Writing style review

Review: Dan Brown
The Example?? ‘Deception Point’


I read this Author on the advice of a friend. The motivation for the suggestion was to have a look at the ‘formula’ style of writing that is the great white hope of the American Corporate Literary Machine or ‘ACLM’ for short.

This type of book is what one person called an ‘Airport’ book. The type of book purchased specifically to fill idle time when waiting or traveling. It doesn’t matter whether you have time to finish it. “Lose it’ in transit? Doesn’t matter. You will never give it another thought. This gives the ACLM the broadest possible marketing reach with the lowest capital risk.

I began the journey as anyone would, by reading the prologue.

It was clear, concise and exciting. Just the thing to get you hooked as you hurriedly try to make a decision while listening to the announcement of the next flight out of whatever hell you are passing through.

So, filled with anticipation, I jumped into the book with both feet------ only to land knee deep in mucus like sludge that seemed determined to wrest ever ounce of energy from my body for each page I forced my way through.

Forced????

No other word quite so clearly describes the first eighty-nine pages of this book.

Long, twisting, undulating paragraphs of ‘character’ building descriptions that alluded to something going on that the author very pointedly was not going to share with his readers.

Eighty-nine pages of the characters talking around the subject and dropping ‘hints’ with a wink and a nudge that were ‘cleverly’ composed to lead you into the mystery and keep you turning pages. The hints were about as clever as an episode of ‘Threes Company’ on a bad writing day.

I use the number eighty-nine, because it was at that point I closed the book and began pounding on it. Not little taps, but great overhead swings filled with the rage of frustration. Tell—Me—what—is – under—the –ice—you—filthy—pig—bastard.
Yes. I punctuated every word with a hard blow to the book.

If I am anything, I am a civilized man. In an instance such as this the only thing to do is stop and walk away for a while and let things settle down, which I did.

But like a character from a Samuel Beckett novel I found myself once again crawling across this desert moaning “I can’t go on”, “I can’t go on.” “I must go on”.

Reading on, I found that just a short distance, page ninety-six to be exact, the raw and unhidden truth began to be revealed. My hopes rose as my fingers gripped the now bludgeoned covers of the book. There it was. After ninety-six pages of fluff and filler, I was getting ready to start the novel.

My excitement was sustained through page one hundred twenty three where the anti-climactic revelation made me stop and look back a page or two to see if I had missed something.

But it didn’t matter. The story was starting and now I would see the magic of this best selling author at his finest.

I turned to page one hundred twenty four and fell, waist deep into the mucus and found that the filler was starting again.

This was not just filler. This was old mattress stuffing from an incontinent geriatrics ward. The author jumped onto my chest and began stuffing it into my mouth and into my nose and under my eyelids all the while screaming, “I am the author and this is my world. Suck it up”

I trudged on through the book while the author threw out misdirection’s to me as if I were a half blind, lame, cur dog whose nose had been run over by a passing truck. By page two hundred twelve I knew who was responsible for the entire plot, (despite the authors clever misdirection’s) and I knew what clever twist was going to give me the thrill that the author was building to.

This is a five hundred thirty-page book. Here I am, less than half way through the book, and the thin plot had been so difficult to maintain that I was already at the end without having to read it. But read on I did, and found that I was right.

What had gone wrong?

That too, was clear.

The author had ninety-eight pages of story, and five hundred pages to fill.

And fill them he did.

Hello! Is there any paper in that stall? It’s empty in here.

Perhaps I should carry a Dan Brown novel around for just such emergencies.

Best regards

Jim Bronaugh

Three Indian Summer

Daily Musings

I was sitting here listening to Mozart’s ‘Requiem’ and playing with my blog, when a song sprang into my head. It was an old Bob Dylan song, one of his early ones and it came from nowhere.

Dylan sang:

While riding on a train going west

I fell asleep for to take my rest

I dreamed a dream that made me sad

Concerning myself, and the first few friends I had.

It is strange/funny how things from your past will all of a sudden spring back into your mind, as if they had lain in hiding, just waiting to come back on you and make you hold on to them one last time.

I read somewhere that old women and young men have the most friends. I think old women are the more fortunate. They are old enough to realize that it will all end some day. Young men feel invulnerable, invincible and eternal. No, in truth, they are just too stupid to realize what they have.

Because we moved so much, my cast of memories includes several groups of friends, but it was the small group that I went to school with between 1960 and 1963 that stick in my mind.

There was Steve Stevens, the half Apache kid who craved the status of normal in school, and was always on the outside. No matter what he did or how hard he worked at it, the others would always bring up the subject of his race and use it to humiliate him. They could do it because he wanted them; but they didn’t want or need him.

His other dream was to go into the Army and learn demolitions. That boy loved to blow things up. We would make black powder bombs out of old fire extinguisher casings and row out on to lake St. Clare and set them off under water. There was always fresh fish in my house during those summers.

Illegal??

You betcha. We never got caught, but we heard things and for that reason alone we quit.

The reason we heard things was because our friend Sonny Crow had been taken under the wing of the High Sheriff of the county we lived in, and gave Sonny a part time job at the jail. Sonny let us know when we were in danger and we were smart enough to know when to quit.

Sonny was half Crow Indian and wanted to make his living as a taxidermist and live in Colorado guiding groups of white men into the wilderness. He would joke about how many he could leave in there and their bodies would never be found.

There was Dick Wigginton. He was the son of the local barfly who was always available for the local men on any Saturday night. I spent a great deal of those three summers I knew him helping him monitor his mom and trying to keep him out of trouble. He was always so angry about everything. It was just assumed that Dick would end up in jail by the time he was twenty-five. His motto was ‘Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse.

Then there was me, a short round kid whose eyes didn’t look in the same direction. I was stuck with a Cherokee name and had to bear the usual snide remarks from the English kids who seemed to need the advantage of not being something else. ‘Google eyed Indian kid’ was the way the Principle of the school referred to me. I was in the orchestra with the principles son who would constantly mock my Texas drawl and crack jokes about which way I was looking.

And Dylan sang:

As easy as it was to tell black from white

It was all that easy to tell wrong from right

We’d be together and the thought never hit

That any of us ever would argue or would split


Steve Stevens died in Vietnam while dismantling land mines

Sonny Crow joined the force as a deputy and eventually became the High Sheriff of the county.

Dick Wigginton earned a PhD. In criminal science and is employed by a Midwestern state as a planner.

And me???

I sit here playing with my blog, with a thousand stories running through my head.