He’s sold millions of novels, but Dan Brown, author of The Lost Symbol and The Da Vinci Code, is a hideous prose stylist. Learn from his errors with this round-up of his worst sentences.
Picture from Wikimedia Commons
The Daily Telegraph’s collection of Brown’s biggest clangers is both mean-spirited and inevitably incomplete, but it does serve a useful purpose. For each example, Tom Chivers also explains just why it’s so heinous, meaning you can learn something from Brown even if (like me) you’ve never managed to get more than two pages into a Brown novel.
Every quoted word in the list is a shocker, but I think this takes some beating for unintentional comedy:
My French stinks, Langdon thought, but my zodiac iconography is pretty good.
The Lost Symbol and The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s 20 worst sentences [Telegraph.co.uk]
Sarah
Monday, September 21, 2009 at 11:23 AMIts someone picking apart someone elses sucess. It should have been tagged ” break all the rules that stuffy ‘want to be writers’ want you to follow, and still make a million.
simulacrum
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 1:52 PMMore like.. “Forget good writing, make millions selling pulp to the stupid majority”
spiderlama
Monday, September 21, 2009 at 12:53 PMAll of his stories are the same! It’s like kicking a dead dog…
Anon
Monday, September 21, 2009 at 1:20 PMBut will it improve my ability to write a bestselling money making novel? =)
Adam
Monday, September 21, 2009 at 7:59 PMBut can it run Crysis?
Daniel
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 5:42 PMApparently, writing a good novel and selling lots of copies are mutually exclusive events. Who would have thought?