by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Today is crucial because, in a sense, it’s a new era in the novel’s development. I’m going to try to wrap up the scene summary on a scene-level ASAP. No later than my birthday in late February. But this could be a pretty rocky point in the year for me for a number of reasons and everything could be thrown out of whack in an rather dramatic and unexpected manner.
Or not.
One thing I’ve noticed about Stieg Larsson’s first book, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is that the first 132 pages or so are dead boring. Once you get past that point, however, the rest of the series is a lot of fun and zooms past at lightening speed, much to the detriment of your sleep schedule. I don’t know what happened at that point in the writing of that first novel, but something changed. My guess is he wrote and re-wrote those pages over the years to such an extent that it completely drained the work of any entertainment value. He came back to what he had written at some point with fresh eyes and simply used what he had when things started to work far, far better.
But that could be complete bullshit. Who knows.
That’s unlikely to happen to me because I’m doing so much development instead of “just writing” as so many people want me to do. I think if you were to study the structure of the completed novel — whenever that happens — you will definitely see how much work I put into the first act. I’ve obsessed over the first 20 scenes so much that there is an exacting sequence of events that get us to the inciting incident.
Anyway. I have no idea what I’m doing and I haven’t even really started writing seriously on the first-but-really-second draft yet. I have no idea how successful any of this is going to be because, well, I’m doing it in a complete vacuum.