Dan Brown. Dan Brown. Dan Brown. And other pitiable aspects of the writer’s life.

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This blog post, “10 Reasons Not to Be A Writer,” is pretty funny.  I like this reason:

One of the very worst things about being a writer is the existence of other writers. There are literally thousands of writers out there, and many of them will have better Amazon rankings than you and be placed in more prominent places in bookshops. Other writers win prizes and climb bestseller lists and are photographed at all the right events. Other writers are probably having a whale of a time, naked, rolling around on the floor, glugging absinthe with other naked people while they scream Beat Poetry up at the ceiling.

While they were doing this, I was wasting a perfectly lovely Memorial Day bleeding words onto a screen.

And then, of course, there’s Dan Brown.  Reason number 7 not to be a writer boils down to Dan Brown.  Dan Brown.  Dan Brown.

My well-read brother visited recently for my son’s graduation, and he left behind a pristine copy of Dan Brown’s latest, Inferno.  Should I read it?  If I hate it, that will be bad, because his success would be so unfair.  But what if I love it?  That would be even worse, because it would mean life is fair, and if you’re not successful, you deserve to not be successful. By the way, he looks like a really nice guy:

You can’t win when it comes to Dan Brown.

7 thoughts on “Dan Brown. Dan Brown. Dan Brown. And other pitiable aspects of the writer’s life.”

  1. How can you not love the writer of the following sentence: “Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino with long white hair.”

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  3. To be honest, Dan Brown is okay with me. But I get why he gets so much grief from the writing community. I don’t think Mr. Brown gives a flip if I like him or not because he is too busy laughing all the way to the bank.

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  4. I just read a review of the new Brown book that said, wonder of wonders, he was actually learning to write good prose. Said it was way better than his previous book. Now, where did I read that? Might have been The Atlantic. (Might not have been, though.)

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  5. Pingback: Dan Brown’s Inferno: Round 1 | richard bowker

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