Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 18

What is wrong with our cultural idea of "Talent"

So many things.

A friend and I were talking recently. Her son was a creative type and when he expressed to people his desire to have a career as a creative type, the response was always “choose something else to do because you can’t possibly achieve that goal.” It wasn’t that he had no talent. He was clearly talented, had clearly shown that he had initiative and determination. So why the lack of support for his stated career in life?

I think it’s because of the bizarre American idea of “talent” and how it leads to success. We tell these stories about people who have “talent,” mostly movie stars, sometimes writers, painters, or musicians. The stories are remarkably the same. Some nobody created something and then magically became successful. Or some nobody got onto a television show and then the money started rolling in and they never had to work a day in their life again.

On the one hand, this seems like a great story, right? Some people win the lottery and then they have it made. That’s the American dream. Ordinary Joe Blow makes it big through no work of his own. He just got lucky.

But it’s actually a terrifying story to those who are actually trying to make a career out of the creative arts because it doesn’t show any process. There are no steps here to becoming a success creatively. It just happens, boom. Some people have “talent” and they get “lucky” and then they become huge. So of course you wouldn’t want to encourage anyone you know to choose this as a career because there’s no path to start on and no guarantee to the results.

But this is just not how it happens. It isn’t how it happens in any other career and it’s not how success happens in the creative arts, either. Why do we perpetuate this lie? I think it’s partly because creative people like to be mysterious. It adds a layer of something to your success story if you can claim that it just happened overnight. Dig a little deeper.

I suspect you will find a lot of hard work behind every overnight success story. And behind every person who is “talented” you will find someone who had lessons, fabulous teachers, and is meticulous in their work habits.

Now I’m not saying that anyone can make it as a creative person. It might be true, but I admit, I sometimes think there are people who won’t make it. I have so far been proven wrong in every case, but somehow some part of my brain still thinks that there is something called “talent” that isn’t the same as “hard work.”

The real problem is that this fantasy story that our culture tells leads people who want to work in the creative arts to be confused as to how to go about it. If you want to be an electrical engineer, you go to college, get a degree, and so on. But that’s not always the case for creative types. College isn’t always a gateway into getting a job. Because, well, working hard and learning the craft are the skills. So are networking, auditions, learning how to deal with failure, determination, continuing to learn every day of your life, and so on.

But really, not that different from any other job. We just send people to college a lot because college is where they learn a lot of that stuff, right? College is where they find a lot of the people who will help them learn what they need to learn and get connected with the people who can get them jobs. For creative types, college is less important than a more informal kind of apprenticeship.

No one makes it through talent alone. No one makes it overnight. No one has it made and never has to work again. Creative jobs are not easier than other jobs. And they’re not that mysterious to get, either.

Characteristics of a lasting marriage:

Independence—the most common mistake in marriage I see is when one partner (often the woman) allows herself to be subsumed into her husband.

Mutual respect. Again, this has to do with boundaries. I believe in setting boundaries and in maintaining them in healthy ways. Celebrate each other. Offer gratitude for the other's skills and knowledge.

Lack of competition. Relates back to independence. When you are independent of each other and have confidence in your own sphere of influence, you don't feel competitive toward the other person.

Willingness to listen. Possibly the most important part of any relationship, and the sexiest thing about another person. It is truly rare to find someone who can listen attentively without jumping into talk about something else. And someone who can leap to understand you when you haven't expressed yourself completely is a gift indeed.

Flexibility. Being willing and able to re-negotiate the habits of your marriage constantly is important. You are not the person you were when you first got married. Neither is your spouse. So why would the same agreements apply?

Patience. The ability to not leap to conclusions immediately, to give time to let the other person's pov unfold, or even to allow bad moments to pass without thinking of them as the “last straw” are extremely helpful. Yes, you need to deal with problems, but not all problems are real problems, if that makes any sense.

Changing a series

One of the most difficult things about being a writer of a series is when you have this revelatory moment (usually in book 2 or 3 of the series) about what the series is REALLY about. And then you have this problem because you’ve already published book 1. You’ve set up the rules. You’ve set up all the characters. The world. The magic system. Everything.

And you’ve done it wrong.

Do you know how simultaneously humiliating and infuriating this is?

Well, if you haven’t been stuck in the middle of a series, you probably don’t.

I can hear you saying to yourself that you’ll never be in this situation because you will PLAN things out in advance.

Well, what do I have to say about that?

1—I hate you.
2—You are wrong.

See, we do plan things out. I’m a pantser by nature, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t make notes on a series. I mean, a series is a big thing. You don’t assume you’re going to pants the whole thing. And you’ve spent years working on the first book, playing around with a draft of the next one. Plus I’m not a newbie as a writer.

And this still happens. I swear it will happen to you.

So I don’t really hate you. Come and talk to me when it happens to you and we’ll commiserate.

For you readers out there, I feel sorry for you. I apologize in advance for all writers who change the rules about the world and the magic system in the middle of a series. We try to do it cleverly. We try to pretend that the main character just misunderstood something, and now we’re making it more clear.

Yeah, we knew you were smarter than to be fooled by that, but it was the best we could do. And really, it’s worth it to keep reading the series. Just fill in the blanks yourself. Feel free to write a letter to your author and tell them how they could have bridged the gap better. You can make them feel even worse about their mistakes.

And then go with it. Because the reason you liked the first book? Well, the author is really going to use all that and more for the second one.

A Vacillating Character

People vacillate. They decide one thing. Then they change their minds. Sometimes they simply don’t know how to decide. However, a character who does this in a book is a really hard one to find sympathetic as a reader. This may seem unfair and unrealistic, but it is almost always true. So, my advice to writers:

Don’t allow your main character to vacillate on an important decision or belief early in the manuscript.

You can show your character beginning with one point of view and then moving towards the opposite point of view. In fact, this is one way to build a great character arc. But having your character going back and forth on this opinion in the first chapter is not a good idea. You need to build toward the change, and you need to work at making the readers believe it.

Other characters should challenge your main character’s point of view. There should be proof of your character being wrong (or at least misguided) in key scenes which you as a writer craft so that they build into an undeniable truth. Then—and only then—should your main character change her mind.

And I say her mind because generally, my experience has been that it is female characters who tend to have difficulty having one point of view. Why is this? My guess is that female characters are often written by female writers. And we as females have difficulty standing up and saying that we believe this one thing and only this one thing. We have a hard time writing characters who do that, as well.

Why? Because most women have spent their whole lives being taught that being inflexible and opinionated is a bad way to make friends. We are told that we aren’t sympathetic unless we see other people’s points of view and waffle. But it isn’t true. This is a big lie that we are carrying into our writing.

Make your female characters grow. Let them be wrong. Let them change. But whatever you do, don’t make them wafflers. I’d rather hate a character than deal with a character who doesn’t know what she thinks about anything.

Asking Questions

One of the things that writers need to learn is how to get readers to ask the right questions. You as the writer should know at every step what you want the reader to need to know. This keeps the reader turning pages.
The kinds of questions you don’t want the reader to ask are things like:
1. What is going on?
2. Who is this?
3. Why should I care?
4. How could that possibly happen?
The kinds of questions you want a reader to ask are more along the lines of:
1. Ooh, I wonder if that’s going to turn out to mean something?
2. I wonder why that character is doing that?
3. I wonder if that’s going to turn out to be the villain?
4. How do these things tie together?
5. That’s weird—I wonder if it will be explained later on.
6. This character is horrible—I wonder if I’ll ever understand why she does what she does.
 

The One Book

I know that many authors think they have only one book in them. I don’t believe it is true, not even of the authors who ended up writing only one book (like Margaret Mitchell and Harper Lee—I often feel sad at the thought of all the books they *should* have written but because of the public, didn’t). Authors are basically storytellers. Storytellers make up stories all the time in their heads. They can’t help but do it. It’s a habit, an illness, and a cure all in one.

Which isn’t to say that you should be thinking about more than one book. Authors who are eager to tell me about the plot of book 6 in their series, instead of telling me about book one, frustrate me enormously. Because they aren’t giving everything they have into the first book, which is what you have to do. Over and over again.

This book, the one you are working on, is the only book that matters. And at the same time, it isn’t the book that is going to matter to you next month, or next year. And that is the way it should be. Every time you work on a draft of this book, you should only care about this book. It should consume your every thought.

And then you need to put this book aside, and work on that book. Sure, take some time off. Rest up, if you can. I admit that I am one of those people who writes “The End” and often on the same day, starts work on the next book, because I love writing so much and I have SO many books on the list that I want to get to. But still, that doesn’t stop me from giving my undivided attention to the current WIP.

I’m not sure I would argue that beginning to hate a book means that something is wrong and you should trash it. All books need you to set them aside for a while before you can make a rational judgment. I can’t tell you how many times I have gone back to a book I thought I loved to find it had turned wretched in the meantime, or the reverse, when I have gone back to a book I thought I hated and realized it was actually brilliant.

If you think you have poured everything in you into one book, that just means you’re doing it right. If you’re exhausted after writing “THE END,” that’s a good thing. You should be exhausted. You should have a headache. You should weep a little to say goodbye to that world and those characters and your perfect dialog.

But just don’t think that it’s going to last forever, that feeling. You will write another book. You will write as many books as you have in you to write. And because, as a writer, you are the kind of person who is changing and understanding the world anew all the time, you will always have another book to which you can again give all of yourself—because you have made a new self to give.
Yes, this means books are like gods to writers. We worship them. We sacrifice for them. We become new for them. And that is as it should be.

FAQs about The Bishop's Wife

Some FAQs about The Bishop's Wife I am answering a lot lately:
1. It is being published by a national press, Soho, which is connected to Random House.
2. I met the editor years ago at Sirens, a women in fantasy conference. We hit it off immediately, and I sent her an early weird Mormon fantasy mystery, which is when she explained that Soho basically published International Crime only.
3. I sent her my first draft of The Bishop's Wife, thinking she would just help me to figure out if a) I could be a mystery writer and b) if there was any hope for the book as a national title.
4. She loved the book immediately and wanted to make it a series. She told me when I asked about how Soho could publish it, since it was international: "Mormons are like another country. They even speak a different language."
5. It is inspired by the Josh/Susan Powell real-life multiple murder story, but that is only the beginning.Obviously, it is fiction and therefore, everything that happens after the first few chapters is entirely made up. So yes, the ending is different. Whether you think it is as sad is probably up to you.
6. Yes, I am an active Mormon. I have been asked numerous times when I left the church. I suppose I could answer that with a dissertation, but though I have had problems in the past, I am a card-carrying (literally) Mormon and work with nursery-age kids.
7. The Bishop's Wife is the amateur detective, not the murder victim. She will continue to be the pov character throughout the series as I have planned it (which so far, is 9 books in).

Triathlon vs. Writing

A friend asked me if I have been enjoying my success as a writer more or my success as a triathlete. This was an interesting question because I just returned from my first BEA where I signed a ton of ARCs and got a ton of attention. I also just finished a triathlon where I got second place overall after a woman who (after I looked her up on-line) turned out to be a rockstar and basically a professional.

I have been thinking about the different experiences and my reaction to them. Both were really fun. One required more focus than the other (the triathlon). For one I felt a lot of pressure to be personable and interesting socially, which is something I’ve been slowly growing into (book stuff). I felt deeply satisfied with both afterwards. Also, I felt extremely exhausted after both and had to spend some days recovering from the various exertions, eating, reading a lot, sitting on the couch more and sleeping extra.

One of the differences is my expectation. I grew up knowing I wanted to be a writer since Kindergarten. People have been telling me I’m a good writer for a long time, expecting great things of me. I’ve always thought of myself as a writer, and even for the years when I avoided writing because I was afraid of not being good enough, that was still my dream future.

But I never thought of myself as an athlete until recently. In elementary school, I was painfully awkward physically and was one of those kids no one wanted to play with. Picked last at every recess game, every gym class team. In high school, I joined the swim team because I was trying to avoid ever having to do the mile run again, which was humiliating since I came last every time. I enjoyed swimming, but I wasn’t much good at it and after three years, I was happy to give it up and go back to more mild exercise.

Lots of people who know me now think that I was always athletic, but it’s not true. I thought of myself as overweight (maybe a little more than I actually was). I figured my brain and my writing was the best part of me. So success as a triathlete is a new and unexpected thing, and in that sense, it is especially satisfying. It’s part of this new vision of myself with a lot fewer expectations.

On the other hand, I admit freely that whatever success I have in triathlon, I am still an amateur. I’m not being paid to compete. Even on the rare occasion I get some prize money, it often doesn’t cover the race entry fee. Because I’m not a professional triathlete and I am a professional writer. So I’m competing in a completely different class. It doesn’t mean my successes as an amateur don’t count, but it means they are a different thing. They don’t have to do with money, and that’s part of the pleasure, I think.

The Perfect Agent

1. Wants me. I wonder sometimes how much of a romantic relationship is the sense of being valued by the other person. It’s important to voice this on occasion, even if you feel like everything you do already says it more loudly than words.
2. Keeps me in the loop. If there are problems with the publisher, I want to hear about them.
3. Is friendly, even if we are not best friends. I know that an agent may not want to be friends with all their clients, but I admit, I don’t want a solely business relationship.
4. Gives me useful feedback. I don’t really expect or want an agent to do line editing, but general concept critiques are good.
5. Is aware of flaws. Both mine and the agent’s own. My biggest flaw is probably a myopic view focused solely on word count and finishing manuscripts. This can be a good thing, because I’m also NEVER EVER late on deadlines. But I also sometimes have a hard time seeing the bigger picture. It’s good for my agent to sort of laugh about this with me. By the same token, it’s good for an agent to have a sense of flaws on the other side. Some agents struggle with timely responses. Some struggle with seeing a manuscript too many times. I can handle many problems, but I like to have them acknowledged in advance.
6. Responds within a few days. I get it if an agent can’t read a manuscript this weekend, but just give me an estimate. I promise I won’t bug you about it!
7. Invites me into a circle. Agents have a lot of contacts. Clients, of course, but also editors, and marketing people, reviewers, and on and on. It’s wonderful to feel like you’ve been adopted into a family.
8. Is a cheerleader. Not just for my book, but for me personally.
9. Is loyal. Just because I’m having an off year or an off decade, I don’t want my agent to throw me overboard. I also don’t my agent to decide that the career of another author represented is more important than mine.
10. Can be a barracuda when necessary. Seriously, you need an agent who can take a hard line with publishers when things go badly. I know most authors don’t want to think about how things can go badly, but they can. You need protection, and you need it from someone who draws a hard line in the sand.
11. Tells me the good stuff as well as the bad.
12. Takes me seriously when I have a bad feeling. I’m not saying I have spidey senses or anything, but I’ve learned to trust my instincts when it comes to people. If I feel like I can’t trust someone, there’s a reason for that. And yeah, I guess I should trust my agent’s spidey senses, too.
I have a good agent already, but these are things that are useful for others to know.

Be Careful What You Say About Depression

Here's the problem with people acting as if depression was simply something that you can "will" away. It actually makes it more difficult to deal with depression properly.
When you tell someone who is depressed to "cheer up" or "turn to Jesus" or "count your blessings," you are telling this person that the depression is their problem, that they are bad, and that they "deserve" to be depressed.
This can actually make a depressed person stop taking medication, not return to a therapist, or stop doing other things in their life that have previously helped manage the depression. I can't tell you how many times my depression has been made worse by people telling me that it's my own fault. Do you tell someone who has broken a bone because they did something dangerous that it is their own fault? No. You deal with the broken bone.
You may believe that depression can be helped by the things you do, things that aren't medication or therapy or lots of things. But accept that other people have different experiences than yours. Your depression may not be another person's. Yes, you can offer your own experience, as long as you remember to couch it in terms of your experience, not someone else's.
It may be that a depressed person is doing things that contribute to the depression, eating unhealthy food, engaging in unhealthy relationships, etc. But here's what you must understand: until you deal with the depression, the other things can't be dealt with. Really, they can't.
One other thing: when we say that something is a problem in someone's "mind," remember that this is a stupid way of reducing the problem. The mind is part of your body. If your illness is "just in your head," well that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Your head is part of your body. Your head needs treatment as much as a broken bone, a ruptured spleen, or a raging virus.