Hemingway vs. Brown (no, not a Supreme Court case)
I just had a revelation: school is a lot like religion, you put a lot of effort into making the same old stuff relevant for another day. But this statement I can relate to literature (or anything else I’m willing to devote a brain cell or two towards, because it is a very good revelation). We’ve read the same books for hundreds or thousands of years, case in point, the Bible. It and other old works have dozens of translators and countless interpretations. The King James version differs greatly from the Catholic contemporary version. Most Shakespeare scholastic editions vary somewhat from each other and contain abundant footnotes, indeed, the editions of Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, and Macbeth had the play on one side of the page and a full page of notes facing the play’s text. Interpretations of Shakespeare run from a Leonardo DiCaprio? movie to a Jane Smiley King Lear ripoff.
For this exercise, I shall pit Dan Brown against Ernest Hemingway. Not very fair, is it? Let’s see how high sales compare to lasting literary talent.
| P 123 | The Sun Also Rises | Deception Point |
| Lines of dialogue | 31 | 6 |
| Passive verbs | 3 | 3 |
| adjectives | 0 | 10 |
| Dialogue tags | 15 | 6 |
| (differing) | 3 | 5 |
| adverbs | 1 | 3 |
| P 109 | Hemingway | Brown |
| Lines of dialogue | 29 | 9 |
| Passive verbs | 2 | 3 |
| adjectives | 0 | 6 |
| Dialogue tags | 3 | 6 |
| (differing) | 2 | 5 |
| adverbs | 0 | 1 |
Of course, this is a highly simplified way to compare the two. Hemingway is known for his short, rapid-fire dialogue and newspaperman simplicity (having been a newspaperman and all) and Brown’s work is replete with cackling villains and conspiracy theories. Also, for some reason, his characters think in italics and clarify the acronyms of obscure government agencies for themselves. All that’s missing is a moustache-twirling villain with a fluffy white cat.
Dialogue.
As I said before, Hemingway is famous for his style, though he would probably fail literary agent Noah Lukeman’s first flip-through test, according to several chapters of The First Five Pages. Hemingway typically uses a single dialogue tag: “said.” Nothing wrong with that. But he doesn’t use it very often, lending to occasional confusion over who’s speaking, a topic covered in an entire Lukeman chapter (108-15). At least he’s not charged with being totally fake, according to chapter 8 of Lukeman ( 91-100), what with characters telling each other everything the other already knows, apparently for the benefit of the reader but only coming off as muddling the story.
Brown’s excessive use of dialogue tags also poses a problem. They are tacky and trip up the reader. A hallmark of strong dialogue is that it is able to stand on its own, that the reader is able to deduce the character’s emotion from the word choice. A tag placed within the sentence can indicate a pause, eliminating the need for even tackier italic font. A goal of dialogue should be to make it sound natural – people don’t speak in font variations.
Passive verbs.
While not a real problem in either text, passive verbs still deserve a mention. Long the bane of the beginning newspaperman, passive verbs make for horrible leads and even worse headlines. Lukeman mentioned that newspaper writers switching over to fiction fall prey to newspapery quoting; other aspects of newspapery language can also apply.
The Sun Also Rises is largely composed of dialogue, leaving little room for verbs. Hemingway gets a pass. Brown has a bigger problem:
Adverbs and adjectives.
There’s nothing wrong with descriptive language. There is, however, everything wrong with flowery description, especially in a conspiracy-thriller. One does not “practically choke on a croissant.” (Brown 5). First off, in other news she’s eating a croissant; a poorly placed first reference of such an action. In that paragraph’s context she might have “snorted in disbelief muffled by the croissant in her mouth.” And for the record, the first two pages of the novel are mostly spent describing the physical characteristics of this particular character, an intelligence officer, clocking in nearly fifty descriptors. And the edition I used is a mass market paperback!
Meanwhile, Hemingway is nothing if not terse. I suppose years of having a word count and a deadline to stick to does that. More newspapermen should become novelists.
