Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 16

Staying Connected

So you're a writer and you have a demanding day job, or you have a family that needs you a lot of the time. You have lots of other commitments to your time. The PTA wants you to help them. You've got homework to deal with. Maybe you have an ill parent you are caring for. And your own health to worry about. I understand.

But if you want to write a book, you need to work on it as often as possible. Yes, there are people who write books in one week on vacation. There are people who write only on Saturday nights for a couple of hours. Somehow these people manage to write books and I'm not going to say they're doing it wrong. But for most writers, writing is a regular thing.

I know people have said it before, but if you write 500 words a day every day, you end up with 100,000 words, likely a full novel's worth, in 200 days. This is real. I have seen people do this, people who believed they did not have time to write a novel in their busy lives. It took them about 30 minutes a day.

But a key to this strategy is staying connected to your work. I think writing 500 words a day every other day might work. Every third day probably won't. And once a week, no. Because you're going to spend most of your time every week getting back in touch with the story, remembering who the main character is, rereading parts that you've forgotten about, and thinking about what is the best next step.

Even if you only write one sentence a day, you will stay more connected to your book. Even if you only reread what you wrote the day before, you will stay connected with the story. Your subconscious will work on the story for you, the rest of the day, if you remind it often that this story matters.

So don't tell yourself you're going to sit down next week and write 10 chapters. Or 30,000 words because you have a week off. Tell yourself you're going to write just a little bit today. You will find yourself putting it off less if it feels like it's less daunting. I mean, who can't write another sentence in the book? You've got twenty four hours to think about what the next sentence will be.

But you know what will probably happen? Most days, you will probably find that you have more than a sentence to write. And if you don't, if you're writing for 5 minutes right before you crash into bed, and all you get is that one sentence, you're ahead of the game. You've got that one sentence, plus you're staying connected to your work. And that matters. It really does.

There are times when we don't write. Sometimes there are touring dates and sometimes you're letting your mind lie fallow. There are times when you have what I call life block and it's not a good time to write. But be realistic with yourself and decide if the level of craziness you're currently dealing with is really just the normal. And if it is, figure out how you can work around it and still do your work.

Luck and Success

I think it’s easy to imagine, when you have worked really hard over a long period of time and suffered many disappointments, only to finally have the success that you’ve always dreamed of—that you are the author of your own success. *I deserve this!* It’s what you thought you would say when you started out on this path.

When you decide to be a writer, you don’t dream and hope for living in an attic, starving to death, writing a few pages here and there at midnight when everyone else working at your crappy job is asleep already. You think about the money rolling in, movies being made of your books. You plan out in your head elaborate launch parties, and what you will say to those people in high school who shunned you. Or how your parents will tell you that you were right all along, and it’s a good thing you didn’t listen to them when they told you to get a more practical, “real” job.

And maybe that all happens. If it happens to you sooner rather than later, I think you are more likely to think that you caused all the good stuff to happen. And I would say that’s a very sad result.

Because the longer I have been in the writing business, the more I see that there are a lot of writers who are just as talented or more so than the ones who get the fame and the big movie deals. There are no guarantees. You work hard and you write work that you really care about, but there are plenty of other people doing the same thing.

What makes the difference between the ones who really break out and make it onto the NYT Bestseller list? Is it pure writing skill? Genius? A talent nurtured from birth? A good education? Brilliant ideas? The willingness to keep trying again and again?

Sorry. It’s none of those.

It’s luck, pure and simple. I don’t think it’s false humility for me to say this.

I don’t think that luck tends to hit as many people who don’t work hard as it does those that do. But I wouldn’t bet my life on the outcome if someone wanted to go gather statistics.

I’m not saying that people who make it big don’t deserve it, though it’s entirely possible that sometimes they don’t. I’m just saying that there’s no difference between the ones who do make it and the ones who did other than sheer luck. And when I say sheer luck, I include in that the thing that makes people connect to one author or one piece of work rather than another one.

There’s a Zeitgeist that is real, and when you hit it just right, good for you. But it’s not because you were smarter than other people. And it’s not because you’re nicer or kinder or simply more talented. It’s luck. It’s something out of your control and out of the control of the people who would like to have the success that you do.

Your work is great. It deserves to be studied in classes in six hundred years from now. But maybe someone else’s deserves that just as much. And maybe your books won’t be studied because you ticked off a certain professor of English at a certain college who turns out to have just enough power to get you taken off lists one year at that college and by a weird series of coincidences, that list ends up being reused for years afterward, and no one questions why your name isn’t on it.

Greatness is a weird brew. So is success. We don’t make them, though. Or at least, we don’t make very much of them.

A Bad Book is the Beginning

You have written a book!

Do you know how rare and wonderful a thing that is?

Do you know how many people say they are going to write a book and never do it?

Why don’t they do it? Because writing a book is a lot harder than it looks. Even writing a bad book.

I would argue that writing a bad book is like running a marathon. No matter what your time is, you’ve still run a marathon, which is an accomplishment. And why do people ask about your marathon PR anyway? Isn’t that rude? Like asking someone what their bank account numbers are.

Writing a bad book is the way you write a good book. I promise it is. Every good book was once a bad book. A bad book with promise, I grant you, but still a bad book.

Every great book has once had someone reject it. Someone once shook her head and said—this will never be published. Someone once told the author to give up and do something else more productive with his life.

Reread your bad book and decide for yourself if you want to revise it. You don’t have to. You can choose to write another one and revise that one instead.

But know this: writing a book from the first sentence to the end, with the same characters throughout, who go through experiences that affect them, where the events lead to some sort of climax however half-assed it is—this is an accomplishment that not many people can say they have done.

Celebrate.

Eat and drink and be merry.

And then get back to work. Because of the one in a hundred people who write novels who say they want to, only one in a hundred of those finished novels will ever be worth reading.

There is no universal standard of “good” writing

The more I am in the business, the more I am aware of this truth.
The more I read manuscripts, the more I find myself giving advice to other writers cautiously.
Which isn’t the same as saying that there is no bad writing. There is bad writing. Bad writing does these things:
1. It fails to convey the author’s meaning to the reader.
2. It fails to evoke the right emotion in the reader.
3. It meanders.
4. It repeats sentences again and again, and has words that echo unconsciously—sometimes with an unintentional humorous effect.
5. It is boring even when it thinks it is interesting.
6. It has character who do not have motivation in their purpose.
7. It uses clichéd language and stereotypical character behavior.
8. It feels like a lot of different writers all mashed up together.
9. It is confusing.
10. It does not have purpose or direction—it feels like you don’t know where it is going or it is going in a million directions at the same time.
Good writing, however, can be so many, many things. Good writing can break all the rules on purpose. It can refuse to tell you the age or gender of the MC. It can neglect to mention the setting. It can defy the rules of the universe as you know them. Good writing is fresh. It is distinctive. A good writer will never be confused with another good writer. It has voice. It does new and different things.
The main difference between good writing and bad writing is purposefulness. I think you can tell the difference between a good writing who is choosing to defy rules and a bad writer who doesn’t know what those rules are quite easily.
 

Subjectivity in Evaluations of Crap in Writing

You know that feeling you get when you’re reading an old manuscript and you think—“this is crap! Why did I not know this was crap when I was writing it?”
And you know that feeling you get when you’re reading a different old manuscript and you think—“this is amazing! Why didn’t I finish writing this? I love this”—and you start working on it again.
(This is related to the feeling you sometimes get when reading galleys or sometimes printed books and you have what is almost an out-of-body experience where you don’t remember writing this, but it’s so good and you think you might be in love with the writer, only that’s weird to say since it’s yourself.)
Have you ever had the experience where a manuscript you reread and thought was crap is suddenly transformed into the manuscript of brilliance? Or the reverse?
I do not know what causes this. It probably just means that I’m having a bad day or a good day. But when you are this subjectively swayed by the quality of your own work, it’s a good time to sit down and realize that hating a novel written by someone else or loving it—it’s all equally subjective. You found those books on the wrong day—or the right day. You read them at the right age—or the wrong age.
It has nothing to do with the book. It’s you.
Except, of course, when it’s your book. Then when you think it’s crap, it really is crap.
 

From Book 9 on Love

"Do you think he loves you?"

She hesitated. "I think he does. But I guess this makes me wonder if he really does. Or if he loves only some part of me that's the part he's always seen when he sees me. Or if it's worse than that, and the thing he loves isn't really me. It looks like me, you know, but it isn't really me. It's some fantasy version of me that he's invented because he can't really handle the real me."
She had just put into words the thing that I had been afraid to put into words. I had been married over thirty years, and I wondered the same thing.

Of course, to be fair, Kurt and Brad might justly wonder that. Maybe we humans were incapable of actually loving each other fully in this mortal world. Maybe we were incapable of bearing the full sight of the reality of each other, and so we saw only what we could see. Mormons believed that you had to be transformed into something greater than mortal stuff in order to bear the sight of God as Joseph Smith had, as other prophets in the Bible had.

Write a Better Book

When I was an aspiring author, I remember hearing other aspiring authors spending a good deal of time complaining about how this or that NYT best-selling author had just published a piece of crap, and how publishing was all totally about who you knew and once you had it made, everything you wrote would be published, no matter what. Yeah, I actually still hear that part a lot.

But here’s what I believed then and repeated whenever I was given the chance:

You have to write a book that’s not as good as what is being published right now. You have to write a book that is better. In fact, you have to write a book that is so good people find themselves unable to say no. They just love it so much they can’t think of a reason to say no.

Because editors and agents are looking for reasons to say no.

How do you write a book that is so good that people can’t say no?

1. You learn the skills of writing. Usually this means writing a lot of words. Sometimes they get published in smaller magazines or by smaller presses. A lot of the time, they don’t. I’ve said it a lot of times, but I wrote 20 really bad books before I got published, so yeah, that was at least 1 million words.

2. You tell a story that is yours to tell. That means giving up on following trends. If you happen to hit a trend, that’s not why you hit it, so I’m going to insist that’s not following a trend. Sometimes you’re mad about what isn’t out there being published already. Or you’re mad because what’s being published on a certain subject isn’t the truth—and you know it. Sometimes you write the story that’s yours because you are so much in love with a certain genre or story or character that you couldn’t NOT write it, even when people told you it wasn’t ever going to sell.

3. You get feedback from other people. And somehow (believe me, this still eludes me on occasion), you figure out how to hear the useful advice and how to ignore the other advice.

4. You revise the crap out of your book. You do the delicate dance that is truly the art of writing, in keeping what is good and throwing out what is bad. You leave it when the revising is done. But you don’t leave it before then and go work on something shinier. Although if there is something shinier, it makes me wonder if this is really the story that is only yours to tell. Maybe it is and you just lack any self-confidence. That’s not unusual, come to think of it. But look at every word, every sentence, every scene, every chapter. Be willing to do the big changes if they are necessary. Listen to your heart or your gizzard or whatever you believe in.

5. You do the work of meeting editors and agents however you can. Sometimes it’s by forming a relationship by sending manuscript after manuscript in. Sometimes it’s by going to conferences that are nearby. Sometimes you volunteer for something writing-related, and stuff happens. I don’t believe that bad writing is going to be published just because you know someone (it happens, but I wouldn’t count on it), but you learn a lot from these connections. People tell you things about the industry that’s useful to know, for now and for the future. And also, it’s always good to have friends to get advice from. And to hang with.

I’m not going to pretend this is an easy formula. It’s not. You’re signing up for a long apprenticeship and there are no guarantees.

I will admit that I have become more cynical about the publishing world than I once was. Maybe that’s me or maybe it’s that publishing has actually changed. But I still think it’s good advice to write a better book than the one you see published today that you hate. I also think that every book has a lesson to teach you, bad or good. And I think it behooves authors not to diss other authors, however easy it is and however good it makes you feel temporarily. We’re in this together. Let reviewers and readers diss us. They do it plenty.

The Stages of Publishing and Time:

1. The author writes a book. This may take anywhere from a month to many years.
2. Agent sends book to editors who might be interested in it. This may take anywhere from a couple of weeks to years.
3. Editors make offers on the book. Can happen in a day. Can take years. May never happen. I have many books that have never made it past this stage. For whatever reason, no offer was ever made.
4. Contract negotations occur. If you have a good agent, this will take a couple of weeks at least, and can drag out for several months.
5. Editorial letters are written and sent to the author. Author has a chance to decide whether to agree with editor about making changes or to refuse to make changes or to make other changes the editor has not necessarily suggested. This usually takes about a year, but can go more quickly. It can also end in a book that never comes out because agreement is never come to between editor/publisher and author.
6. Book covers take months to create, even if they are done with photography. The publisher's art director will have input, as will the editor, and other people from the publisher. The author is sometimes given a chance to say something about the cover (though not always). This will often happen in tandem with the editorial process, but not always. Problems with cover art can occur, and then the art department has to start all over again. Takes months.
7. Often ARCs are created at this stage, when an editor feels confident enough about the manuscript to think it is ready to be sent to reviewers. ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) are paperback, cheaper versions of the book, sometimes even without the final cover on them. They are free (even though you sometimes see them for sale on ebay) and they wlll have errors in them.
8. Manuscript goes to copyediting. Usually takes a couple of months for copy editor to go through manuscript with fine-toothed comb. Authors often are given a deadline at this point to get manuscript back to publisher. Sometimes the author has only a week to make final changes, sometimes several weeks.
9. Copyedited manuscript is turned into a "galley" which is typeset the way the final book will look. Authors often get a chance to make final changes, though contract will limit exactly how many changes are allowed. This isn't the time for major alterations. Takes a couple of months.
10. ARCs are sent out to major reviewers and publicity for the book begins. Reviewers needs at least a few weeks to read the books and write reviews, though they will usually get a couple of months. Also, ad copy for ads needs to be written, and ad campaigns have to be managed. (Some books have virtually no publicity, but for others, it may feel like the book is being talked about long before it will be available in stores. This is to make people aware of the book so they rush out to buy it soon after it arrives, so bookstores will bring in even more books to sell in subsequent weeks.)
11. Books are printed, often in China because it's cheaper, and the slow boat wait begins. Can take months.

Hopefully, this explains why it takes about two years for a book to move from an acquired manuscript to a finished product, and why it may take much longer than that.

What I Love About Writing

So, we writers complain a lot that writing is hard. And it is. It can be really, really hard. It can be so hard we think about quitting. Maybe more than sometimes. Our dearest companions sometimes may suggest to us that we do something other than writing, temporarily or permanently because of our bad moods about writing.

But when writing goes right, and by that I don’t mean being easy, but by that feeling of satisfaction you get when by God—you captured something in words that no one else has been able to write before—writing is such a joy.

There is a time to commiserate with writers about the terrible pay, the lack of control of creative people over our own work, the grind of writing to deadline, the pressure to do more than write by having a “presence” on the internet, the emails, the cover art issues, the business end even when you are getting paid, and of course, the

I’m not going to write anymore about that now, though. I am going to write about the sheer, unadulterated pleasure that is writing on a good day, on the right day when it turns right because you got that sentence right or you figured out who the murderer is or because you know now why your main character does that thing she does.

Why I love being a writer:

1. Writing in my pajamas, whenever the notion strikes me.

2. Eating food while writing.

3. Sitting down and rocking the world.

4. Reading a note from someone who “got” your book in just the way that I one day hoped someone would.

5. Finding out a truth about myself that I would never have known if I hadn’t been writing that character that day.

6. The light that goes off in the middle of the night and you know how you’re going to do that revision and fix EVERYTHING!

7. When I’m cooking dinner and my characters talk to me about what they would be eating instead.

8. Cutting out the weight that was holding my book down and now it feels so free, so clean, and so pure.

9. Surprising my editor and making her say, “Woah! That is awesome!”

10. When people tell me the part they loved about the book, and that they wanted more and were sad when they reached “THE END.”

11. Figuring out what the next chapter is going to be about.

12. Writing dialog that makes you want to read it out loud.

13. Taking out a notebook when your brain is on fire and writing words down with an actual pen.

Let’s Get You Stronger

This is something that one of my early therapists told me. She was actually pretty smart, but I didn’t keep seeing her for very long because I wasn’t ready for some of the things she had to tell me. In this case, I told her all these things that had crushed me and when she said that her job was to help me get stronger, I was so furious. I didn’t want to get stronger. I wanted the world to get easier. Basically, she was saying that I was going to have to change, to do work, and I was too depressed to think about any of that.

This is a frequent problem with depression. If someone in your life is depressed and you find yourself thinking up brilliant suggestions for them which they hate, well, you’re not doing the wrong thing necessarily. It’s just that often you have to wait for the depressed person to initiate movement toward change. I’m not sure you can do much to push them forward except standing by them and giving support—sometimes even when it seems ridiculous. Say “yes” and nod a lot, make sympathetic noises. And eventually they may get to the part where they have enough energy and enough clarity to change.

That change may include medication or it may not. It may include therapy. It may include weird things that you think are stupid. Diet changes. Exercise changes. Sleep changes. Relationship changes. They may change things that didn’t need to be changed and they regret them. But at least they’re trying something. Of course they can’t see clearly, but the energy to do some change is a good thing at base.

And the truth is, my therapist was right. There was nothing she could do to make the world less cruel, to take away the pain that I was suffering. There might be people around me doing things that hurt me more. But she and I couldn’t change them. I wanted to point fingers and say everyone else was doing everything wrong, that they were the problem. This is pretty common in depression. And I’m not even saying it wasn’t true. It just didn’t matter that much. Because when you’re the one in pain, you’re mostly the one who has to change—even if the only thing you can change is getting rid of the people in your life who are unable to stop causing you pain.