Gift

[Note: This post has been edited as of 11:56 AM Eastern on 11 Nov to correct a number of small errors and infelicities of expression.]

As I grow older, I find myself reading less and less fiction preferring instead to spend my book-reading time with non-fiction works in the fields of music, theoretical physics, and cosmology, the latter two in works written for laypersons. In fact, since my early thirties, I think the number of works of serious fiction I've read could be counted on the fingers of two hands, and, aside from the Harry Potter books, of genre fiction, none at all (an exception to this last is noted in passing below).

That said, although I've spent much of the past two decades off The Street, so to speak, I've not been living in a cave entirely, and so was aware of the huge publishing success of Dan Brown's 2003 mega-bestseller mystery novel, The Da Vinci Code. Unlike with the mega-bestseller Harry Potter books, however, I wasn't curious or provoked enough to read the thing just to see what all the fuss was about, nor did I bother to see the 2006 Ron Howard movie made from the book.

This past week, TNT telecast the movie, and so I took the opportunity to give it a look-see just to get an idea of what the book was all about. The plot premise was intriguing if a bit farfetched, but the movie, a crashing bore its Hollywood car chases notwithstanding, and that was enough to provoke me into getting hold of the book itself to see just what it was that made it a runaway bestseller, for if the movie was any indication of the book, there was nothing there (as I later discovered, the movie in fact missed or merely brushed past just about everything that made the book even marginally worth reading).

My first — and last — attempt at writing a novel-length work of mystery fiction (the S&F posts recounting the 13-years-ago genesis of which experiment and the recounting of my subsequent years-later experiment at self-publishing are collected here) taught me two things subsequent to the passing away of my first delusional flush of triumph wherein I was convinced I'd written a niche-market hit: 1) writing a work of genre fiction requires an intimate knowledge of and "feel" for the genre in which one is writing which knowledge and feel I foolishly, not to say arrogantly, wrongly imagined I could gain by reading some ten-gazillion novels of the genre within the space of a few months just to get the "formula"; and 2) that I've zero gift for the writing of fiction. In fact, the work I'd written was not so much written as manufactured to formula; the formula I'd wrongly imagined I learned from the reading of those ten-gazillion mystery novels. Excluding a mere handful of exceptions, those ten-gazillion mystery novels also shared one other thing in common beyond their adherence to the conventions of the genre (i.e., the "formula"): their prose writing was, shall we say, less than stellar. And so when I began reading The Da Vinci Code, I was prepared for less than stellar prose writing notwithstanding that the novel was a runaway bestseller. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for what I found.

There's hardly a page of The Da Vinci Code that does not induce multiple cringes at the execrable prose writing; writing so execrable it's almost beyond tolerance. Excluding from consideration the efforts of my own good self, I don't believe I've ever read a work of fiction, even mystery fiction, that could equal or surpass it in badness. And yet — and this, for me, is the real mystery — I kept on turning the pages!

Why? The characters are two-dimensional jokes; the incidents, contrived; and the plot, while inherently intriguing, is not much more so than the plots of a number of mystery novels I'd read previously in my above noted several-months mystery novel reading marathon. True, the expansion and embellishment of the quasi- or pseudo-historical basis of the inherently intriguing plot of The Da Vinci Code gave that plot a certain frisson not otherwise attainable. But still....

So, what's the answer; the explanation of the mystery of what it was that made me continue to turn the pages of this execrably written work of mystery fiction? I confess, I'm not really sure. What I'm certain of, however, is that no matter how deficient a writer of prose Dan Brown may be (or, rather, clearly is), he possesses a gift — i.e., that which cannot be acquired, but must be inborn — for the plotting and spinning out of a mystery narrative absent which gift even the best of fiction prose stylists would be helpless to write an effective novel of the genre. Further proof, if any were still needed, that writers and artists of all sorts, like idiots, are born, not made.

Students (and instructors) engaged in so-called "creative writing" courses, take note.