vinci Code - not the movie

In response to yesterdays post, Debi Alper brought to my attention the fact that Dan Brown has sold a lot more books than the rest of us put together:

I’m not sure if this should make us despair or not, but I do think we have to be aware of what people out there want . . . even if they’re not the same people who are ever likely to read our books . . . (snip) . . . While I was appalled at the language, plotting, characterisation etc etc I was also sucked into the page turning mode. I reckon we ignore this at our peril.

I’m not sure, Debi. I never thought of comparing myself to Dan Brown. To make sense of the world you have to compare like with like. I’m an individual writer, so are you by the sound of it, something like all the other hacks out there. I write because I write because I write. That’s what I do, what I’ve always done. I write because it makes sense to me, it’s how I experience the me who is doing it.

Dan Brown, on the other hand, is a corporation. He’s a money-making machine. I didn’t read his book but people close to me with opinions I trust, tell me that it is, as you say, badly written.

I don’t now and never have made the kind of money that Dan Brown makes. I’m sure that he does something different to me.

But I’m equally sure that the difference doesn’t lie in his ability to make people turn pages, and your and my inability to do so. People tell me all kinds of things about my books, but very rarely, if ever, do they tell me that they didn’t finish one of my books because it lacked suspense.

The difference between Dan Brown and the majority of writers is the same as the difference between a cabbage out of my own garden, or my neighbours garden, and a cabbage from one of the major supermarket chains.

One of those cabbages makes money. The other offers some kind of nourishment and a spark of hope for the future.

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— The Da Vinci Code - the movie

In todays Guardian, Mark Lawson claims that:
In a nation where it was reported yesterday that the most popular new name for baby girls is “Nevaeh” - the word “heaven” spelled backwards - religious beliefs, which are properly a matter for that variety of opinion called faith, have been redefined as fact.
The nation is America and [...]

— Modernism VII

Herbert Read argued, in 1933, that the modernist movement had produced the greatest seismic change of all time. We were not, he wrote, concerned with an unprecedented development. But with an abrupt break with all tradition. The aim of five centuries of European effort is openly abandoned.
Twenty years later, C S Lewis, referred to the [...]

— Out-takes II

A watch of nightingales finished a set piece and settled down into silence.
*
And yet, he thought to himself when he finally escaped to the Gents and settled himself down, would they be so keen and so effusive if they knew that he hadn’t had one good dump in the last fifteen years.
*
I was still hearing [...]

— Modernism VI

Virginia Woolf wrote:
If a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feelings and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted [...]

— Out-takes I

‘It’s the latest thing,’ JD continued. ‘First thing they gave me was a vacuum constriction device. It was an elastic band on a plastic cylinder attached to a vacuum pump, and I had to put my digery-doo inside the cylinder, then pump the air out of it.’
Marie closed her eyes. Tried to [...]

— Wanted: Character for Novel

I’ve told this story before, but every telling leaves something wanting. Here I am having another go at it.
I think it was a Monday night. We play on Tuesdays now, but back then there was a game on a Monday. We were on table 13, which is way over in the far corner, the one [...]

— Modernism V

Chekhov was the first dramatist to realize that, on stage and in life, what is not said explicitly is often the decisive dramatic ingredient. In The Cherry Orchard, Lopahkin fails to declare his love for Vanya by getting himself tied up in a redundant conversation about lost galoshes.

But it was the job of the [...]

— Gore Vidal and the bomb

The novelist, Jay Parini, remembers how, as a young man, he was mentored by Gore Vidal.
One summer, I was sitting by his pool in Ravello, working on a piece of fiction. I wondered aloud if it were possible to hold the reader’s attention for about a dozen pages while my characters discussed Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism. [...]

— Humour and such

In Fowler’s Modern English Usage, we are given the following, which is quite wonderful and which I have often rediscovered during my time. Has this ever been improved upon?

.
Motive or Aim
Province
Method or Means
Audience

Humour
Discovery
Human Nature
Observation
The Sympathetic

Wit
Throwing Light
Words & Ideas
Surprise
The Intelligent

Satire
Amendment
Morals & Manners
Accentuation
The Self-satisfied

Sarcasm
Inflicting Pain
Faults & Foibles
Inversion
Victim & Bystander

Invective
Discredit
Misconduct
Direct Statement
The Public

Irony
Exclusiveness
Statement of Facts
Mystification
An Inner Circle

Cynicism
Self-justification
Morals
Exposure of Nakedness
The [...]