Tag: The Girl Who Played With Fire

A Critical Re-Examination of My Novel Writing ‘Textbook’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

When writing a novel, you’ve got to start somewhere, and I started with Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl Who Played With Fire.” But as I grow into my own as a novelist, I find myself mulling how wrong I was about the novel and how maybe I was wrong to use it as my “textbook” in the first place.

The chief issue for me as I march towards the Beta Reader process for my first novel is how self-indulgent all of Larsson’s work is. Just off the top of my head, I could shave off 50,000 words from The Girl Who Played With Fire. There’s just a lot of fat in the novel that doesn’t need to be there.

Get to the point, Stieg!

In fact, I wasted many, many, many days struggling to figure out the structure of my “textbook.” It just made no sense. I could not figure out what the midpoint of the novel was. It was not until much, much later that I learned that — get this — the novel is actually half of a far longer manuscript that was cut into two.

As such, the reason why I couldn’t figure out the structure is the midpoint was actually the end of the novel. NOW the novel’s structure makes sense.

I think the reason why Larsson got away with being so self-indulgent is was not only was he a successful journalist in his native Sweden, but there was a little bit of linguistic nationalism going on — the publisher probably was willing to publish the novel because it would contribute to the the Swedish language and, more broadly, Swedish culture.

It was not until much, much later that I realized that as an American writing in English that I had a tight 80,000 to 100,000 sweetspot that I needed to hone to. I still as of yet don’t know if I’m going to succeed in doing that. I think it’s possible I may closer to the general 120,000 – 140,000 word range.

I hope not, but it’s possible.

Anyway, I’m, in general, feeling pretty good about the status of my first novel. I still have a great deal of work to do, but it’s at least possible that I will succeed in wrapping up the public Beta no later than July 4th.

Mulling Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Series & What Drew Audiences To It

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

Why 5 Novels?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

I really fucking hate the MAGA New Right.

These Five Novels Will Have A Lot of Heart


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve been doing a lot of writing today and I’m very pleased with what I’ve managed to come up with. These first few novels, as I keep saying, will have a lot to owe to Mare of Easttown. Even I am taken aback by how female-friendly from an audience perspective these novels may be. Or not. What the fuck do I know. I’m a middle aged white CIS male who should be neither seen nor heard.

But here we are, with me being my usual bonkers crank self, pontificating on shit I shouldn’t.

I’m working on the assumption that if I should actually manage to write the “break out” novel — which, in itself would be a miracle — that I will be canceled at some point soon after because my well documented views don’t always follow the media narrative. I believe what I believe and if you don’t like it, then fuck you. Wink.

But, like I said, I am pleased with how much heart these novels have. How much they at least try to accommodate the needs of the female audience. One thing I’m taken aback by is how this first novel is far, far more Mare of Easttown than the book that started all of this, The Girl Who Played With Fire.

At the moment, it really won’t be until the last two novels I’m working on, when we start what will hopefully be an open-ended thriller series, that the direct homage to Stieg Larsson’s work becomes obvious. But I have to make clear — I’m simply not as dark a write, by nature, as Larsson. I have used The Girl Who Played With Fire as my “textbook,” but it’s a real struggle for me to be as dark and serious as Larsson in, say, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Anyway. I’m going to throw myself into writing, reading and development this weekend. That, at least, is the plan.

Fuck this fucking storytelling “test.”

Wow. I’m Actually Working On A Second Draft Of This First Book


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

For the first time for this massive project I’ve been working on for about four years now, I’m finally — finally — working on a solid second draft. I think a number of things have contributed to this being possible.

The man, the myth, the late Stieg Larsson.

The first is I’ve made this second draft as tight as possible chronologically. Second, this story is far more Mare of Easttown than it is The Girl Who Played With Fire, so I’m dealing with something I’m pretty good at — detailing the human condition — rather than having to live up to the potboiler expectations of Stieg Larsson.

But things are moving fast. I have a pretty stable first chapter now and am going to work on the second chapter today. My first draft was stable enough and good enough (in my opinion) that revisions are going pretty smooth. Unlike previous versions of this process, things haven’t fallen apart the moment I review what I’ve written.

Really leaning into making this first novel a homage to Mare of Easttown.

So, I think I’m well on my way to start querying as part of the fall querying season of 2022. And, as I’ve said, if it gets pushed into the spring season, then I will have several other books in this series finished and I can try to sell them as a series.

Hopefully, however, I won’t drop dead of a widowmaker heart attack like Stieg Larsson. Go, me!

‘Old Brown Thriller Shoe’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

From the beginning of this project, Stieg Larsson’s “Girl Who Played With Fire” has been my textbook. My goal is anyone who has read Stieg Larsson’s three novels will read my work and instantly feel at home. It’s meant to be like putting on an old brown shoe.

Throw in a lot of influence from Mare of Easttown and away we go. I don’t want to challenge the reader with anything too fancy, I just want to spin a great fast-paced yarn. And, yet I also want a lot of character development. I’ve read parts of one novel that wants to do pretty much want I want to do and I found it lacking. It’s author seems to have come away from Larsson’s work with a dramatically different interpretation of what made those first three books so popular. It was way more about the vigilante thriller part of those first three novels rather than the part I liked — what a unique person Salander is.

To me, what makes Lisbeth Salander so interesting is she’s weird, yes, but the case could be made that she would have been a lot more normal but for her upbringing which was pretty fucked up. And I want to write something really fast paced — so fast you stay up all night on a weeknight to finish it — but I also want to present well developed characters that seem like real people.

One thing I find interesting is how using The Girl Who Played With Fire as my “textbook” has caused me to make some decisions that I keep hearing people contradict in books and in conversations. I think what I’m really noticing is there is no reveled truth as to how to write a novel. Everyone writes a novel differently and the point is you tell a story in a coherent, cogent manner that keeps people turning pages — how exactly you do that is very much up in the air.

My interpretation of Lisbeth Salander looks like this.

You’re the master of your own fate when you write a novel. There are plenty of rules of thumb to tell your story in a better, easier to understand manner, but in the end, lulz, do whatever the fuck you want. In the end, the only thing that matters is when a gatekeeper reads your work they like it and understand it enough to be willing to buy it.

That’s it.

In the end, that’s the only hard, fast rule of writing a novel. Everything else is a lulz, in real terms.

As such, these five novels owe almost all their structure from what I’ve been able to discern from The Girl Who Played With Fire, mixed with what makes the most sense to me from all the “how to write a novel” how-to books I’ve read over the last three years.

It just can be annoying sometimes how absolute people — or books — can be about how wrong this or that thing that Larsson did, or didn’t do is. But I’m quite please with what I’ve managed to come up with.

Let’s rock.

I’ve Got Lightening In A Bottle With This Thriller Series


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m really struggling with the (new) first book in this four book thriller series I’m working on. But I definitely get the sense that there’s something there. I just have to be willing to put the work in to make this as great a yarn as I know it can be.

But it’s not going to be easy, just as it hasn’t been easy the last several years I’ve been working on writing a novel. I’ve redoubled my studying of Stieg Larsson’s stuff and I noticed something: he doesn’t cover every single solitary day in the chronology of events.

He focuses on one or two important days. I used to think that The Girl Who Played With Fire was the perfect textbook for me to use to write my own novel, and now I realize, on a structural basis, it’s not

It doesn’t really follow the structure I need. So,lulz.

But I do still study it a lot to get some sense of how to write A Novel, just maybe not My Novel.

Things Are Getting Really Good With The Novel’s Development


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m finally just about where I want to be with the novel. At least on a developmental basis. The first act is pretty stable at this point, as is the third act. It’s the second act that I still have some blank spaces left in the outline. But in the next day or so, I hope to rework it to such an extent that I can fill those blanks and start writing with gusto again.

I finally feel like I have laid out the proper structure for the novel. One of the crucial things I had to do was stop following the structure of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire so closely. My story just doesn’t fit its structure. As such, when I finally figured out the story I wanted to tell and how I wanted to tell it, the novel is it’s own thing now, not just overwrought fan fiction.

Once I sort the second act out, things should move a lot faster when it comes to the actual writing. I have a lot of reading to do, still, to flesh out some of the characterizations. I keep punting on reading because I’m nervous I’m going to read something that makes me throw everything out again. I’ve done that so many times — and so often felt like I was spinning my wheels — that it’s very frustrating.

And, yet, the only way to give life to my characters is to do a lot of reading. I hope to at least try to get back into the habit of reading a lot again in the near future. It’s just so difficult to do when my entire life has become consumed with developing and writing this novel.

But, in general, the structure of this novel is really, really strong. My goal is to write a first draft that’s so stable that when I write the second draft all I’ll have to do is just rewrite everything, I won’t really have to mess with the actual structure of the story. You’re supposed to give yourself a month between the first and second drafts and I think I’ll spend that month working on the second book in this two book story.

I wish I could follow in Stieg Larsson’s footsteps (minus the dying of a heart attack, of course) and finish three novels, but that’s just not how it worked out. I have a prequal (or two) already mapped out in my mind, but those would only be written if I manage to sell these two books and they’re popular enough that people want to know what happened before the events they depict.

I keep looking at the outline, even with all the gaps and am quite pleased. It’s taken me about three years to get this point, but I finally see land just over the horizon. I really hope to get to writing again soon.

The Influence Of Stieg Larsson On My Novel


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

If you were to have asked me a decade ago what novel I saw myself writing, I would have said some sort of scifi novel. But here I am, working on a thriller in the style of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I, of course, am actually using his The Girl Who Played With Fire as my “textbook.”

The only reason why this happened is I love The Girl Who Played With Fire so much that I can read it over and over and over and over and over and over and not get bored. The ironic thing is I haven’t even read it all the way through that much. I just read the first 50-100 pages a lot as part of my “study.” Larsson, in some ways, was far more ambitious in his structure than I am.

My novel is going to be a lot more straightforward in its structure. I just don’t know squat about police procedurals and was never that good a journalist, either. So I just have to try to fake it. This is going to be a far more journalistic oriented novel than The Girl Who Played With Fire.

Anyway, I keep being paranoid that the Larsson estate is looking at this blog in alarm for this or that reason. If you are — cool it guys, you have nothing to worry about. While my heroine is meant to be an American Lisbeth Salander, that’s where the similarities stop. I will, however, give myself credit – I’ve come up with a pretty good heroine, if I do say so myself.

I’m sure something will happen to make my dreams of writing a break out thriller moot, but I’m digging the endorphin rush of allowing myself to be delusional for an extended amount of time.

#Writing A #Novel Is Hard Work


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Things are really beginning to stabilize with the rebooted novel. But at the same time, it’s beginning to sink in the amount of hard work I’m going to have to put into it. I’m really looking very closely at how Stieg Larsson did The Girl Who Played With Fire. And, yet, at the same time, my story and his story share only a genre. Otherwise, the intention of the two novels could not be more different.

I just don’t get how he got away with so much exposition and backstory upfront. I don’t have that luxury. I can’t really follow his work too close to the specifics of scenes structure and so forth because I need to get to the point a lot quicker than he did in that novel. And my novel is a first novel in a potential series, while The Girl Who Played With Fire is the second.

But I definitely with this rebooted version of my novel understand that if you have a big universe like I do, that you don’t just throw it at the audience in one big shot. You have to methodically begin to roll out your universe in a way that keeps them reading.

As I keep saying, I have no idea what I’m doing, so in my insecurity I’m using The Girl Who Played With Fire as my “textbook.” I hope things will go a lot faster with writing from now on. But I have to be dogged in my drive to finish this work up as quickly as possible.

My lingering fear is the result of the upcoming election — whatever it may be — will cause the conceit of the novel to seem quaint. But you can’t edit a blank page, as they say.