Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 13

Lucky $*%*@s

I find myself saying this more and more: For every author who makes it big, there are a hundred authors who worked just as hard and wrote just as well--and didn't make it big.

My experience is that the earlier in the career an author makes it big, the less they are able to see the effect luck has on their success. If an author says that you just have to work hard and write better books, they don't get it. That's not the way the real world always works. We wish it was. We all wish that we had that kind of control over our own success. We can do what we can do, yes. But that isn't sufficient.

And I find myself admiring more and more the authors who find a way to keep on keeping on, despite setbacks that had nothing to do with them and their good work or their personality or any other flaws they may sometimes think had something to do with bad luck. It comes out in the kinds of stories they write. They are filled with more compassion, with different kinds of heroes. They write with a wider worldview. And they take more chances, I think, because they see past formula and they don't have this idea that they have to keep repeating the first lesson of success in order to keep having more of it.

Writing has Layers

I write dialog first. Almost all my first drafts read like scripts, with talking heads. I don’t have description. I don’t have dialog tags. There is no movement in a spatial arena. Worldbuilding is often pretty sparse and contradictory. Action scenes are almost non-existent. I HEAR my stories rather than seeing them, and this is the result.

But every author writes a first draft differently. And that’s OK. I suspect that every book is different to some degree, as well, but I don’t know that I will ever do a book that isn’t talking heads in the first draft, even if it moves away from dialog heavy after that.

Don’t be afraid of writing your first draft the way that you write it. If you write slowly, revising what you wrote the day before, then moving on. That’s OK. If you take months (or years) to consciously or subconsciously plan out a book and then write it down in one big chunk over a weekend, that’s OK. You’re not a hack because you use your own particular method of drafting. If you write all description first, or spend years working out the magic system—it’s all good.

But I thought it might help to make a list of the layers that most writers will eventually add to a first draft, to think about while working on revision.

Layers of your book may include:

1. Dialog

2. Description

3. Action

4. Backstory

5. Emotion

6. Voice

7. Theme

8. Relationships

9. Timescale

10. Pacing

11. Pretty/Quotable Words

12. Hook

13. First Chapter

14. Last Chapter

15. Climax

16. Surprises

17. Tension

18. Conflict

Each genre will probably have it own requirements. Mystery needs red herrings, clues, etc. Romance needs building romantic suspense. Horror needs a feeling of dread. Science fiction needs sensawonder. Fantasy needs setting that is personified. But anyway, this is a start.

Good luck on your first draft as NaNoWriMo is beginning, and remember to give yourself permission to be messy and bad, and to do it the way that works for you uniquely, and not necessarily for anyone else!

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

This is probably the most frequently asked question of all writers, and most writers really hate it. I hated it for a long time, in part because I get too many ideas and am actually trying to find ways to get rid of them without having to write them down in novel form, which takes a long time and is emotionally difficult to carry.

But I remember when I didn't get a lot of ideas, and it felt crippling. What do you write about? You can't even begin without an idea, especially one you're passionate about. I hear people say a lot of the time, "You're so lucky" or "You're so talented. I could never be a writer." Because of the barrier of not having an idea, I think mostly. But I don't think it's true.

The main reason that people feel like they don't have ideas are:
1. They tell themselves all their ideas are bad. This happens especially to people who are taking literature classes in college or who did so in the past. It can take a long time to recover from graduate school.

2. They aren't engaging with ideas on a regular basis. I don't know about other arts, but if you're a writer, I feel strongly you need to be reading books. Every day. When you read a lot, you end up feeling like ideas are normal, and you see the pattern of how ideas are turned into stories. This is really useful. Also, you start to see how ideas are reused by different authors and changed. This is the beginning of getting your own ideas. Yep, pretty much stealing and reworking.

Sometimes people feel like they're just not good at getting ideas. It's not a terminal problem. It's like someone saying that they're not good at running downhills or uphills. Well, you know how you fix that? You do it regularly and then it's not as hard.

To many writers, getting ideas can feel like the easy part of the process. It's sitting down and writing it over days and weeks and months and years that is the hard part, and revising it so that it's better, and then all the work that goes into publication. But if you don't know where to start, the rest doesn't matter. So to get started:
1. Read.
2.Think about how you would do a scene differently.
3. Change the ending.
4.Write a chapter from another character's point of view.
5. Write a secret diary for your favorite character.
6. Make a side character into a hero for the day and see what happens.
7. Give someone a super power that was unknown before.
8. Write what happens after the book ends.
9. Write a prolog or a scene before the book begins.
10. Write a letter to an author about what should have happened at the climax and why.

Coincidence and Empowerment

So you hear a lot about how coincidence is bad in a book because it makes the plot weak, it shows the writer behind the scenes, and it is just unbelievable and throws the reader out of the world of the book. Yeah, it may be all that. But I think the real reason coincidence is a problem is because of the way that it steals power from the protagonist.

You want to build a protagonist who is active. You don’t have to have a perfect protagonist. You don’t even have to have a sympathetic protagonist. You can have a weak protagonist who doesn’t really know anything important. But what you can’t have is one who does nothing interesting or that moves him/her toward his/her goals (however stupid they may be in the beginning of the book).

When you as a writer give your protagonist the answer to a problem by having someone else solve it, or by simply having it drop from the sky, you are missing the chance to show your protagonist working hard and learning skills and cred by trying and failing multiple times.

Sometimes I think that writers are so worried about getting in enough plot that they overstuff their books with so much plot that they end up having to use coincidences to get through it. You need less plot than you think you need. You need more character. Plot isn’t the cool stuff that happens that makes the reader think that you, the writer, are cool. Plot is the character doing stuff to get what s/he wants. That’s it.

Go forth and plot!

10 Things You Need to Believe to Write

1. Only you can write this.
2. You were born to write this.
3. People need you to write this.
4. The world is waiting for you to finish this.
5. One day, someone will tell you how much they needed to read this.
6. You can write anything you set your mind to.
7. This has a glimmer of brilliance in it.
8. The crappy words will fall away in revision.
9. Your vision of the world matters.
10. You see what no one else does.
You don’t need to believe that this is going to be a bestseller. You don’t need to believe that you’re going to be a household name. You don’t need to believe that someday people will study your book in college. But you do have to work to counteract the relentless voice of defeat in your head that says:
1. No one will ever read this.
2. I am banging my head against the wall here.
3. Who am I to think I could be a writer?
4. My father/mother/partner is right. I should give up.
5. I don’t know how to do this. I never learned. No one ever taught me.
6. My voice doesn’t matter.
7. My experience is too different from anyone else’s to connect with readers.
8. I don’t know what happens next.
9. I feel too exposed. I want to hide and protect myself more.
10. I can’t expect anyone to pay me for this when they can get so many other things for free.

10 Biggest mistakes I see in beginning writers’ manuscripts

1. Lack of pacing, especially trying to tell too many scenes too quickly.
2. Starting with something really big that has no context and means nothing.
3. A lack of relationships that matter.
4. World building jargon that takes long minutes to parse through.
5. An evil villain who is Snidely Whiplash.
6. Telling too much backstory all at once. (My rule is one paragraph at a time.)
7. Good, meaty dialog that shows conflict between characters (rather than backstory).
8. A sense of layers. This can be a sense of humor or a great voice or foreshadowing.
9.Telling part of the story that feels like filler because someone else told them they had to.
10. Not knowing where to start and so starting in about five different places, one after the other. There is only one beginning.

12 Ways Writing is Like Running 50 Miles

It’s so easy to do the first part. Everyone can write a few chapters. It feels great.
You start hearing about people who are doing better than you are. You feel like everyone is passing you. Maybe they are.
You need aid in the form of food that makes you happy and encouraging smiles from strangers or family and friends.
Sometimes it gets messy. You just have to keep going.
You feel like you are all alone. There is no one who seems to be doing what you are doing for miles around.
You have to keep going, making tiny goals.
You have to readjust your goals when you realize you won’t be able to finish in your goal time.
You need to tell other people what you need.
You need a support crew to look after the home fires for a bit.
You may get lost and have to start over again.
When you can see the finish line, everything gets easy again.
After the finish line, there will be casualties and you will need to recuperate.

10 Ways to Beat Writer’s Block

Start typing the phone book. Eventually you will think of something better to type.
Start a new novel.
Take a few days off.
Give yourself different seasons to write, a revision season, a drafting season, and a conference/promotional season.
Think of athletes who have been over-trained. What do you need to do to rest up and get ready for another season?
Try writing by hand for a while.
Give yourself permission to write badly.
Write a book that no one will ever publish. Write a book for yourself.
Type in a first line from someone else’s novel and go from there.
Give yourself permission to have writer’s block.

What a First Chapter Should Do:

1. Make the Reader Feel Something.
You want to evoke an emotion. It can be a negative emotion. It can be a positive emotion. But an emotion is almost always going to be associated with a human character. If your main character is not human, you are going to have to work awfully hard to make the reader feel an attachment to the character. Try to show the character as human as possible in the first chapter. You want the reader/editor/agent to really want to find out what happens in the next chapter. And reminder here: impressing the reader/agent/editor with your big words or pretty language isn’t an emotion that is likely to make them want to keep reading, all on its own.

2. Introduce a Character who either desperately wants something or desperately needs/fears something.
This is one of the main reasons that a prolog can be a problem. Even if you have a prolog character who is desperate, if you change povs in the next chapter, you may lose your reader. Ideally, you want to keep the same protagonist from chapter one to chapter two and show this character doing something to get what s/he wants or needs. An active character is always better than a passive one. But the reminder here is: don’t let worldbuilding overwhelm your character, especially in the first chapter. No matter how much you might want to tell the reader about all your cool stuff, if you don’t have a strong character attachment in the first chapter, you are likely doing something wrong.

3. Be Unique.
Sometimes this means having a unique voice, but it can be many other things. If you are doing a paranormal romance (which I’m still seeing at a lot of workshops), make sure your set-up is unique and that your dilemma is unique. If it feels like the same-old, same-old, my eyes glaze over. Don’t tell me that there is an evil bad guy and your mg protagonist has to save his father and then the world from this evil. Don’t tell me that your two main characters have been in love for centuries, but keep losing track of each other and have to find each other in a new incarnation. Don’t tell me that a vampire hunter and a vampire fall in love.

4. Show Conflict.
You don’t need to introduce the main conflict of the whole novel in your first few pages. In fact, you probably don’t want to because it takes too much set-up to explain the stakes and the worldbuilding. But you do need conflict in your first few pages. Conflict shows us about characters and it moves things forward. It makes things feel real and important. It makes characters feel real. So if you have characters who agree with each other or who don’t argue in the first chapter, who are passive or not talkative, reconsider.

5. Is Clearly Written so that the reader knows what is going on.
This cannot be overstated as an important part of a novel. I know so many writers who are so concerned with proving that they can write as well as the greats in their field—or better—that they forget that a story needs to be understood to be valued. Just make sure that you aren’t honing your words to the point that they lose all meaning. We need to know who people are, where they are, and what they are doing. It seems simple, but it can be very hard to achieve.

16 Ways to Conquer the Blank Page

Turn off the internet.
Start writing a letter to yourself about the book you want to write.
Take a book off your shelf and start typing in the first page of that book.
Go back to the page you wrote before and edit it.
Go back and reread what you wrote the day before.
Set a timer and force yourself to sit in your chair (with no internet) until it goes off. If you have to sit long enough in boredom, you may find yourself suddenly able to write.
Draw what you think will happen next.
Talk—out loud—to your characters and complain to them about the blank page.
Find a photo on line of a character or landscape for your book and simply describe the photo.
Write what wouldn’t happen next in your book.
Write a line your character would NEVER say.
Type the phonebook.
Write about the sound of silence.
Reread a book or watch a movie that you hate. You may find you suddenly have something to say.
Starve yourself of books or movies, any source story. You may find you NEED to write to fuel the part of you that can’t get story any other way than through yourself.
Write a list of questions that you have for your book.