Previous Q&As:
Q&A #1 (January 2021)
Q&A #2 (May 2022)
Q&A #3 (May 2024)
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnajvidelin ... 2zhoyCWbQ/
YouTube:
00:44
Welcome, those of you who are here. I'll be sitting here for about an hour and answer your questions, tell you about some stuff. I was just going to start, before we go over to the questions and the like, by of course telling you that here is my latest book: The Ghost in the Machine, which is the third part of my Bloodstorm series which began with The Writing in the Water. It's the thickest one so far. The three parts are very different. The Writing in the Water was intended to be real Jason Bourne-like thriller action story with a lot of international jumps. Then came The Room in the Ground, which was meant to be shut-in and claustrophobic and very much almost a chamber play between a small number of people. And now The Ghost in the Machine, which is a very contemporary and societal story about forces, mainly negative forces, active in society today. It's about terrorist organizations, far-right extremist movements, artificial intelligence, and also animal rights activism when that goes too far and becomes violent, via Astrid. So it's absolutely the most contemporary book I've ever written, even though it takes place in 2019 since I didn't want to have to take the pandemic into account. Plus that when I planned this one, about 5 or 6 years ago ... As some of you may know, the original plan was for it to be part of the Millennium series. Had that happened, it would've been released maybe 3 years ago, so before ChatGPT became big. I'm not going to say too much, but ... reality has caught up to The Ghost in the Machine.
It opens with ... This is early on, it's not a spoiler. A suicide bomber blows themselves up in the marble foyer of the Royal Dramatic Theatre during an intermission during a performance of Hamlet. Loads of people die. If any of you have ever been in the marble foyer during an intermission during a play on the main stage, you know how packed with people it is and what a terrible effect an explosion in such a room would have. And it has a terrible effect. It becomes the worst terrorism act in Swedish history. Jonny Munther gets appointed as part of the investigation, and Julia and Kim eventually get involved as well. And then an even worse attack happens and society enters a state of total revolt with Julia and Kim, as well as Astrid and Jonny Munther, caught up in the middle of everything.
I'm very pleased with it. It's by far the most complex book I've written in the sense that there are so incredibly many plot threads which initially seem disparate and disconnected but ... damn, I thought a lot, and asked myself a lot of questions and wrote a lot of notes. This is the book I have the most notes for, like 300 pages. Simply to sew all these threads together into a single web. But I think that I succeeded, and even that the trilogy as a whole gets a reasonable closure. So ... [laughs] I can recommend it.
OK! A bit later on I'll tell you about ... that I have another finished novel which has nothing to do with this but which is getting released this autumn, around September or October. And that's something extra. We'll talk about that in a little bit, but first I'll take some of your questions. Some have sent in questions in advance, and Hans-Åke will also over time send me the ones that he thinks "Maybe John will think it's fun to answer this one". I'll pick and choose a little from your questions, since there are several people who have asked several questions.
05:15 How much of I Always Find You is true?
It's true to the extent that I lived in precisely that house on Luntmakargatan for a couple years, right next to the spot where Palme was murdered, next door to the Brunkeberg Tunnel. So I lived there and have intimate knowledge of the geography there. And it's true that I previously tried to make a career as a magician, primarily performing magic in restaurants by the tables, bothering the guests while they're waiting for their food. So to that extent, this John Lindqvist who appears in I Always Find You is very based on myself. And it was a lot of fun to write about practical magic, what I know about finger dexterity and "sleight of hand" as it's called. I had some problems deciding how much I was going to reveal about how a magic trick works, because if you reveal that you get expelled from the Swedish Magic Circle. I'm not a member of it anymore, but I still had the old manners so I didn't want to reveal too much. On the other hand, I know that the fact that John commits a burglary in a fancy villa and that kind of thing ... At one point, my son asked: "John, have you really done this, have you broken into villas?" And I said: "No, I've never done that." "Aw, goddammit." Ha! I shoplifted like hell, but no burglaries.
06:40 Which is your favorite character and which one do you like the least?
My favorite character is two people, and that's Lennart and Olof from I Am Behind You and I Am the Tiger. I was planning to write a separate story about them, but that'll probably never happen. But I think Lennart and Olof are incredibly lovely. Me getting hold of those characters was part of the reason I wanted to write I Am Behind You. "Lennart and Olof. Think of old Centre Party leaders", as they say, and then they have a cat named Maud, of course.
Like the least ... I mean, I always try to like my characters. One some level I can at least understand Håkan in Let the Right One In, even though he's a completely horrific person. But he motivates his actions to himself in such a way that it's possible to sympathize ... not sympathize, maybe that's the wrong word, but I can accept: "Yes, a person with this self-image could believably commit these actions." But the one I like the least is probably Max Hansen from Little Star. I had a lot of difficulty giving him sympathetic traits. I had to find something ... he had some kind of metal sun he won at the Copenhagen Tivoli when he was very young, which was a happy memory for him and which he sits squeezing in his hand so it almost starts bleeding whenever he's in difficult situations. Simply to give him a few sympathetic traits, because he's a completely ... he's a horrible person, and something of a cliché to boot. But Little Star is my darling of the novels I've written, so Max Hansen gets to tag along. But no, he's ... yuck. He's no good.
08:32 If you'd written Bloodstorm 4, what would it have been titled?
Yeah, I'm having serious problems with the title of Bloodstorm 4, which I do have plans of writing, but I have four or possibly five books I'm going to write before then. One of them is finished, the one I'm going to talk about later. One is half-finished, and the other one I'm doing the planning for. But I don't know what Bloodstorm 4 is going to be called. Astrid Helander is going to be the main character, and Kim and Julia and Jonny Munther are going to be a little more in the background. I've experimented with a number of titles but I think they're all pretty shoddy, so I don't know. "The Girl" ... "The Girl in the Forest", no, that's such a bloody terrible title. I'll have to come up with something better. Maybe it's just going to be called "Astrid H". It's possible. And at the same time it's not really Bloodstorm 4. It'll have to be "A Bloodstorm story" or something like that since it has those characters.
09:40 I like long books where the characters and stories get developed in-depth. How many 1,000-page novels are you going to write in your career?
Well, we'll see. I'm 56 right now, so we'll see how much I have time for. My novel Harbour was originally planned to be VERY long. I almost thought close to 1,000 pages, maybe in two parts, that it was going to be a real historical epic of the archipelago. Those traits are still there in the story, but it didn't end up that long. On the other hand, I have ... [thinks for a moment and laughs a little] Now I'm going to sound like Kent [the band], "This is it and that's the end". But maybe seven books down the line, I have ideas for a book called We Played Here, which is also about the archipelago and ghosts and stuff and rising sea levels. It's going to partially take place in the future and partially in the present. What happens in the present has created ghosts that appear in the future when the sea level has risen a couple meters. And then there's a bunch of other stuff too. But I imagine that that one is going to be ... one hell of an epic that I'll give myself a couple years to write. Maybe it'll come out. I hope I can satisfy your needs with that one, but it's in the far future. But I have so many ideas.
11:12 After reading all of your books I'm wondering: are all your books connected?
No, they absolutely aren't. However, some books are connected, more or less. Every time I start writing a new novel or short story, I think to myself: "Does this one link up with any of the others? Can this one take place in the same universe as Little Star or Handling the Undead?" If it was going to do that, one has to accept ... I remember thinking about this with Little Star, if the events of Handling the Undead had happened in that universe, if there had been a time when the dead actually woke up and they had some kind of connection to that. But then there are of course connections back and forth between different books, even the ones that aren't part of the same series. There are winks here and there. Hans-Åke has made a pretty fun compilation on my website listing what references there are and which characters appear in multiple books. He's been admirable when it comes to finding these links, plus that he's made a complete character gallery. All the characters that have appeared in all my books, listed with their name and which book they're in. Completely incredible. I think there were something like 1,600 last I checked once he'd gone through everything. So they're not connected, at least not all of them, no.
12:50 How difficult is it to narrate one's own book? Does your narration require a lot of retakes?
No, I'm actually very good at reading without stumbling. I can, at the most extreme, read like three pages without making a single mistake. It can be an inhalation, a little sigh, that I have to drink water. But I notice almost all retakes myself, that I read something too quickly or ... that I slipped on a word or the like. If not, I have a very good sound technician who helps me and says: "Hold on, that's not what the text says." But no, recording my audio books goes pretty fast. I don't read fast, I read in a normal tone, but I don't make a lot of mistakes, no. I've learned over the years, since I've narrated all of them except I Am Behind You. Just finished recording The Ghost in the Machine, by the way, but there's some tinkering to be done with it before it's available for listening.
13:53 [The next three questions are from me.]
Siggdalos, yes, Siggdalos. [Hi.] Thanks for your transcriptions on We, The Infected. That's a fan page that started with Let the Right One In where a bunch of people discuss and talk about my books, and where this Siggdalos has actually transcribed these Instagram Lives in English, because a lot of people following that site are English speakers. So he's made the effort of transcribing into English these things I sit babbling about. Thanks for that, Siggdalos. [You're welcome.
]14:30 Have you come up with what The Summer of 1986 with Lovisa and Melinda is going to be about yet?
Yes, that's exactly what I'm working on now. I have 18 pages of just notes, and I have come up with the entirety of the basic story. I also have the ending, the final scene, which is going to be completely magnificent. It'll be so rad. But then there's a lot of details along the way left to add. But it's the one I'm working on now, and I know precisely what it's about. I mean, The Summer of '85 opened with: "It was that summer. The summer of 1985. The Live Aid summer." '86 is going to open: "It was that summer. The summer of 1986. The Chernobyl summer." And that's important. And Lovisa and Melinda play-reenact the Palme assassination and such. So yeah, I know what it's going to be about.
15:15 Do you read foreign reviews? Have there ever been any fun culture shocks or misconceptions from foreign readers, considering that you often base your stories around typically Swedish phenomena and cultural references?
Nah, I've stopped saving reviews since 8 or 10 years back. I read them, but I don't save them. And foreign ... no, not often. The funniest misconception is one Tomas Alfredson told me about, when he was out in the world with Let the Right One In. It takes place in 1982, and people abroad saw how people looked in that and said: "Damn, you have it rough in Sweden. You don't even have cellphones!" [laughs] Another popular misconception is: "Have you been inspired by Twilight?" [hangs head tiredly] LTROI came out ... the year before the first Twilight book, I think? That's probably the most common daft question I get, if I've been inspired by Twilight. I have read the first part, though. [makes "so-so" gesture]
16:15 Who would win in a fight between Sigge, Horven, Tindalos, and the Fisher?
Oh, that's a fun question. Here's someone who knows my books. [Äsch då.] I'm putting my money on Sigge. When that short story comes in a future collection, it'll become apparent why Sigge would win. Sigge is ... "mighty shit". It doesn't really come through in I Always Find You and I Am the Tiger. What happened in I Am the Tiger is only preparation for something even bigger. Enough said on that.
16:53
To those of you who are getting bored already and think that this maybe wasn't as fun as you'd hoped, I'll reveal before you go that this autumn I'll release a book whose first version I finished 3 or 4 years ago, but which hasn't felt appropriate to release. I think it'll come out in September or October, thereabouts. It's a short novel, it'll be maybe 120 pages in print. It's called The Pigs and has been lying in wait for several years. I've told this story in a couple places, but I read all my books aloud to my wife while I write them ... not WHILE I write them, but once I have 10 or 15 pages, and she comes with objections and opinions. It's the first time it's happened that I've read aloud to her and she's said: "No, John. I don't want to hear any more of this book." Because it is so ... disgusting. It's so ... graphically violent, a lot of slush and filth and disgusting things in general. It was very fun to write. I think it's the funniest book I've written, but one has to have a very special sense of humor to appreciate this. I gave the manuscript version to my son and it's the first time I've heard him laugh out loud while reading in his room.
But it'll come with a warning text at the start called "Last warning" where I explain what this is, that this is my attempt to write Swedish hillbilly horror. You know, when people—usually young people—end up in the backcountry inhabited by a bunch of strange farmers and degenerated individuals and a bunch of horrible things start to happen to them. So this is my contribution to that genre, with lots of trigger warnings. I'm not going to narrate it as an audio book, precisely because I don't want anyone to be surprised after reading these cozy crime novels I've written, only to BAM! Get The Pigs in their ears. I don't wish that on anyone who's not prepared for it. We'll probably also release a fun thing to amplify this further: uncut, so you have to cut open the pages yourself as you read it. We'll probably do that, me and Ordfront, but we'll see. But it's ... yeah. [laughs a little] It's something extra. Coming this autumn.
19:30 How is The Little Store that Refused to Die coming along?
Damn, you all are well-informed. So this is a novel that me and my wife, Mia, are writing together. We have around 100 pages. We're also doing a children's book in which Mia's doing the illustrations. But no, The Little Store that Refused to Die is not a horror story. It's a kind of paraphrase on those Jenny Colgan books, The Little Beach Street Bakery, The Little Bookshop, "The Little Blah Blah This-or-That". So it is to some extent a feelgood book, but the opposite. It's about a person who is forced to take over the family— [Glitch in the recording caused part of this to be cut out] —the town, he finds a love interest, you know, all that. Here it's the opposite. He does his best to make the store fail since he doesn't want to be there, so he simply tries to ruin everything. But then it turns out that the store itself seems to have a will of its own concerning that. It's also funny.
20:40 [Another glitch, so unfortunately the question and context were cut out]
—my books. I'm very interested in religion. I'm not religious myself. I was significantly more ... religious many, many years ago. Prayed to God and all that. But that's fallen off me. I've become a little hostile toward religion because of how religion is used in various ways. But it doesn't cease to fascinate me. The themes, the mythology, the literalism, how one puts one's life in the hands of that kind of ideology that's dependent on, well, an omniscient omnipotent incomprehensible creator. That very thinking. And the very possibility that it could be that way. I'm not an atheist, I suppose I'm a heavy agnostic. But I don't stop being fascinated by the mysticism around Christianity as well as other religions. I return to it a lot in my stories, because on some level it's ultimately about what people do to find meaning in their lives.
22:30 Were you inspired by Lovecraft in Harbour?
Yes, absolutely. I think that Horven or whatever we should call it, the Anchor Troll as it's called in Norwegian ... Lovecraft is skulking about somewhere in the background for sure. He always is. Because it really is what I said earlier, about being interested in religion, mythology, mysteries in general. Lovecraft's anti-religion, to so speak, the Cthulhu Mythos ... This very idea of the idiot god, the sleeping, turned-away god who really doesn't have any interest in human beings whatsoever, but who's out there and is an immense cosmological fact and whose adherents sometimes create problems for humanity. And of course causes people to go crazy when they realize the scale and indifference of the Great Old Ones. It's the only example I can think of of a modern literary cosmology that's had such impact. There are many authors who write with it in mind, like Thomas Ligotti. I do too, "Tindalos" is ... of course it wasn't Lovecraft who wrote "[The Hounds of] Tindalos", I think it was Frank Belknap Long. So that mythology always exists in the backseat, to varying degrees in different stories. I wrote a story called "Today, Tomorrow and Always" for [radio] P1 that's really Lovecraftian at the end. So yes. In Harbour specifically, it is this idea of the immense, fundamentally will-less deity that is the sea, but who is still an intelligent and omniscient being.
Then you can, in a way, say that another one of my favorite authors, Beckett ... right, I just remembered I saw somebody asking about my three favorite authors, so we can talk about that as well. Concerning Samuel Beckett, he doesn't have any idiot gods but his cosmology, so to speak, or the existential way in which his characters relate to life is actually similar. The idea that there is nothing to pray to, there is no point to human existence beyond some kind of reduction, to drill down to the absolutely essential. How much is left of a human being once you've stripped away all the meaningful elements in what it means to be human? Beckett is very occupied with that. That's also a steady source of inspiration, but actually a lot more in the comedy stuff I've written since Beckett is also very funny. Unlike Lovecraft. [laughs] He's really not a jolly fellow. So no, yeah, Lovecraft, absolutely.
25:50 Top three authors and why?
Gabriel García Márquez, because One Hundred Years of Solitude is my absolute favorite book, all categories. Pan's Labyrinth is my favorite when it comes to film, so it should be the Spanish-speaking world. But I've read One Hundred Years of Solitude three or four times in Swedish and a couple times in Spanish. [shrugs] It's simply the novel of all novels. Love in the Time of Cholera is also wonderful, and others. I've read basically everything he's written.
Then there's Selma Lagerlöf, who I feel quite a kinship with in the sense that ... both of them work in what's called magical realism, writing about a recognizable reality that contains fantastical elements, which absolutely don't need to be horror but which means that something beyond human comprehension can be essential to their reality and suddenly appear. I also think Selma Lagerlöf is one of our best horror authors and many of her stories use horror as a tool for effect. And she's also so wonderfully pathetic. She really tries to play with the big emotions. She's so darned good at writing chapters as though they were short stories, like a long chain of endings and beginnings. Not short story collections, I mean, but The Emperor of Portugallia, Gösta Berling of course, Jerusalem ... every chapter is to some extent finished stories, at the same time as everything is linked together. I mean, simply Selma Lagerlöf's structure and her constant, constant forward drive in her stories is a steady source of inspiration.
I've mentioned Beckett, and I also want to throw in Yan Lianke, who's my most recent discovery and is a real darling author of mine. Primarily his book Dream of Ding Village, which is poetic, horrific ... I think many of his books have got everything. We most recently read Women. Me and my wife read aloud to each other a lot, and Yan Lianke has become a new favorite for that. Right now we're into Julian Barnes, who also has a lot of good stuff. But Yan Lianke. That'll have to do.
28:20 Is there any possibility that Ajvideland gets made in the future? The idea of an anthology series with John as a Rod Serling type/Cryptkeeper-like world really gets the mouth watering.
We actually tried one of those. The intent was that I'd be the presenter of each episode. So we did a test, where they scanned my face from different angles Gollum-style. Then I presented the episode, and they did a digital effect so that something started crawling through my eyes. And every episode I was going to present and something scary was going to happen with my face at the end. Looked really cool, but ... I don't know. I have no idea. Like I say, I would've written three or four more novels by now if I hadn't worked on failed film and TV projects. I have no idea what'll come of it. I've written screenplays for three or four episodes of that, but ... bosses get replaced, priorities change, the economy looks different, and now I'm going to have a smoke. I don't know. But screenplays exist, for anyone who's interested. [lights a cigarette] I think it would've been really fun, but ... I don't know if this is secret. Maybe it's not so secret. But it's of course public that The Summer of 1985 is being made into a TV series, it's going to start being filmed some distance away here come spring, and the plan is that I'm going to have a function in the series itself. [laughs] There's another film project being worked on where it was decided that I'm going to be a janitor character dragging a shovel across asphalt. [laughs] That's the kind of role that's adequate for me.
30:45 How finished is the ending of the story when you start writing? Is the entire story finished before you start writing or does it come bit by bit, and when the story ends up on paper, are there many or few changes in the story itself?
That's a good question. It varies so bloody much. I mean, in Little Star, the ending with the Sing-Along at Skansen massacre was crystal clear to me. I even wrote the ending with all the death scenes when I'd written half of the rest of the book. Other books ... I didn't at all know how Handling the Undead was going to end. At some point I simply felt that, "No, that's enough. I'll stop there." And then I cut out in the middle of it. I mean, not in the middle of it, but I had a pretty action-filled scene where I simply, chop, cut to black. It varies a lot. Like I'm saying, I know exactly how The Summer of 1986 is going to end, while the—in my opinion wonderful—final line in Harbour came to me only just as I wrote it. I won't spoil the book in case anyone wants to read it, but that little exchange between Anders and his daughter that closes the whole book came as a pure surprise, and I started bawling because I thought it was so beautiful.
Then I don't necessarily know how the ending is going to look. But for example, for those who've read The Ghost in the Machine—I won't spoil—it's the same thing there. The very last line in that book was clear to me when I was planning the first book. Because I planned from the start that it'd be a trilogy. The skeletons of the plot of each book had varying degrees of thickness, but that part I knew: how the third one would end and what the last line would be. But beyond that it varies a lot. I Am Behind You, for example ... there was so much in that one. At some point I decided that I was going to write a sequel and that it was going to be about the Palme assassination, so I just threw the famous murder weapon into the plot at the end without really knowing what I was going to do with it in what ended up being part two, I Always Find You. But it worked out.
So in those cases it's very much that it emerges over time. I can often have a concluding image, but it's very unclear how I'll reach it, and sometimes I don't even have that. I just think I have plot elements that are interesting enough, characters that are fun and interesting enough to write about that I think that they, with their internal dynamic, will lead the story forward and to some kind of reasonable ending. It's primarily if I have enough characters that I think are fun to write about. That's very much the case with Lovisa and Melinda in The Summer of '86. So ... I don't really know how to answer the question. It varies, quite simply!
34:15 Do you have any writing tips for those who're aiming at becoming authors/authoresses?
Well, I get that question sometimes, and I think the single most important tip I have is to finish things. There are so many people who have good ideas for novels or feel that they want to write a novel, and writing a novel is a bitch. It's very demanding. It takes time—it doesn't take too much time for me, actually, but that's something I've learned over the years—there's a lot that needs to be juggled, there's a lot that needs to be tied together ... Writing a novel is tricky, which means that people get 20 or 30 pages in with their good idea and then give up. I think that that's the worst habit one can pick up as an author: giving up. If you do that you'll keep doing it. "Meh, this wasn't any fun anymore." It's a lot better to decide to write a short story in 5 pages, or 7 or 10 or whatever level of ambition you have. But finish it! And even if you feel on page 5 that you're not done with the plot, that it's not turning out very good, finish it anyway. You learn—
35:32 [Glitched out again]
—"she said angrily." It should be apparent from the line that it's being said angrily. But I can use adverbs too. And then of course, deciding on a time of day every day, or the days when you do have time. Decide that this is your writing time, even if it's only 30 minutes or an hour. You don't even need to write anything, but this is the time I'm going to devote to my writing. Then you can sit there looking at the tauntingly blank page, write a sentence and delete it, or whatever, but that you try to devote that time to your writing, even if it's as little as thinking, writing a couple notes about a story you want to write, or writing a few sentences and deleting them, or writing something that you can at least use a piece of.
On a more advanced level, in later years I've started brainstorming, primarily about characters. I just write down everything that comes into my head, what kind of perfume they like, what they wear, a movie that scared them in the cinema, something about their parents, where they've lived. Everything that comes up and seems to connect together to make a person. When I have that, I start writing a monologue in which that character gets to tell me who they are. I just write completely freely what comes into my head. "When I was little I was obsessed with the Gummi Bears and when I was 7 I collected a bunch of rowan berries and crushed them and god how sick I got ..." I'm just making things up now, but like that. And then maybe only a little bit of what they tell me gets used when I describe that character, but letting them talk freely gives me a kind of sense of what kind of person they are. That's how I do it. I don't do it with all of them, some of them pop up ready to go in my head, but others demand some brainstorming and monologuing from their side in order for me to get a hold of them.
37:55 Why didn't you narrate I Am Behind You?
Yes, so that's the only one of my novels I didn't narrate myself. My friend from the standup period and former neighbor Thomas Oredsson did. I didn't have the time. I actually don't remember what I was doing at the time, but it was probably some film screenplay and I Always Find You and something for radio ... I don't remember, but I had a couple deadlines on things. I don't on my novels, I often simply send them to Ordfront when they're finished. But I remember that I had too much at the time, so I didn't have the time to travel to a studio and record it. Since then, Jenny Bjarnar at Ordfront has been skilled enough to find a fantastic sound studio in Norrtälje called Sound & Vision, where I've recorded my latest books. So these days I don't have to travel that far. Previously I had to go to Stockholm, but now I can do it in Norrtälje in a wonderful little building. So, knock on wood, from now on I record all my audio books myself. During one period I recorded them while sitting inside our bedroom wardrobe. A few books are recorded that way, The Kindness for one. Traveling simply takes too much time, since I have so much I want to write as well as things—not novels, other things—I have to or should write because I've signed contracts. So no, I simply didn't have the time for I Am Behind You. I know there have been some requests from people who wish that I'd narrate it. Maybe I'll do it, but there's no economy in that. And like I said, I think it's better that I write new stuff, rather than sit and mess around with the old ones.
40:10 What did you play most recently?
What category? Music or games? Right now me and my wife are playing The Medium on the PS5, the Polish game with the two realities. Before that we played Alan Wake 2, but it was too complicated with the different realities you had to juggle. But The Medium is working fine, I think. Then we'll play Diablo IV, we just have to get a new controller. And Split Fiction, of course. So we play a fair amount of video games. Other than that we've also played quite a lot together with our son. Gloomhaven, a game that requires a large kitchen table. I don't know what you mean by "played". I don't play floorball, I don't play soccer. I suppose that's the closest I'll get to playing. I've listened to "Bara bada bastu" several times [laughs] but maybe that doesn't count. By the way, I'd like to recommend Evert Taube's "Möte i monsunen". It's the inspiration for the children's book I'm working on. Håkan Hellström did a completely fantastic cover of it at Gröna Lund with Sven-Bertil Taube and Lill Lindfors in the audience about 10 or 12 years ago. It's on YouTube. And there's a question posed in the song: "Who got the elephant?" That's what the children's book is about. "Who got the elephant?"
42:05 Are any of your characters inspired by any of Dostoevsky's characters?
Whew, now that's a question. I suppose Raskolnikov or Myshkin are the first ones that come to mind, but ... I guess I've read the four of five big novels by Dostoevsky at least twice each, so it'd be strange if that hadn't leaked in but ... no, off the top of my head I can't say that there are any characters of mine that are inspired. But there most likely are, I'm convinced there are. But no, even though I'm a real Dostoevsky fan and have read biographies and such ... 1821 to 1881, I think he lived. But no, unfortunately, I can't say that.
43:15 Your flashbacks where you delve into your characters are really to die for. How do you work those out? Do they come naturally or are they moreso planned?
Those are rarely planned. A good example is the character Marko in The Kindness who views his father as a hero. And when I read this aloud to Mia, she said later on: "But why does Marko view his father as a hero? What has he done?" Which led to me writing something of a favorite scene, actually, about what the father did during the war in Yugoslavia, which I think is a lovely scene. But that was entirely caused by, "Oh right, that's true, we need to have a scene that supports this and what kind of person this is. He's not just this little man sitting in a semi-shabby apartment and having trouble finding a job, he's actually been a hero at some point." So in that case the flashback was entirely caused by that. I think it's very often the case that I realize that I need ... A character has a certain personality or trait, and then I can get feeling and decide to motivate this or I get a story in my head. For example, Johan's hatred for the Norrtälje Municipality in The Kindness, where I wrote an, also quite good, scene when he was little to show what his hatred was based on. So I would say it's very much caused by me feeling while writing that I want to explain more about why this person is the way they are. Can I make up a story to explain it?
It often comes down to ... especially when you're flashbacking to a character's past, the reader is always to some extent going to go: "Ugh, I want to see what happens in the present, not another bloody fucking flashback", so the flashback needs to be interesting and have a hook pretty early on in order to pull the reader in and make them interested: "Well, I still want to see what happens, but what's this now?" I would say that, in a purely technical sense, flashbacks demand more in terms of forward momentum and drive and a hook from the start. I don't always succeed at that, but I'm at least aware that it has to be that way since otherwise you lose interest. My foremost goal ... I mean, I have some stylistic or literary ambitions, but those are secondary to simply making the reader want to read the next page. "I have to see how it goes." That's my number one. But if you write everything too shoddily or can't believe in the characters, you don't care how it goes. So that's also number one, writing characters you care about, and for that you also need their background, their history. How did they turn out this way? And hopefully you can get more invested in them, like them more, or dislike them even more so you want things to go badly for them, but that's also a drive.
When I write notes, it's often that I make up scenes, I see the images I have, and I ask myself: "OK, good, this is a good scene, but where is the momentum? Where is the forward movement in this scene or image?" It might lead up to something special, a certain scene, but what's the movement to get there? In a crime novel, it doesn't work to simply have people stroll around collecting clues and talking to people and learning more about why manufacturer Karlsson got a wedge point crowbar shoved through his head. There has to be preferably both an emotional movement inside the character, that this scene does something to this person, or that we learn something new about this person. There has to be a forward movement so that the reader doesn't turn the page solely to find out how it goes, but because they want to know more. And then it's up to me to as the author to make it interesting enough that it feels worth getting to know more. That was a long answer, sorry.
48:05 Would you consider writing a horror scenario for a horror roleplaying game?
In a way I already do, in that we play the roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu in the family and have for over 20 years. I'm game master and there's my wife, her brother, her brother's children, all of my wife's sons, our son Fritiof, and so on ... five or six players. We're currently playing Masks of Nyarlathotep. And there I often have to make up loads, beyond what's written in the scenario book. "They're going to investigate this", but they're going to ask so many questions and want to know so much, or "I can use this to trick them". When we're going to play, I often spend three or four days just writing notes, preferably also finding pictures to print out to create some atmosphere. So within the family I'm already a roleplaying game writer. But writing one from scratch that other people can play ... no, I think that's too much work. It takes too much time. On the other hand I'd be happy to write the basic story to a video game or something, but no one's ever asked. But we have fun with Call of Cthulhu, but it's a buttload of work being game master if you have a certain level of ambition to make it fun for the—
50:03 [Glitch again] —do you use AI (ChatGPT) to get suggestions or ideas when you write?
No, I have never done that. I tested ChatGPT at my son's suggestion once, but that was just to ask something dumb to see how it worked. Actually, maybe I've asked a couple factual questions, like for The Ghost in the Machine about how certain explosive materials work. But never anything in the writing itself, no, more as an alternative to Wikipedia, or Flashback for that matter. Flashback can actually be very good in that sense. I've used that some when there are people who are knowledgeable in an area or have a profession I want to know more about, who can describe what it's like to work in psychiatric care or as a police or whatever in long texts and people ask questions. That's pretty useful. Of course, there's a lot of junk on there too.
51:08 Could Little Star be made into a film/TV series?
It's being worked on. I can't say more, but it's being worked on. [Note: The Swedish is vaguer here, but I don't know how else to translate "Det hålls på." Just so people don't get their hopes up unnecessarily.]
51:30 What do you think about writing on a deadline?
Like I said, I never have any of those for my novels. I give Ordfront some kind of vague timeframe for when I'll be done because they're making a catalogue or so that they know how to plan their releases and that kind of thing, but these deadlines are pretty fluid, and it's only once I feel that I've written enough or know enough about what's happening next that I can say "I'll be done by the last of September" or "I'll be done before New Years". But when it comes to film and TV it's a different matter. I'm pretty comfortable with deadlines. I'm pretty good at forcing myself to write, to put the words on the computer. So no, I don't have any problem with deadlines and even think they can be somewhat fertile, often because they give me a chance to feel diligent. I'll say regarding a film project: "You'll get this in a month." And then they get it after a week instead because I've written it so quickly or it's flowed so well. I think I'm somewhat known in the business for being hella quick when I turn in work.
I'm damn stubborn but also impatient, which led me to write lots of new stuff all the time when I was a standup comedian. It was often that I wrote a monologue that semi-worked. I did it on stage and got a couple laughs. In that situation you're supposed to fine-tune it, develop it, put the punch lines and timing differently so it works, but I usually just wrote something else instead to see if it worked better. That was also what caused me to constantly have new texts so that other comedians started contacting me to ask if I could write material for their monologues. During a few years I had that as a side income. I wrote for Babben Larsson, Ulla Skoog, Jesper Odelberg, and Lasse Lindroth, rest his soul. That was largely because I wrote new stuff all the time and wrote quickly. So in that sense I don't have any problem with deadlines. It's good to have that sword hanging over you. And I think it's nice to get things over with quickly so I can spend more time on the things I have to think more about, like The Summer of 1986 currently, which I'll spend several more days just thinking and writing notes about.
54:50 When is The Summer of 1985 coming out in English?
That I don't know. I have no idea. I know that The Writing in the Water is coming out in English later this year, I think. I know there are people who've bought the rights to all three books in the series, so that one's coming. But I don't know anything about The Summer of '85. But if the TV series turns out good—and I think it will since there are so many talented people involved—there might be more interest.
55:50
Hans-Åke writes that the hour is approaching its end and it's time to round off. Yes, it certainly is. I don't know what else ... To those of you who weren't here from the start, here's The Ghost in the Machine, and as previously mentioned, The Pigs is coming sometime this autumn. The Summer of 1985 TV series is airing sometime next year, I hope. There are four or five other film and TV projects that are in the works. I'm writing the screenplays for two of them myself, and the others are in other people's caring hands. There's a lot of fun stuff happening, actually, that I hope I'll be able to talk more about when it's time. OK, I don't think there's anything more I can say. A short story collection containing "Sigge" is coming eventually. That was all I had for today.
[reads in the comments: "Looking forward to The Pigs"]
Yeah, watch out. I think I'll get a lot of shit for that one. That's why we're making so clear what kind of book it is, that it's not this cozy stuff I've been doing the past couple years. The Pigs is something else entirely. "Backcountry horror to dansband rhythm", like I wrote somewhere. OK, thank you for joining me. Now I'll be heading inside to make some pizza, play some Medium, and watch The Penguin. Have a good one. Thanks for coming along. Tja.
