You suddenly say: ‘I didn’t even spell that right.’ You become the guy trying to swing the baseball bat who’s thinking of how to move the muscles and you’re crippled. You type a sentence and say: ‘Wait a minute, how many millions of people are going to read that?’ And you read it again and see the word ‘there’. Published in 2003, it became one of the bestselling novels of all time and was turned into a film directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks.ĭoes success like that become a burden? “I definitely had a number of weeks when I became self-aware.
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But then he came up with The Da Vinci Code – in which Harvard code specialist Robert Langdon discovers a series of cryptic clues in the works of Leonardo – and thought it the exact book he would like to read millions agreed. His early books made little impact and he began to question whether he could make a career of it. I took a year and educated myself, which was part of the fun.” I wrote a book called Deception Point about glaciology and Nasa. So he came up with a solution: “Write what I want to know. A teacher told him: “Write what you know” when he was 16 and didn’t know much. He found that the classic lessons for budding authors – write with passion, keep your focus, show don’t tell – are all true but not especially helpful. Writing fiction was a hobby and a hinterland. Teaching was one of Brown’s first jobs he still looks the part in blue jacket, sweater and open-collared shirt. His parents were both in education: his father even went to the White House to pick up an award from George HW Bush. Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon in Angels & Demons. If they had a perfectly healthy boat and some big engines, they could just outrun the shark and the book’s over.
The ocean’s their crucible: they can’t go anywhere, they have to deal with the problem. If you look at the end of Jaws, you’ve got these people sinking on a boat and a shark’s coming toward them.
If they met in a town and there’s no husband coming back, and there’s no ticking clock, it’s not an interesting book.”Īnd the crucible? “That’s one of my favourites: this idea of constraining your characters and forcing them to act. Her husband’s coming back in a few days and these two people have got to figure out if they’re going to be together. “The idea of a ticking clock: you go back to even something as gentle as The Bridges of Madison County. The contract is the promises made to the reader that have to be kept, so earn readers’ trust. “These are the elements that not just thrillers have but all stories have,” he explains at his publisher’s offices in New York. Will Robert Langdon find the virus and save the world? Will Ahab catch the whale? Will the Jackal shoot his target?”Īmong his first lessons are the three Cs: the contract, the clock, the crucible. “Build the foundation of your novel with a single brick: make it simple, make it easy to follow. Like parts of a car engine, the key elements of a thriller include a hero, a goal, obstacles that seem to make it impossible and, of course, a moment when the hero conquers the villain. “Every single idea has been done over and over and over,” Brown explains in the film. Ian Fleming’s James Bond, for example, always defuses the bomb and gets the girl. The good news, Brown assures writers staring at a blank page, is that your idea does not have to be startlingly original. His class includes chapters on finding that idea, choosing a location, creating heroes and villains, doing research (but not so much that it’s an excuse to procrastinate), creating suspense, writing dialogue and editing and rewriting. The 54-year-old can’t tell you what idea to have, he says, but hopes to provide a roadmap on how to turn it into a story. Despite the distinctly old-fashioned format – middle-aged white man dispensing wisdom direct to camera – this is Brown’s love letter to the creative process.
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