Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 23

The Good and the Bad

I can name some good things that came from my daughter’s death:

1. I learned to love my remaining children with renewed fierceness.

2. I got into better shape, and so did my husband and the kids.

3. I was able to write about grief in a way that other people connect to, because I am a good writer and those skills transferred.

4. I became more compassionate and aware of the pain of others.

5. I learned how to find real happiness.

6. I learned how to calm myself in the midst of anxiety and troubles.

7. I learned how to stop expecting so much from myself and others (though I wonder if anyone can see this change but me).

8. I have learned to let go of things I cannot change.

9. My beliefs in God and religion are more real and more important to me.

10. Music is sweeter to me.

But there are probably a lot more things that remain bad about the bad things, and even the good things have tinges of bad things in them.

1. Just because I feel pain for others doesn’t mean I can do anything to help them. I often have to leave because I feel so much and I feel like I have to take care of myself first or I’m no good to anyone.

2. I feel more distance from other people because my experience is not a typical one.

3. I don’t find that church soothes me in the way that it once did, because the casual assumptions of most people are painful to me, and I am always having to decide I should challenge them aloud or now.

4. I am angry more.

5. I feel broken most of the time. It has become the new normal for me.

6. I feel like I have a smaller capacity to deal with stress. I reach a limit and I will NOT push past that.

7. I need more sleep, food, and habitual, familiar things around me.

8. I need more silent, private time.

9. I find it more difficult to focus.

10. I find it difficult to talk about what I really think, and therefore wonder how much of my life is authentic.

11. I spend more money on myself for frivolous things.

12. I don’t pay much attention to politics anymore.

13. I say no more often. I have less of myself to give away.

14. I feel less in control of myself and my emotions. I fear that when I am hurt, I tend to lash out and hurt others in return.

15. I have to consciously work at enjoying myself. My mind naturally spins to the negative and even the most wonderful positive things tend to have a shorter effect on my mood.

16. I tend to do things less often simply because other people tell me to do them, or because they are expected of me. I don’t follow rules unless I know the reason behind them. Times ten.

17. I have a handful of weird quirks that I know are a result of my emotional wounds. Things like checking all the doors to make sure they are locked at night, hugging and kissing everyone in the family before they leave for the day because who knows if I will ever see them again. Making sure we have more food in the house than we can ever eat.

18. I tell myself a lot that I will get to things later. And I may or may not get to them later.

19. I break promises with myself and other people more. I used to feel like a promise was an unbreakable trust. I just can’t do that anymore.

20. I am more likely to make snap judgments and adhere to them.

After nearly ten years, I have come to accept that these effects aren’t likely to go away anytime soon, and that it’s useless to whine and complain about them anymore, or feel like I am somehow not a good person because I can’t say everything has changed for the better. I am still wounded and I refuse to insist that those wounds be overlooked.

How Parenting is Like Writing

Basically, you say no to your characters just like you say no to your kids.
I want to be special.
No.
I want to have magic.
No.
I want to be important/famous/popular.
No, no, no.
I want to have friends.
No.
I want Mr./Ms. Hot to fall in love with me.
No.
I want life to be easy.
No.
I want people to do what I tell them to do/what I want.
No.
I want my ending to be what I expect.
No.
Now, of course, your characters aren’t really your children. If you tortured your real children the way that you tortured your characters, you’d probably get put in jail.
However, do consider the delights as a parent of watching your children make mistakes, especially if you already told them not to. You can totally use this for your next book. I give you permission.

Why We Write

It can be easy, when you’re waiting for a book to come out, to let your imagination spin out realities where you become rich and famous. You think about what you would spend all that money on, if you become a mega bestseller. You think up all the sequels or prequels or related stories you will write when this book is the next big hit. You think about interviews on TV, about old friends who will suddenly be proud they know you, that your parents will suddenly relate to you in a different and better way. Your neighbors will offer you respect, and maybe your kids will, too.

But after a number of years of these kind of hyped delusions before the publication of a new book, I have learned to damp them down a little. And to think more carefully about why I write what I write. Why I think almost all writers write what they write.

I don’t think many writers write for money. They’d be crazy to, honestly. There are just so many jobs where you have more control over hard work leading to tangible results. You’d be more likely to end up a millionaire investing yearly money in the stocks. And it would probably take less time and energy.

I think that writers write ultimately because they want to connect with people. We write because we love books ourselves, and because we have books that matter to us in our lives, books that changed us, books that saved us, that made us feel like we had a place in the world. We know books that got us through a hard spot because they were sheer fun, and books that made high school English a little easier because there were some beautiful passages in them. We know books that we HAD to read the sequel to, and waited day by day for the release. And we want that for our books.

We want readers out there to love our books in the way that we once loved someone else’s book. We want to write a character who feels like she could step off the page. We want to make someone’s terrible life a little easier. We want to say, you’re not alone. We want to create a fictional world, at least, where people like us exist and find each other.

So today, as I think about my upcoming book, I am thinking about readers out there who need the character in that book, and who need to believe that the world of that book is a real one. As writers, we don’t have control over this. It’s always a mystery to me why people connect with certain books of mine and don’t with others. It can be a crushing disappointment when people hate a book that you wanted to connect with them. It’s not just that bad reviews hurt. It’s that they make you see that the book’s feelers reaching for that connection were severed somehow.

When a book does connect, it’s like a secret club of people who will find each other, not just the year the book comes out, but for the rest of their lives. In college, when their kids are on the playground, maybe even in a retirement home. That’s what I write for. I write for readers I have never met and may never hear from. I write for readers who need a connection, not to me as a writer, but to my world and to my people.

What is Voice?

My simple answer to this is that voice is the mistakes that you make on purpose. When you have run-on sentences, or fragments. When you don’t have subject/verb agreement or you use colloquial phrases or you use the wrong word for an effect—that’s voice. Voice is when you deliberately choose to annoy your copyeditor and when your mother, who is an English teacher, will frown at you and correct your sentences over and over again, trying to be helpful.

But voice is more than just sentence choice. It’s also the choice of the story you tell, the characters who inhabit your story, the metaphors you use, the feeling that your reader gets when opening the book. Voice is all the other authors that you have read who come through when you make allusions. Voice is you believing that you have the most important story in the world to tell. Voice is when you’ve read everybody else and you know why they are the greatest writers in the world, and you still are arrogant enough to think that you matter even more, that your story is the story that people should be reading today.

Character Leads to Plot--Part 4

The climax of the book is the event which makes certain whether the protagonist wins or loses.

The climax should also be the event in which the emotional change of the protagonist finally connects and there is no turning back after that.

The climax should reveal the full growth of your protagonist. The world should have opened up, and the rising stakes allow the protagonist to become larger and more important than ever before.

The climax must hold within it the possibility—nay the likelihood—of failure. And yet it must move forward inexorably.

And don't forget that after the climax, there must always be a resolution, at least one scene which shows the protagonist in her new place in the new world, at peace once more (as at the beginning) at least for a moment before the next chapter in her life begins.

Gratitude

Whenever I race, I try to find one moment where I can feel true gratitude for the pleasure of being in this race on this day with this body. I really am a lucky person. I have done a good job with what I have, I think. I don’t have a perfect, athletic body to begin with. But I have a good, functional body.

A race is hard. I don’t mean to say it’s not. But it is possible for me. And it isn’t possible for everyone.

If I am puking my guts out. If I am bleeding because of a crash, if I am sorrowful because I am not getting the time I want to, I can always be grateful for the fact that I am out there, doing what I love.

I can be grateful for the weather, for the incredible scenery, for the incredible bike that I have the pleasure of riding on. I can be grateful for the aid stations and the volunteers at them, for other racers who cheer me on or encourage me.

Gratitude isn’t something that comes easily. You can’t just snap your fingers and be grateful. You train yourself to feel gratitude in difficult times the same way that you train for anything else, with practice. And while it doesn’t change the bad things that happened, it gives them a little more balance. It makes it possible to move forward without the same weight of the past, because you know that there will be something good ahead.

From Life Lessons in Triathlon

http://www.amazon.com/Life-Lessons-Triathlon-Mette-Harrison-ebook/dp/B00I7WLT26/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1397140536

The Grief-Bearer

She opened the door a crack, and then wider.
She had been warned.
She knew of the Pain-Bearer
And the Fear-Bearer
And the Hate-Bearer.
They had never tempted her.

“It won’t cost a thing the first time.”
The voice was pleasant, no pressure.
The face was familiar, seen everywhere,
But no one’s friend.
The bearers weren’t friends.
Not even with each other.
They did not bear for free,
Except the first time.

“Just this once,” she said, and stepped back.
The Grief-Bearer stepped in.
There was a moment then when she reconsidered.
She thought of the consequences.
But she was alone.
Her husband was asleep.
The chatty neighbors had left her a meal to warm.
It stood on the table, cold and unappealing.
Why did they think she could eat?
They did not know grief.

“What do I do?” she asked.
“Sit.  And think.  And breathe.  That is all.
I will hold your pain for you.
I will feel it as deeply as you would feel it.
I will give honor to the one lost,
And I will remember the futures you wished for,
And planned for, and expected,
And did not receive.”

Character Leads to Plot—part 3

Bad things must happen to good characters.

Think of what the worst thing is that would happen to your character. Then make that thing happen. Seeing how someone reacts under the worst possible conditions is why readers read. Either that's Schadenfreude or a real desire to see courage, I don't know which.

But beware that the worst thing for one character will not be the worst thing for another character. Each character's worst thing is individual and unique. Build into your character the fear of the worst thing, and then when it happens, the plot feels inevitable.

And don't forget the bad things we do to ourselves. We sabotage our own successes, because we are afraid of them.

We are ignorant and have our ignorances revealed to us.

We are overconfident and fail precisely because of that.

All our virtues crumble into flaws just as we are learning to lean on and depend on them.

Character Leads to Plot—Part 2

What does your character absolutely know to be true? And what happens when your character finds out that it's false? This is plot.

What is your character's primary identity and what happens when someone challenges that identity? This is plot.

What will your character NOT do to get what she wants? And how do you design a plot that forces a dilemma that shows what happens when want and moral values are at odds?

What does your character hate about himself? How will that change by the end of the book? This is plot.

What secrets does your character want to keep hidden? How will those secrets be revealed anyway? This is plot.

What things does your character avoid from the past because of the wounds they have caused? How will your character be forced to stop avoiding the past? This is plot.

What emotional patterns does your character fall into? How will this change? This is plot.

Leaving Mormonism and finding my way back

I wrote this post for an old friend of mine from Princeton days and thought some of you here might be interested in it. Click below if you want to read the rest.

When I lost my sixth child Mary Mercy at birth in 2005, I went back to church the very next week. I went back to work. I went back to exercising probably long before I should have. I was convinced that I would feel normal again if I acted normal. I believed that I would get through the worst and come out on the other end if only I hung tight to my religion and trusted in God. We blessed the baby with the permission of our bishop in the hospital. We gave her a name and spoke about her as a member of the family. We told our other children they would see her again when they were in heaven. I gave several “inspirational” (according to friends) testimonies in the months following, explaining that I trusted that God would teach me about “Mercy” through her namesake and that this was all meant to be.

When a woman told me just a few days after my daughter's death, in the nicest possible way, that this was a good thing for our family because she was sure that now we would work even harder to be a “forever family” with all the members determined to make it to the celestial kingdom, I told myself I was sure she meant well. I made excuses over and over again for people who said really unconscionable things to me, including those members of my ward who were certain that it was my decision to home birth that had led to my daughter's death. I was consumed already with my own guilt over what I had or hadn't done to cause her death (all completely unrelated to home birth, since I hadn't even started labor when she died). It was excruciatingly painful to deal with the hints that somehow my own faults, spiritual or otherwise, had led to this tragedy. I believed that I'd stop feeling sad and that random stupid things people said to me would hurt less.

But as the year following her death passed, I didn't feel better. In fact, I got worse. I began to feel suicidal after church on Sunday.


http://janariess.religionnews.com/2014/04/03/leaving-mormonism-finding-way-back/

http://janariess.religionnews.com/2014/04/04/leaving-mormonism-finding-way-back-part-2/