Dan Brown is infamous in the world of grammarians. One of my favourite resources, It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences: A Writer’s Guide to Crafting Killer Sentences, criticizes the first sentence of “The Da Vinci Code” Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery. The author, June Casagrande, questions whether “vaulted” adds anything useful to “archway”, but she […]
One theory why Dan Brown writes so badly
Writing in Sentence Fragments
Sentences are supposed to contain a subject and an object. Incomplete phrases should be included in the same sentence as the main clause, joined to it by commas or semicolons or the like. Paragraphs should be built from related sentences, and split when you change speaker or focus. Them’s the rules. A deception. Not a complete sentence. Used — not only as a complete sentence — but it […]
Using the Unreliable Narrator
I thought it was going to be easy. I thought it would be obvious. I decided to use an unreliable narrator in my writing exercises blog. I thought the result was interesting, so I worked some more with it and showed it around for critique. A narrator can be unreliable by lying, or by not providing information and lying by omission. When you discover that the central character of […]
Writing Review: Divergent, and other YA
More results from my project of working through some top reading lists. Next up: Divergent, by Veronica Roth. Divergent comes right after Looking for Alaska, and having speed-read The Hunger Games the weekend before seeing the first movie, and Blink & Caution a year or so back, all good YA genre novels. Blink & Caution is probably the most challenging read because it’s written from two alternating perspectives— those of […]
Technique, and Rock and Roll
At some point — somewhere around one or two years ago — I made a conscious effort to focus less on larger elements and to pay attention to how I worked with phrases, sentences, paragraphs; the elements of writing in general as opposed to the elements of a novel or of fiction that you learn in school. My theory was that the larger inspirations could be explored and developed at […]
Goodreads reading
I’m still working on my project; reading through various titles of a Goodreads list. My object is to sample recommendations from various genres with minimal bias or preparation. Since I’m reading only e-books downloaded from the library I don’t see the summary notes on the inside jacket, the glowing reviews, or more about the author. Just a cover, the title, and the author’s name. Reading e-books is different than reading […]
Writing a Character Driven Novel
I’ve completed four novels to date, all connected with some form of writing competition; three NaNoWriMos and one 3DayNovel; a 23,500 word submission which subsequently expanded into a 60,000 word novel. The one that I’m working on now is the first non-competition generated novel. It’s also the most character-driven and has some of the thickest writing that I’ve done other than in some short stories. Thick meaning dense; the words […]
Review: And When She Was Good
I’ve always had difficulty finding enough good stuff to read. During the last three or four years I’ve been working my way through Pulitzer, Man Booker, and other award finalist collections, treating the lists as recommendations. Now I’m trying a new compilation; Google’s list of top books for 2012. I know nothing about these books. I download them from the library so I don’t see reviews or summaries, just the […]
Review: Gone Girl
Just finished reading “Gone Girl“. It sticks in my mind, and I’m not sure why, so I’m going to see if I can figure it out. One element about it; it strikes close to the balance that I’ve been striving for between literary and genre. Decent writing, decent characters, decent plot, and characters and plot titillating enough to carry casual readers. But writers have always found ways around that, most […]
The Kefuffel over Alice Munro
Back on September 25, the author and literature instructor David Gilmour was quote as saying in an interview, I’m not interested in teaching books by women. I’ve never found—Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one short story from Virginia Woolf. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would teach only the people that I […]