Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 14

How to Get More Done in the Same Time

How to Get More Done in the Same Time
1. Focus on ONE thing at a time.
2. Work until you need a break, then take one and use your brain in other ways.
3. Keep your body healthy.
4. Block out distractions with ear plugs, turning off cell phone and internet or whatever you need.
5. Be in the present moment.
6. When you are done with work for the day, put it away and focus on other things.
7. Give full attention to each person/thing as they need.
8. Don’t let your mind wander back to work during non-work hours if you can avoid it.
9. Keep your boundaries in place.
10. Let yourself do trivial things every day.
11. Give yourself a reward of silence every day (not the same as sleep).
 

17 Ways to Conquer the Fear that is Keeping You From Writing

Lie to yourself. Tell yourself that no one will ever see what you are writing on.
Write by hand so that it feels less permanent.
Make sure you do not tell anyone (including close family members, friends or your agent) about your current project until you feel more confident about it. Not always possible, I admit.
Have a secret project to work on even while you are working on a contracted one.
Close the door and turn out the lights while you write.
Write a project under a pseudonym (even if it is made up).
Keep yourself surrounded by good reviews, nice cards, or other things that remind you of your successed.
Remind yourself that anxiety is just energy your body is storing, ready to be used. It feels the same as excitement. Try to think of it as excitement.
Write out your fears, or the negative words that echo in your mind, and then crumple them up and throw them away.
Learn how to divide your mind so that you don’t pay attention to the fearful parts while you write.
Develop a routine, same time, same place, same drink, same music, which you always repeat to get you into a “writing mood.”
Write something easy to get started.
Tell yourself you are only going to do a little editing today. Then maybe if you feel like it, you can move on to writing more.
Write someone who has told you that you are a bad writer into a story and make something bad happen to them.
Do some yoga or deep breathing exercises.
Write a story for your inner, frightened child where a fearful child conquers fear and triumphs over evil.
Write your Newbery acceptance speech.

12 Steps to Success in Writing (or anything else in life)

1. BIC (Butt in Chair). This means just sit down and get it done.
2. Don’t Make Excuses. People who make excuses tend not to accomplish much.
3. Make a Working Space. Work there on a regular basis. Don’t have fun there. It messes with the chi.
4. Find a coach. This might be virtually, but find someone who can give you advice, someone who is further along the path than you are.
5. Make Big Changes if necessary. This means throwing out hundreds of pages on occasion. It means not taking offense when someone tells you truthfully what you are doing wrong.
6. Stay True to Your Vision. (Which sounds like it contradicts #5, but doesn’t. You need to have a vision so you can keep moving forward, even if you make changes.)
7.Deal with Fear. Fear is a part of every success. You face the fear, and then you move past it.
8.Join the Real Competition. This means that if you are a writer, you send stuff out. To real editors and agents. In the athletic world, it means you have to compete with people who are a lot better than you are. You learn a lot this way.
9. Celebrate the Rejections. This may sound crazy, but you’ve got to do something to encourage yourself to keep taking chances, because that’s the only way to success.
10.Read good books. Or experience what is of the best quality in your own field. Watch good swimmers. Experience incredible art. You need something to aim for.
11. Build Community. You need people to compare yourself against, to encourage you, to make you see what is realistic in terms of time frame. You also need human contact, no matter what you may have heard about artists in the ivory tower.
12. BIC. Because it always comes down to the work. And you doing it.

Crime Fiction Must-Reads

1. Murders in the Rue Morgue EA Poe 1841

2. A Study in Scarlet AC Doyle 1887

3. The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett 1929 Sam Spade

4. The Big Sleep by Raymon Chandler 1939 Philip Marlowe

5. Agatha Christe (best-selling writer of all time, Bible and Shakespeare have sold more) And Then There Were None (still sells 1,000,000 copies per year) in 1939.

6. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith 1955 (anti-hero, con artist doing a long con).

7. The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin 1979

(These by Juliet Grames, my editor at Soho)

Why Editors Pass

This came from my retreat this weekend with Juliet Grames of Soho, and is therefore somewhat mystery-focused, but I think it probably applies to almost every editor and author:

1. Doesn’t fit my list for international crime fiction.

2. Motive. Why is the protagonist investigating?

3. Beats too Familiar. Story feels clichéd. This book has been written before. (Try unusual pov—character development.)

4. Wandering point of view, in particular depicting the villain (which confuses the reader).

5. Coincidences

6. Interesting Monsters. (Remember the World Around them.)

7. Small Stuff (Sloppy Forensics, Sloppy Plotting, Sloppy Research)

8. Pacing (Cutting Volume without Cutting Content)

Most of Writing a Book is Failure

Some writers will tell you that you need a character who wants something. And the plot is about that character getting what they want.

*rolls eyes*

No, this is why so many writers end up writing lousy plots that meander everywhere. Because a character who wants something getting what she wants is a straight line. And it takes about one chapter.

I want to be an astronaut. I study, work hard, get good grades, go through all the training, and then end up on the moon. The end. One sentence, actually.

What makes a character interesting is when the character wants something and doesn’t get it. Over and over and over again. She tries, and fails. Tries again, and fails again. And then gives up. But not really. Because how can a good character ever give up? But secretly is still trying to get what she wants, and failing.

Until one day, the character may get what she wanted at the beginning. Or—and this happens often in fiction—gets something completely different that it turns out she realizes she wanted more.

Because characters change during the course of a story. If the character changes, then how likely is it going to be that what the character wants changes? Very likely. So if she gets what she wants, then she isn’t satisfied and has to get something else, because she’s changed. And then changed again.

Sure, people want fiction to do some things that don’t happen in real life. We want shape in fiction. We want there to be a point to everything, for there to be a purpose to our struggle.

But part of writing fiction is acknowledging that the struggle changes and looks different as we change. And the shape we give our lives is often a fictional one. That is, in telling our stories, we make them have purpose. But we can’t tell a story until the change is done. Or at least until some change is done.

Your Creative Space

Make what no one but you can make, what no one but you wants to make. Create a space that protects your creative spirit and makes sure that others aren't looking over your shoulder either figuratively or actually. Keep your work to yourself while it is still in its infancy, vulnerable and easily mocked. Before you give others a chance to say what it is, make sure you know what it is--and what it isn't.

Counting Numbers

Some writer friends asked me today how many words I write in an average day and I groaned a little. Partly because people say they hate me when I answer this truthfully, but more because this is the wrong way to think about something that is essentially an art. Yes, writing is also partly commerce, but it’s also deeply artistic, and trying to measure art is just wrong.

Sure, we do it. We do it every time a painting sells or a book is up for auction. We do it when we look at our amazon rankings and when we google ourselves and when we look up our bookscan numbers and when we ask our editors what our sales figures are and when we compare our advances to someone else’s and when we think about movie deals and on and on. And all of it is crazy making.

Sure, there is a place for being a business person. Even about your writing, you need to be able to separate yourself from the work and think about target audience and genre and where it will be place in the bookstore and what kind of a cover will get the right person to pick it up. I’m not saying you should put your fingers in your ears and ignore everything but your own muse’s voice.

I am saying that you should put earplugs in while you’re writing, though. And if you can’t turn off your mind from spooling about numbers while you’re writing, you might need to turn off some of your feeds that are drowning you in the wrong kind of information.

Instead, may I suggest reading a favorite book of yours that never made any money?

May I suggest reading a poem that wasn’t discovered until the author was dead?

May I suggest finding a book written by an author who spent twenty years researching it and never wrote anything else?

Numbers can matter, but books are not to be reduced to their numbers. You are not to be reduced to your number as an author. If you write 50 words in a day and they were the words you felt were the ones you needed to write that day, it doesn’t matter how many someone else wrote.

How Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth

Have you thought about taking your own life?

Yes.

Have you thought about how you would do it?

Yes.

Have you made a plan?

Yes.

How often do you struggle with these thoughts?

Every day.

Read the rest of the essay here: http://journal.segullah.org/essays/how-sharper-than-a-serpents-tooth/

Admiration and Imitation

When I was a teenager, I wrote tons of fan fic. I wrote a Star Trek novel, a Perry Mason novel, a Sherlock Holmes story. This was excellent practice. No one told me that I couldn’t write those things, that they wouldn’t be published because of copyright issues. I wrote when I wanted to read.

There was a point in my 20s when I realized that I still hadn’t figured out what my “voice” was. People talked all the time about how important voice was, and I believed it was true. I could see voice in the writers I read and reread. I could hear it in my head when I put the books down. Those characters were alive beyond the words on the page.

But how to do that myself? I couldn’t figure it out. I wanted to have a voice like that, which of course, you can never do. You can’t borrow another person’s voice. Occasionally, I’d hear people say that you can’t write until you’re older, because you don’t have “important” things to say about life until then, which I thought was typical adult crap, devaluing the things that young people do.

Maybe there is some truth to the reality that you get older and you find voice isn’t such a struggle anymore. But if so, it’s because you stop caring what other people think. It’s not that you stop trying to do what other people do, or that what you have to say is suddenly more important, though.

Some tips to finding your voice:

1. If you’re angry, write while you’re angry.

2. If you’re sad, write in that moment, with tears dripping down your face.

3. Write up your most embarrassing moments. Every detail.

4. Make fun of writers and writing you think is ridiculous.

5. Write about food. Or about running. Or about your children. Write about what makes you passionate. Write about things no one else cares about.

6. Write endings to stories that finished wrong. Write better versions of things that you wanted to love.

7. Write dangerous things.

8. Write about the things you don’t want anyone to know about yourself.

9. Write about people no one else sees.

10. Write mashups that no one likes but you.