Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 12

Hacks or Jerks

I remember when I was an aspiring author, I thought a lot about the mistakes I saw successful writers supposedly making. I hated it when a successful author would insist on writing a book outside of the series that I loved. I also hated it when a series ended up veering off in the “wrong” direction, or if it felt to me like the author had lost interest in a series and was just “phoning it in.”

Things look a lot different from the perspective of the publishing writer, let me tell you. What seems obvious to a reader’s perspective (that a writer is doing it “wrong”) is not at all clear from the writer’s perspective.

I remember writing a couple of letters to authors I admired about books that I didn’t love. One author kindly wrote back to explain to me that other readers had very much liked the book I had not liked, and that even if she agreed with some of my criticisms of said book, not every reader had the same tastes.

And guess what? This is so true. I have since talked to other fans of the same series and discovered to my surprise that the very books I found weakest were their favorites. And the books I loved that took a few chances (but not too many), these readers didn’t like.

Just because you don’t love something doesn’t mean that the author has given up writing good books and doesn’t care about readers anymore. Just because an author decides to write something different that isn’t in your favorite series doesn’t mean the author has become too big for regular readers and doesn’t care about anything but indulging herself.

Writers need to try new things. Sometimes that is the only way they can keep writing. Sometimes writers are still loving a series even if you aren’t. Sometimes writers are forced by economic concerns to continue writing a series that they wish they could end. That doesn’t make the writer a jerk or money-grubbing. It makes a writer a real human being.

I hate the idea that if a writer isn’t doing what a readers wants, that writer is either a hack or a jerk. Some writers will write to a different audience for a while, and that’s OK. Some writers will try something else and then come back to an old, familiar series when it feels fresh again. That’s not selling out necessarily.

I am terrified sometimes at the idea that a reader will dislike one book, after liking five or six of them, and never try another book of mine again because I’ve become a hack or a jerk. I’m not saying any reader is obligated to buy every book a writer publishes. Of course not. Readers can choose and sometimes readers will get tired of a series for reasons unrelated to the writer’s skill or commitment to the series. But please don’t make assumptions about the writer after one book you didn’t like.

December: National Novel Revision Month

You know how you’re always thinking up the “right” way to zing back at someone, two years or twenty years after the fact? Or how you see a movie a million times and then you realize how it SHOULD have ended?

Yeah, that’s why we writer invented revision. NaNoWriMo is great. I love that people bang out a quick, first draft. It can be exhilarating and it can be exhausting. But now that you have a great draft, make it better!

December should be National Novel Revision Month. And January, too. And maybe February and March. Hell, the rest of the year should be National Revision Months and you get a new first draft for Novembers only. Because it will likely take you a year or so to get the novel right.

In fact, if you’re like me, you’ll still be thinking up the RIGHT ending to the book, and the RIGHT conversation for those two characters ten years after it’s published. It’s the biggest reasons authors do not spend time reading their own published books. Because it drives us crazy we can’t revise anymore.

Yes, writers write. But even more than that, what I think brings writers together is that we revise. A lot.

Do Authors Put in Symbols and Stuff?

My teenage niece asked me about her high school English teacher who had been teaching her students to find symbols in novels and poetry. Since I am an author, she wanted to know if I really put that stuff in there on purpose or if her teacher (as she suspected) was making it up. It seemed hard to believe that it was real.

I told her that

1. It doesn’t matter if the author puts that stuff in on purpose. It can still be there. The work of the author is often to let the unconscious speak, and the author does not always control how the unconscious forms thoughts. Therefore, the author is often speaking for the culture rather than for one person.

2. Don’t ask the author what the book means. The author doesn’t know what the book means. That’s not the job of the author. The job of the author is to create. If an author says that a book means this or means that, do we take that as guaranteed? Of course not. If the author of a book insisted that there was no racism in it, but there is clearly racism in it, does the intention erase it? No.

3. The job of the critic is just as creative as the job of the author, and it is to find meaning where no one had seen it before. I talked a bit about Dadaism and how the point there was that anyone can be an artist, using ordinary kinds of text and image, and that the creativity was in bringing the same kind of vision to ordinary life as to that deemed "high art."

4. Be kind to teachers of literature and writing. It’s a hard job and it’s an important one. I believe that art of every kind is important. As important as food. As important as shelter. I know not everyone agrees with me, but the ability to make life make sense matters a lot. Also, the way that we can change the world by first imagining the change in art is the way humans work. Why do you think that we landed on the moon after we imagined we did?

Self-Confidence in Interviews

When I was in high school, I applied to be various different Sterling scholars: Foreign Language, English, General. When I was scheduled for the Foreign Language interview, I turned out to have a very high fever. But I decided to go in anyway, because I wanted to show I was tough. Bad plan. Very bad plan. This began a string of terrible interview situations.

The French teacher asked me several questions in French. Perhaps because I had learned my French in Germany and he was American, I could not understand him. I kept asking him to repeat himself, and eventually gave up completely. The the German teacher talked to me for a bit, ending on this lovely gem, "Why do you want to be a Sterling scholar?"

To me, this seemed the stupidest question I had ever heard. Yet people were asking high school students this all the time, as if we had some brilliant, humble answer. I wanted to be a Sterling scholar because it was an honor that all the adults around me said I should go for, and basically, because it would look good on my applications for college. Which was my end goal in life at the time: getting into a good college with a scholarship.

In my feverish, deluded state, I said something like (in very bad German), because it would be a great ego trip.

Yeah, not great interviewing skills.

Fast forward a couple of years and I was doing an exit interview from my B.A. program where I had to do an oral interview completely in German with a native speaker. I was doing OK until I flubbed a little on the broken pipes question. My German did not tend toward the practical, since I spent most of my time reading 18th century texts.

The really bad part came when the professor asked me what I would do if my sixteen year-old daughter announced she was going to get married. I was nineteen at the time and remembered quite keenly how it felt to be sixteen. At nineteen, people still treated me as a teenager (which I was) and constantly told me that I would agree with them when I was older (mostly, I don't, but it's really just a way to stop an argument).

So I argued that I wouldn't stop my teenager from marrying, that she was probably perfectly capable of making a mature, adult choice. The professor was appalled. I'm pretty sure the argument shortly became a test of my sanity rather than my German. He did give me a decent grade (A-), but he was ANGRY. So was I.

Since then, I have always been  nervous in interview situations or anything public. When I became an author, I was terrified of doing school visits or even book signings. I wanted people to tell me EVERYTHING I was supposed to do, what I should wear, what I should say, how long I should say it for, where I should look, what expression I should go for, and on and on.

Then this weekend at Bouchercon, I had a panel called "Small Towns." I did a bit of reading up on the other panelists and the moderator to acquaint myself with their work. And that's it. I wasn't even remotely nervous about the panel. A couple of questions surprised me, but didn't faze me. Afterward, my publisher and editor seemed very happy and complimented me on how well I had been able to both answer the question and bring up "talking points" about The Bishop's Wife.

I hadn't once thought of any of it. I was just having a good time, enjoying myself as if at a friend's dinner party. It was only that night when I was back in my hotel room, not at all nervous about meeting new people and saying the right things, that I realized how far I had come. I thought about another author I met who seemed tongue-tied and thought how I was exactly like that about ten years ago. It didn't mean anything about intelligence, only about ease.

I don't know where it came from, but thank God it came at last.

The Price of Multiple Narrators

At Bouchercon this weekend, my editor Juliet Grames was on a panel of editors, agents, and marketing people in the publishing business. At the very end, someone asked her what made her love a manuscript. She said:

1. A single narrator.

2. No serial killers.

3. No pov from the villain.

4. Characters.

5. A hook

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that she agreed with me about single narrators, but it’s long been one of the reasons I tend to prefer YA fantasy and sf over adult fantasy and sf. Maybe this makes me shallow, but I don’t like head hopping.

Why not?

I like to get to know a narrator really, really well. This is impossible if I’m constantly being interrupted by other narrators. Sure, you can say this makes me simple because the more complex political stories require multiple narrators.

But guess what? I think a really good writer can tell a story of the same complexity with a single narrator as someone who writes multiple povs. A really great single narrator is going to have contact and conversations with lots of different people. And those different people can present their own pov, with the narrator having to respond to it. I love this. I love characters who are forced to deal with people who disagree fundamentally with them.

The problem with head hopping is that every time you change narrators, there’s a chance I’m going to close the book because I don’t like the new narrator. Yeah, again, call me shallow because I need to like a narrator. I don’t mean like-like, though. I mean, find this narrator fascinating enough to spend time with. And yes, brilliant writers (George R. R. Martin comes to mind) can still make me love every single narrator. And yet I still sometimes want to throw his books across the room because they play with me and refuse to give me closure. I like closure. Sue me.

I don’t really think that you have to do this one way or another to be a good writer. I’ve certainly written books with multiple povs. Let me tell you, though, they are not my most popular. I love first person when it’s done right, but I can also love third just as much. Just think about this when you’re writing. Is it really necessary to change povs? And is it worth the cost in reader investment in the story? Am I sure they aren’t going to close the book and go to bed instead of reading another chapter?

In the Club

The year was 1990 and I was in graduate school at Princeton University. I was just barely 20 years old and I felt very lost, coming from the rather isolated and innocent world of Mormon Utah. I had recently married my high school sweetheart and dragged him with me to New Jersey, where people were constantly asking us why we were married and why we were Mormons (in one guise or another).

I had been born in New Jersey, but my family had moved to Utah when I was ten so that my father could teach at Mormon church-owned Brigham Young University. My oldest brother Mark, however, had moved back to New Jersey when he married and got his first job. He had two children and invited us to come over almost any weekend we wanted. In addition to giving us free food, he also allowed me access to his vast paperback library of science fiction and fantasy. He even had a monthly budget of $100 to spend on any books he wanted, which seemed like the very definition of wealth to me.

It was in my brother’s library that I discovered Kate Elliott, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Tamora Pierce, three women writers who were telling stories that turned the world upside down for me. Women DID stuff in these books. Women had their own stories to tell. They changed the world. They didn’t give up their femininity, but they were like the male protagonists I had spent my whole life reading about and had assumed that if I were to become a writer, I would spend my life writing about. I had so far written a number of novels, all with male heroes who rescued damsels in distress, with backdrops borrowed from Star Trek, Perry Mason, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond.

I borrowed as many books as I could carry and took them back to my tiny apartment. During the day, I went to my grad school classes. I read complicated German novels, epics, Bildungsromane, and a lot of literary scholarship. I even took classes on German art and philosophy. I studied with Elaine Showalter and read about the secret pulp stories published by Louisa May Alcott under a pseudonym. I took a class in creative writing in the department that Toni Morrison taught in.

And when it was 6:00 p.m., my workday ended and I got out my own books. I read for hours on end, sucked into a world that could make me forget about dinner, about grad school papers, about a dissertation I had to figure out, about professors who told us that there were no qualified women on the PLANET they could hire nor were women writers appropriate material for dissertations or articles for tenure. I forgot about the assistant profs, all women, who wrote letters complaining about sexism to the university and then left, one by one, as I struggled to find a mentor for my work on women writers of the Enlightenment, where women had for the first time a voice of their own and actually an economy that encouraged them.

I loved Kate Elliott’s Jaran with the kind of passion you can only understand if you were one of those kids who read books on the way to school. And as you walked in between classes. And on a camping trip where it rained so badly during one night that you regretted bringing your favorite book with you because your parents would never allow you to buy a second copy, since you’d already read it once and why would anyone want to read a book more than that? The matriarchal society that was depicted seemed a cure to me to all those time travel books where the Larry Stu author goes back in time and gets to oppress women and minorities in the name of historical accuracy. The power struggle between the two characters in love felt like something that could only happen in a book, except that it was my life, too. My negotiation with my husband about where we lived when and who took care of the kids during what times of day so that we could both work jobs that were important to us.

I met Kate Elliott in person for the first time in 2012 at Sirens in Oregon. By then, I’d met a lot of favorite authors. Some meetings were just what you’d imagine they might be. Some were disappointments. Others disasters as I realized that loving a book isn’t the same as loving an author as a person. I followed Kate on facebook, on twitter, and tried to avoid being stalkerish. I brought all of my Jaran books to be signed once, those later editions that I bought after I’d worn out my brother’s copies and, since he had all that monthly money, let him replace on his own.

And then, she expressed interest in getting a copy of The Bishop’s Wife. I contacted my publisher and they sent one along. You learn not to hold your breath at these kinds of things. It’s not personal. People sometimes have deadlines or family events that make it impossible to read at all. And then there is the reality that not everyone will fall in love with your book, even if your book is good. Even if you loved their books. Even if you desperately want someone to love your book and see you hidden inside of all those words.

But today, I went to my amazon page

(http://www.amazon.com/Bishops-Wife-Mette-Ivie-Harrison/dp/1616954760/ref=sr_1_1_twi_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1415632397&sr=8-1&keywords=mette+ivie+harrison+the+bishop%27s+wife)

and I saw this:

“Don’t be deceived by the unassuming heroine and quiet start of The Bishop’s Wife. In this gripping and contemplative mystery, a woman who most people would identify as living an ordinary life discovers she is the only one willing to pursue a dangerous puzzle. As she uncovers layers of deceit she struggles to remain true to her deeply courageous self.”
—Kate Elliott, bestselling author of the Spiritwalker Trilogy

I could just say that I feel like I’d won the lottery, but I think this is a lot better than that. The lottery is a prize that is completely impersonal, and unearned. And hearing a hero of yours loved your book is one of the sweetest rewards of becoming a writer. Really, I think that for me, all the prizes in the world, all the book sales, can not make a dent in the feeling of pride and satisfaction as a writer in being welcomed into the club.

Thanks Kate!

Don't Write Too Much

This may sound like crazy advice from someone who writes a lot daily, but I think for NaNoWriMoers and others who are starting out, it is actually useful.

I spend 3 hours a day at the keyboard. And then I leave it be. I may come back to check on email or to do other kinds of writing-related things, but pushing myself to write more words than I have to write only ends up in killing projects and any desire I have to work on them.

Set yourself a certain time to write. Be honest about it and don’t play around on the internet instead of writing. If you can’t think what to write, you can do things like writing notes to yourself or writing scenes that don’t appear in the manuscript to get yourself going.

But when you’re done, don’t fall prey to the temptation to make a good day an ever better one. I always try to write the first sentence of a new chapter or a new section before I leave for the day, and even if I have a mind brimming full of ideas for that chapter, I don’t write them down that day. I save them for the next day.

I feel like this is part of the reason that I can keep going, day after day. I never use up all my creative energy on one day. It’s like measuring out how much of a workout you can do each day without stressing yourself out so much that you end up overtrained and have to take months off. I always take weekends off, too. It’s good for my brain and body to recharge.

Try it. Try writing half of a sentence or just a little bit more of what you know. Then leave it and come back the next day. Always walk away from the keyboard when you have a little more energy. See if it makes a difference.

Of course, as always with writing advice from someone else, YMMV. If it doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t. There are plenty of writers I know who gorge on writing for a month and then have long, dry spells. That’s just not the way I work. If it’s the way you work, go for it and ignore me completely!

The Gaping Maw of Genius

We sometimes get this idea that creator are geniuses who create things out of nothing, that they came from nowhere. This is actually never true. I tend to dislike the word “genius” for precisely this reason. It grants this weird status to people who basically never deserve it.

To me, a genius is someone who is able to make connections that other people don’t make. This means that geniuses tend to be people with broad interests. As much as it can be tempting to tell creative types to focus on one craft, there is an important element of creativity that needs to be fed and it is vastly hungry. It needs all kinds of food.

If you’re a writer, don’t just read books. Which isn’t to say you don’t need to worry about reading books. You do. Read and read and read. But also watch TV, watch movies, read newspapers or other journalism, read non-fiction. And then when you’re done with that, go to a museum and look at sculptures. Learn about painting. Study the history of fashion. Learn about the history of musical instruments. Do some archeology if you can. Go birdwatching. Enjoy nature. Exercise. Become obsessed with something completely different from your art. Love animals. Love people.

You may not feel like you’re doing anything. You may feel like you’re being lazy and that you’re just “enjoying” yourself. This is what a lot of people may be tempted to tell you you are doing. But you’re not. You’re filling the gaping maw of genius.

If you want to create, you begin somewhere. All the great musicians, artists, and writers—they all built on the shoulders of those who went before. They didn’t invent something out of nothing. They put two things together that no one had put together before. Or three things. Or eight. Or fifty.

So when you’re not working at what you’re working on, don’t beat yourself up. You ARE working on it.

When you look around and think that what you’re doing is derivative crap, well yes. It all is. That’s what genius is. Derivative crap seen rather more kindly. Or perhaps derivative crap that has just one moment of brilliance that raises it above other derivative crap.

The idea that we all want to be geniuses seems to me to be missing the point. The genius as this solitary individual is a crock. Geniuses tend to have groups of other geniuses they work with. Guess why? Because they inspire each other. They steal from each other, if you will. They bring each other the best of many, many things. And they talk about and stimulate each other.

If you want to be a genius, don’t sit in an ivory tower. Find a bunch of people who love what you love. And guess what? You’ll make each other geniuses.

Writers Are Failures

Writing is about failure. If you want to be a successful writer, you should probably get used to the idea that you’re going to fail a lot.

Well, no. Actually, you can’t get used to it. Getting used to failure means that it doesn’t hurt you anymore and that somehow you expect. You can’t expect failure as a writer because you’ve got to keep believing that *this* book is going to be *the one.*

And the truth is, every book has the chance to be *the one.* In some alternate universe other than the one we live in, your book will be the mega bestseller there that you thought it would be here. Or it will change the world. It will reinvent everything that people thought they knew about writing.

There. But it may not to do it here.

I tell people a lot that I wrote 20 novels before I wrote one that got published. I don’t know any other authors who have written that many books.

Am I proud of the fact that it took me that long? Well, yeah, sort of I am.

Because I didn’t take short cuts. I never stopped believing that I could make it. And I didn’t stop looking critically at my own books after I’d written them so I could see what was good and bad about them. I kept seeing that there was some kernel of something I’d tried to do that was brilliant, but that it hadn’t been fully realized. So I had to try all over again. From the beginning.

And you know what? I keep failing. I still write about 5 novels to every book that I publish. Some part of me wishes they were all publishable, but they’re not. I keep writing by throwing myself at a thing and wrestling with it. Sometimes I win and sometimes the thing wins.

I don’t like failure. I cry over my books that don’t get published. I sometimes wish I could see the alternate universe where that book was the perfect one that matched the exact set of circumstances that would make it *the book.*

But I’m here. In this world. And being creative isn’t about success anymore than it’s about failure. It’s not about the result. That’s where people get messed up. You don’t get to decide if you’re a creative person when you succeed and when you don’t.

You only get to decide if you’re going to put yourself in the ring again. I think that if you’re surrounded by other people who think they can shape your creative impulse into something that always works or always connects with other people—you’ll end up being stunted. You’ll think about the results.

And that’s not what creative people are supposed to do. I know, we live in this capitalist world where it’s hard not to think of money as the ultimate badge of success. But that’s not ultimately what your job is, to make money.

Your job is to try, and to fail. And to keep doing it. Success is almost beside the point. Because all you’re going to do is fail again after you’ve succeeded.

I’m not saying it won’t hurt it. It damn well better. You’re the chosen sacrifice. You do what other people can’t do, because they want success. You have to want something other than that. You want the journey itself.

My new "long" bio

Mette Ivie Harrison grew up on a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in central New Jersey in a family with eleven children, a dog, a pony, and lots of chickens. She moved to the more suburban Utah city of Provo at age ten, where her father taught Computer Science at Brigham Young University.

In 1985, when she was in high school, she spent a year abroad at a German Gymnasium. She took numerous AP classes when she returned to Utah, and in 1988, was named one of twelve female "Ezra Taft Benson Scholars," the highest award offered by the Mormon-owned Brigham Young University, given not only for academic scholarship, but for service and dedication to the Mormon church. Because of AP credit, German language experience, and her tendency to take heavy credit loads, Mette was able to graduate from Brigham Young University with a Master's Degree in German Literature only two years later, in 1990, when she was nineteen. During her two years, Mette was a writer and editor for The Student Review, the subversive student newspaper not approved by the university. She also had experiences with several of the "September Six," the notorious feminist scholars who were excommunicated in 1992.

Mette married high school sweetheart Matthew Harrison in December of 1990, following his mission for the Mormon church to Haiti. She went on to earn a PhD from Princeton University in 1995 in Germanic Languages and Literatures with a dissertation on the female Bildungsroman of the 18th century. She faced considerable difficulty on the topic because of prejudice against a dissertation that focused completely on women writers in a department without a single female tenured faculty member.

Beginning in 1994, Mette worked as an adjunct professor at BYU, but decided in 1997 to work on her fiction writing career. Two years later, in 1999, she sold her first young adult novel, The Monster in Me, about a young teen girl who is fostered by a Mormon family in Heber, Utah. Mette has since published seven young adult novels, including Mira, Mirror and The Princess and the Hound. She has also published Ironmom, a memoir about the loss of her sixth child in 2005, and the subsequent training for an Ironman competition, which brought her some semblance of sanity after years of depression.

Since 2006, Mette has completed four full Ironman competitions, more than one hundred total races, and is ranked 144 for her age group nationally in triathlon. She also trains her husband, Matt, and her children. All but the youngest have competed in at least half-marathon distance races, swim well, and volunteer at local races. Two have completed marathons, two have completed Olympic distance races, and one just finished his first half Ironman (beating his father for the first time) in training for his first full Ironman. Mette trains an average of three hours a day and her PR for a half-Ironman (1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike, 13.1 mile run) is now at 5:16.

Mette delivered three of her five children at home. Her first son was delivered in a hospital after an emergency transfer. In 2002, Mette was part of one of the first Orson Scott Card "Literary Boot Camps." She gave birth to her fifth child, Zachary, on Thursday of the Boot Camp, after spending Wednesday writing her story between contractions. Friday morning, she was back at the Boot Camp with baby in tow. This made her rather memorable to everyone there.

An active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mette has served as Gospel Doctrine teacher, as a member of the Primary Presidency, as an aid for an autistic child, as a Primary instructor, and as a leader for the 8-11-year-old girls. Currently, Mette works in her ward nursery and her husband serves with the scouts. Mette's five children, now ages eleven to twenty, are a dynamic group with a wide range of talents and attitudes toward faith.

You can find Mette on the web at www.metteivieharrison.com. She is on Twitter at @metteharrison and has a Tumblr, metteivieharrison.tumblr.com. She also posts on Youtube with her "Ugly Ironman" vlogs. Depression, health and fitness, and questions about doctrines of the Mormon church regarding family and women are frequent topics of essays and blogs.