Today is has been a good day for the novel. The beginning is a lot stronger than it has been since I started this third draft. It is becoming more and more clear that this novel is very, very ambitious relative to my actual storytelling ability. There was just too much going on at first.
But now I’ve fixed that problem by staggering major developments in the story to the point that things slowly come to a boil at the end of the first act. I’m very pleased. I’ve also realized that I can’t just keep using my ad hoc, arbitrary rules derived from attempting to reverse engineer Stieg Larsson. I have to be willing to do what serves the purposes of telling a good story.
So, things are going pretty well. The story still has some pretty risky elements to it, given that I’m a smelly CIS white male who some people within the “woke cancel culture mob” believe doesn’t have the right to tell any story, much less a story about a “sex worker who solves a mystery.”
But, you know, lulz, slings and arrows and all that.
I hope to methodically write a few thousand words during the course of the day. I can’t keep spinning my wheels forever. Once I establish the first few chapters, things should move really, really, fast.
One of my big fears as an aspiring novelist is that somehow, someway, the conceit of my novel will somehow be rendered moot by someone’s independent idea. Well, apparently there is a new Amazon series will be set in the Stieg Larsson Millennium series universe.
My homage to that universe is so totally different from what he wrote all those years ago that I don’t THINK there will be a problem. My main fear is what somehow, because form follows function, that even if my novel series is totally and completely different that somehow, someway, something I have come up with will be just close enough in creative proximity that, lulz, I have to scrap what I’ve worked so hard on.
I suppose it’s possible, but at the moment, it’s not probable. It is something to keep an eye on, I suppose. And, if nothing else, it encourages me to throw myself into a second creative track so I can have a back up plan ready incase my absolute worst fears become a reality.
Editor: You have to forgive me, I’m in something of a bad mood.
While I am trying to follow in pop literary footsteps of Stieg Larsson, he had a tendency to write far, far darker than I am inclined to do. And, yet, there is something to be said for being…provocative…in the name of keeping the audience interested and stimulated.
But anytime you start getting into going dark (and spicy) you bump up against the woke cancel culture mob’s rage over denying your female characters “agency.” My response to this is, ok, I get it, and yet, it’s that very lack of agency that keeps people reading because your natural inclination is when something bad happens — especially to a woman — that you feel for them and want to know what happens next.
I suppose only transgender women can write from a female point of view as a (born) male, so, lulz, just by writing ANYTHING from a female point of view as a man is enough to enraged the woke cancel culture mob. As such, I know my vision for this story and that’s what I’m going to, come what may.
I say all of this because the second chapter is going to get dark and spicy. Our heroine goes on a bender because she fears she’s failed in her objective for the first part of the story and, as such, she engages in some self-destructive behavior. She is “saved” by the male romantic lead, so, I suppose she doesn’t have “agency” and I should just give up and stare at the ceiling with the lights off until I decide to become transgender. (Wink.)
Needless to say — fuck that.
I have a really good story on my hands and to tell the story I want to tell, I’m going to have to bend the “your heroine absolutely must always have agency” law that the woke cancel culture mob seems to believe writers have to follow when they’re not plastering their works with “trigger warnings.”
Anyway, I have written the scene summaries for all of the scenes in Chapter 2 that I haven’t written out yet. So, all I have to do now is get wasted, fire up Spotify and get to writing. Writing dark spicy scenes are a real challenge for me because I hate conflict and I’m not thrilled with the idea of putting my characters through hell, but that’s what you have to do tell a great story. Put your characters up a tree then throw rocks at them.
So, that’s what I’m going to do.
I’m either going to write these dark and spicy scenes tonight or sometime early tomorrow morning. I’ve come up with a really interesting series of events that I feel will both engage readers and be provocative enough that they might actually want to finish the Goddamn novel instead of ghosting me when I give the finished second draft to them for the Beta Reader process.
I’m re-writing this first novel AGAIN, and I’m being really, really careful with this scene I’m working on where I describe my female protagonist. It’s so hard. I don’t want to look like either a leering, dirty old man or someone who is so clueless about how women might think about their bodies that female audience members throw the book across the room.
It’s tough. Really tough.
But I have decided to try to read other examples of men describing women — specifically, of course, Stieg Larsson depicting Lisbeth Salander describing herself from her own POV. It is helping, even if I keep being reminded at how much more talented Larsson obviously was than me.
And, yet, I can feel my storytelling and writing ability getting better. Larsson was, after all, a successful Swedish journalist when he wrote the Millennium series. As such, I can only be so hard on myself.
Things are getting so much better with this story overall. Each time I start a new iteration of this first novel, it gets just a little bit better. And there have been many, many versions of this story so far. An embarrassing number.
I just have to keep believing in myself. I have to stay focused.
While I’m quite pleased with where things are with the novel I’m developing and writing, I have to also admit that even at my best I’m not writing as well as my literary hero the late Stieg Larsson.
Stieg Larsson
There seems to be a lot of elements of development that he did that I simply don’t know anything about. Given that I’m approaching the same age he died at — and sold three novels — I feel like the clock is ticking. I need to dramatically improve my writing if I’m going to get this novel (and the five subsequent novels) published before I shuffle off this mortal coil.
Anyway, you can’t edit a blank page, as they say. And my personality, from what I can discern, is very different from Larsson on a number of different levels — I can’t write as dark as he did and I’m not a conspiracy theorist — but I do have my charms.
At least in my own mind.
So, once more unto the breach as they say. The key thing is I have to manage my expectations. I have to accept that for me to get through the various gatekeepers that stand between me and getting traditionally published that a fair amount of luck is involved.
But I really enjoy the process of learning how to tell a story in novel form. I can’t help that it’s taken me as long as it has to get to this point.
It’s interesting how different authors interpret Stieg Larsson’s first three books involving Lisbeth Salander. What I liked about them — and the element I hope to emulate — was the characters.
I really like The Girl Who Played With Fire the best of those first three books because of those three books that make up the Millennium Series, it’s the one book that really reads like a normal novel. The first book is way too slow at times and the last book is just, well, weird. It’s too complex and about conspiracy theories that Larsson obviously believed in.
Anyway.
I continue to pause my writing on the first novel for about a month. It’s a real struggle. Every day since I went on this “pause” I’ve felt the urge to say,”Fuck it,” and read the first draft so I can turn around and start actively working on the novel again. But I know there are plenty of other things I could be doing while I wait to start up again.
I need to do a lot of reading, for one. A whole lot. I’m going to read — or try to read — the latest book in the new series featuring Salander. I’ve read just a few pages and I already taken aback by how different it is in tone from the other books (I tried to read the first post-Larsson written book in the series and…kinda got bored midway through and stopped.)
But I really need to read any and everything I can get my hands on while I pause my writing. And I also need to throw myself into working on development of the other four novels. I need to remember as I do that, of course, to stay flexible. That’s the one thing I’ve learned from all this work over the last few years is don’t grow too attached the specifics of anything in your outline.
Everything should be up for reworking or change as need be.
I read another novel that is trying to do what I want to do — cater to the Larsson audience — and I was again taken back by how different it was from what I expected. Larsson’s work is very much slow-burn in nature. It’s as if the author of the book in question was trying to cherry pick the best bits of the Larsson stuff so he could be more of a hack.
I don’t know. Whatever. I have my own vision and interpolation of what made Larsson’s work great and I’m going with it. The first three novels in this five novel project are DEFINTELY very “me.” They have my sense of humor and aren’t nearly as dark as Larsson’s stuff, which is probably bad. I need to work on making all these novels darker.
I’m just daydreaming here, but I often find myself thinking about the marketing of these five novels and how that should change the novels themselves. One issue is, as it stands, the Olivia Munn-type character is the protagonist of only two of the novels. Then her son is the protagonist for two novels and then my Lisbeth Salander-type person is the hero of the last book.
This works, at least from a creative standpoint because I see the first three novels as a trilogy and the last two novels as the beginning a new series based around my personal interpolation of the Lisbeth Salander trope.
And, yet, at the heart of these five novels is the relationship between the Olivia Munn-type character and my Lisbeth Salander type character. But I sometimes find myself struggling with how all of this would be marketed. People want a character they know they’re going to come back to once they grow familiar with it and I wonder how marketing would deal with the shift in focus over the course of the series.
I personally think I’m overthinking things. The point is to tell a series of great stories that have an overall theme to them. I can’t get too worked up about the marketing of the stories if I do a good to great job telling the individual stories. And it’s not like people’s favorite character — if she becomes one — will be missing. She’ll still be there, it’s just the focus will be on her son, and, then, later a fucked up woman about Lisbeth Salander’s age in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
Imagine Olivia Munn playing this type of character (to some extent) and that would be the protagonist two novels in this series and the series’ overall heart.
And, I want to be clear, my interpolation of the Lisbeth Salander trope is a variation on a theme. The two characters are dramatically different, to the point that, again, only for marketing purposes might their similarities be enough to highlight.
Anyway, I have a long ways to go before I have to worry about such things in real terms. I have to fucking finish an actual first draft, for Christ’s sake. But every time I get closer to a serious first draft, I get closer to not embarrassing myself.
It’s just taken much, much, much longer than I expected because apparently my storying telling ability sucked a lot more than I realized when I began this process a few years ago.
I’ve reached something of a milestone — I’ve completed something akin to a pretty decent first act of a first draft of an actual, honest-to-God thriller novel in the tradition of Stieg Larsson.
This is the point where I sheepishly admit that I have about 50 scenes for this first act, which is way too long if each scene is about 1,000 words. Your novel is supposed to be 25% first act 50% second act and 25% third act. If I held to that, I would now be looking at a novel with around 200,000 words.
There are a few solutions, given that the sweetspot for someone in my situation is 80,000 to 120,000 words. One is, the individual scenes aren’t all 1,000 words, but only average 1,000 words. The other is, the rest of the novel isn’t strictly setup the way it’s “supposed” to be and so it’s more like 40%, 40%, 20%. That’s not too bad. But right now, I’m looking at just about 80 scenes for the Second Act so…I got a problem.
Another way to look at this is, I’m just working on a first draft. I can always hack away at things when I work on the second draft. I’d rather have too much than too little copy going into the second draft so, lulz.
As I keep saying, this is the first novel in what is planned to be a five novel (3 + 2) series, with the last two novels hopefully starting an open ended series with my own interpolation of the Lisbeth Salander trope.
At least, that’s the dream.
But I still have a huge amount of work to do. As such, I’ve decided to switch gears for about a week and concentrate on doing a lot of the reading that I’ve not done since I started this project. The second act is where the police procedural element of the novel comes to the fore and I have to figure out how to at least not to embarrass myself.
So, throwing myself into reading it is. There is so much reading I have neglected. Giving myself a sold week of just reading should not only inform things going forward but also refresh me so when I throw myself back into the novel I’ll see things with clear eyes again.
It sure would help if I had a muse, or a girlfriend or a wife.
According to Star Wars lore, Obi Wan Kenobi was killed off in the original Star Wars movie because, lulz, George Lucas had nothing left for him to do. I find myself in a similar situation.
I have — out of desperation — shoehorned myself as a character into the first novel in what is meant to be a five novel series. Things are going really, really, well.
But for one thing — after the first book, I have nothing for my proxy me to do. So, I’m killing the character off before the end of the first book. In short — I plan on killing off the protagonist of my first novel off in mid-story. Or, not really mid-story — his murder will be about as strategic as I can get — but he won’t make it to the end of the novel’s plot.
Now, in the context of five novels it makes total sense — if you read all five novels then, obviously, his death is the emotional hand off to the real “heart” of the story, the woman who loves my interpolation of the Lisbeth Salander trope. But if you were to just read the first novel you might be taken aback that I killed off the hero of the story.
So, yes, it’s risky. But I hope that given that it is obvious that there are TWO heroes to the story that if I kill off one of them, people will be upset…and interested in where the story goes after that point.
Anyway. I’m sure I’m breaking like three or four fundimental rules of novel storytelling by doing such a thing, but fuck you. There is no revealed truth as to how to write a novel or a screenplay or TV — the point is to tell a great story and to entertain the audience.
I don’t know what else will happen, but that’s my goal.
I may have written about this before, but let me recapitulate how I got myself into a situation where I see this is a five book project. It all started several years ago when I was full of a white of rage over Trumplandia. A number of different things were going on at the same time.
I first wanted to write a huge scifi novel series. It was going to be epic. All my anger about Trumplandia would be shown in subtext of this sprawling scifi epic. And then I hit a wall — realized I just did not know enough about geopolitics to properly do what I wanted to do.
So I scrapped the concept.
But I still wanted to rant via subtext about much I fucking hated the rise of Trumplandia, so I turned to the work of Stieg Larsson. Not only was he older when he got published, but there was one specific book of his — The Girl Who Played With Fire — that I loved so much that I could read over and over again with no problem.
So, I decided to write a novel about a strange little Southern town that would, in its political geography, allow me to explore an allegory about how much I fucking hate Trumplandia. Everything was going great until I realize the story was too big — I split the novel into two, with the first novel ending in a cliffhanger.
Again, everything was going great. I was figuring out how to lay out this universe, thinking that Trump would, through hook or through crook brazenly steal the 2020 election and everyone who read it would be like, “Ahh, of course! This is about the modern dystopian hellscape that is autocratic America.”
And then Trump choked and prove himself too big a fucking lazy moron to do what I — and a lot of other people — assume he would do.
When Biden became POTUS, I realized I had a problem. I felt uncomfortable ranting about Trumplandia when Trumplandia didn’t exist. It then occurred to me that maybe I could root around in the backstory of how my strange little town came to be.
Over the course of an afternoon, I realize I had two solid concepts that would lay out exactly how things grew so strange in my small Southern town. And THEN, after much struggle, I realized that I needed to split the first book into two. This solved a problem — I hated having four, not five, novels — and it also allowed me to really concentrate on the particulars of the ur event that started the town’s drift towards being an allegory for Trumplandia in the first place.
My literary hero, Stieg Larsson.
So, now I have five novels to write. I’m a little concerned as to the logistics of doing such a thing, but I can learn. I’m very pleased with how things are working out.
Now I have a multigenerational saga about a baby that grows up to be a very Lisbeth Salander-type person. She’s the thing that everyone wants a piece of. And, at the same time, the overall story is greatly influenced by Mare of Easttown in the sense that an older woman is the the “heart” of the five novels. In my instance, of course, that “older woman” happens to look a lot like Olivia Munn.
Anyway. I’m writing novels not screenplays. So, lulz, it may turn out that all of this is a fool’s errand. But to date all I’ve done with my life is start a failed monthly magazine for expats in Seoul. I believe I can pull another rabbit out of my hat and top that in a big way by writing five engaging novels that are also a seering take down (via subtext) of the bonkers insanity that is Trumplandia.
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