Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 21

Mourning Your First Draft

One of the processes of revision is mourning the old draft of the book. This is one of the main reasons that you need to put away a book for a few months before you can work on it again and see it properly. Because all you see after you’ve been working on it for a long time is the time and effort that you’ve put into it. And that isn’t going to help you figure out what the book needs next.

In order to be ready to do a good revision, you have to be willing to throw out absolutely everything. Note: This does not mean you should actually throw out absolutely everything, although it is certainly a possibility. You have to see that parts of the book you once loved no longer work with other parts of the book. You have to be able to see that the book has changed in your mind as you’ve let it sit, and that things you thought were in the book are not actually in the book. You have to acknowledge that there are parts of the book that never ended up on the page, and that you still want those parts of the book in the book.

Loving your book is great. It helps you to keep going—except when it keeps you from making it any better. This is why people talk about how the book they envisage never ends up on the page, because if they keep thinking about the book as this Platonic ideal, then they can get the strength they need to keep carving away at another revision, and another. I, personally, never feel like the book in my head is better than the one on the page. The one on the page is basically the only one there is. I can either choose to keep working on it to make it better or I can choose to work on another book, but perhaps that is a topic for another day.

I think it would be useful if writers groups had funerals for old drafts of books where they all stand up and talk about the old book and how much they loved it, and all the good things it did, how it inspired them to be better writers. And then you can put that old draft in a box and bury it in the ground, never to be seen again because it is dead. It is time after the funeral to get to work on the new book.

But yes, it can be very painful to say goodbye to an old draft. It can hurt on a physical level to reread a book you thought was perfect and see that it is decidedly not. I think all writers know this, and we should acknowledge it more to one another. Yes, writers who have been in the game longer are used to the process. We have our rituals for saying goodbye. We can sometimes get impatient with those who aren’t ready to say goodbye. But we’re just like the jaded ninety year-olds in a resting home who refuse to linger at a funeral because there are only a few years left to enjoy life and everyone’s going to be dead long enough to enjoy that.

One Sentence at a Time

The great thing about writing a book is you only have to know the next sentence or two to write. Maybe you know a whole scene that comes next. Maybe you know the next chapter. Maybe you think you know the whole next section of the book. Good for you.

But for the rest of us, all we have is the next sentence. And when we’ve written that one, we get to figure out the sentence after that.

Sentence after sentence builds up, day after day, until we get to the point where we realize that we’re missing a few things, and we go back and add in a sentence here, and a sentence there. Or sometimes even a whole chapter, written sentence by sentence, that was missing before.

You write a whole novel this way, a sentence at a time, bit by bit, never completely sure what the whole shape of it is.

If it helps you to sketch out the whole shape so that you don’t worry about that while you’re writing your sentences, that’s fine. No one kicks you out of the club of sentence writers just because you have a little quirk. But outlining or whatever your ritual is doesn’t let you escape from writing one sentence at a time.

There’s no easier or harder way to write. Just one sentence at a time.

Classes on How to Deal with Mothers/Fathers

I wish sometimes that instead of having Mother's Day and Father's Day we had classes in high school and college about how to deal with parents and in-laws with whom you have a complicated or difficult relationship. This class would discuss how to create appropriate boundaries, how to keep contact with people who are technology resistant, how far you might choose to go (with different strategies), and perhaps end-of-life scenarios that you could choose from to say goodbye.

I think this would be much more helpful than our attempts to lionize the people for whom many of us can never think of without mixed feelings. Sure, there are people who have incredible mothers—but those aren't the people who need help figuring out how to do the whole relationship thing. And the rest of us sit around on Mother's Day wondering what we're supposed to do with all of our feelings. Apparently, stuff them in the box you got the chocolates in and hold them tightly bound until next year.

Mothers as People

Mothers get such a raw deal in fiction. If they are good mothers, they are ONLY mothers. If they have a life outside of mothering, they are bad, neglectful mothers.

I read a great quote from Martha Hughes Cannon (first female state Senator in Utah, ran as a Democrat and beat her husband, who ran as a Republican, for the same spot) recently. She said, basically, “Show me a woman who has more to do than dishes, laundry, and a house to clean, and I'll show you a better mother.”

I'm not trying to give mothers even MORE they have to do to be good mothers. Please, no! But I do wish there was less pressure on women to give up their identities to serve children and more chance to be individuals with dreams.

That dreaming can include many things, from home decorating and knitting to being a doctor, writer, inventor, or whatever. But whole people. People allowed to be whole people are always healthier, mothers or not.

How to Get More Ideas

If you struggle finding ideas you want to write, some of the problems I have seen are:

You just haven't trained yourself to look for story ideas. Start keeping a notebook with you at all times and write down every idea you ever get.

You keep pushing away the ideas that are already coming at you because they aren't “good enough.” An idea itself is never going to be good enough. Get over it and write it anyway. It gets better when it is actually turned into a story. Better still after multiple revisions.

You are doing things that are chasing away your muse on a regular basis. For me, these things are negative thoughts about myself and negative thoughts about authors who have been successful who I am envious of. Also bad for the muse is pressure to write like someone else instead of like me. And worst of all, sharing a story before it's ready to be shared with the wrong person.

A Guilty Admission

When I was a new author, I read a book by every author I met or was likely to meet or who got a good review or who was recommended by a friend. I felt strongly that this was what I was supposed to do to understand the business. And it certainly was a great education on what was selling currently and it taught me a lot about how you started a book and finished one.

But a massive problem was that if I hated a book, it became very difficult for me to like the person who wrote it. And even if I only liked the book mildly, I had no idea what to do when I was in a social situation with the author. Since I was reading books of all the authors who I was most likely to meet in social situations, I was the killjoy of all social interaction between authors.

If an author asked me if I liked a book, I would go off on a long explanation of what I hadn’t liked and why. You can imagine how delightful this was to the authors in question, who had surely expected some kind of kind, single sentence response along the lines of “it was fine” to “it was brilliant.” But I felt that doing anything other than this was “lying” and of course, everyone knows that lying was bad. Telling the truth would help these other authors become better authors.

But of course, it didn’t. It only made me feel horrible for hurting people’s feelings and it made other authors think I was pretty stinky.

So I spent a few years not reading the books of anyone I met, reading books instead outside of my genre so that I wasn’t in a sticky situation because I wasn’t going to meet any of those people. If asked if I had read a book, I would simply say—as everyone does—so sorry, I don’t have time to read much anymore. Because no one expects authors to read every book of every other author they meet (except for the previous version of myself, of course).

I realized at a certain point that I had become afraid of reading books by authors I knew personally because—what if I didn’t like it? What if it wrecked my friendship with a person IRL because I couldn’t stand their book, thought the romance was rapey, thought there was no feminism, saw cliches all over the place, and on and on?

I am slowly coming to a place where I can accept that someone I like personally may write a book that isn’t for me. Not good or bad, but just not for me. This felt like such a cop out of an answer to me ten years ago. But it’s true. Not every book is for every person. Some books do some things well and not other things. No book does everything well. And just because I do not forget I am reading and fall into a world does not mean the book is bad.

Readers may love a book I don’t fall into. I may already know certain tricks of the genre I work in, and therefore it is more difficult to surprise me. Surprise is not the only good feature of a book, however. Readers may love a character I find bland. Or they may love a character who creeps me out. This does not make the author or the reader a bad person.

If the author wants to ask me for advice at some stage of the production before publication, then that is the time to offer my opinions, if I choose to. After that time, my advice is useless and therefore not worth my breath. When authors ask me to read an ARC for a blurb, I usually try to read the first few pages at least to see if the book seems to be for me. But I have no obligation to read the whole book if it isn’t, and there’s no need for me to tell the author why I didn’t like it. That’s not what’s being asked. A request for a blurb isn’t a request for a critique. It’s just a—do you like this? If so, praise it. If not, shut up.

Anyway, my advice to other authors who are as socially awkward as I was at this same stage of the game. Hope it helps!

Magic School Alternatives

Magic school is a great way for an author to introduce a reader to a magic system. It works particularly well in young adult and middle grade fantasy, but it can work for adult fantasy, as well, since many adult fantasy still have younger protagonists. But what other choices do you as a writer have to avoid a massive infodump that stops action cold and more importantly—wrecks the integrity of the voice you are using to narrate your story?

1. A debate about the old ways of magic and the new ones between an older character and a younger one. This can even be disguised as “conflict.”

2. A newcomer or foreigner arrives and a character tries to explain the magic system to this person, who is clueless and needs constant correction. This can be disguised as “humor.”

3. An embedded newspaper article, encyclopedia entry, or historical archive. But remember, if you do this, keep it short. You can put one at the heading of every chapter, but also have fun and make sure the reader is having fun with these.

4. Dueling wizards who pontificate on their own style of magic before each blow with a wand is struck. Can be televised.

5. A person from our world of any age enters the other world and asks questions that the reader would ask. Very commonly done, which is part of the problem with this approach. Either do it cleanly and quickly or do it deftly and with an original style that makes readers want to keep going.

6. Someone finds a book from the past that has completely different assumptions about the magic. Can be a journal or a textbook or a newspaper.

7. A new area of magic study is being added to the accepted canon. Adults and everyone else have to learn it and see how it works.

8. Write a poem (a la Tolkien) about the magic and it will feel more mysterious.

9. (Not my favorite) Have a prophecy about the change in the magic in the future and allow people to interpret it in different ways.

10. Show someone who is doing the magic absolutely wrong and someone else can come along, laugh, and give some hints on how to do it better. Not quite the same as school, but not dissimilar, either.

Paradigm Explosion

The best fantasy novels set up a paradigm early on in the book, explaining how the magic works and setting up a terrible dilemma that gets worse and worse as the climax approaches. And then, just when it seems that things are the worst, the protagonist refuses to accept the paradigm anymore. The dilemma that has been set up and the terrible choice that it appears there is no escape from, are all rejected, and a completely new way is found out of the problem to resolve the climax.

I love this because I feel like it is the way that real life works. When you are caught in a paradigm, the only way out is to be able to see that this paradigm is not the only way of viewing the world. If you can reject it and see an entirely new way of living, then you are going to be able to find new solutions, and perhaps even happiness.

Which isn’t to say that finding a new paradigm is easy. It isn’t. And the best books show this, too. There is a cost in rejecting the old paradigm. Sometimes that cost is literal, and it is paid in blood and tears. Sometimes the cost is giving up certain people who are clinging to the old paradigm. Sometimes the new paradigm demands that you walk away from everything you’ve ever known and enter a new world where you have to start over and learn from the beginning again.

You die in a very real way and have to learn to live again as a new person. Fiction shows us how to do this because we all go through it in real life and we know how real and important it is. There are plenty of people who stick with one paradigm all their lives, and simply live with the dilemma and accept the horrible choice that it entails. But paradigm shifts are the way that we all are made new.

Of course, once the paradigm shifts, it’s really hard to write a sequel. Because while it’s true that many people go through multiple paradigm shifts in a lifetime, it’s difficult to make readers go with you again when you’ve destroyed the world that they already bought into and loved. Some writers can do it, but not many. It’s a huge breach of trust to the reader to destroy a paradigm that has been set up for so many pages. And another broken trust to make us love a character who has been wounded and remade.

Things I Tell Myself to Dial Down Anxiety (In racing and writing)

1. This isn’t your only chance to get it right.

2. You’ve prepared for this. Trust your preparation.

3. Draw energy from the nerves. That’s what they’re there for.

4. You’ll have fun once you get started.

5. Remember the people in your life that give it meaning.

6. Set a goal you have control over rather than one you don’t have control over.

7. Refuse the temptation to see others as competitors and see them instead as friends along the way to make your hard path a little easier and commiserate with you.

8. Take a moment to be grateful for where you are.

9. Remember how far you’ve come to get here.

10. Avoid self-sabotage as an easy relief from the stress.

Inside Your Character's Skin

Telling a story from inside your character’s skin is one of the things that a novel can do better than a movie can. Movies do many things beautifully, and showing scenery is only one of them. You get to see everything in a movie from the point of view of the director (the camera itself). But in a book, you can go even farther inside the pov, so that we not only see, but also feel and think everything that the pov does. I think this is a wonderful thing and something many authors do not use often enough or deeply enough.

If you are writing a scene and tell about the setting, for instance, you can do it in as a bland camera angle, telling about the color of the furniture, perhaps what brand it is, how old it is, if it has been cleaned recently, perhaps even if it smells. But when you are telling all of this in the point of view of your main character, you get to do so much more than just give details about your setting. You get to tell all about your character, even if you think you aren’t. What details does your character notice? You know what? Those are the only details that matter. If your character doesn’t know what to call something, the likelihood is that your character isn’t going to notice that thing at all. So leave out general, vague descriptions. Focus on the specifics that your character knows and cares about.

If a character I am writing about is obsessed with numbers, the first thing he is going to notice when entering a room is the things that he can count. Floor tiles, numbers of mounted photos or images, books on the shelf, bits of debris on the floor, number of hooks (including which ones are broken), number of light bulbs (including the ones that are burned out), if the pictures are straight or not, how many holes or dents are in the walls, and so on.