by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
My textbook for writing these five novels has been Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl Who Played With Fire.” It’s that book that if you’ve read it, when you pick up any of my books, you’ll immediately feel at home. It’ll be an emotional old brown shoe for you if you’ve read that book.
Here are my rule of thumb, totally arbitrary rules that I use when it comes to some elements of these novels.
First, when it comes to POVs (I’m using third person intimate) it has to go something like this:
POV: X
POV: Y
POV: Y
POV : X
POV: X
POV: X
I like the idea that when you open a chapter, you automatically know whose POV you’re going to see the most of within it. I’ve been a little too strict with this rule, which has greatly slowed me down. It should be that as long as you have one person’s POV more any anyone else’s that you’re fine. But, lulz, I really struggle not to follow this rule.
I should be following the Scene – Sequel rhythm as proposed in “Scene & Structure” but studying The Girl Who Played With Fire indicates that Larsson did not follow it, so, lulz. But that is a really good book to kind of give you a sense of what the “rules” are that you can promptly ignore.
Anyway, I’ve been doing a lot of heavy lifting with this first novel the last 24 hours. I’m getting really, really, nervous that everything is going to change on me unexpectedly and I will regret not trying harder to finish at least the first novel in the series.
