Elements Scenes 2: Sweden & Tiveden

By Mark David  

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My journey into writing The Elements began with a trip to Sweden. Sweden is not the country of extremes I naïvely thought it was. Or so I thought I thought it was. 

My first impression of Sweden was driving North from Copenhagen. Skåne is flat and very much like Denmark - neat, orderly. The flag was different but the landscape was nearly the same, just bigger. Then we arrived at the belt where the open landscape stops and the real Sweden begins: The land of forest, shade. Boulders and rock. And moss. 

Isolation

Books dealing with characters in isolation could almost be a genre it itself. It's seeing a place and sensing the power of isolation that is the difference. I happened to be in Sweden in the fall and was struck by the vibrance of this season in that typical Swedish landscape: boulders left from the ice age and trees covered in moss, the scatter of dry leaves. Isolation. nature. Here was a setting for characters removed from the comfort zone of their ordinary lives, a place for things to happen. That was just the beginning. 

Returning home I then began a process of research. Little did I know this was something to consume myself and my life for the next seven years. The next summer holiday was directed to a place that could take all those ingredients I discovered in the beech forest of Sweden and elevate it to the next level: This place was Tiveden, the area outlined in the pale blue circle. The little lake there in the middle of the circle is lake Unden; not so little.

Tiveden is a place like no other. It is the country just to the right of lake Unden - a bare-boned nature stripped of all the comfort found in wild overgrown places. Not desolate. Radical, I would call it. Tiveden is a radical place with a radical history: Places of sacrifice. The heart of it known as Trollkyrka, or Troll Church Mountain. A radical place that just demanded a radical story. He Who Favours Fire opens at Trollkyrka with an opening I guarantee is as extreme and violent as the place it takes place: Troll Church Mountain.

Tiveden struck me and my family as the perfect place to begin The Elements - the concept had grown in the meantime to a full-blown mystery thriller though the writing had barely begun. Tiveden is very rugged - like no other place I've ever been to before. So began the process of crafting by scene visiting. This country blew me away. 

The time I was there in the summer in a sweltering 32 degrees C. Hiking with nothing but shorts and my leather aussie-hat I nearly fainted, falling over from heat stroke. All the while, thinking 'what would be like to caught out here in a storm ...'. Then I remembered my previous visit to Sweden in the fall. Tiveden in the fall. That was it: He Who Favours Fire had found it's home. 

But this was just the beginning. It was researching the history of this place that really made an impression beginning a process of story-weaving based on little known but historically accurate legend-digging that makes He Who Favors Fire an original mystery-thriller. 

By Mark David