Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 20

Steps to Being Published and Becoming a "Real Author"

1. Write a book.

You would be astonished at how many people want to skip this step.

2. Revise book.

3. Let book sit for a while. Read other books, some in your genre, some not.

4. Revise again.

5. Have people who are not related to you read the book.

6. Let your thoughts sit for a while. Read more books, some in your genre, some not.

7. Revise again.

8. Try writing a query letter.

9. Revise query letter.

10. Realize you still need to revise the book. Read more books. Lots of books. Weep because these books are better than your book could ever be.

11. Start another book in despair.

12. Go back to the first book when in despair about the new book.

13. Revise some more.

14. Realize you aren’t really revising anymore.

15. Write another query letter.

16. Now—and only now—begin to research agents and publishing houses.

17. Send queries out. Wait for responses.

18. Chew off your own fingernails as you wait some more. Read books in the meantime that make you wish you had never sent in query letters. You weren’t ready and now you want to take them all back into protective custody.

19. Collect rejection letters.

20. Begin again.

21. At some point, someone somewhere offers you a contract/agency agreement.

22. Celebrate.

23. Wait while your book is edited.

24. Revise again. Read more books.

25. Begin making a list of all the jobs you could do that would pay more and be less frustrating than writing.

26. Realize that you don’t want to do any of those jobs, and that you’d rather be a frustrated writer. Read more.

27. Call up someone and complain to them.

28. Find out your book is going to be published.

29. Get medicated for anxiety about your book being published.

30. Complain to everyone about how long it is taking for your book to be published.

31. Realize that you can’t take it back anymore. Watch television because you now hate all books, especially your own.

32. Ask your editor if you can still change things. (You can’t.)

33. Get your first review. Weep.

34. Consider changing your name.

35. Put on a happy face for the launch party.

36. Obsessively check your amazon or bookscan numbers, because you have no control anymore and you want to pretend that you do.

37. Go to conferences and meet other authors whose careers you wish you had or whose books you wish you had written.

38. If you are lucky, have one real moment where you hear another author saying the same thing as you.

Congratulations, you are now a “real author.” You’ve been through it all.

Tell Yourself A New Narrative of Your Life

We tell ourselves a narrative of our lives every day. The narrative we tell about our past shapes our future.

For a long time, I had been telling myself a destructive narrative about being a failure. I was a failure as a college professor, a failure as a writer, and a failure as a parent because my daughter was suicidally depressed. These were not things I could change. I had failed already and every day was just further proof of this fact.

But telling myself a different narrative really changed what I thought of myself. This is why story is important. Story is a way of shaping events so that they make sense. Our real lives often feel like they are story-less, shapeless, and meaningless. We want to give them meaning, but the easiest meaning is failure because failure has either no shape at all or it has a shape that isn’t finished.

Being finished isn’t really failure, though. Think about it. If you took a book you loved and then yanked off the last fifty pages, would you still love that book? If it ended right where the night was darkest, where the hero had given his all and the villain seemed to be winning? Would you love a book where all the effort seemed to be for nothing?

I daresay you would not. When your life feels this way, don’t write a narrative of your life about how this is the end and there’s no point in writing anymore. Remind yourself that the narrative isn’t over. Take some time to finish the narrative in a positive way, using your imagination to fill in some empty spaces.

Two Lists

Like many people, I have a to-do list at the beginning of every day. For most days when I am not traveling, the list looks like this:
1. Eat breakfast.
2. Write 2 chapters of WIP. (Or possibly, revise 2 chapters of WIP)
3. Put up a helpful writing post on tumblr/lj
4. Answer email.
5. Get my workout in.
6. Plan future events, like Writing For Charity, retreat, etc.
7. Deal with family emergencies, health care issues, etc.
8. Laundry/dishes/household stuff
9. Errands for kids.
10. Dinner, family time in the evening.
I spend a lot of energy getting my daily to-do list done. I feel great satisfaction after having accomplished my list. It helps me deal with my anxieties about myself. But at the end of the day, I make a different list. This list is my list of things that happened that made me glad I’m alive. On this list:
1. A hug from one of my kids.
2. Good food, sometimes made from scratch.
3. Laughing out loud.
4. Cuddling with a blanket.
5. The sound of a perfect piece of music.
6. Holding hands with my husband.
7. Hearing the voice of a distant friend on the phone.
8. Reading a book just for fun.
9. The smell of my daughter’s hair when she presses her head next to mine while we watch TV together.
10. A note from a reader saying they loved my book.
This is a completely different kind of list and has nothing to do with things that I do or accomplish. But it has changed my life. Day by day, as I remember the things that ended up on my list at the end of the day, I look forward to those more. I cherish them when they happen for longer. I anticipate them. And my anxiety decreases.

Writing without the Internal Editor

So, a third question I was asked recently: How do you deal with that internal editor that tells you everything you’re writing is crap and makes you keep deleting everything?
First of all, a good internal editor is not something to be unhappy about. Most beginning writers have no internal editor at all. I remember what this was like as a kid and a teenager. I read everything and I liked everything I read. It was fun to be a reader, but it didn’t make me a good writer. It made it impossible for me to see if something was wrong. If someone pointed out a problem in my stories, I didn’t know how to fix them without just rewriting everything and basically writing a different story.
An internal editor is what makes it possible for you to move past first draft writing. You MUST have an internal editor in order to be a published writer. Celebrate this critical part of becoming a mature reader. That internal editor is what allows you to watch television and see what is wrong with an episode of a show you love. It’s what makes it possible for you to talk to other people about what works and doesn’t in a movie you’ve both seen.
Now, having an internal editor also means that you don’t enjoy as many things as you used to. This is one downside. You won’t love everything you read. You won’t breathlessly wait for what happens next because you’ve seen the pattern and you can guess. If the writer isn’t doing a really good job, you’re going to have it all written in your head before you see it unfold before you on the page.
But an internal editor can get in the way of writing a quick first draft. Some writers simply accept this and write very slow first drafts. They may write 400-500 words a day and not always new words, either. There is nothing wrong with writing this way, if it works for you. And by works, I mean you actually have a manuscript by the end of a year or so. (Some writers take even longer than a year to get a working manuscript—like four or five years and it doesn’t kill them.)
If you want to pound out a quick first draft, here are some ideas on how to do it:
1. Have a writing space that you go to every day and that makes you feel safe and comfortable.
2. Fill your writing space with objects that have a positive connotation for you. Good reviews printed out. Photos of happy family members who love you. Trophies or medals from successes in your past.
3. Keep snacks of whatever kind will make you stay in your writing space and keep writing. If it’s chocolate, keep chocolate around of every kind that you love. If it’s dried fruit and nuts, keep that.
4. Many writers play instrumental music while they write to set the right mood for the piece they are working on. (I personally don’t like any music at all, except perhaps the happy hum of the dishwasher.)
5. Reread something that you’ve written before and that you are proud of before you start on any new words for the day.
6. Think positive thoughts about your new writing project.
7. Keep a journal that you write a few sentences in at the beginning and end of each writing day. Remind yourself what it is you are writing about, what you love about this book, who the characters are and so on. Write about your hopes for the day, and then what you think you’ve accomplished that day.
8. Light a scented candle or keep a scent in the room that helps you keep on track mentally.
9. Fill the room with books you love that you can consult when necessary.
10. Keep other people out of this room because you want the energy there to be writing energy, not talking energy.

Bouchercon, The Bishop's Wife, and me

When I was a teen, I was obsessed with Sherlock Holmes and spent many hours compiling a book of trivia which no one ever read but me. I also devoured all of the Perry Mason novels one summer, then moved onto the other Erle Stanley Gardner series I could find. I made my mother take me to every library within driving distance of our home, including the local university library, where a handful of otherwise unavailable books were waiting for me. That year, my mother asked me if I didn't want to read something else. “No,” I said. “Why would I?” When I was deeply into a series, I had no interest in emerging from that world.

After Perry Mason and Sherlock Holmes, I turned to James Bond and Isaac Asimov's robot novels. I am pretty sure that my mother had no idea what exactly was the content of the James Bond novels. On the other hand, it was probably just as well since in a family of 11 children, I was apparently the lucky one who got skipped when it came to the talk on sex. The James Bond novels might have given me a healthier view of sex anyway, and the specifics were probably more clear.

At the same time, I read romance novels by the bucketful and eventually became interested in fantasy. My first published novel was a young adult contemporary published by a small national press (The Monster In Me, Holiday House). I then published 6 other young adult romance/fantasies (The Princess and the Hound, Harper to The Rose Throne, Egmont).

It wasn't until my young adult career appeared stalled in 2012 that I began to consider other forms of narrative. I eventually wrote the first draft of The Bishop's Wife early in 2013, feeling as if I had fallen into the most comfortable form of storytelling I had ever tried. I was able to write about a female amateur detective who was also a wife and Mormon mother. So many literary marriages are either completely dysfunctional or so happily-ever-after that there are never normal arguments or negotiations. So I create Linda Wallheim and her husband (the bishop) Kurt Wallheim, who is patterned in great part after my own husband, Matt, a man who is never bothered by the fact that I beat him at nearly every triathlon or running race we have ever done together.

I also wanted to write a story about a woman who was a fierce mother and also had a mind, career, and future of her own apart from mothering. We have stories in the last twenty years of kick-ass heroines who do everything their male counterparts do. Except that they have to give up family in large part. Women who have lives of their own can't be mothers, can they? But I know so many women who have found different ways to balance motherhood and interesting lives of their own. In fact, I believe that the best thing mothers can do is to have rich lives of their own to show their children how women come to adulthood.

I was also able to tell about a small and rather ordinary Mormon community like the one I live in myself. This is something I think that mystery does best of all the genres. The best mysteries tell about a community where everyone has a motive for murder, and the detective has to be enough apart from that community to see it realistically, but enough a part of it to understand the twists and turns. I'm not saying that my Mormon neighbors are all likely to be murderers, but they all have deeper lives than appears on the surface.

Mystery is also one of the few narrative forms that can tell a story on the huge canvas of ten or more full-length novels. I love the space that this allows me as a writer to show real character development, and even to plan out horrible events in my detective's future. As Lois McMaster Beujold (a master of mystery in the sf field) says, the best way to write a story is to think of the worst possible thing that could happen to your protagonist, and then make sure that happens. As your character changes on this large canvas, that worst possible thing changes, as well.

I am thrilled to be part of the mystery writing community and have appreciated the warm welcome I have received so far. I will be attending my first Bouchercon in Long Beach, California November 13-16 and hope to enjoy the splash http://www.bouchercon2014.com.

I really wish I had more time to do x

Today, I am contemplating what it means when we say things like "I wish I had more time to do x." I have concluded that we usually mean we wish we could alter the laws of the universe, continue to do exactly what we are already doing, but somehow also at the same time have extra time that no one else has, and also time that does not cost us anything else that we are already choosing to spend it on. We also do not want to have to use sleep to fuel any of this extra time. Yes?

What it doesn't seem to mean is that we want to look closely at our lives and the use of our time already in place. We don't want to give up the things that we are already doing and that matter to us, nor do we want to give up the rest time that we are expending on important rest activities. We don't want to give other people our time, either, because it is too precious. Sometimes we don't even want to go through all the boring moments of time passing doing the thing we want to do.

We want to be able to do something like playing an instrument or speaking a language or writing a book, but we don't really want to. Because if we REALLY wanted to, we would already be doing it. Yes?

When You Can't Finish the Book

Another question I was asked recently was what to do if you can’t finish the book. The questioner said something about how she knew she was “supposed” to soldier through and get to the end, but she just hadn’t been able to do it.
I said that there were usually 2 reasons that people couldn’t finish a book.
1. Life block, which means that you have stuff going on in your real life that is preventing you from having the emotional energy to deal with story problems. Some writers write even during the worst possible life crap. Most writers don’t. There’s nothing wrong with having real life impinge on your writing. It happens. Deal with your real life crap and then you’ll be able to write again.
2. The book is crap. Sorry! I know this sounds rude. But at some point your subconscious (the course of most creative first-draft ideas) may refuse to work on a book because it knows that there is something deeply, deeply wrong with the book. Until you figure out what the problem with the book is, you’re not going to be able to keep writing. So go back to the beginning and see where you went wrong. Amputate the stinking, gangrenous part, and then you may find you can keep going.
There are writers who seem to start a book and then get bored, start another book and then get bored again, and on and on. These writers may have 20 beginnings of books and wonder what is wrong with them that they can’t finish a book.
I will say again, I don’t think the problem is that you need to just plow through and finish a book that’s crappy, though I hear that advice fairly often. If you keep starting books and not being able to finish them, there’s definitely something wrong, but it’s not necessarily that you don’t have stamina. You may need to try outlining. You may go wrong fairly early on. You may need to sit down and analyze a book that is absolutely gripping from beginning to end and see what you need to do to copy that.
Just because you start twenty books and don’t finish them does not mean that you will never finish a book actually. You may just need to hit on the right idea and then you will find that you have no problem finishing a book.
 

It's Not About Discipline

At an event recently I was asked if I had advice on how to become more disciplined so you got more writing done. I think this is not the right way to look at it. If you think you need more discipline, that means you are going around telling yourself all the time how undisciplined you are and that you are a bad, bad person for not getting your writing done.

It’s possible that you really do lack discipline. But far more likely are a whole host of other things, including:

1. You are too nice to tell people no when they ask you to do things for them that aren’t writing.

2. You don’t know what your story is yet. When you know that, it often writes itself, or at least it burns inside your head and demands to be written.

3. You have certain compulsions to finish other projects first before you write (cleaning, etc). That’s not lack of discipline. It’s called a mental illness.

4. You have children who genuinely need attention and that means you only have 5 minutes stretches of time to write in.

5. You have physical health issues that need to be addressed before you are going to feel alert and happy enough to write on a regular basis.

6. You work a full-time job and are too exhausted emotionally to have resources to write creatively daily. Try the weekend instead and build a schedule from there. Lacking a schedule is not the same as lacking discipline.

7. You need to figure out the right time of day to write where you will have energy for it.

8. You haven’t given yourself permission to give up on the current manuscript and your heart isn’t in it anymore. As soon as you realize you’re “allowed” to move on, you will find you love writing again and don’t lack discipline.

9. You’re wounded from a nasty critique and need to recover from this.

10. You’re writing in the wrong genre/to the wrong age group.

People who truly lack discipline don’t get much done in life. If you only lack discipline in this one area, it may be time for you to think about why that is. We often beat ourselves up instead of investigating the real problem. Be a scientist here and think about a bigger picture.

I'm a Writer Because

When I first started writing, I was absolutely convinced that I would become a NYT Bestseller. I had spent my life being successful at goals I set for myself, and I didn’t see why this one would be any different. I had been very successful in academia, getting a PhD at age 24 at Princeton, and I figured I would continue to experience the same thing. I was going to win awards and make money because I was smart and I worked harder than anyone I knew.
Then reality struck. I wrote 20 really bad novels in the next five years. I sent them to every editor possibly on the planet. I got humiliating rejection letters and a few mildly tepid encouraging ones. This was not the same as anything else I’d ever done. You couldn’t just expect hard work to do the job for you. There were a bunch of other factors at play here.
Luck in meeting the right person at the right time. Luck in hitting the market at the right time. Luck in having a voice that connected to other people. And also, writing is an art. There is skill involved, but there is also something that isn’t quantifiable, that can’t be duplicated. It really can’t.
Yes, I eventually sold a first novel for a small advance to a small company. Yes, I got a good agent. Yes, I got decent reviews and some minor awards for that first book. But it took me five years to get that one deal, and I’m sure I spent more money on postage sending books out and going to conferences than I earned from that first check. And it took three more years to sell another book. And two more years to sell the book after that.
But then I finally wrote a book that sold well, and I had a publishing company that seemed to be behind me. I had a fabulous editor and I had a contract for books I hadn’t even written yet. This was the dream, right?
Only my editor was laid off from the publishing house and I was assigned a new editor. Things didn’t go so well from there. My big contract was canceled and when I sold a new book, it absolutely tanked for reasons that are still not clear to me. And I began to talk about pseudonyms in order to save my career.
I also began to think about how much time I had spent doing this and whether I had reached the point where I should be considering a “real” career. I had skills, didn’t I? I had once had many employment offers from big companies because I was smart and hard-working and generally considered to be socially acceptable. In the business world, these assets would be well compensated.
But the reality was, I wasn’t finished. I had books I still wanted to write. I had things I still had to say to the world. I had things I needed to figure out how to say to myself, forms I needed put to experiences I had had. I needed the shape of writing books in my life. I loved writing too much to let it go.
And you know, I think this may have been a really good thing that happened to me. Because I stopped caring about bestseller status. I stopped worrying about money because I figured I basically wasn’t going to get any for my writing. I began to read books because I wanted to read them again, instead of because I thought they would be valuable for learning about the market.
Sometimes, the only way to realize what matters to you most is when everything else gets taken away. And writing really matters to me. I’m not a writer because it’s my job. I’m not a writer because it’s the way I hope to make money. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with making money at writing or at seeing writing as a job. It just wasn’t what ultimately mattered to me. And this was the way that I found that out.
I am a writer because it’s the way I live in the world. It’s the way that I see television shows, the way I listen to bits and pieces of conversation in the mall, the way that I talk to friends and warn them that they are going to end up in a book. It’s the way I think about putting words to the food I just ate, and to talking about the workout I just finished, and explaining to people why the book I read was fabulous—or terrible.
If you had told me fifteen years ago that this is how things would turn out, I would have thought it was a tragic story, but it isn’t. I’m so glad to be where I am today. I’m glad to be the person I am. Because what I learned was that I am far tougher and more resilient that I ever knew. And I am deep down to a part of my soul I didn’t know existed a writer and creator and thinker and shaker. I feel and I connect and I argue. I am a writer still, and that can’t be taken away.

Top Yourself

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to writers about problems in their book and they tell me about the cool thing they are “saving” for book 3 of the series. Or that they answer that question, but later on. Or that they have that all solved, but they’re waiting for a big reveal.

Um, no.

When you are writing a book, you are writing *this* book only. You put everything you’ve got into *this* book. You don’t think about any other book. You don’t care about any other book. There is no other book in the series. Because if you don’t get *this* book up to near perfection, there isn’t going to be a book 2 or a book 3 or anything else.

I know the fear. Yeah, that part I get. If you use everything up of yourself and your ideas in book 1, then what do you do for any of the other books in the series that may or may not sell and make you millions. Here’s the big secret of writing:

You have to make it up as you go along.

Yup. That means you don’t plan out book 2 and book 3 when you are writing book 1. You may hope to hell that you get to write another book, but you don’t get to save your best stuff for later. You have to depend on having better stuff later than you have right now.

The thing is, we’ve all read series where the writer petered out in books 2 and 3 and it makes us mad as readers. So as writers, we think that isn’t going to happen to us, right?

Yeah, well, it isn’t going to happen to you because your book 1 isn’t going to be good enough to get anyone to buy it or even complain about the rest of the books.

Sorry. I know it hurts to hear it. I know that you’re terrified someone is going to criticize you for the thing you criticized someone else for. That’s life as a writer. You are actually privileged if you get criticized like that. It’s a badge of honor because it means someone cared enough to get far enough to notice.

But you still don’t get to save all your best stuff for book 3. You have to grow as a writer. You have to stretch for the future and then you have to wait to see how people will react. You don’t get to control if they like you or think that your ending to book 3 was worth it. You give writing all you’ve got, and then that’s it. That’s all she wrote.