By Grant Nicol
It wasn’t all that long ago that
Arnaldur Indriðason came up with the idea of setting his own brand of crime
fiction stories in Iceland. At the time people here thought he was joking and laughed
at him. None of them are laughing any more.
The Sigurðardóttir code
At the recent Iceland Noir Crime
Fiction Festival in Reykjavík the most amusing anecdote came during the first
panel of the first day when Lilja Sigurðardóttir, author of ‘Steps’ (2009) and
‘Forgiveness’ (2010) described how she got published. When she saw an ad from a
publisher saying that they were “looking for the new Dan Brown” she decided to
send her manuscript to them hoping that they would decide that she was to be
the author of the next ‘Da Vinci Code’. When they got back to her they said
that while she wasn’t “the new Dan Brown” they were going to publish her
anyway.
Five years later and she is in the
process of adapting that first novel, ‘Steps’ for television. When asked how
screenwriting differed from writing novels Lilja said that it was important in
an adaptation to “leave room for the other artists to bring their talents to
the project”. It is after all a collaborative enterprise unlike the daily
solitary pursuit of novel writing. She also said that crimes do not necessarily
have to be the result of a criminal act, “Crime in Iceland can just be an
accident. It doesn’t have to be an evil force” and spoke of the alternatives to
the traditional publishing route, “A lot of people self-publish in Iceland.”
Not everyone is lucky enough to not be the next Dan Brown.
Parallel Universes
Certain things happen to your brain
when you decide to start writing a book. There are the obvious speed-humps
along the way known as self-doubt and any number of potentially traumatic fears
that you will make a giant arse out of yourself as well as the nagging
questions along the lines of why the hell am I doing this when I could be at
the local beach/pub/art installation? Sverrir Berg Steinarsson admitted to
something I felt very strongly when I was working on my first book. He said “When
I started writing it I didn’t tell anyone about it because I didn’t know if I was
going to finish it.” Either did I, for three long years. Fear of failure does
strange things to your behavioural patterns.
There are other more subtle things
that happen to you as well. As a crime fiction writer you will find yourself
staring out of a window, into a construction site or an area of wasteland and
thinking about how the next murder victim in your book is going to die. As Ævar Örn Jósepsson said, “You go from
“What a lovely lava field” to “That’s a great place for a body.”” I find it
difficult to even visit the local swimming pool without dreaming up strange new
ways for people to be kidnapped or pass from this world to the next. It’s not
that you become unnaturally gruesome, it is just as he also said, “You never look
at places the same way again.”
Everywhere in your life becomes a
potential location for your next chapter. Your whole world becomes part of your
next book which rather than being odd and disturbing, not for you anyway,
becomes a hugely cathartic release. I don’t recommend telling too many people
about these things though, not even close friends. No matter how much they love
you, they will think you have lost your mind. Even if we know that it is not
what is going on in our heads that is dangerous, they may not see it that way. Jón Óttar Ólafsson said it best,
“It’s the real world that’s scary.” If you want to be really freaked out, pick
up a newspaper.
The method behind the eyes of the
madness
It must be easy for people who
think along the lines of normal human beings (that’s our friends, not us) to
wonder why we do it. Is it a compulsion, an addiction or something else
altogether? I’m not sure that I can answer that myself but I will make an
attempt using a little story that one of the panellists at Iceland Noir shared
with us. Johan Theorin summed it up succinctly with another of the more
memorable anecdotes from the festival, “People tell stories so as to not be
forgotten.”
He once worked in an old people’s
home and sometimes the staff were the only people left to hear the stories that
the inhabitants had to tell before they died. They had no one else left to turn
to and needed to pass on to someone what they had been through and what they
had achieved with their lives. An eleventh hour narrative last will and
testament. It is an experience that has stayed with him ever since and one that
taught me a very valuable lesson about why I do what I do.
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