You know those simple line drawings, usually of women’s heads, that appear in ads toward the back of bubba-magazines, the ones with the big headline: Draw Me? All you have to do is submit your rendering and you’re on the way to a bigtime career in Art.

Dan Brown’s international bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, when you think about it a little bit, is actually a literary version of those old Draw Me ads. Except you don’t have to send anything in. All you have to do to get started on a bigtime career in Literature is read the book, copy his simplistic formula and you’re on your way.

There are two catches:

1. You will have to spend some time in a library doing a bit of research.

2. You’ve got to choose a topic for your novel that is just shocking enough to titillate but not so shocking that it upsets a lot of people.

Apart from that, reading The Da Vinci Code makes it clear that the path to International Literary Stardom and Riches is as easy as, well, copying a drawing at the back of Mechanix Illustrated.

Note especially that, to do this, you do NOT have to be a writer at all.

The Formula
The Formula, actually, has been well-known since the days of Jules Verne but it seems that every generation has to rediscover it for itself.

First you’ll need a few two-dimensional stick figures, called "characters." One of these will be your "hero," another your "heroine." Another will be your hero’s and heroine’s guru—a wise, old person of either sex who provides sage advice and timely tips to keep the plot moving.

Of course you need a bad guy, the badder the better, to balance the pure hearts of your hero, heroine, and guru. Some generations opt for bad guys bent on destruction. Others go for wealth. Still others for power.

Fittingly for this age of theodicy, Dan Brown tweaks his villainy in the direction of divinity-gone-wrong: the church-on-the-rocks approach to religion.

With your puppet-like characters set up and ready to roll, all you need is a MacGuffin. A MacGuffin is an object which normally seems to be whatever it seems to be: a newel post, a chandelier, a painting, whatever. But as your clockwork plot creakingly unfolds, you slowly allow the reader to guess that lo! the MacGuffin is in fact an object containing the key to the Secret of the Universe, or, in the case of The Da Vinci Code, Jesus’s marriage license.

Writing It
Then you start.

Don’t worry about character development. Two-dimensional characters don’t develop.

Don’t worry about natural-sounding dialog. Two-dimensional characters don’t speak naturally. If getting their conversations on paper is a problem, watch a few backlot Tarzan movies from the 1930s, or read a few Hemingway novels. You’ll get the hang of it real fast. You can never go wrong with simple, declarative sentences: subject-verb, subject-verb.

It will help to keep your own interest up as you write if you put your characters in places you’ve either been and liked a lot or in places you’ve never been but would love to visit (an hour or so at the library will provide you with a few convincing local color details). Dan Brown is obviously fond of London and Scotland but really really likes Paris. And of course one of the reasons he’s Dan Brown and rich and famous and you’re not is because he knows that, in spite of everything, Americans really really like Paris too.

Write long. Readers who buy books like these believe size matters.

Above all, be sure you hedge the ending. The sequels that you’ll turn out by the pound will just be more money in the bank.

Avoid sex, and keep the graphic violence to a minimum. Remember that you, like Dan Brown, are basically writing Harry Potter for grown-ups.