"Writing the Mysterious: Notes on the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" by Bill Johnson

It's a convention in mystery writing to 'start with a body.' Starting with a body sets up some immediate questions: who is the victim? Who killed him or her? Why? What makes the case compelling to the character seeking to solve the murder, and, by extension, to the story's readers?

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo takes a different tack. Here's there's no body, just a mystery around what happened to a missing girl. It is the mystery of the situation that creates the initial hook to draw in readers. In this essay, I'll set out how that quality of mysteriousness is created.

First sentence, It happened every year, was almost a ritual.

The question here, what happened? What made it like a ritual?

Second sentence, And this was his eighty-second birthday.

This tells us something about who is involved in what's happening.

Third sentence, When, as usual, the flower was delivered, he took off the wrapping paper and then picked up a telephone to call Detective Superintendent Morrel who, when he retired, had moved to Lake Siljan in Dalarna.

That the character here calls a detective about the delivery tells us something unusual and possibly criminal in involved; it also begins to set out a place for the story. It's important to understand the difference in withholding information for dramatic effect (like the meaning of the ritual) and withholding information that gives a reader a sense of time and place. Time and place can be withheld as part of creating mystery, but if not done correctly, it can also create irritation and a sense of an author confused about the craft of telling a story.

Fourth sentence, They were not only the same age, they had been born on the same day—which was something of an irony under the circumstances.

Why this is an irony is another mysterious question.

Last sentence of paragraph, The old policeman was sitting with his coffee, waiting, expecting the call.

So, the delivery of the flower happens every year on the old man's birthday, and it involves information that he immediately relays to a detective. Yes, this is mysterious, but there's a concrete quality to the information. It's a great hook and creates the necessary effect of a first paragraph: the reader is pulled forward to read a second paragraph.

The old man and the detective have a conversation about the flower, but the upshot is that it revolves around a mystery that 'which no-one else in the whole world had the least interest in unraveling.

This raises the question, so why is the mystery so compelling to these two men? What is the mystery?

Also, characters in novel must exist in a state of narrative tension to sustain the drama in a novel. Here, we're introduced to the tension these characters feel about this situation of the annual delivery of a picture of a flower, ahead of more mundane details about what they look like. Without narrative tension, a novel manuscript is simply a collection of details that turn in to an impassable swamp.

After a line break, the novel continues with a description of the flower, that it is native to the Australian bush. This is foreshadowing. It seems like an unimportant note here, but, understood in the correct context, it would solve the mystery of the flower and its delivery to the old man. But he doesn't know that, and we don't know that, but the author does. And he plants this clue here knowing exactly what it means.

The question here for the old man is, could the flower by grown in Sweden? That gives us a place for this story. The last line of this section, It needed pampering, is also suggestive in a way that won't be clear for hundreds of pages.

The novel continues with the old man pondering, again, that there was no way to trace where the flower print came from (since they arrive every year on his birthday from all over the world). Again, we are in the realm of the mysterious here.

Continuing, The strange story of the flowers had never been reported in the press; only a very few people knew of it. Thirty years ago the regular arrival of the flower was the object of much scrutiny—at the National Forensic Laboratory, among fingerprint experts, graphologists, criminal investigators, one or two relatives and friends of the recipient.

Without directly saying what this is about, the scale of the investigation of where the flowers are coming from heightens the dramatic impact of its arrival this day. This was once part of a major investigation.

Now, it's of importance only to the old man, the old detective, and, presumable, the person sending the prints of these rare flowers.

It's revealed the detective has arrested dozens of violent men and murderers, but only the details of this case have remained an obsession that haunts him (and the other old man). This again heightens the mysteriousness of what's happening, without saying exactly what it is.

In the last two paragraphs of the prologue, the old man looks up at the wall covered with framed, rare flowers that he has contemplated for 44 years, one for each year.

The last line of the prologue, Without warning he began to weep. He surprised himself with this sudden burst of emotion after almost forty years.

That's the conclusion of the prologue. We still don't know what this is all about, what is at the heart of this mysterious event. But we've been told enough that we're being drawn forward to want to know more.

There are answers to questions here, but not the deeper answer: what set this mystery in motion?

To begin to get that answer, we have to turn to the first chapter of the novel.

What Stieg Larsson demonstrates here is a consummate ability to know what to reveal and withhold to draw readers in. The focus here is the narrative tension these two men share over this unsolved mystery.

Hooking a reader on a character's narrative tension is what makes a novel compelling, whether it starts 'with a body' or a character haunted by not knowing what happened to a loved one.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was just released as a movie. Anyone considering turning a novel into a screenplay would find reading the book and then watching the movie instructive.

Where so much of the book is internal, about what characters are thinking, the movie tightens the plot to focus on two main characters and recreates the visual action of the novel.

I found the novel to have more depth, but the movie was also a pleasure to watch.

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A fourth edition of Bill Johnson's writing workbook, A Story is a Promise and The Spirit of Storytelling, is now available for $2.99 from Amazon Kindle. The book reviews popular novels, movies and plays to teach an understanding of story structure.

Creating a Novel With An Emotionally Numb Main Character

A Guest Post by Bill Johnson

One of the most common problems I see when I real novel manuscripts is an emotionally numb main character. Writing a novel around an emotionally numb main character is difficult because the character often has no feeling about what's happening. Since a story's readers often access a story's characters through their reactions to events – their feelings -- when characters have no feelings, it's hard to experience a story world through them.

It can be done. A great example of how it can be done is demonstrated in the novel The Accidental Tourist.

The novel begins, 'They were supposed to stay at the beach a week, but neither of them had the heart for it and they decided to come back early.'

The questions here, why were they 'supposed' to stay at the beach for a week, and why didn't they have the heart for it? These questions draw readers forward.

Continuing,

'Macon drove. Sarah sat next to him, leaning her herd against the side window. Chips of cloudy sky showed through her tangled brown curls.'

There's a subtext here of Sarah sitting as far from Macon as possible.

Continuing,

'Macon wore a formal summer suit, his traveling suit – much more logical for traveling than jeans, he always said. Jeans had those stiff, hard seams and those rivets.'

These details are not just a description of Macon, they tell us that Macon has thought about how to travel comfortably. These details speak to a truth about Macon.

Continuing,

'Sarah wore a strapless terry beach dress. They might have been returning from two entirely different trips. Sarah had a tan but Macon didn't. He was tall, pale, gray-eyed man, with straight fair hair cut close to his head, and his skin was that thin kind that easily burns. He'd kept away from the sun during the middle part of every day.'

These details emphasize how different Macon and Sarah are. The line about 'two entirely different trips' is especially telling. This 'trip' has been the beginning of a formal split of these two different people. Their differences raise a question, why have they stayed together?

Continuing,

'Just past the start of the divided highway, the sky grew almost black and several enormous drops spattered the windshield.'

The storm is symbolic of what is happening in this relationship. This kind of metaphor is often used in stories because it works, just as in a movie a cab arriving, a plane landing, a ship coming in to dock, speaks to a character on a journey.

Moving forward,

'Sarah continued to grip the dashboard. She had a broad, smooth face that gave an impression of calm, but if you looked closely you'd notice the tension at the corners of her eyes.'

This author will be looking closely at Sarah and her tension.

Continuing,

“I don't know that you really care that much,” Sarah said. “Do you?”

Macon said, “Care?”

“I said to you the other day, I said, 'Macon, now that Ethan's dead I sometimes wonder if there's any point to life.' Do you remember what you answered?”

This is the purpose of the trip. Macon and Sarah are trying to regroup as a couple after the death of their son, Ethan. How Ethan died will come out later.

Continuing,

“Well, not offhand,” Macon said.

“You said, 'Honey, to tell the truth, it never seemed to me there was all that much point to begin with.' Those were your exact words.'

“Um...”

“And you don't even know what was wrong with that.”

“No, I guess I don't,” Macon said.

Sarah is pointing out here that Macon doesn't have much feeling about life. A subtle point, Sarah doesn't have much more feeling than Macon. Being married to Macon her lack of feeling isn't an issue.

Soon after,

“You're not a comfort, Macon,” Sarah said.

And soon after that,

“Macon, I want a divorce,” Sarah told him.

This couple has moved forward along this divided highway.

Continuing,

'For some reason, it was this that finally made her finally break down. She turned away sharply. Macon switched his right blinker on. He pulled into a Texaco station, parked beneath the overhang, and cut off the engine. Then he started rubbing his knees with his palms. Sarah huddled in her corner. The only sound was the drumming of rain on the overhang far above them.'

What the writer suggests here is that both Sarah and Macon are emotionally numb, even while Sarah suggests she has more feeling than Macon.

As the novel continues, Sarah moves out and Macon tries to continue his work of writing travel books about how business people can travel anywhere in the world in a kind of cocoon. The irony is that Macon could not prevent his personal cocoon from being ruptured.

As the novel continues, Macon's inability to deal with his grief and loss lead his dog to internalize Macon's unexpressed feelings, and the dog begins to attack others. Because Macon travels, he must find a place to board Edward, but Edward's biting makes that difficult.

Macon meets Muriel, who boards dogs. She's lower-class, the opposite of the careful, neat Macon. She also has a sickly son, the last thing Macon wants in his life. But she's also fully, deeply alive. Being around Muriel, Macon slowly learns to feel, to go from being emotionally numb to alive to his own life, and then a life with Muriel and her son.

Then Sarah returns. Sophisticated Sarah, the opposite of Muriel.

Now that Macon has changed and learned to feel, she wants him back.

In the end, Macon decides to stay with Muriel and a haphazard life instead of returning to a new cocoon with Sarah.

The Accidental Tourist, by Anne Tyler, is a wonderful example of how a story can be told about an emotionally numb main character.

If you're a new author trying to write a novel about an emotionally numb character, consider whether you're using that story character as a vehicle to experience feeling. This creates a story designed to help move you through states of feeling via the situations you place your character in, while leaving your audience unmoved. Our personal wounds can provide much dramatic fuel to write a novel, but the risk is that we consume everything we create for our own needs.

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Bill Johnson is author of A Story is a Promise and The Spirit of Storytelling, a writing workbook, and web master of http://www.storyispromise.com, a web site that explores principles of storytelling through reviews of popular movies. Spirit is now available on Amazon Kindle at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V020N0