Mega-thriller author reveals provenance

In a funny take on a court document submitted by Dan Brown in the ongoing case in British court against his novel Why should I even give the title? You know what I'm talking about, Slate highlights moments in Brown's career, including the Eureka moment when the Amherst-educated east coaster realized literature didn't necessarily have to be, you know, boring:

Brown resolved to become a writer when he read Sidney Sheldon's The Doomsday Conspiracy while vacationing in Tahiti. "Up until this point," he writes, "almost all of my reading had been dictated by my schooling (primarily classics like Faulkner, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, etc.) and I'd read almost no commercial fiction at all since the Hardy Boys as a child." The Sheldon book was a revelation, swift and merciless where Shakespeare, etc., had been slow and cumbersome. "[L]ife seemed to be trying to tell me something," Brown notes, adding, "I began to suspect that maybe I could write a 'thriller' of this type one day."

But first he had to sell his soul to the devil, saying, "I wish to learn of this 'thriller' genre, and also not to put words denoting 'concepts' I look down upon in 'quotation marks.'"

I made that last part up. The item is courtesy Mediabistro's Newsfeed. But notice the false modesty: "I began to suspect that maybe I could write..." Jeez, could you qualify a thought any more? Give me a break, Brown! I'll bet it was more like: "Fuck, I'm wasting my time studying Chaucer -- give me more of this pablum pronto. And someone look up Sidney Sheldon's agent -- this has got to be a fucking gold mine!"

Dan Brown, writers, Eureka moments