Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 15

My Birthday Post

If you haven't heard of my birthday curse, you may not know me very well. I hate birthdays, but not because they indicate me getting older. I hate them because I have a bad history of crap happening on my birthday. My husband thought it was ridiculously superstitious when we got married, but has since decided that perhaps I am right. Today, I was supposed to do a race with him. But the birthday curse struck again. I had a crash.

Let me describe what happened. I was about half finished with the bike and my swim had gone better than any swim had ever gone before in my life. I was pretty happy, after struggling with asthma all season. I felt well within my limits and had my inhaler, but was watching my breathing to make sure I was OK. Then I came across two racers who were riding right together, which is completely illegal. I noticed the motorcycle with the race officials coming up behind them. I suspected they were being written up for this. A turn was coming up and I figured I could easily pass them before it.

I called out "On your left" to indicate to them not to move left while I passed. They were taking up most of the middle of the road, and I would have been fine if the male counterpart who was all the way to the right, hadn't decided I was calling out to him that he should turn left. He crashed directly into me. I flew over the handlebars and landed hard. There was some blood. I was in pain, obviously, but was still pretty stunned. The guy rode off as the race officials stopped to help me. My bike wheel was ruined (almost $1000 to replace it) and I was in bad shape. I had a big hematoma on my right arm, road rash everywhere, and several fingernail tips were shredded, which is where the dripping blood was coming from.

It took me about 10 minutes to realize that I was going to have to give up on finishing the race. I was shaking uncontrollably and an ambulance came to take me back to my car. They checked me out, told me to go to a hospital or my doctor, and tried to bandage me up. I was SO angry, and SO sad. This was my last race of the season, and I had so much wanted it to go well. Not only had I not gotten that, but I was going to have pay a bunch of money to fix the bike that I love and have ridden for 6 years now. Plus I was in pain and shaking uncontrollably.

I packed up my bike to take it to the shop in hopes that it would get fixed as soon as possible. As I drove, I was filled with anger. That guy should have been forced to abandon the race, just like I was. He should be forced to pay for my bike to be repaired. And for my race fee. And for my hospital bills. And for my pain.

But of course, he couldn't pay for my pain. He couldn't do anything to take it away at all. That's the way that life is. We humans hurt each other in ways that we cannot take back or make up. I hate that about life. I really do!

I knew that I would be better off if I could let the anger go. But I was also angry that it was my birthday and it was turning out badly. Again. I drove and thought about a conversation I had with a friend this week whom I admire for changing. I thought about myself. Had I changed? I thought about the fact that about 10 years ago, I had an experience that made me realize that I had no idea how to forgive. I had spent my whole life learning how to understand other people, so that if they did something stupid or hurt me, I could understand why. I thought that was forgiveness and discovered that it wasn't.

I have spent a good deal of emotional work since then to learn how to forgive and I can say with confidence that I have forgiven exactly one time in my life. It was a really momentous occasion. I forgave someone who had asked for forgiveness and who was sorry, but it took months for me to give up the pain that I felt and accept the plea. I felt strongly that this was a gift to me, not a gift to the other person. I felt so clean and strong afterward, and it didn't like something I could have given to myself.

As I drove home this morning after the race, I felt the same feeling of clean wash over me. The anger disappeared. The physical pain was still there. But the rest was abruptly gone. I realized that I had the capacity to pay for my bike repair myself. I had already paid for my race fee. It wouldn't be easy to do that, but I could do it. This man whom I do not know and have never met except in this crash had not asked for my forgiveness, but I was giving it anyway, and it was a powerful experience.

I thought of the one time in my life that I felt that I could not be forgiven. I know that other people have told me again and again how illogical it is that I blame myself for my daughter Mercy's death, but I know that in my subconscious I do. I have nightmares often about killing the people that I love, not the murder itself, but the realization of what I have done, and the knowledge that I am waiting for the consequences of being taken to jail and humiliated, revealed not to be the good person I think that I am. I spent a lot of time in the last years trying to forgive myself and I'm not sure that I've ever managed it. The most I could do was just accept it and move on.

But today, the realization that *I* could forgive someone who was, as far as I know, undeserving of it, that I could forgive someone because I had the reserves (financial and emotional ) to do so, was overwhelming to me. I am such a small person emotionally. The fact that I have only really been able to give forgiveness twice in my life seems to me to prove that. But if I could forgive this, then how much easier it must be for someone who has greater emotional reserves than mine to forgive me for something I feel terrible about and have carried guilt about for years. It might not just be possible; it seemed likely.

This man who ruined my race cannot give it back to me, just like I cannot give my daughter back her life. That is the mortal world we live in. But I can have forgiveness. That's not the same as moving on. It's not the same as understanding. It's not the same as letting go. Those are all useful things to do. But forgiveness is something else entirely, and for me, the most difficult forgiveness to give is the one to myself.

I did not get the great race I wanted to give myself as a gift for my birthday today, but maybe I've been given a greater gift than I had ever thought to ask for.

Drastic Manuscript Word Loss

I am a bloated writer. My manuscripts always end up 20-30% longer than my publisher wants them to be, and that much longer than they need to be or should be. So after a first draft, I go back through every manuscript and I cut 20-30% of the words before I let anyone else read it. Here are the things that I cut:

1. Extraneous scenes. This is the biggest bloater of manuscripts. I like my characters to stand around and talk. I think I’m good at character development. Nonetheless, when your characters are sitting around saying, “What should we do next,” it’s a good hint that it’s you, the author, coming through and that though it might have been necessary for you to write that scene to get to the next one, your reader does not need to read it.

2. Rambling. I admit it, I ramble. My characters tend to ramble. I get into their heads deeply and they take control of my fingers and type the words that they/I think. If the rambling is a sentence or two, you can let it stay. If it’s longer than that and doesn’t reveal important character information or hint at plot development, take it out.

3. Repetition. You’d be surprised how many words can be cut from a manuscript simply by taking out words that mean the same thing or sentences that echo the same meaning. I swear, I write a lot of things twice and I’m hitting the reader over the head. There is no need to assume they are too stupid to get it the first time, just because I was too stupid as a writer to formulate it right the first time.

4. Information from a second pov character that we already have from another pov character. If you’re doing multiple povs, be careful that each one says distinct things. And really, resist the temptation to retell a scene just because another character has a fun take on it. You only get to tell a scene once.

5. Too much too soon. Sometimes when I edit for word count, I find that I’m also doing wonderful things for my tension. Just because I revealed to myself what a certain character’s motivations are, that doesn’t mean that I need to reveal that to the reader at the same point. Lots of the time, it’s better to hold back.

6. Less is more. If you’re giving details about a physical description, a history, or anything else, just the right detail. A lot of the time, a single word that is precise is better than a vague paragraph.

7. Cut adverbs as ruthlessly as possible. If you’re using a shortcut in dialog, telling the reader the character’s emotion through adverbs rather than through the actual words of the dialog, cut the adverbs and then rewrite your dialog better. Which brings me to dialog.

8. Characters in a book have snappier dialog and more meaningful conversations than most people in real life. Get to the meat of it. You don’t need all the chatter and small talk that you’d feel necessary if you were there (or I would). Think about it as the movie version, which can only be 90 minutes long.

9. Don’t feel obliged to make whole sentences. If a fragment works, take out the rest of the sentence. This is true in dialog, but it can also be a great way to get voice. People who think in full sentences are often boring narrators.

10. Combine sentences when possible. Commas are your friend. Semi-colons and colons to put sentences together rarely are. I’m not talking about making longer sentences here, really. Just see if your two sentences can be put together into one shorter sentence by using just a phrase from the first or second sentence.

The Practice Room

So my daughter, who is a student at Berklee School of Music, is home for a few days before the start of classes, and told me that one of the best things about Berklee is the number of practice rooms available for students to reserve on a regular basis. For two hours, she can go in, close the door, and SOUND BAD.

That's the main thing she loves about the practice rooms. If she's at home, with her keyboard, she rarely practices. Not the good kind of practicing, anyway. Because people are listening and she's supposed to be a musician and that means making good music. So she "fiddles around" instead of practicing.

Because practicing is about doing all the nasty parts that sound crappy and that you skip over when you're running through pieces for fun. Practicing is about the nitty-gritty, the parts you're crap at. You have to confront them head-on, no glossing over them. Do it wrong again and again until you get it a little better, and then a little bit better.

And that kind of practice doesn't happen unless the door is closed and no one is listening.

I'm sure writers can see how valuable this analogy is. We try so often to write "well" to begin with. We want our first drafts to be beautiful and they aren't. So we work on the same first chapter again and again, afraid to go on until we get it "right," afraid to "practice" the tricky parts of the book, the middle section, the sad parts, the parts where we're unsure what is supposed to happen.

My advice? Find a practice room. Or make one.

You need a space where you're safe, where it's quiet and there are no distractions to keep you away from just being bad. You've got to be bad. There's no way out of it. You have to practice writing just like a musician practices music. And if you've never heard a musician playing badly in practice, that's just because you're not in the practice room and they're really just "fiddling around."

Don't fiddle around with your writing.

Don't let people see what you are working on. Don't share it while it's crap, at least so long as it's crap you know is crap and you know how to fix. When you get to the crap you can't figure out, sometimes you have to share and invite another musician into your practice room. But until then, keep the door closed and make sure it's sound-proofed.

Be real inside the practice room. Don't fiddle around. Play the hard parts. Dig into them. Make it hurt. And when you're finished, you fling open the door and you leave the practice room behind until the next day, when you come back in, close the door again, and let the bad music commence!

Questions Without Answers #4: What do I do when I get conflicting advice about revision?

First of all, pat yourself on the back.

Seriously, if you’re getting conflicting advice about revision, that means that you’re showing it to lots of different people, which is a courageous step and is really healthy for you becoming a better writer. It also means that you’ve found people to read your work who are giving you real feedback and not just “It’s great!” that family and friends often stop at.

Second, welcome to the real world.

If you go and look at reader reviews at amazon or goodreads, you’re going to see how varied the opinions are. Some people love Twilight with a holy passion. Other people hate it so much their minds explode. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that people react differently to your book, in its first stage.

I’d suggest making sure that you take notes if you go to a writers’ group to get criticism. Write down anything that immediately chimes with you. If you think—that’s what I meant to do or—of course, I should have thought of that, highlight or star or underline or box these comments. And then don’t work on the book immediately. Let it sit for a month and then go back to it and you will probably be able to see more clearly what *you* want to do to make your book better.

I say this as someone who has tried several times to write a novel based on a committee of feedback, trying to please everyone. A little distance can help you see things more clearly and gives you time to forget exactly what other people said. You don’t need the voices of other people in your head while you work. What you need to do is make an action list of things that *you* want to fix. If that happens to coincide with a few items on other people’s lists, that’s fine.

Beware of doing everything anyone tells you to do. Yes, even your agent. Yes, even your editor. Beware of doing nothing other people tell you to do. While I would read an editorial letter a few times during the process just to keep touch with the comments, don’t read it every day. That’s my advice anyway.

Conflicting advice during revision may make you think that no one knows anything. I remember when I was in high school, there were a bunch of students who thought that anyone who graded an essay was doing it completely subjectively because there were no objective standards for a good essay. Au contraire! The same is true for novel writing.

I would pay more attention to people who say things like:
1. I was confused by . . . .
2. I thought this part was boring. . .
3. I didn’t understand why this person did this . . .

I would pay less attention to people who say things like:
1. I really didn’t sympathize with this character. . .
2. I think you should add more of this . . .
3. I wish you would take out this part because it annoys me . . .

And here is something to remember about any critique that you get, paid for or in a writers group or anywhere at all. Your book is *your* book. No one (not even your editor) can MAKE you change something. I’m not saying to be stupid and refuse to listen to people who are trying to help you make a better book. But if you have a reason (even if it’s only that your gut is telling you something), talk it over with an agent or editor. And with other people, you don’t need to convince them. They shouldn’t be looking over your shoulder while you write. They give you feedback. You decide what to do with it.

Questions Without Answers #3: How Can I Tell if My Editor’s Comments are Right or Wrong for My Book?

I can answer this with a zen comment like, “If it *feels* right, then that means that you should go with it.” I’ve heard people say that if it chimes with you automatically, then it’s the right way to go. Or that if you envision the book with those changes and it is closer to the book you wanted to write, then they’re good comments.

Here’s the reality:

No editor is ever going to see the book in exactly the same way that you do. And this is a good thing.

Yes, I have seen people make changes that an editor suggested that I thought were a mistake.
But most of the time, what happens between an author and an editor is a collaboration that ends up with a book that is better than what either of them would have produced separately.

That means that the collaboration isn’t just a compromise kind of situation, where you get some of what you want and the other person gets some of what she wants. It means that you are bouncing ideas off of each other and sparking brilliant new ways of solving problems that you couldn’t do yourself. The best kinds of collaborations between authors do this same thing.

But with an editor, it’s a little different because an editor has a sharp eye for what is working and what isn’t working. Editors also have a bit of an idea (if they’re experienced) of how to get an author to think about something differently, or how to approach a problem in a new way. Sometimes other authors don’t always know how to do that.

So I would say that it’s less important if you immediately feel a zen peace with your editor’s comments and more important if you and your editor work well together. If you can call up your editor and start pinging ideas off of her, that’s a great thing. If she has ideas for you, also a great thing.

I know some people don’t like editors suggesting something. They only want critical feedback of the sort that says—this needs to be fixed. I’m a little more loose about what an editor does. I tend not to mind if an editor (horror!) adds a sentence here and there to my manuscript. I don’t feel possessive of my words that way.

I feel like a novel is a collaboration between an author and a reader, as well, and I have much less control over that. Having an idea in the first place, writing it down and then going through multiple drafts on my own—that’s my first step. But letting other people see it, writers groups, friends, agent, and editor, doesn’t make me feel like the novel is less mine.

That said, I would beware of you as the author feeling resentful about changes you feel “forced” to make. That should never be the spirit of the relationship. And if you feel like you’ve lost the sense of the novel being yours, that’s a problem you’re going to have to work out. You may need some time without the editor seeing the book to play with and get your touch back for it. Same thing with multiple drafts with a writers group or an agent.

Questions Without Answers #2: How Do I Know When I’m Done Editing?

Everyone is going to answer this a different way.

Some choices:

1. You’re done editing when your deadline hits.
2. You’re done editing when you say you’re done and you shouldn’t let anyone rush you.
3. You’re never done editing and you are going to keep editing a book in your mind every time you see the words again.
4. You’re done editing when you’re ready to write the next book.

No one can tell you the answer to this question. You make the answer to the question by your own actions.
Does that mean there isn’t anyone who can offer you useful advice? No. Hopefully, you have writing friends who can give you general rules of thumb. An agent can be useful if s/he can say, “Now it’s ready to go out,” which isn’t the same as being done being edited.

But ultimately, there is no expert about this. There is no one who can say, “You edit it six times and then it’s done. The first time, you edit for character. The second time, you edit for plot. The third time you edit for pacing. The fourth time you edit for time scale. The fifth time you edit for language. The sixth time you edit to get details right.”

Yes, there are lots of people out there who will tell you a very specific answer to this question. To me, hearing people pontificate about a specific answer to something like this is really useful to me because then I can add them to my list of people that I don’t ever want to talk to about writing (or politics, either) again.

As a kid, I remember that when adults told me that the answer to something was “it depends,” I got really frustrated. I didn’t want to be part of the adult world where everything was gray and there was no black and white. That’s why I liked math, see? There was an answer and the teacher knew what it was.

But the adult world of writing is even more full of gray than I had imagined. No one knows the answer to my questions. And as an adult, I’m actually really happy about this because the questions I’m asking are only interesting to me because there aren’t any answers.

The reason that no one can tell me when I’m done editing my book is that I’m writing a book that no one has written before, not even remotely. If someone else had written it and there was an answer so that you knew when it was done, I wouldn’t be writing it.

(And as it turns out, after talking to my mathematician friends, this seems to be true in math as well. Mathematicians are not at all interested, once they are on a certain level, in working on problems with obvious answers for the rest of us. They want to deal with questions no one knows the answer to yet, too. So they find problems that are really, really hard. And spend sometimes their whole lives working on them. And this makes them happy. Go figure.)

Questions Without Answers #1

A lot of writers will ask me a variation on the following:

How do I know if this is the right book for me to be writing?

I want to kind of laugh, but really, it would be mean. Because I know it’s a real question and I know that someone is hoping that another person has the answer to it.

I suspect what they’re hoping for me to say is something like, you know it’s the right book because you have a feeling inside that just chimes. Or, you know it’s the right book because when you talk about it, everyone is super interested in it. Or you know it’s the right book because your agent keeps bugging you to write it.

But that’s not really the way that it is. Sure, there are ideas floating around and some are probably better than others. Some are hackneyed. Some are so overused that at the moment, it might not be a good idea to spend a whole bunch of time on a book idea that might feel to an editor that it’s been overdone.

On the other hand, who would have guessed that it was time for vampires to come back when Twilight was published? Did The Hunger Games anticipate a new trend for dystopia or create one? Why is Harry Potter the school with wizards book that made it big when there are arguably better school with wizard books out there already?

No one can tell you which book you should write. And there’s no magical sense of “rightness” that’s going to make you sure that this is the one. Asking for that is basically asking for a time machine.

All I can say is this:

You make a book the right one by refusing to give up on it.

You make a book the right one by revising it again and again until it’s so good that people love it.

You make a book the right one by pouring yourself into it in ways that make you squirm and embarrass you when people who know you too well, including your parents, read it.

You make a book the right one by pushing aside thoughts of success and writing the best book that you can write.

You make a book the right one by becoming the right author to write that kind of book.

You make a book the right one by refusing to ask yourself if it’s the right one because you’re not going to work on another one until this one is finished, by gum!

Changing the World

There are a lot of ways to change the world, and I would certainly not want to say that one is the only way or the best way. But I am going to say that I think writing and publishing is a valid, enduring way of changing the world.

I have come to believe that many of the worst evils in the world are caused by thinking that “we” are, in fact, “us” and “them.” We make these binary systems up because they are easy, and then we read and experience so many stories that confirm them.

Germans vs. Allies in WWII

Men vs. Women in many romantic comedies

Straight vs. Gay

Religious vs. Atheist

Americans vs. Everyone else

But the best books, in my experience, are the ones that force us to see the world from the point of view of the “other.” They make us give up our old ideologies and make new ones that are more inclusive.

No, writing a novel isn’t going to end a war today or tomorrow. Probably.

But writing a novel might end the wars that will happen in another generation. It will change the hearts and minds of the future. It might not stop people from thinking in terms of a binary, but it might make them give up some of the old categories. It might make them think twice before creating new ones.

Writing a novel is the act of making a world. And if you can make a world where we see each other more truly, you are fighting injustice. If you make a world where heroes are not of one color, you are changing the soldiers of tomorrow. If you make a world where women have the same opportunities as men, where men and women work together and have equal parts to play, you are expanding the world that your daughters and sons will live in.

And that, to me, is enough. That will mean my work has done its part.

Books vs. Movies

People outside of publishing think author’s main goal is a movie/TV deal. That’s when you know you have it “made,” right?

But authors and others inside publishing almost always cringe to talk about movies made of books. It’s never as good, is it?

An author of a book has so little say in the vision of a movie. Not sure why this is so, but it is.

A book is not a story waiting to be made into a movie.

An author is not a wannabe screenwriter.

Hollywood money thrown at a book does not make the story better or more accessible.

Looking Down

I am a cautious person by nature. When I was a kid, my cousins had a trampoline in their backyard. One day, they got out a full-sized ladder and set it up next to the trampoline. Everyone climbed the ladder and then jumped onto the trampoline. It looked like fun. So I tried it.

I got to the top of the ladder and I looked down and I realized how far it was from the ladder to the trampoline and I couldn’t do it. So I climbed back down the ladder to the annoyance of everyone who was waiting below me who knew it would have been faster for me to just jump.

A second time, I climbed up the ladder after watching even tiny kids jump. I couldn’t do it again. I climbed back down.

The third time I went up the ladder, I stood at the top and was frozen. I couldn’t climb back down the ladder, either. I couldn’t move. Everyone was angry with me. They shouted at me about being a chicken. I could live with being called a chicken. What I couldn’t do was jump off that ladder.

Finally, someone started shaking the ladder in an effort to get me to either fish or cut bait, as they say. In fact, neither happened. I lost my balance at the top and instead of jumping in a controlled fashion toward the center of the trampoline, I hit the hard metal bands around the side of the trampoline and was knocked unconscious.

Some time later, I woke up in my aunt’s bed. She was terrified. She apologized again and again for the stupid ladder game. She promised me and my mother, who had arrived to pick me up and take me home, that no one would ever play that dangerous game again. She apologized also that I’d been shaken off the ladder.

The after-effects of this are that I am a bit queasy when it comes to ladders. Trampolines don’t bother me as much, but I’ve never had one in my backyard as a mother myself.

What does this have to do with the writing life?

Well, writing is a lot like standing on the top of that ladder. Sending something into an agent or an editor is like jumping off and hoping that when you land, you bounce in the middle of the trampoline and not hit the metal bands. It seems a really stupid thing to do, writing a book and asking someone to publish it. The risks are HUGE, and the returns seem tiny, even if you are lucky enough to get published eventually.

But eventually you have to jump. No one can do it for you. You can’t really wait for someone to push you off (and believe me, you don’t want to).

There are several seconds of free fall that are glorious. You can think about all the possibilities. You might make millions. You might be lauded by generations of college professors as the new Shakespeare. You might make enough to pay for the new computer program you bought.

And then you land. And it hurts. You think that you never want to do that again.

But you do. You get back on the computer and you write another book. And another one. You keep jumping. And why do you do it? Why do you take the kind of risks that other people can’t imagine taking? Why do you put your ego on the line every single time?

Because you’re a writer. And being a writer is as much about jumping as it is about the free fall and the landing. Take heart. We’re all falling, slow or fast. We’re all going to hit the ground hard. And we’re all going to try it again.