Don’t do your reader’s thinking for them. Stimulate imagination; don’t stifle it.

This is about writing fiction but it can apply to other forms of writing, too. I’ll let you work out how to make the transcription. (See what I did there?)

Doing your reader’s thinking for them is condescending at best and self-defeating at worst. The most powerful tool your reader possesses is his or her imagination. Let it roam. Let it bloom. It’s what made them want to read your book or story in the first place.

I recently read the new ‘Girl’ — aka Lisbeth Salander — book by David Lagercrantz. I was a big fan of the original three books in the Millennium series written by Stieg Larsson. Unfortunately, Stieg won’t be writing any more books in the series, of which he had planned to write ten. Stieg was a ferocious and dedicated anti-fascist: it’s not obviously apparent that Lagercrantz shares quite the same antipathy to the right.

Of course, this is all about the brand now and the brand is not politics but about Lisbeth Salander. According to the publishers and the marketing, Lagercrantz is a superior writer to Larsson. Quite what that means exactly is open to question. And although the first of the Larsson books had its clunky moments, that could just as easily have been down to the translation. What is not in doubt is the fact that Larsson created a set of wonderful vibrant characters in Lisbeth Salander, Mikael Blomkvist, and the staff at Millennium.

Being a better writer, though, appears to mean that Lagercrantz has pretensions to make the fourth in the series a more literary thriller. In practice, this requires that all characters are introduced by endless paragraphs of internal debate. It is obviously essential that we become intimately involved in their streams of consciousness before they can perform any action.

I’m not trying to do a review of the book, however. The Girl In The Spider’s Web is 470 pages long. Immediately before reading it, I had read Graham Greene’s England Made Me — something of a test for a proud Scot, of course — and that is less than 200 pages. What marks the Greene as literature, in my opinion, is that it manages to deal with morality and predatory capitalism while presenting the psychology of its characters through what they do and say. Actions are not prefaced by expository analysis.

In the Greene, plot and character and subtext are as one. The reader is sucked into the world of the book and allowed the space to imagine all the little extras that make up life in this rather sordid world. In the Lagercrantz, plot is one thing, character another, and there is no subtext as such because everything is broadcast at high volume in the gaps between the action. We have no chance to exercise imagination because the story proceeds almost as a series of tick boxes.

I loved the Greene and I thoroughly enjoyed the Lagercrantz. The difference, in the end, is that the former stimulated me and the latter constrained my imagination. This seems to me a fairly basic first — and I know there are many ways to skin a cat — test to distinguish the literary credentials of a work of fiction.