Cult of Dan Brown: Ready to give up

Certainly The DaVinci Code will be a very tough act to follow. Brown may well have cut short his writing career by playing his high-value cards too early--the aces are on the table now, and even if he comes up with kings and queens for a sequel it will be seen as a failure.

As many writers will tell you, early success--even on a much more modest scale than The DaVinci Code--is one of the worst things that can happen to a writer. Thereafter everything you write gets compared to your early masterpiece, and it's almost always an unfavourable comparison. In large part this is because the original work sparked a pop culture phenomenon by jabbing a lot of people in a sore spot with a sharp stick, and once people lose their sensitivity it doesn't work again unless you allow a long enough period to elapse between attempts--years, usually, and sometimes an entire generation.

It's also often the death of creativity in your career, since your fans all want you to write sequels and don't care much for any new and unrelated works you might want to write. This will be a problem for J.K. Rowling in her post-Potter career. There's enormous pressure (and big money on offer) to return to the characters and worlds that made you famous, even if you've run out of clever things to do with them. It's rare that an author with that degree of success manages to carry that success over to unrelated future works.

The other problem that early success leads to is the desire to keep upping the ante in an attempt to make the next book more thrilling and more controversial than the last. Whatever worked the first time, let's take it up another notch! You can't keep doing this indefinitely, of course, any more than you can keep increasing the tension and suspense in a story without eventually relieving it. Pretty soon Robert Langdon is exposing a conspiracy by lizardmen from Zeta Reticulon--who were naturally behind the events of 9/11, in collusion with a secret cabal of former world leaders, Masons, and the Pope, who've been plotting this since the Roswell crash in 1947! Once the shark has finally been jumped, interest dies off quickly, and usually with some disgust. Better to "leave them wanting more", as the show business adage goes.

On the plus side for Brown, The DaVinci Code has likely set him up for life, financially, so he can retire quietly on a high note. Much as there's reader demand for a sequel, writing an inevitably disappointing follow-up would tarnish his legacy. The more he tries to write at this point, the more The DaVinci Code looks like a fluke--an accidental success that owed less to Brown's writing skills than to its controversial subject matter.

On the other hand, what may be best for Brown--if he still has any interest in pursuing a writing career--is simply to start writing under a new alias for a while. He can even pretend to be one of his own imitators--a writer trying to cash in on The DaVinci Code's success by writing a "better" sequel. That way the pressure is off, and if his new books fail people will merely say, "he's no Dan Brown."

Post Extras: