Tyme Shift: Don’t Ever Click Here

You can click here if you’re interested in the entire novella.
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TymeShift

This was my first time. Well, my first hit, I mean. My job at the Committee was to take a analyze at any sites that the System coughed up, poke around and flag any that looked “interesting.” That was the exact word my boss Jeff gave me. Interesting. Best job ever, right?

Well, picture this: you’re in your handi-kit cubicle, laser-printed picture of someone else’s cat push-pinned to the felt wall (Company Rule 14: No identifying names, pictures, objects, letters, or memorabilia will be allowed in the building at any time. TymeShift

This was my first time. Well, my first hit, I mean. My job at the Committee was to take a analyze at any sites that the System coughed up, poke around and flag any that looked “interesting.” That was the exact word my boss Jeff gave me. Interesting. Best job ever, right?

Well, picture this: you’re in your handi-kit cubicle, laser-printed picture of someone else’s cat push-pinned to the felt wall (Company Rule 14: No identifying names, pictures, objects, letters, or memorabilia will be allowed in the building at any time.Failure to comply can result in immediate expulsion). Your mid-screen flashes vomit green and the two side screens go dark.  An unpromising website flashes up. On it, you see a WordPress blog with one entry. It reads: THIS MY FIRST POST. I PLAN ON USING THIS TO VENT ABOUT THAT ASSHOW, WHO SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS. THIS WILL BE THE PLACE I GO TO SO THAT THE WHOLE WORLD CAN FIND OUT WHAT A SHIT HE WAS AND HE’LL NEVER FIND ANYONE TO BE WITH HIM. EVER.

That’s it. No other posts. The asshow somehow escaped further vitriol, or at least the writer found another vehicle. Why did the System flag this? Is there something insidious about this particular screed? Your job, code monkey,  is to spelunk through the code, worrying out anything that isn’t what it seems. Of course, almost everything is exactly what it seems. The world is boring and shitty like that. That’s what I thought then, anyway.

I’d spend most of the morning checking and double-checking that the Asshow was just an Asshow (spoiler alert: he was). I’d take a long coffee break that involved actual chin-ups—the weak, halfway down kind—and contemplated going back to school to learn medical transcription before I returned to my desk. Here comes the next one.

Eventually, I came upon TymeShift. Which, to be honest and to give the psychopaths at The Committee their due, looked just as unprepossessing as any other sputum expectorated from The System. I was sure it was just some JavaScript 101 homework assignment. You’ll see, of course, it isn’t and I lost almost three weeks before I figured it out. It’s a good thing I didn’t add a few more zeros just for funzies.

Gentle Browser, I don’t doubt that you can see where The Committee is coming from on this one. It doesn’t take a Nicolai Tesla to see how this website could wreck havoc, just totally obliterate families and schools and workplaces and the space/time continuum. No doubt, that’s why this is such a good place to start because we want to take that Stockholm Syndrome shit and bust a cap in its ass. Fuck that. They, those They, don’t get to decide. Screw your Prime Directive. More than anything, Time should be ours to spend or waste or decimate as we wish. I don’t need a bunch of old farts in dresses telling me what to do with my Time.  Also, my cyanide tooth, last-minute plan Z is that if I get caught in their trap, the pinchers pinching, I can always TymeShift 50 years and they’ll have to waterboard a bunch of skeleton bones. Suck on that, The Committee!

This website, as far as I can tell, is a joint production from a cabal of pasty hackers and a Russian witch. Are Russian witches more malevolent than other witches? Who knows? Before all this started, I always assumed that witches were widows with property and too many cats that the townspeople decided they needed to be relieved of. I know. I know. Just bear with me here. You can type in the URL and try it out yourself in just a second.

The intentions behind this site, though, are still pretty murky. They have no advertising on their site; there is no FAQ explaining why they created this. It simply exists.

When you type in the URL, you’ll probably think There’s nothing here. In the center of the screen is a blue glowing oval and underneath is a single text entry box that asks for a number. Maybe you’ll type in a number, say, 58. You’ll hit return or double click or every key on the keyboard and nothing will happen. Is this a joke? A scientific study to see how much time the average user will waste on the most boring website in the world? No.

Here’s what you do.  Look at the clock and write down the time on a piece of paper. Then, type the number 5 in the box. The next part, well, you’ll have to trust me with this. Lean towards the screen and gently kiss your forehead to the oval. Try to get the entire oval to touch some part of your forehead. If you have a prominent brow ridge as I do, you might need mash your forehead against the screen with some force. OK, now just hit return. Once. Seriously, just once.

Look up. Look at the clock and compare it to the time you’ve written down. You will notice that 5 minutes have elapsed during the short time you pressed Return. Congratulations! You’re a time traveler! Unfortunately, you can’t go back. Sorry.

I can already hear your questions. How? Did you not read the part about the hackers and the witch? Duh. That part should be obvious. Do I get that time back? Maybe added onto the end? Um, no. Should I have mentioned that before we started? The time is simple erased. You fast-forward the minutes; your body ages but you have no memory of it. The time doesn’t exist for you. You skipped it.

Why? What use is this? Wouldn’t it be better to just take a nap? It depends. Perhaps to you, every minute is so precious, every minute is a distilled piece of Jehovah descending down from the heavens that you are grateful and gobsmacked at its magnificence. If so, this website is not for you. This website is for people who often find long swatches of time that are so interminable that it seems that time has stopped and your existence is suspended in amber. Your hot date with Jenny down the street is in 3 hours and you don’t know what to do with yourself. It’s Sunday and you are seriously considering cleaning the toilet. Jersey Shore is on in 30 minutes.

Isn’t this the end of civilization? Probably. It doesn’t take a grand leap of imagination where people who, at first, only fast forward through sleep (skipping their dreams?) will decide that Sunday afternoon needs to go next and then the standards of what constitutes tediousness will rise exponentially. When the iPhone app comes out, grocery lines will disappear; commutes never happened; DMV…fuhgetaboutit. In fact, time that we are actually willing to experience for real will boil down to sex (maybe), eating tacos, and surfing the Internet. Will we ever just sit down and contemplate the Universe or our navels or how we got to this place in our lives ever again? No, I don’t think so either.

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Prologue: Don’t Ever Click Here

For the entire novella, you actually can click here.

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Prologue

I’m writing this on a computer in a public library in a city I’ve never been before. Still, I’m sure they know where I am, have already mustered up hypertrophic dudes in suits and I only have about 30 minutes before they hit the door. I wonder if their orders are to burst through the door, guns blazing, spilling bullets indiscriminately throughout the Staff Reads sections, massacring any innocent readers browsing through the Contemporary Fiction. Will they kill everyone just to get to me? Or, are the orders more subtle than that? Will they glide in with a fuzzy picture on a smartphone and one hand on a coiled ear radio? Maybe they’ll suddenly appear behind me and I’ll have to make a decision: go quietly to a dank room and a square-jawed interrogator or make a run for it, probably finding myself gunned down Bonnie and Clyde-style before I make it to the paperbacks.

In any case, I have to write quickly and I have to post this widely. It has to go everywhere. If I were to email this to my 100 best friends, they might think that they can still contain this thing, that 100 people (and their families) is a small price to pay to stop what I’m about to tell you from getting out. And they’d be right.

So. This has to go everywhere. A pimply kid in Belarus, a cat photo aficionado in Denver, a Firefly fan fiction superstar from Quito—they all have to get it all at once. And then They have to believe that They’ve lost, that there’s nothing They can do but hunker down and hope the hurricane passes over. If They think for a second that They have a chance, that with one more garroting in a dark alley all of this might be avoided, They will.

What you’re about to read is a simple list, a simple description of a selection of websites. I know. Yawn. However, these websites are not indexed by Google. No aggregator links to them. Reddit won’t redirect you there. These website are part of the UnderWeb, the network of websites that offer users the chance to improve or destroy, find out or bury under, invoke and deny, to finally harness the powers of a network of computers and brains to manipulate the world to their specifications. The UnderWeb has already irrevocably and invisibly altered human nature—maybe not for the best, but, on the other hand, maybe it is for the best. Who am I to judge?

The Committee feels ready to judge and block these sites from you, but I think you should decide. The Committee has recoiled in horror at these sights, like a corseted Victorian chick aghast at uncovered piano legs. Oh dear, oh dear! That will not to do! Screw that.  Information wants its Rumspringa. Will that Information destroy us? Will we find ourselves unable to resist the siren call of these new powers? Am I Prometheus bringing fire to humanity or Eve biting off the Tree of Knowledge? No doubt, we’re heading for a Second Fall from Grace, a Fall we might not walk away from, but I’m just a humble man who is thinking of you, Dear Browser.  What’s the worst that can happen?

I was going to say that you should tread with caution in the fields of paradigm-busting possibilities that await, but, you know, whatever. When Napster first hit, did our parents all say: oh, I’ll just download a few Metallica songs and call it good. Hell no! They said: give me the whole fucking Metallica discography even if it takes 2 weeks on my crappy Hayes modem to download it all. Oh yeah, I’ll take the unreleased bootlegs from the Hamburg concert as well and I won’t feel guilty, I refuse to feel guilty, because I want it and it’s there.

So. Don’t feel guilty. Don’t eat with the smallest spoon. Eat it all and then ask for more. I promise I won’t tell anyone.

Editor’s Note: Don’t Ever Click Here

Editor’s Note:

When our parent company acquired the rights to Mr. Stearns’ work from his estate, we here at Kennison Publishing were unsure how to properly categorize it. Clearly, what you’re about to read was meant as nonfiction, meant as a document of the supposed plot to hide crucial information from the American public. The writer believed he was working in the grand tradition of crusading journalists like Woodward and Bernstein or Tarbell and Mitford. Consequently, he intended to unearth a complicated scheme to disappear all members of any organization who threatened to upend society through the propagation of website content that would radically alter the nature of humanity and its relationship to the government.

Of course, Mr. Stearns was a raving maniac.

This then begs the question: Can something be nonfiction if almost none of it is true? When it is, in the truest sense, fiction? Can you shelve paranoid fantasies on the same shelves as The Smartest Guys in the Room or The Boys on the Bus? We decided the answer to that question was no. Would you call it reportage? After all, Nate Stearns believed what he is about to relate to you is absolutely true and, similarly, journalists have reported information that later turned out to be false. Again, we have to say no. None of those professionals were blinded by mental illness; their blindness more often resulted from lax journalistic methods or overly stringent ideological partisanship. When Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber Manifesto was published by our friends at Wingspan Classics, they classified it as Political Science, which we suggest was a mistake.

In the end, we’ve decided to call Mr. Stearns’s work what it is: fiction. There is a long history of insanity in the works of literature. From the megalomania of Ernest Hemingway to the delusions of Walt Whitman to the schizophrenia of Edith Warton to the paranoid ravings of Jonathan Frantzen–almost every powerful voice in American literature suffered from a mental illness. It is with that understanding as a context for debate that we present to you Mr. Stearns work–which has already reached a wide audience in its fractured distaff blog form– as a strangely beautiful and utterly misconceived modern classic of delusion. While we recognize it holds no literal truths, it nevertheless compels us to behold the intricate dance of paranoia and fantasy that infuse our modern world so completely and relentlessly.

With complements,

Morton LaPelle
Editor-in-Chief
Kennison Publishing

OK, I tried…

I had the idea that I would use this space for my thoughts on lit-ra-chure, but I should have realized that a) I have a real job b) I don’t have that many thoughts…What I do have is an entire novella that I wrote about paranoia and the internet. It’s called Don’t Ever Click Here and it still retains some charm for me. The basic premise is that a hacker employed at a government agency combs the internet for danger and threats to national security. Of course, as these things go, the agency is more of a threat than the internet. I spent way too much time making little icons for each of the black sites that the agency is trying to quash.

I’ll start publishing a chapter every few days until it’s done.

I want things to burn but remain unscathed: power fantasies and storytelling

I think way too much about a movie I’ve only seen part of: Man on Fire (dir. Tony Scott). In it, Denzel Washington plays a CIA/Marine/Ninja/alcoholic badass who goes on a murderous rampage when Dakota Fanning is kidnapped. There are tractor-trailer loads of movies wedded to this trope (Liam Neeson movies, Stephen Seagal movies, Eastwood/Bronson). There’s even an upcoming Keanu Reeves movie where the trigger is the death of a beloved puppy.  Usually, you need to have only a few pieces to make this work.

First, you need a flawed hero.

Usually, you’re an alcoholic, especially if you’re a cop. And your ex-wife/kid has issues with you. There needs to be some sort of built up carapace of frustration for the MC to explode out of. Often a bungled or almost-suicide is involved. Think Haymitch from The Hunger Games or Rick Blaine in Casablanca, The Knick uses addiction to liquid cocaine as the chemical hamarita, but that’s still pretty vague. Of course, your hero could be happy and generous, but even then there needs to be a tragic past where you Did-Bad-Things or we’ll think the future rampage is unrealistic.

One of the reasons for this, I think, is that as viewers we want to go through a process of not-me-ing–this schmuck has got problems. The flaw is played for glamour rather than pathetic humiliation, but we want to start with a feeling superiority over this person–which will be useful when he starts blowing shit up.
Because this trick is soooo old, I think something radical has to happen. I’m more partial to uselessness as a flaw. Maybe someone who is rich and bored or someone who has a ridiculous job or someone who believes really strongly in something that is spectacularly revealed to be absurd (a company, a partner, a childhood dream).

Then, you need an excuse.

In Man on Fire, it’s a cute, blonde girl. It’s a hall-pass, basically from being human, which–admittedly–almost all of us would welcome. Even if it would lead to our eventual doom. The question you have to ask yourself is What would it take for you to be willing to stop giving a shit? Apocalypse is the most popular answer of the day. No need for social niceties when you’ve got a horde on the undead on your tail. Crank gives us a MC who has to do crazy batshit stuff just to stay alive. Again, we get to see our power fantasies enacted while being able to maintain a stance of judgmental disconnection.

We can rethink this. When this is done badly, the result is ugly: Brody in Homeland gets radicalized by an American drone strike on a telegenic son-figure. The connection is hastily established between the two and the fact that the man has been tortured by Islamic jihadists is hand-waved away.  Honestly, Denzel’s attachment to Dakota is barely believable. Often, the excuse hinges on atonement—making up for your sins by committing really big ones for a good cause. I knew learning how to snap a man’s neck with my bare hands would be a good thing eventually!

Because we are looking for 1) a reason to look down on the violence to come and 2) a whole lot of violence to get our adrenaline surging, the excuse needs to be plausible but maybe also faintly unpersuasive. If its too persuasive, then we won’t be able to feel superior. I’ve always thought a MC who was incited into violence based on a misconception that the audience is privy too would make a good story. Imagine, a hero who is gunning down Chechens who he thinks are evil mobsters/human traffickers/boogeymen when we know everyone he’s killing is innocent. It’s much more chilling. Of course, also less fun from an audience’s point of view.

Next, you need to burn it all down.

This is the payoff. Every shot slams home. Your swinging baseball bat cracks a skull on the forehand and the backhand. Fireballs! Cars caroming off cliffs! More fireballs!  This is righteous anger and it feel really, really good.

Justice is served and heads go a-flying: a confluence that happens never in real life. You could complicate it with a breather in which the MC muses whether this is really doing any good. Or the MC could mistakenly take out an innocent. The violence should satisfy the audience but then threaten to spiral out of control…or what good is it? When Bruce Willis kills bad guys in Die Hard, his violence stays under control; he has a reasonable goal of rescue rather than an Old Testament desire to burn the motherfucker down and then burn the ashes and then burn whatever comes after the ashes.

Blue Ruin does a great job of showing how inhuman and unrealistic this is. The MC wants revenge and seems to get all of his ideas from the movies, which is probably true for all of us. Tricks that would work in a Neeson movie fail spectacularly. I’d like to push that further and have the hero be as incompetent as possible. The MC could be forever planning artistic displays of carnage, only to find that the google-fueled plans of Grand Guignol collapse around his ears. Again, kind of a bummer for an audience that wants its fireballs, its forehead shots, its climactic impalings.

Finally, you have to die. (or at least get hurt badly)

Ok, so Creel in Man on Fire dies in a blaze of bad guy immolating glory, but it’s not always the case. Of course, if you have any Merlin/Obi Wan figures, they usually have to die in the middle of Act II, but your lead? Well, is your lead such an anti-hero that he needs the cleansing bath of Death to give his life meaning? One of my favorite characters, Doc Holliday in Tombstone has that Byronic deathwish vibe that is appealing even if there are parts of me that want to throttle the parts of me enamored by something so transparent.

Also, it does seem that if you create a character that is ultra-competent and seems to never find an obstacle that is too daunting, you have to kill them at the end. King Schultz must die!

If as Lucian Freud says, “The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable,” then the tendency of a good story in 2014 mightbe to take the power fantasies that people have, exacerbate them, and then turn them around–show how these fantasies are grubby, inhuman, vile. Of course, dear artist, you were the one who brought these out in the audience; unless you can self-implicate in the process the whole thing will be inauthentic and hectoring.

I don’t like killing my characters, maybe because they seem too real and killing them is too painful. Or, because it’s too neat as a close cousin to the equation book is finished = death. Or, because I think death is really, really frightening and that playing with it in my fiction is like trying out ouija boards (if they weren’t bullshit) on Halloween night.

The problem remains: humans yearn for power and our stories often gratify that ignoble desire, but writers have to figure out where to direct that primal hunger. Should we take it for a spin as a modern day Violent Passion Surrogate or should we try to push back at these grimy genetic codes of destruction?

What I’m reading

The Collected Works of T.S. Spivet and The Last Policeman are good compliments to each other. Spivet is part of the by genius genre–The Last Samurai, Little Man Tate, Extremely Loud and Incredibly close–with a cartography obsessed kid in Montana trying to map his way through the mysteries of human interaction. The text takes up the center of the book, but the margins are packed with all kinds of diagrams, asides, journal entries, and illustrations. As if David Foster Wallace learned how to map… The writing is beautiful, with a sort of 19th century parallelism and a wonderfully optimistic tone of wonder.

The Last Policeman is a mystery and as I might have mentioned before, I hate mysteries. I especially hate mystery mysteries. Here’s a dead body; here’s an alcoholic detective; here’s a warmed over Chinatown plot. Here, though, the difference is that the world is ending. A comet is on a collision course with the earth and everyone’s grappling with their mortality in a way that they can’t escape…which is kind of perfect for a mystery because I’ve always felt that the act of reading one to be more or less akin to playing mindsweeper on the computer. Hand-waving distraction before encountering death. The writing is strong here too, but obviously more cynical, more desperate and futile.

When one gets to be too much, the other is a good counterbalance. Bennies and uppers, I guess…

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Why mystery, like life, always disappoints us

One of my favorite TV shows of the oughts was Lost. You know how this ends.

TV up to that time didn’t have the mindset of setting you up for a mystery and failing to provide you (well, there was X-files) with a solution by the end of that show. I think the writers and producers reasonably figured people have better things to do than keep a set of plot points in their memory banks from week to week. But, actually, no we don’t. We really don’t have anything better to do.

My plot points are down there!

I still remember the scene where the Locke character stumbles onto a hatch and tries to open it, tries to blow it open, basically bets everything on it opening and revealing something meaningful and transcendental. And if does! After he gives into despair, a light comes on (cue season cliffhanger) and eventually he finds a weird Scottish dude pushing buttons in order to keep the world from exploding. That might have been the last time in the entire series where a Mystery is proposed, time Stretches to enlarge the tension, and the Reveal surprises us while still remaining plausible. After that, Mysteries keep getting introduced; time is Stretched until, well, (I’m still waiting on what The Numbers were or where they came from); and the Reveals became more and more disappointing. It becomes clear that we’re the victim of the long con.

Which brings us to why Mystery has so many pitfalls that I’m wary of using it…even though it might be one of the most basic tools in a storytellers toolbox.

Here’s where I’m at:

If we imagine that Mystery has three components–Mystery, Stretch, and Reveal–how do they work?

Mystery

In the initial stage, you have to provide a question to the reader/viewer that is 1) intriguing 2) not easy to predict 3) contains some sort of stakes or risk. Because all of us have been trained by the massive amounts of stories we’re seen and read, you have to be careful not to set up a mystery where the savvy reader has it all figured out: the guy in the wheelchair isn’t, the Mole is the commanding general, the helpful friend has been manipulating us all along.

The problem here is that because readers have  systematically built up resistance to hoary tropes, you have to come up with something new that invokes a sense of wonder but that has the potential to be Revealed in a way that is satisfying. Lost failed spectacularly when their last season involved a split dimension conceit–that had potential!–but was revealed to be a sort of antechamber to heaven which made people (the viewers) want to go back in history and convince their previous selves to devote their time to intricate scrimshaw instead of Lost.

Stretching

Not the old hanging from the balcony trick again

The classic answer here is the Hitchock bomb under the table. Very sensible, the Director reminds us that just blowing shit up without warning doesn’t contain a lot of drama (though there are times when this is exactly what your story needs). He’s right; dudes talking about baseball when there’s a bomb under the table are inherently more dramatic. We want to reach into the screen and jog these guys into reality. Unfortunately, I don’t really like the kind of negative pleasure very much. You might feel drama and tension and some sort of release, but after the tension is over, you (OK, I) feel manipulated. It wasn’t good for me.  Often, the tension is peripheral to the larger story. You can see this in a forgettable Denzel Washington movie Out of Time. Basically, it’s milked suspense throughout–yikes the fax is coming!–and then end result is resentment.

Reveal

The basic math is that the longer you stretch the tension the more the Reveal has to deliver surprise and transcendent meaning. When the Savior comes back he/she, better have a great story. Also, It is painfully obvious when the author knows this expectation has been set up, but has lost any interest in the Mystery’s solution. A romantic triangle, for instance, is the oldest Mystery in the book. Who will Katniss pick? OK, so at the end of the third book, Patient Reader, I’ll tell you, but only because I’m contractually obligated to. It’s Peeta the baker. Not that it matters. Stop bugging me about it!

Lost has the same problem and its solution is always the same. Answer the mystery with another mystery, keep those Jenga blocks piled on top and when the whole thing threatens to topple, get one more season out of it and peace out.

Which is why the JJ Abrams piece on mystery–the Wired article and the TED talk–interests me. Here’s Abrams shaking his head:

Perhaps that’s why mystery, now more than ever, has special meaning. Because it’s the anomaly, the glaring affirmation that the Age of Immediacy has a meaningful downside. Mystery demands that you stop and consider—or, at the very least, slow down and discover. It’s a challenge to get there yourself, on its terms, not yours.

He wants the story to be that his readers are too impatient to let him be the Wizard of Oz–the buggers keep pulling back the curtain when they should be genuflecting in awe. But maybe the story is that his curtain is shitty and the Wizard behind it pretty un-Wizardly. We’re not letting him be the Priest of Mystery; we demand the real thing. Or at least we have a failure of credibility. If the Rambaldi device ends up being a complete and utter letdown (and it does), you might want to know what you’re in for before Star Wars fools you yet again.

Anyway, this is why mystery still enthralls readers but often ultimately lets them down. And it’s why writers reach for a mystery when they don’t have anything to show you. When you read Shakespeare, there’s not a whole lot of mystery: who killed my Dad? My uncle, duh…

The Garden of Narrative Delights, introduced

One of the reasons I wanted to make this blog, beyond trying to introduce prospective readers to my book, was to think out loud about the different ways that stories give us pleasure. We could say make us happy but I hesitate–happiness seems too bland, too shallow for what I’m feeling when I read a good book. For instance, I’ve been watching The Knick–the Stephen Soderberg directed Cinemax series about early 20th century surgeons–and enjoying the hell out of it. Weirdly, I’d thought I was done, done as in divorced-you-can-keep-the-kids-don’t-expect-a-Christmas-card done, with doctor stories. The Knick somehow gave stock characters (brilliant, self-destructive surgeon; slimy administrator; whiskey nun) an energy that made me forget that I had seen all this before. How? Part of it, I think, is the introduction of showy art film techniques into a TV medium that tends towards the pedestrian; we probably have a good half decade where ripping off the Dardenne brothers will still work.

Anyway, it made me think: what do I/we enjoy about stories? The plan is to regularly think this through and then collect what I have in a separate page so that I have a running record of my ideas. If you’ve ever read, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (sample definition: vellichor–-the strange wistfulness of used book stores) you have an idea about what I’m talking about.

Here are some of my ideas:

• mystery (especially jumping off the mystery box idea of JJ Abrams)
• patterns matching, patterns diverging
• power fantasies
• making the mundane sublime
• characters like us, characters we want to be
• settings that change our lives
• high/low–mixing complex thought with genre pleasures
• subverted tropes
• spending time in someone else’s mind

Why Dan Brown Scares Me

This is my first post for my book blog. I’ve tried to start these before but I’ve never been able to maintain a forward momentum for creating content, for writing posts that others would want to read, even for earning how to induce people to spend their attention dollars here.

Now, I have a book called Lousy Gods. Actually, I have 80k+ words strung together which are in the rough form of a novel, but that would not be a pleasing reading experience for anyone involved. This blog is meant to try and connect with potential readers and fellow writers as I revise and edit and try to figure out what publishing a novel in 2014 means.

Which is why the example of Dan Brown scares me.

My book is not particularly Brownian (I’ll tell you about the plot later), but I am interested in genre writing–mostly because I like it when things happen. And Dan Brown writes books where things definitely happen, but he’s–and I apologize for starting off so negatively–not very good at it. I definitely don’t mind that he’s popular and Scrooge McDuck-rich despite not being particularly good at writing. That’s actually very inspiring! I’m also capable of writing not very well! Instead, the problem is that he hasn’t gotten any better. At all.

Here are the novels and nonfiction Dan Brown has written:

Digital Fortress (1998)
Angels & Demons (2000)
Deception Point (2001)
The Da Vinci Code (2003)
The Lost Symbol (2009)
Inferno (2013)

and…

187 Men to Avoid: A Survival Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Woman (1995, co-written with his wife under the pseudonym Danielle Brown).
The Bald Book (1998, co-written with his wife)

What Dan Brown writes

Here’s an excerpt from Digital Fortress:

They were in the smoky mountains at their favorite bed-and-breakfast. David was smiling down at her. “What do you say, gorgeous? Marry me?” Looking up from their canopy bed, she knew he was the one. Forever. As she stared into his deep-green eyes, somewhere in the distance a deafening bell began to ring. It was pulling him away. She reached for him, but her arms clutched empty air. It was the sound of the phone that fully awoke Susan Fletcher from her dream. She gasped, sat up in bed, and fumbled for the receiver.

Here’s an early section from The DaVinci Code.

Robert Langdon awoke slowly.

A telephone was ringing in the darkness—a tinny, unfamiliar ring. He fumbled for the bedside lamp and turned it on. Squinting at his surroundings he saw a plush Renaissance bedroom with Louis XVI furniture, hand-frescoed walls, and a colossal mahogany four-poster bed.

Where the hell am I?

The jacquard bathrobe hanging on his bedpost bore the monogram:

HOTEL RITZ PARIS.

Slowly, the fog began to lift.

Langdon picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Monsieur Langdon?” a man’s voice said. “I hope I have not awoken you?”

Dazed, Langdon looked at the bedside clock. It was 12:32 A.M. He had been asleep only an hour, but he felt like the dead.

and here’s something from Inferno, I skipped the dream sequence until almost the end.

The woman’s face revealed nothing. Seek and find, she repeated.

Without warning, she began radiating a white light. . .brighter and brighter. Her entire body started vibrating intensely, and then, in a rush of thunder, she exploded into a thousand splintering shards of light.

Langdon bolted awake, shouting.

The room was bright. He was alone. The sharp smell of medicinal alcohol hung in the air, and somewhere a machine pinged in quiet rhythm with his heart. Langdon tried to move his right arm, but a sharp pain restrained him. He looked down and saw an IV tugging at the skin of his forearm.

His pulse quickened, and the machines kept pace, pinging more rapidly.

Where am I? What happened?

The back of Langdon’s head throbbed, a gnawing pain. Gingerly, he reached up with his free arm and touched his scalp, trying to locate the source of his headache. Beneath his matted hair, he found the hard nubs of a dozen or so stitches caked with dried blood.

He closed his eyes, trying to remember an accident.

Nothing. A total blank.

Think.

Only darkness.

When you see it all together like that, it’s devastating.

Why hasn’t Dan Brown gotten better?

I’m an English teacher and one of the central tenets of teaching writing is that if you practice writing, you will get better. Some teacher believe that the mere act of putting more words on the page will organically lead to better writing. Others adhere to a “guided practice” theory where students need both instruction and feedback to improve.

Dan Brown has written thousands of pages and had the best editors Anchor/Doubleday could provide. He also has more motivation than almost anyone else on the planet to write–shipping containers stuffed with high denomination bills. Surely, he’s gotten feedback and instruction. Right?

And yet…3 books…all opening with someone waking up. Something I would warn every Creative Writing student away from. His writing is unavoidably getting worse. How can that be? Shouldn’t he be learning from his mistakes and gaining new skills. Shouldn’t we be getting the best Dan Brown right now?  Still, we might wonder:

What’s so wrong about how Dan Brown writes?

• Cliché: In the excerpts you can see that he’s stuck on the conceit of waking up confused. You could imagine this working out in the right hands, if he hadn’t used the most obvious examples. Of the three, DF is the worst because it involves someone dreaming of a significant other and being rudely awakened by the phone. I’m pretty sure Sophocles would find that trope overused. DC is bad because it’s naked exposition–clearly meant to tell us where we are and who our main character is. When you can see the strings on the marionette, the mystery is lost. Finally, Inferno has a woo-woo dream sequence that involves a beautiful woman/lady in the lake figure, but the cryptic koan she gives Langdon is insipid: seek and find. Blech.
• Ugly Description: “somewhere in the distance a deafening bell” “He had been asleep only an hour, but he felt like the dead.” “and then, in a rush of thunder, she exploded into a thousand splintering shards of light.” I’m sympathetic to bad description. I’ve even heard writers and songwriters say that they purposefully use workaday language to give readers a breather before they hit them with turned phrases that are more surprising, more innovative. Brown, though, doesn’t have any phrases like that. The Inferno dream sequence, a place where most writers would drop their most rococo figures, goes with “rush of thunder.” It’s one thing to write in a way that’s invisible–there’s a place in literature for that–this is actively horrible.
• Inept characterization and exposition:  People are smarter about tropes (if you haven’t fallen down this rabbit hole, I envy you) and suspense tricks. We’ve been trained by TV and the movies into story ninjas. If you’re still using the old waking up with amnesia trick, you’re playing checkers instead of chess. Maybe tic-tac-toe.
• Weird tonal shifts between realism and fantasy: If you tell readers, hey this is the sort of book where the pope tries to kill the hero by flying him in a helicopter and kicking him out. And, the hero survives when he hits an awning. OK. I can live with that. But then if the same book has semi-learned discussions about Catholic church history and quantum mechanics. I’m not able to abide.

What is Dan Brown good at?

Well, he used to be good at two things. First, he brought a number of interesting facts and non-obvious concepts about history into his pedestrian plots, which allowed readers to learn something while imbibing easy listening prose. Hey, so that’s a Merovingian! Second, he had a sort of Hardy Boys attitude towards plot twists where the protagonists had to solve some sort of puzzle or device in order to progress through the story. It’s an hoary device but it still has the power to bring us back to a childish sense of joy in accomplishment and feeling smarter than other people. That’s worth something.

What can we take from this?

I’ve read a lot of Dan Brown. Something must be good for me to keep reading, but I’m also keenly aware of how bad the writing is. What is a writer to do with this info.

It could be that Brown won the lottery and despite being incompetent, he still mints money. That seems to me to be too easy to be the truth.

It could be that Brown’s success is despite his badness, he has other qualities that keep us reading. His settings, his easy-to-digest characters, his mini-Wikipedia essays on history.

It could be that Brown is read because he’s bad and that writing well is actually a detriment to reader enjoyment.

That last one is the one that keeps me up at night.

Extra: If you want to see a good parody of DB in the voice of DB, see this piece from Michael Deacon at The Guardian.