I am reading The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown because I like to keep up with the big books that come out–plus someone gave it to me. When I first started the book, I thought this article by the Telegraph on Dan Brown’s 20 worst sentences was harsh. (Sample sentence: “Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes.”) Having read almost half the book, I now think the article is right-on. It’s frankly disturbing how bad of a writer Brown is, especially considering his rampant popularity. Someone called The Lost Symbol “Harry Potter for grown-ups,” but that’s an insult to JK Rowling, who is a pretty good wordsmith.

I don’t put this up here to make fun of another writer, but because Dan Brown’s writing ticks are common ones that all writers should avoid. Reading bad writing can be as educational as reading good. The Telegraph’s 20 sentences are examples of telling not showing, overuse of unimportant details, unnecessary formality, clichés, excessive adjectives, and most commonly, word misuse. Amazingly, Brown’s writing is littered with words that he seems to only half-understand the meaning of. As such, his images contradict themselves and end up giving a muddy picture of what’s going on, even though you usually understand what he’s trying to say.

Which leads me to this smart analysis of Brown’s writing by linguist Geoffrey Pullum. His opinion of Brown, quoted in the title of this post, is pretty damning. And he backs it up with analyses of samples from Brown’s writing. For example, take this passage from The Da Vinci Code:

A voice spoke, chillingly close. “Do not move.”

On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.

Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.

Pullman: “Just count the infelicities here. A voice doesn’t speak —a person speaks; a voice is what a person speaks with. “Chillingly close” would be right in your ear, whereas this voice is fifteen feet away behind the thundering gate. The curator (do we really need to be told his profession a third time?) cannot slowly turn his head if he has frozen; freezing (as a voluntary human action) means temporarily ceasing all muscular movements. And crucially, a silhouette does not stare! A silhouette is a shadow. If Saunière can see the man’s pale skin, thinning hair, iris color, and red pupils (all at fifteen feet), the man cannot possibly be in silhouette.”

The post is well worth reading, and not just for schadenfreude. It’s also a reminder that writers should pick words carefully, be specific, and make sure that even on the smallest word level, everything you write makes logical sense.

Language Log: The Dan Brown code

Telegraph: The Lost Symbol and The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s 20 worst sentences

First Amish Romance, now angels. Publishers Weekly says that this fall, publishers are introducing more than a dozen titles about angels:

… good ones, funny ones and especially fallen ones, kicked out of heaven. “We’ve kind of exhausted where we can go with vampires,” said Heather Doss, children’s merchandise manager for Bookazine. “Now we’re taking the safe characters and making them the bad guys. We’re turning that stereotypical angel image upside down.”

Sounds like the books range from your typical guardian angel story to comedic stories about angels to the angel-as-romantic-lead. Apparently, angels, especially the fallen kind, “are the new hotties. Like modern vampires, they can be gorgeous, immortal and otherworldly heartthrobs, unlike, say, zombies.”

I don’t know about this last idea. First of all, fallen angels are demons, according to the Bible, so it’s kind of weird they are playing with angels and ignoring that part of their make-up. Secondly, unlike vampires, a lot of people sincerely believe in angels and see them as religious icons, so this idea could backfire on publishers.

On the other hand, remember that TV show where that Irish lady was an angel? And there was a black lady who was also an angel? And for some reason they both helped people, maybe because they were friends? It was on the Family Channel or something. Anyway, people seemed to really like it, so maybe this trend will be like that.

As part of its quest to be involved in absolutely everything in my entire life, Google is going to provide on-demand printing of books the company has already scanned and made available online. The way it will work is that stores and libraries will have high-speed printing and binding machines that charge people about $8 to print out a public domain, out-of-print book from Google’s collection. The machine can print a 300 page book in under five minutes. Part of the money goes to Google and part of it goes to OnDemand, the maker of the Espresso printing machine. And the rest ($3) goes to the bookstore or library hosting the machine.

There’s been a lot of hubbub in the publishing industry–and the courts–about Google’s digital library and the copyright and royalties problems. So this printing project only includes books with expired copyrights that are no longer in print. However, I’d guess that if it takes off it will soon include authors who opt in to have their works included. This takes it from Google providing information online for free to the company making a profit from it.

I really am quite annoyed that Google has to mark its territory on anything it considers information. It’s creepy. It may very well be the basis of several sci-fi novels already in the works. Think technological singularity, dystopic future, lots of shiny chrome … the usual stuff. (Read on …)

The NYTimes likes Bright Star, the new movie about the life of Keats. It looks horribly sentimental and mushy, but not so, says AO Scott:

This is a risky project, not least because a bog of cliché and fallacy lies between the filmmaker and her goal. In the first decades of the 19th century, some poets may have been like movie stars, but the lives of the poets have been, in general, badly served on film, either neglected altogether or puffed up with sentiment and solemnity. The Regency period, moreover, serves too many lazy, prestige-minded directors as a convenient vintage clothing store. And there are times in “Bright Star” when Keats, played by the pale and skinny British actor Ben Whishaw (“Perfume,” “I’m Not There”), trembles on the edge of caricature. He broods; he coughs (signaling the tuberculosis that will soon kill him); he looks dreamily at flowers and trees and rocks.

But these moments, rather than feeling studied or obvious, arrive with startling keenness and disarming beauty, much in the way that Keats’s own lyrics do. His verses can at first seem ornate and sentimental, but on repeated readings, they have a way of gaining in force and freshness. The music is so intricate and artificial, even as the emotions it carries seem natural and spontaneous. And while no film can hope to take you inside the process by which these poems were made, Ms. Campion allows you to hear them spoken aloud as if for the first time. You will want to stay until the very last bit of the end credits, not necessarily to read the name of each gaffer and grip, but rather to savor every syllable of Mr. Whishaw’s recitation of “Ode to a Nightingale.”

Sigh. Now I am going to have to see this movie…

Here’s a fascinating interview with Joyce Carol Oates on Shirley Jackson, most known for the short story The Lottery. Oates talks about Jackson’s novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which I tooootttaaaalllllly want to read now. (In fact, I just ordered it off the Internet.) It is about two sisters who live isolated from the nearby town in a castle. It has a dark, gothic vibe similar to The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

In the interview, Oates draws parallels between the themes of the book and Jackson’s life, which sounds awful. Jackson became agoraphobic, feared the people in the town around her, believed she was a witch, and probably had a some serious mental illnesses. It’s remarkable she was able to produce good writing in the middle of all that chaos. (Via Bookslut)

You know, it’s all well and good that this guy can teach me how to write a novel in 7 minutes a day. I buy his guarantees that he can help me “monetize” my work so that my “inbox is overflowing with an avalanche of success.”

However.

Seven minutes? Seven whole minutes?

A day?

Wow. That’s a commitment. I’m pretty busy, you know. I mean, let’s face it, I couldn’t spare the 7 minutes a day it takes to get a flat stomach or read the Bible or clean my bathroom, so what makes him think I have 7 minutes a day to spend writing and publishing a best-selling novel?

Nope, he’s going to have to do better than that.

I want a pill.

Here’s how it would work: I would take it and it would write the book for me. I wouldn’t even have to know what it’s about. When it is done, I would just take my novel and cash it in for millions of dollars and fame. Just like Dan Brown.

So let’s get going on that, Author 101 University. (Via Mediabistro)

Who knew? A new trend in publishing is Amish romances. They are, according to The Wall Street Journal, G-rated romances about Amish women, also called bonnet books.

The trend was started by novelist Cindy Woodsmall, who is not Amish herself but has done a lot of research into the culture/religion. Her first book When the Heart Cries “revolves around Hannah, a young Amish woman who falls in love with a Mennonite and hides her plans to marry him from her strict parents. The lovers struggle to overcome the cultural divide, and actually kiss a couple of times in 326 pages:

‘His warm, gentle lips moved over hers, and she returned the favor, until Hannah thought they might both take flight right then and there. Finally desperate for air, they parted.’”

These books are selling like hot-cakes to Amish and non-Amish alike, so much so that publishers are expanding looking into Amish thrillers and murder mysteries. Publishers “attribute the books’ popularity to their pastoral settings and forbidden love scenarios à la Romeo and Juliet.”

This is a cute fad. I like it much better than books about falling in love with a sparkly vampire.

What? Word Pirates are blogging again? That can’t be! But it is. I figure since Jose Saramago has retired his blog to concentrate on his novel, it was time for me to ignore my novel and concentrate on this blog again. Or something like that. Anyway, the point is, after a long hiatus, I am feeling the Word Pirates blog love. Hurrah!