by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
There is a lot I don’t know about how other people develop and write novels. And, as such, I need to read other works other than just one novel over and over again. But the novel I continue, despite everything, to use as my “textbook” is Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire.
Even though I continue to feel as though there is something — maybe a lot of something — that I’m missing as to how Larsson wrote his novels, his writing is at least at the far end of my ability. In other words, I can only reverse engineer what he did so much. There comes a point where my own innate ability — or lack thereof — determines what the end product looks like.
But, in general, I’m feeling quite content with what I’ve managed to come up with to date. I’m very much a plotter, rather than “pantser” and I STILL struggle getting this thing done. I know the story back and forth like the back of my hand and things continue to change rather dramatically as I go through and write the scenes out.
And, yet, like I said, I think, I’ve come up with someone pretty cool. If nothing else, I’m not going to embarrass myself. Which was the whole point of this project to begin with — to learn how *I* develop and write novels and to also prove to myself that all those people who think I suck, who won’t take me seriously because I’m a (drunk) kook that, if nothing else, I really can tell a great yarn.
