{"id":70,"date":"2012-03-08T03:56:09","date_gmt":"2012-03-08T08:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.franciscostork.com\/journal\/2012\/03\/08\/the-larsson-approach\/"},"modified":"2012-03-08T09:31:17","modified_gmt":"2012-03-08T14:31:17","slug":"the-larsson-approach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.franciscostork.com\/journal\/2012\/03\/08\/the-larsson-approach\/","title":{"rendered":"The Larsson Approach"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s the story of how the Larsson Approach was conceived. You’re at the Gardens Mall in West Palm Beach three months ago. You volunteer to stroll baby Charlotte around while your wife and daughter and daughter-in-law make their way from Abercrombie to Zappos. They’ll meet you by the Starbucks in an hour and a half. Baby Charlotte falls asleep the first five minutes after they leave and there you are with 85 minutes left. You find a padded bench and sit. In back of the stroller you see your daughter-in-law’s book: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo<\/em>. You’re a bit of a snob and don’t ordinarily read any book that has sold more than the Bible, but you’re desperate. After a few pages you discover that the boy can write. He’s no Marcel Proust, but still he has something. A certain honesty. You can feel\u00c2\u00a0the fire\u00c2\u00a0behind his words.<\/p>\n

Three months later you’ve read his three books. You have found out that he died of a heart attack soon after he submitted the three books to a publisher. You are intrigued about his life and pick up a biography by his life-long partner, Eva Gabrielsson. Here’s how she answers a question about how much planning went into the books: “Well, the books weren’t planned out at all. Everything started out with Stieg’s boredom during our summer vacation in 2002. He began writing the project that would turn into The Millennium Trilogy just to pass the time when he had nothing else to do, but he kept going because his newfound enthusiasm kept growing.”<\/p>\n

You’re hopelessly stuck in a deadly funk. The revisions you need to make are albatrossian. There are no words to describe how you feel so you make up new ones. At your lowest point, help comes. It always does. You just wish it didn’t take so long to get there. And you sure as hell don’t expect it to come from Sweden. So the Larsson Approach is conceived during one of these bleak\u00c2\u00a0nights. It goes like this. You have been practicing law for thirty years. You say: I’m\u00c2\u00a0a lawyer not a writer. What if I write a book\u00c2\u00a0to pass the time, for fun. Other people do puzzles. So you write for an hour or so after you come home from your legal job, after dinner. You write on weekends. When new found enthusiasm comes, you wake up a couple of hours before you go to work and write. There are no expectations. No need to be better than your last book. No need to sell more books than someone else. No need to read reviews. No need\u00c2\u00a0for that\u00c2\u00a0nothing-pleases-him-inner-editor. You’re a lawyer not a writer. This is not your whole life, it’s a hobby. But, you write with honesty. You write\u00c2\u00a0with your life and\u00c2\u00a0from your llife’s joys and aches, just like Larsson.\u00c2\u00a0You take that lump in your throat and try to give it words. Just because it’s fun doesn’t mean it can’t be serious. A\u00c2\u00a0hobby can still be\u00c2\u00a0essential, a matter of life and death. How you pass the time is important. It counts.\u00c2\u00a0Larsson had\u00c2\u00a0a fire\u00c2\u00a0burning inside of him. You’ve read his books, you know what mattered to him, what consumed him. You say: What\u00c2\u00a0fire burns inside of me? I’m going to\u00c2\u00a0make\u00c2\u00a0it burn bright, with beauty and passion, just to pass the time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s the story of how the Larsson Approach was conceived. You’re at the Gardens Mall in West Palm Beach three months ago. You volunteer to stroll baby Charlotte around while your wife and daughter and daughter-in-law make their way from Abercrombie to Zappos. They’ll meet you by the Starbucks in an hour and a half. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,49,1,41,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inspiration","category-stieg-larsson","category-uncategorized","category-writers-block","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.franciscostork.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.franciscostork.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.franciscostork.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.franciscostork.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.franciscostork.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.franciscostork.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.franciscostork.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.franciscostork.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.franciscostork.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}