humanizing the character

After yesterday's post examining my quickie rewrite of scene 1 of The Da Vinci Code, I was talking with my mother, who'd read the post, and she was expressing how the character of Robert Langdon needs to be developed more, made to seem more real. To her he doesn't feel like an academic who is passionate about his subject--as presumably he must be in order to have written several books on it, and to have become famously associated with it.

When he is awakened by the ringing phone, she thought, he might even be thinking or have been dreaming about some problem or subject related to his work. Sure, I thought--why not? As a student of symbolism, he might very well get an idea or inspiration from a dream (I thought about the famous story of how the 19th-century German chemist Kekule solved the problem of the structure of benzene by dreaming of a ring of dancing elves, or some such). If Langdon were to awake excited by an idea arising from a dream, he might be eagerly groping for his bedside notepad to scribble it down before he forgets it.

Notice what this would do for his characterization. First, it would show him to be passionate about his field--he's doing it even in his sleep. Second, the problem or image itself could eventually plug in to the mystery of the main plot. A nagging puzzle that he brings into the story could relate to the story puzzle, and get its kickoff here, right at the top. Third, the fact that he might jot down a dream-image before answering a ringing phone at night tells us something powerful about his values: it's a choice he makes, and the choices that characters make are exactly what tell us about their nature--what is interesting about them. This guy is a symbology nerd who puts symbolism ahead of ringing phones.

So that's a good idea. Mom went on to imagine some other possible details, such as whether Langdon might not have his own bathrobe from home instead of using the hotel's silk one. That might be her own preference if she were in the hotel, and giving the character similar preferences helps to humanize him and make him more self-assertive on his environment: he's not just a passive user of stuff provided by others, he brings his own choices along with him. A comfy old bathrobe would be a piece of home you could take with you, and the prof might lounge in it while working at his laptop in the hotel room. Such a Langdon is starting to feel more real to me.

These ideas are things to help with the characterization of Robert Langdon--crucial if he is to be an interesting and believable character. But characterization, defined as the details by which a character manifests him- or herself, is not the highest or first job of character design. What the main character should really have are contradictions in his nature that create conflicts for him. I haven't read the actual novel, but the level of writing suggests to me that Brown does not design his characters at that level of depth. A paradoxical Robert Langdon might be, for instance, an expert student of religious symbolism who was also a passionate atheist. Such a person makes us wonder what makes him tick; it suggests complexity and personal history. He might find himself getting, almost against his will, into heated arguments with clerics and believers, attacking their naive faith even as he knows more about it than they do.

That's just an off-the-cuff example. A well-designed story brings out the contradictions in a character, and leads him to tough choices that put his values to the test. A writer can't even begin the task without a lot of self-knowledge. You need to know what your own contradictions are to be able to get inside someone else and feel theirs.

So my own rewrite was more of a technical exercise; I did not set out to rewrite the book or recreate the character, only to render scene 1 in a way that did not violate my sense of the characters' personhood, if I can put it that way. At the very least I need to be able to sense that I'm reading about people, and not just looking at words printed on a page. The task of deep character means going up the levels of story, getting into it at the level of theme, and that means taking on more and more "story responsibility"--assuming the burden of knowing what the story is ultimately about, why it is worth telling, and how these particular characters are the best for telling it. It's a heavy burden.

Still, it might be tempting to try a rewrite based on that more fully characterized Langdon. On the other hand, aren't I supposed to be doing some writing of my own at some point?

Da Vinci rewrite: postmortem

In the late 70s or early 80s the comedian and talk-show host Dick Cavett, in his autobiography, said that in his comedy career he always found it easy to write material for other comedians but hard to write material for himself. He could write a joke on any topic or theme, and put it in the style of the comedian concerned by getting into the persona of that comedian and letting the joke come out in that person's voice. Cavett gave off-the-cuff examples, "writing" jokes for Jack Benny and Bob Hope, maybe a couple of others. As a writer for Jack Parr on The Tonight Show, he could crack off his week's work in a couple of hours in one day. But when it came to writing material for himself, he agonized. What was his persona?

(I remember one of Cavett's own jokes: "When I was in college I got in some blind dates with some very unattractive girls. On this one date--you've heard of a face that could stop a clock? My date had stopped sundials.")

Well, I've had a faintly similar experience with my little rewrite job on scene 1 of The Da Vinci Code. When it's not your project it's easy to breeze through. One reason, I think, is that the decision to do the project in the first place has already been made; someone has assumed liability for the validity and value of the project. Someone has already answered the question, to his own satisfaction, "why this?" So the material is a given. The rewriter can relax and just play with what's already there.

So for me the rewrite was pure fun, not something I slaved over. I did my "thinking-through" the revision, such as it was, here in my blog, then just sat down and dashed something off yesterday.

By bedtime I had gone over it a couple of times and tweaked it a bit--the way I do with my own material, changing and deleting bits on each read-through. Can't resist. Maybe it would be useful to mention these tweaks, to give an idea of my thinking.

I remember only two (I think that's all there were). The first was down in the paragraph where I had Langdon saying "What's this about? Am I under arrest?" I deleted the first question and just had him ask the second--the one that counts.

The second tweak was in the bottom paragraph, where I had Langdon wonder about his family back in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That bugged me even as I was writing it--the inclusion of "Massachusetts", a purely expository addition, to let the reader know we're talking about the U.S. and not the U.K. It seemed pretty clear that Langdon was an American in any case, although of course he could, theoretically, be teaching at Cambridge in Britain (assuming he wants a pay cut!). But soon he will be talking with a cop, and it would quickly come out that he's a Harvard prof. So I cut "Massachusetts".

Looking over it this morning, the next thing that's bothering me is the way I introduce the character's name. I have nothing against--and everything for--simply giving the name early, as Brown does himself by making Langdon's name the first two words of chapter 1. But in this case I have the concierge addressing him by name in paragraph 5 (which I believe is motivated), so strictly speaking giving his name in paragraph 1 is not necessary: we're getting it twice on the same page. If I were to work it further, I would cut his name from paragraph 1 (using good old he), let his last name come out when the concierge calls, and let his first name be revealed in the interview with the cop. This way, exposition comes in a natural way, from the flow of motivated action--always preferable, even for a seemingly small and obvious thing like getting the name of your character to the reader. Don't get me wrong: I dislike "cute" efforts to conceal the character's name and bring it out in the action; but here I feel that its occurrence is soon enough and natural enough to make it work. Also, by holding back his name, it makes Langdon's sense of disorientation more immediate--maybe he doesn't remember his name at the moment. We're not just watching him, we're experiencing along with him.

Oh--I found another tweak I did. I broke out the sentence "Five sharp raps sounded on his door" into its own paragraph. It's more shocking that way--gives it the prominence it deserves.

Found another: In paragraph 19, "Hold on!" etc., I changed the word said to added for his line "Gotta put some clothes on." This to me gave a little more quality of afterthought to this line, as well as suggesting a quieter, sotto voce quality. It also provided a bit of variety from the workhorse said (although, again, I have nothing against said and usually dislike efforts at "elegant variation" in using other verbs for this one).

Looking over the rewrite now, I see the usual wordiness of a first(ish) draft, and would prune out more if I went through it again. I'm not totally happy with the exchange between Langdon and the concierge--there are a couple of nonsequitur-ish aspects that arose as a result of deleting and rejigging while I was drafting the material. They are subtle, not noticeable to others, perhaps. But part of the goal is to make it so that events and information are happening in a motivated, connected way, so that the right information is being delivered at the right time. Each character is responding to the situation as it has just unfolded to that moment. An example: I moved around Langdon's checking of the time, finally settling on putting it after the concierge's telling him that a policeman wants to speak with him. Notice how this feels natural? "A cop wants to talk with me--what the hell time is it?" The weirdness of the hour is an index of how serious the situation is. It works for me, anyway.

There: some real inner workings of the writer's mind in the act of writing. Speaking for myself, this is fun!

Da Vinci scene 1, take 2

After my critique of the opening scene of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code over the past couple of posts, I have decided to stump up some prose of my own as an alternative. I've just sketched in a rewrite of the first part of the scene, using the principles that I've mentioned in the previous posts.

Curious?

If you want to refresh your mind as to how the real book opens, check this post first.

Here's what I came up with:

A telephone was ringing--tinny, strange. Robert Langdon, dragged from a deep sleep, felt a spike of alarm in the cavelike darkness.

Where the hell am I?

The room was hot and still; he smelled stale cigarette-smoke. Paris. Yes: Hotel Ritz. Relieved to remember where he was, but not liking the dark, he fumbled for the bedside lamp and switched it on, snatching up the telephone handset as he sank back into the massive bed.

"Hello?" he croaked.

"Mr. Langdon? I'm very sorry to disturb you." It was the concierge, the short guy with dyed hair. His English was excellent. "There is a policeman here who wants to speak with you."

"What?" said Langdon. He glanced at the bedside clock: 12:32 A.M.

"I told him to wait until tomorrow, but he says it is urgent."

"What?"

"I don't know what it's about," said the concierge. "He wouldn’t say."

As though searching for an answer, Langdon looked dumbly around the pretentious opulence of his Louis XVI room: its heavy drapes, its frescoed walls.

Five sharp raps sounded on his door.

Langdon jerked involuntarily, an instinct to run away. He remembered stories of how the Gestapo would always show up in the middle of the night. He could see why. His heart thumped, his mind was blank.

"Am I under arrest?" he said.

"Oh no Mr. Langdon," said the concierge, "I don’t think so."

You don't think so? thought Langdon.

"It's very rude of them to disturb a guest at this hour," said the concierge. "We'll be filing a complaint."

Great, thought Langdon, you can keep me posted on that in my jail cell.

There were three more raps at the door.

"Hold on!" said Langdon, now feeling anger. To no one in particular he added, "Gotta put some clothes on." Then, sarcastically, into the phone: "Thanks for calling."

He hung up and swung his legs out of bed. The four-poster, too big for the room, sagged and creaked so much that Louis XVI had probably slept in it himself. No doubt his hosts, the American University in Paris, thought they were treating him well. A surge of adrenaline was making him tremble. Wanting to stop that before he opened the door, he took his time pulling on some underpants and putting on the hotel's monogrammed jacquard bathrobe.

Breathe deeply. Think. What have I done or seen in Paris that could possibly be of interest to the police?

Then another, much worse thought came: what if this was about his family back in Cambridge? Had his son crashed that goddamn motorcycle? Langdon strode to the door, no longer caring whether he trembled or not.

I think that instead of going to a flashback of Langdon's lecture, I would let backstory emerge in his interview with the cop. That seems a natural place for us to find out Langdon's job and what he's doing in Paris, and what he was up to today. Since the reader shares some of the same curiosity as the cop, the writer can use that to answer questions in the reader's mind.

It's not perfect--but I think it's better.

scene 1, continued

A light drizzle falls outside; Kimmie's short Easter-time vacation is over, and she's soon to head back out the door to Mother Corporation. Time also for writers to pick up their tools dropped nine or ten days ago and resume work tunneling through the granite mountain of their project.

But I wanted to finish my thoughts on chapter 1, scene 1 of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. In my last post I looked at how I (not having read the whole novel) might approach the backstory to the scene. That job can be done only provisionally in one's first draft. You won't really know--or be able to know--what your story is truly about until you've finished a draft. Only then can you go into a scene with a knowledge of its real function in your story. Only then can you make sure it has the right things in it, and that the characters are loaded with the right motivations.

So with this work I'm strictly at a first-draft level; I don't yet know anything more about these characters than what I read in the first scene. My ideas and suggestions therefore rest only on that limited basis.

I'd like to look at the writing in a bit more detail. Here's the opening again:

Robert Langdon awoke slowly.

A telephone was ringing in the darkness--a tinny, unfamiliar ring. He fumbled for the bedside lamp and turned it on. Squinting at his surroundings he saw a plush Renaissance bedroom with Louis XVI furniture, hand-frescoed walls, and a colossal mahogany four-poster bed.

Where the hell am I?

The jacquard bathrobe hanging on his bedpost bore the monogram: HOTEL RITZ PARIS.

I've already commented on the opening sentence. Because of its softness, its low impact, and the fact that we don't yet know who Robert Langdon is, I might cut it. I have found that the quickest way to a stronger opening sentence is simply to delete it, and open with your second sentence. This is true not just of fiction, but of almost all works of writing. Often the first sentence is a kind of warmup; the second sentence starts getting to the point. Opening your work that way is much more vigorous. Try it.

Sentence 2: A telephone etc. It's a bit wordy, and also contains an awkward repetition of the word ring.

Sentence 3: He fumbled etc. It's okay: prosaic, purely expositional. One thought I have is that it's not self-evident that one would switch on a lamp in order to answer the phone in bed. Would I, especially if very tired and groggy, hoping to get back to sleep? I might, if I felt some disorientation and anxiety about being in an unfamiliar bed--or plain old fear of the dark.

Sentence 4: Squinting at etc. Hm. I suspect we don't need the word plush, since any "Renaissance" bedroom with a telephone in it is not likely to be a flophouse. We already know it's a bedroom, so that word is not strictly required either. I don't know what Louis XVI furniture looks like--but that's okay. To me it suggests "old, French, and expensive", which fits the bill. Again, "hand-frescoed walls" is redundant, since fresco is the art of painting on wet plaster, and as far as I know there is no machine process for this. As for the colossal mahogany bed, that's certainly expensive-sounding, but I feel a vague doubt that mahogany is Louis XVI, since mahogany is a tropical wood. It might be genuine (colonial forests), or possibly someone made a Louis XVI-style bed out of mahogany, although that seems unlikely: why make expensive period furniture out of nonperiod materials? What would they say on The Antiques Road Show? If the author has seen a Louis XVI mahogany bed, then no problem. Or if the hotel were in Las Vegas instead of Paris, then I would not expect them to care about the authenticity of the furniture. But if I were writing it, I'd play it safe with a European hardwood.

Sentence 5: Where the hell etc. This feels a bit out of sequence for a guy who has already turned on the bedside lamp and looked around. He found the lamp, which must be of different type and location from the one at home. If it were me, I would have thought this before I groped for the lamp. To have such a sustained experience of not knowing where you are is uncanny-feeling and anxiety-provoking. We should see this in the character.

Sentence 6: The jacquard bathrobe etc. It's the bathrobe that answers Langdon's question about where he is. This also feels late. The French Renaissance bedroom is a tipoff he's not in Kansas anymore. Possibly he travels so much, and stays in so many hotels, that he can't bring the name of this one to mind without help. But I suspect that the writer has used this detail as a mere expositional device, to tell the reader where Langdon is. This is bad: the writer has sacrificed character authenticity for a minor bit of exposition. In reality I think Langdon would recall exactly where he is when he switches on the lamp. If he doesn't know at that point, he's in a dissociative state. Sure, he might be a sleepyhead, a non-"morning person" who can't get it together so quickly upon being wakened, but then I think the writing should lead us to that conclusion more definitely. The narrator implies that Langdon is lucid enough to note the Renaissance style of the room, the mahogany of the bed, the jacquard of the bathrobe, while still not knowing where the hell he is. For me it just doesn't add up. I see "expositional device", and that would be enough, probably, to put me as a reader off the whole book. This writer does not see his character as a person--so why should I?

Well then, there's some more detailed criticism of scene 1. Next time, perhaps, Vitols the writer will turn his own hand to rewriting the opening of one of the best-selling novels of all time...

Da Vinci, scene 1

Let's dig deeper into chapter 1, scene 1, of Dan Brown's mighty bestseller, The Da Vinci Code (I picked up Mom's discarded copy at her house yesterday).

In my last post I looked at the first sentence:

Robert Langdon awoke slowly.

Now let's read on from there:

A telephone was ringing in the darkness--a tinny, unfamiliar ring. He fumbled for the bedside lamp and turned it on. Squinting at his surroundings he saw a plush Renaissance bedroom with Louis XVI furniture, hand-frescoed walls, and a colossal mahogany four-poster bed.

Where the hell am I?

The jacquard bathrobe hanging on his bedpost bore the monogram: HOTEL RITZ PARIS.

Slowly, the fog began to lift.

Langdon picked up the receiver. "Hello?"

"Monsieur Langdon?" a man's voice said. "I hope I have not awoken you?"

Dazed, Langdon looked at the bedside clock. It was 12:32 A.M. He had been asleep only an hour, but he felt like the dead.

"This is the concierge, monsieur. I apologize for this intrusion, but you have a visitor. He insists it is urgent."

Langdon still felt fuzzy. A visitor? His eyes focused now on a crumpled flyer on his bedside table.

THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF PARIS
proudly presents
an evening with Robert Langdon
Professor of Religious Symbology,
Harvard University

Langdon groaned. Tonight's lecture--a slide show about pagan symbolism hidden in the stones of Chartres Cathedral--had probably ruffled some conservative feathers in the audience. Most likely, some religious scholar had trailed him home to pick a fight.

"I'm sorry," Langdon said, "but I'm very tired and--"

"Mais, monsieur," the concierge pressed, lowering his voice to an urgent whisper. "Your guest is an important man."

Langdon had little doubt. His books on religious paintings and cult symbology had made him a reluctant celebrity in the art world, and last year Langdon's visibility had increased a hundredfold after his involvement in a widely publicized incident at the Vatican. Since then, the stream of self-important historians and art buffs arriving at his door had seemed never-ending.

"If you would be so kind," Langdon said, doing his best to remain polite, "could you take the man's name and number, and tell him I'll try to call him before I leave Paris on Tuesday? Thank you." He hung up before the concierge could protest.

That takes us to the end of the first scene, just before Langdon starts reminiscing about the past year and the past day. After the flashback scene, we return to Langdon's hotel room, and a pounding on his door by what turns out to be a police officer, Lieutenant Jerome Collet of the Direction Centrale Police Judiciaire.

Not having read the book, I can only assess the scene on its own content. The story function of the scene is to rouse the protagonist from his everyday life by having a new problem impinge on him. In that sense, it's exactly the right place to start: right as the story launches. The scene conflict is between the concierge, who is trying to prepare Langdon for the arrival of the cop, and Langdon, who doesn't want to be disturbed.

That conflict idea, while okay, feels a bit underpowered, considering who the players are in the scene. Since the police are here as part of what appears to be an investigation (a man linked to Langdon has apparently committed suicide), I expect they have the legal power to question Langdon if they want to--that is, they don't need his permission. In any case, scene 3 starts with the cop pounding on Langdon's door, so his effort to put off the concierge looks and is ineffectual.

The concierge's behavior and dialogue are, to me, not very plausible. His opening remark that he hopes he has not awoken Langdon seems weak and insincere. He's waking Langdon because the cops are making him wake Langdon--it's not his fault, it's theirs, and if I were the concierge I would make sure Langdon understood that up front. Instead we have a concierge who is strangely mysterious about who is visiting. He seems overawed by the policeman and refers to him cryptically, in an urgent whisper, as "an important man." Huh?

In my opinion, it appears that the backstory to this scene was not worked out. The writer did not think through the motivations, backgrounds, and actions of the characters involved. If I were writing the scene, I might start by imagining my concierge. He is probably on the same floor as Langdon, attending to the guests on that floor, he works at a posh hotel, and is very probably a snob, used to seeing famous people come and go, and helping them with various personal matters. He's probably territorial about protecting the privacy of his guests, and would resent a cop coming up and using the law to override his authority here. To him the cop is not an "important man"--his guests are important men: Bill Gates, Vladimir Putin, Justin Timberlake. This is just some cop throwing his weight around. The people tipping him--and tipping big--don't want to be bugged, least of all at 12:32 a.m. His job is to get rid of pesky, officious plebs like the cop.

Therefore, in my backstory, I imagine that the concierge has already fought the first battle with the cop--and lost. He would certainly make it plain to Langdon that any inconvenience and annoyance are 100% the fault of the cop, that he did his best to prevent this rude intrusion. He might not do this in a crude, obvious way, but that would be his attitude, and it would color his dialogue. If the concierge has no further role in the story, that will probably be enough for him: he will have enough color and attitude for a good minor character.

Langdon himself, as the protagonist, needs lots of attitude as well. He shouldn't merely be a generic professor who's peevish about some of the effects of becoming famous. He should have passions, issues, problems--things on his mind while his career carries on. If he's being woken up, why not use the opportunity to learn more about him? What if he were waking from a dream about his wife, who has recently divorced him? How about waking to the memory that he's just been diagnosed with heart disease? Something to start suggesting a person and not just a name and a job.

For the purposes of this scene, I would want to figure out how Langdon feels about being in France--does he come here a lot? Can he speak French? Does he travel well, or is it a chore--does he miss his home? If he doesn't speak French, does he notice the attitude of the local French people toward him regarding this fact? (I recall being in Paris and watching an American traveler approach an information table staffed by a young woman. The traveler simply started talking in English. The woman responded in excellent English, but she was coolly polite. When I approached I first asked, in French, permission to speak English, and got a much warmer reception.) The concierge may be subtly patronizing toward those who do not speak French. How observant is Langdon? Is he used to staying in posh hotels? How does he feel about it? I would want to know these things--and show them--if I were writing the scene.

All these questions and issues form part of the backstory of the scene--the story before the story. The writer needs to know what attitude each character has toward each of the other characters in a scene. The concierge, to the cop, might be arrogant, resentful, and minimally compliant. To Langdon he might be ingratiating, self-justifying, and subtly patronizing. The cop might be self-assured and ironic with the concierge, and to Langdon be polite, apologetic, and slightly intimidating.

You get the idea. I'll have more to say on this scene--but that's enough for today.

an opening sentence--in depth

Last Thursday, when I went to visit my mother for lunch, she had a bag of books resting in the front hall, ready to be taken off to a thrift store for charitable resale. The top book in the bag was the paperback version of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. Never having read the book, I picked it up to have a look.

Of course I'm aware that The Da Vinci Code is one of the best-selling books of all time (I recall a figure of 40 million copies sold). It alone will have made its author a multi-millionaire. It didn't even appear in paperback until the release of the movie version last year, so the book will have been a particularly rich source of revenue for Dan Brown.

Good for him: I salute anyone who can do well at writing. I also think he did not deserve to be sued by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, a key source of ideas for The Da Vinci Code. Unless The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was intended as a work of fiction, they were wrong to sue him, and I'm glad he won.

I have undergone a fair amount of angst ever since I heard about The Da Vinci Code, since I am making use of many of the same ideas (I think) in my own work; I too was inspired and fascinated by The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, and felt a huge uprushing of creative energy when I read it in 1994. The fact that Dan Brown "got there first" and hit such incredible pay-dirt with this material I found troubling and dispiriting. Partly for that reason, I didn't want to read or even look at The Da Vinci Code until I had finished my own book.

While Mom heated up some homemade beef soup for us to eat, I perused the opening scene of chapter 1 and we talked about the book (Mom herself could not get into it, and bailed after the first few chapters). I thought I would express some of my findings here in my blog.

First: the novel opens with a dramatic prologue--a device I generally frown on, as I have pointed out in previous posts (such as this one). Usually a dramatic (as opposed to expository) prologue is a "grabber" intended to hook the interest of the reader, who otherwise might find the story starting at chapter 1 to be too boring. Typically it contains a murder scene or other shocking or surprising element, and is intended to make the reader wonder more about the world of the story. The bad thing here is that the writer is himself sending the signal that he's afraid his story opens in a boring way. The writer thinks the story is boring--not good. Following my usual policy in assessing a novel, I skipped the prologue. I understand there is some kind of albino geek in the book who kills people, and I expect the prologue contains the first of those killings.

On to chapter 1 proper, then. I don't have the book in front of me (got to pick it up from Mom's place), so I can only quote the first sentence verbatim:

Robert Langdon awoke slowly.

I'll start with that. I'll go into some detail, because I think first sentences are important--I often use them to decide whether I want to read on.

Overall, I think it's a fairly weak first sentence. Not terrible, perhaps, but not great. It tells us four things: that there is a character called Robert Langdon; that he was asleep; that he is now waking up; and that he is waking up slowly, as opposed to quickly. In storytelling terms, let's see what this does for us.

Robert Langdon: Character names are important. This is a fairly bland, Anglo name--no crime in itself; there are no doubt many Robert Langdons in the world living worthwhile lives. But it doesn't give us as much of a sense of character as might a less colorless name. How might you feel if the book had opened with

Myron Berkowitz awoke slowly ?

or

Oliver Mbehele awoke slowly ?

or

Luz Fernandez awoke slowly ?

Differently, no? Of course, we don't know anything about these characters either, but they provoke us into imagining backgrounds for them a bit more--we have the beginnings of expectations about them, expectations that may well be defeated by the story, but that will create subtle tensions within us, tensions that are, in my view, synonymous with interest. Robert Langdon right off the bat has a harder job in getting us to imagine him as vivid and real. Is he a banker? A blue-collar worker? A drug dealer? No way of knowing as yet. He's a blank slate.

Next: awoke. That's okay--awoke is a perfectly fine verb. It tells us he was sleeping, an activity we can all relate with. We're willing to extend the narrator credit that the fact Langdon was sleeping may be important for some reason.

then: slowly. Hm. Why modify the verb awoke here? Presumably it matters that he awoke slowly as opposed to quickly or "normally". To me it suggests deep unconsciousness, or perhaps the gentleness of the stimulus that awakens him. I might be awoken slowly by a soft breeze starting to move through my Mexican beach cabana, for instance. Or I might awaken slowly after taking sleeping pills, or being knocked unconscious.

It will turn out that Langdon was indeed deeply asleep in a Paris hotel room, tired from giving a lecture earlier on. But I don't find that this opening sentence tells me much of use or interest about the scene. It is utilitarian; I get the feeling that it is simply something to communicate the name of the main character. The transition from sleep to waking is symbolically powerful, and could be heavily charged. Another (very different) novel that opens with a character waking up--or rather with the dream from which he awakes--is Gravity's Rainbow, which opens famously thus:

A screaming comes across the sky.

When I first read this I wasn't sure what it meant, but I did get a sense of uncanniness and danger--a bit of the dread of having a bomb or missile approach. It's certainly not bland, and too poetic to be a run-of-the-mill "grabber" or "shocker" opening, although it does have shock value. The unusual use of the gerund screaming signals that this writer is a poet who is willing to try things to achieve his effects. It establishes the subject-matter of the book: the development of the German V2 rockets in World War Two, as well as the important theme that these weapons, which live on in the form of the giant nuclear arsenals of today, are aimed at us all right now. Thomas Pynchon has opened his novel by launching a ballistic missile right at us. At six words, his opening sentence is 50% longer than Brown's, but two of those words are a and the--function-words that simply hold the rest of the sentence grammatically together. Four words do the main duty: screaming comes across sky (the way a Russian might say it).

You might say it's no fair to compare Dan Brown to Thomas Pynchon, and sure, it isn't. But a sentence can do a lot of duty for your story, or not, whether you're writing a smaller novel (and arguably Brown's novel is hunting even bigger thematic game, in a sense, than Pynchon's) or a major work.

Of course, to do a proper assessment of the first sentence we need to look at its context: what comes after it. But that will have to wait until I get my hands on a copy of the book again!