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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 2378342" data-attributes="member: 5171">I read the Da Vinci Code. I was annoyed most of the time, but I'd paid for it, and I was stubborn, and it's been on the bestseller list for a couple years now. If I'm going to get over my snobbishness and admit that deep inside, I'd love to write something that was not only well-liked by critics but a big heaping barn-burner of a commercial success, it seems only fair to try to figure it out. Here's what hit me as I read it:- Most non-SF readers are really surprised when they read fiction whose biggest commodity is ideas. The book contained very little that my father-in-law, a minister, hadn't learned in his first year of theology -- and most of that little was, well, the parts that Brown made up. Most SF people I've talked with seemed to be unwowed by it, but the people who read it as regular thriller or mystery readers seemed to be blown away by the sheer scope of the ideas. Moral for me: Out-there ideas will impress non-SF readers, but aren't going to impress the average SF reader. (I might differentiate between fantasy and SF here, since SF sells itself as the literature of ideas, and I don't think fantasy has that opinion of itself -- so when a fantasy novel with lots of new-to-the-reader ideas comes along, it's still pretty wild for the average fantasy reader (I'm thinking of Perdido Street Station, which wasn't to my taste but did have a lot of original ideas flying through it.))- Most readers apprently don't care if the author uses cheap tricks on them. Man, the times I howled when Brown pulled an infodump in the middle of a chase scene. Or when he had someone infodump by remembering a class he'd taught, complete with dialogue from his students at the time. Or when he tried to build suspense by violating viewpoint rules, having characters whose heads we were inside allude to things interminably without ever actually telling the reader what it was they were thinking about. That stuff grated on me in a big way, but evidently, the average reader either doesn't notice or doesn't care.- New ideas are better than a new plot. For all its new ideas, the Da Vinci Code is a stereotypical thriller in terms of its plot and characters. In fact, it's a pretty lazy thriller by those standards. If I get a bug up my ass to be original and not cater to cliches, the place to do it is in general world ideas, not in the plot (unless I am taken by the muse and absolutely absolutely must), because the readers seem more comfortable with a story that has the trappings of new ideas but a pretty vanilla plot once those trappings are taken away than they do with a story that has a non-normal plot and no trappings of weirdness.(I'm not making sense on that last one, I think. By "vanilla plots", I mean that in a mystery novel, generally speaking, the protagonist finds out about a crime, spends time hunting down clues, has false leads or suspects that create some internal character conflict, and eventually finds out who did it -- either proving the innocence of the person close to the protaonist suspected in a happy mystery, or proving that the person close to the protagonist was the culprit, or responsible for some unpleasant red herring in a more tragic or psychologically harrowing mystery. If I decided to be original by having the protagonist not solve the mystery in the end, that would most likely come back to bite me in the butt unless I did the bestest job ever. If I wrote a romance novel, I'd better not have the heroine end up in a dysfunctional, quasi-abusive relationship just for the sake of realism and a twist ending.)</blockquote>

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