by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
While I love Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, there are a few weaknesses with it that eat away at me. One is while Lisbeth Salander is iconic, there are a few problems with her that are off-putting. One is she’s supposed to be some sort of dark superhacker with Asperger’s who is not very easy to get along with.
We fall in love with her in large part because of graphic, horrific scene that I hate. But it is so bad that you keep worrying about her fate as the books progress.
All of this has led me to want to create a heroine who is far, far more accessable. My heroine, like Lisbeth Salander, has a fucked up personal history, but she is, natively, essentially a manic pixie dreamgirl. But for events beyond her control, she would be more Natalie Portman’s character in “Garden State” than Lisbeth Salander. My inspiration for this is how you sometimes hear about a woman who went to law school specifically to free her brother from jail. I always wondered, “Now what? She got her brother free, but she’s still a lawyer.”
Anyway, now that I’m learning about character that concept is, at least, within my reach now. In the past, it was something of a daydream. I’m feeling pretty pumped that maybe I might actually pull this off. But I still have a huge amount of reading to do, a huge amount of work to do.
It will be interesting to see what this story finally looks like. But I have a feeling once I nail down character, the actual writing may begin to go far, far faster than it has to date.
