Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 26

10 Things You Need to Believe to Write

1. Only you can write this.

2. You were born to write this.

3. People need you to write this.

4. The world is waiting for you to finish this.

5. One day, someone will tell you how much they needed to read this.

6. You can write anything you set your mind to.

7. This has a glimmer of brilliance in it.

8. The crappy words will fall away in revision.

9. My vision of the world matters.

10. I see people in a new way.

You don’t need to believe that this is going to be a bestseller. You don’t need to believe that you’re going to be a household name. You don’t need to believe that someday people will study your book in college. But you do have to work to counteract the relentless voice of defeat in your head that says:

1. No one will ever read this.

2. I am banging my head against the wall here.

3. Who am I to think I could be a writer?

4. My father/mother/partner is right. I should give up.

5. I don’t know how to do this. I never learned. No one ever taught me.

6. My voice doesn’t matter.

7. My experience is too different from anyone else’s to connect with readers.

8. I don’t know what happens next.

9. I feel too exposed. I want to hide and protect myself more.

10. I can’t expect anyone to pay me for this when they can get so many other things for free.

10 Things Not to Do When You Meet an Agent/Editor

Immediately ask if you can pitch your book.

Demand to know number amounts of the latest advances of certain books this agent/editor sold.

Complain about how many books in the industry you hate.

Tell insider stories about other editors/agents you dislike.

Ask about trends in the hopes you can change your book to meet those trends and sell it by tomorrow.

Give advice about what you think is going to trend next.

Dominate the conversation and refuse to listen to what they have to say.

Give them advice about health/nutrition because you're trying to be “helpful.”

Ask if they look at previously self-published titles.

Ask about the conspiracy in the traditional publishing world.

Writing Pet Peeves #2: “There's No Other Choice”

Frequently, authors will write a character into a dilemma in order to increase tension and stakes. The idea is that if they can make the reader invested enough in the story, the reader will have to keep reading and will enjoy the experience. The problem for me is that having a character describe a situation and then say that “there's no other choice” to excuse away the action that followed makes me feel a) manipulated and b) like the author doesn't understand the real world.

There are always, ALWAYS other choices than the choice that we make personally. Saying that there is no other choice in your own mind is simply a way to excuse yourself from responsibility for the consequences of your actions. If your daughter is kidnapped and you choose to make a bargain with the kidnapper to give away valuable information that might lead to the deaths of others, I'm sorry, but I don't agree that you had “no other choice.” First of all, there is always the choice of simply refusing to deal with the kidnapper. You might feel horribly guilty. You might have to deal with the death of your daughter. But you will probably have to deal with that anyway. That doesn't mean there isn't a choice.

In addition, the person who is holding your daughter hostage should be the last person whose advice you take regarding what choices you have. A person who wants you to see life as a series of “no other choices” situations isn't going to be someone I want to have in my head. Creative, intelligent people can usually think of at least a dozen choices in any given crisis. The more creative and intelligent they are, the more choices they can think of. It's hard to be creative and intelligent under pressure, I get that. But nonetheless, you can think outside the box anytime you want.

Here's the other thing: as an author, your job is to show the reader all the choices. You are supposed to be writing about a character who is creative and intelligent even in the worst of circumstances. If you can't do that, you're doing this writing gig wrong. Readers read in part because they want to be surprised. They want a different experience than the one they have in real life. They want to see people who are doing things they would never have thought to do. And guess what? You as the author have as long as you need to think up other great ways out of a given situation. You shouldn't feel the pressure of a crisis because you're not in it (unless you're on deadline, but you put yourself there and that must be how you work well, right?).

So don't tell me that your character “has no other choice.” Show your character thinking ahead, agreeing to something in a crisis, and then thinking of a way out of it. Don't let your characters, unless they are truly evil, excuse themselves by saying that they were “forced” to do what they did.

Calories In

About ten years ago, before I became an Ironman triathlete, I was trying to lose weight. Why was I trying to lose weight? Pretty much the reasons most women want to lose weight. I had put on pounds through five pregnancies and was in my thirties and feeling like I had “let myself go.” I wanted to look like I had when I was seventeen, and to me that meant getting back down to the same number on the scale that I had been then. For me, that was 115.

I am only 5'2” tall, and I never thought of myself as thin when I was in high school. In fact, in junior high, I thought of myself as fat and I hated PE so much that I worked out a way never to do PE again in high school. I was tired of being the fat girl that no one wanted on their team. It is amusing to me as an adult to look back at my photos of myself in junior high and high school and realize that I looked in the mirror and often thought I was fat. Because all I wanted when I was 30 was to get back to the size I had been then.

I signed up for an on-line diet program that a relative recommended. This program was ingenious! Not only did it give you an approved number of calories per day for the weight goal you said you wanted to achieve. It also allowed you to log in what food you ate. And then it adjusted each day depending on what the scale told it you needed to do. So if you went up a pound, the program automatically told you you had to cut even more calories than you had previously planned on. I suppose it would do the reverse if you went down more weight than expected, but this never happened to me.

I will say that the relative who had recommended this program was a man. I think that most men have a completely different experience in trying to lose weight than women do. They always talk about numbers and how it's all about calories in and calories out. It's a simple mathematical calculation, right? Only it isn't for most women. Our bodies work against us. Perhaps because we are working against them, trying to get ourselves to a weight that isn't reasonable or rational. We don't want to be “healthy.” We want to be “fabulous” and that means “thin beyond any reasonable expectation.”

I wanted to be 115 again, and I was at that point at about 135. This brilliant diet program also gave bonus calories if you exercised. I had always been the kind of person who enjoyed exercise and movement, so long as it wasn't judged or coordinated by a team effort. I swam or ran most days because I liked it. I wasn't interested at that time in being competitive about it. But I started exercising more so that I could “earn” more calories from my diet program. It all made sense, right? Calories in, calories out.

But it didn't work for me. This is a familiar story to most women, I am sure. I carefully weighed and measured my food. I ate carrots and celery to fill my stomach. I ate salads for lunch with maybe a soup or a piece of bread on the side. One piece of bread. I ate oatmeal for breakfast because it was supposed to stay with you longer. I had tiny little portions of treats at the end of the day as a reward for hitting my calorie goal for the day. And it didn't work. I lost a few pounds in the first few weeks, but then I hit a plateau. For nearly six weeks, I was counting calories, feeling hungry all the time, exercising like you're supposed to, and I didn't lose an ounce. In fact, I was pretty sure I was gaining weight.

I called my male relative and talked to him about the problem. He insisted that I just needed to weigh and measure more accurately. The laws of the universe do not change for one person, he insisted. Calories in, calories out. Maybe I needed to exercise more? And he told me that having three small tacos for dinner was just “too much.” I had to really make “sacrifices” if I wanted to lose weight.

The next day, I went running for six miles. I felt good in the mornings, and that was when I always exercised. But when I got home, my diet program had cut me down to about six hundred calories a day to reach my goal, because I hadn't lost anything and my end date was coming up quickly. It was panicked and was trying to do whatever it could to help me reach my goal. It promised that if you followed it, you would reach your goal weight.

I ate my oatmeal and I was still starving. I tried to exercise self-control. I ate more carrots and celery. And then I lay on the couch and felt like I was going to die. I was pretty sure I could feel my body eating itself. It was crying out for food and I was doing everything I could to ignore it. I just needed to train it to get used to fewer calories. I needed to get used to feeling hungry all the time if I wanted the body I dreamed of. Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, right?

In that moment of feeling like death, I thought about my future. I realized I could spend it wanting to be thinner than I am and being hungry every moment of my life. Or I could accept my body and my weight and move on. I could eat the food that my body said I needed to it, ignore the stupid diet program that thought it could outwit the pre-programmed weight my body wanted to be at. I could give up diets and eat well. And I chose to eat well.

I never logged into that diet program again. I do still have a lingering habit of counting calories, I admit. But I don't let myself go hungry. Not ever. Hungry is your body telling you that you need to it. Calories in, calories out just doesn't seem to work for me. My body works against it. I'm not saying the laws of the universe don't apply. I'm just saying that your metabolism can change and you suddenly don't burn calories that you would normally burn because your body doesn't want to burn them. It feels threatened.

When I look in the mirror, I am sometimes happy with what I see. I sometimes still wish I could go back to my high school weight. I wish I had a flat stomach. I wish I didn't have a sagging behind. Even after doing four full Ironman competitions and a hundred competitive races in the years since this diet disaster, I weight between 125 and 130. If I weighed less, would I be faster? Maybe. But I doubt it. Because I would be spending too much time on the couch, wishing I could eat to get up and really hit my intervals hard. I am what I am. I'm never going to be the “thin” I was in high school, which I thought was “fat.” But I am also never going to be hungry again.

This is what I learned: your body is never going to get used to being hungry. It's just going to shut down and stop burning calories. And if things get really bad, it will send more and more drastic message to “EAT!” through more and more desperate hungry signals. And after that, it will shut down and take away all your energy and make you lie on a couch until you realize that food isn't your enemy and that calories in, calories out doesn't matter. What matters is calories in.

Writing Pet Peeves #1: Countdowns

I've heard writers give the advice that you should add a countdown to your book whenever possible because it increases the stakes and raises the tension. Readers, the argument goes, will have to keep turning pages once you've got a countdown going, because they know now that there's a deadline and the book can't go on forever. Once the countdown starts, the real climax has begun.

Well, I admit that there are certain stories in which a countdown is effective. If you're writing about a bomb going off, then yes. If you're writing a thriller in which there's a specific plot to abduct or assassinate the Prime Minister at a very particular moment, then yes, it works. But otherwise, I really think this harms your story and makes you seem like a writer who is just adding a countdown in because you think it will make readers like a story that they don't.

How many episodes of television have you watched with a countdown that seemed added because some network exec didn't trust the writers to have a good story without it? And how many times is that countdown utterly ridiculous? A countdown to death by radiation poisoning is almost always just plan silly. That's not the way radiation poisoning works. You don't suddenly die from it because it reached a toxic level, and then find yourself perfectly fine if you don't reach that level. See, that's where the whole idea of a countdown is overused. Some threats aren't on or off. Lots of threats aren't. And to use a countdown where one doesn't belong reveals to me that you think every story is the same.

Not every story is the same. A real writer knows this instinctively and accepts that every story is going to have its own threats, its own timeline. And that's the way it should be. If you are telling the story right, your readers will stay with you. There is no need to panic and start throwing in the kitchen sink with the rest of your story. Trust your characters. Trust your readers to be smart enough to see that you're telling the story the way your story needs to be told.

A countdown doesn't belong in a story about medieval England. It doesn't belong in a plot about lovers who discover the terrible secrets of the past. It doesn't belong in a story about environmental dystopia. You trying to shoehorn it in there is only going to make you look like an amateur. Or possibly like a network studio exec from TV. One of the ones who canceled Firefly because it didn't have enough countdowns in it. It would be like someone insisting that sex sells, so you should add it to every story. Well, that can result in some pretty ridiculous scenes, as well. Sex in the middle of an epic battle scene where everything stops so that the hero and heroine can get it on—well, that's not my style of writing, either.

Everything You Need to Know to be a Published Author:

Most large publishing houses are closed to queries and to submissions.

The exception to the above rule is if you go to a conference with an editor from a large house. Often then the editor will give permission to conference goers to submit in a small window with a code of some sort.

Smaller presses are sometimes open to queries and submissions. Smaller houses often give a very small advance or no advance. There's nothing wrong with this. Sometimes smaller presses will do a great job editing and promoting. Sometimes they won't. You may like less pressure. It's completely up to you as the author.

If you want to know addresses of publishing houses and names of editors, go to the library and get Writer's Digest or go on-line and get a membership. Be aware that almost all the editor names will be outdated by the time your submit to them. There's a lot of editorial musical chairs going on.

Agents are usually open to submissions, though some may require a client referral. If you want that, get it and don't fake it. Never ever lie to your agent. Seriously. Never. Not before you sign and not after, either.

Most agents are on-line and have their submission rules posted. Follow their rules to the letter.

You should expect to pay an agent 15-20% and sometimes some incidentals on top of that. A good agent is worth every penny. But this money does not come upfront. It comes off the top after you land a deal. Any agent who suggests otherwise is running a scam.

Likewise, any agent who tells you that you should send the manuscript to a professional editor to be cleaned up before submission is running a scam. This agent will send you a list of approved editors from whom he gets a kickback of some kind. Run.

Agents often go to conferences, as well. You can buy some cheap pitch time, but don't have high hopes that you will sell based on this. You'll be better off using the time to chat amiably, or if you find the agent in a bar, just have a normal human conversation.

Authors you meet at conferences are often happy to talk shop, but please don't ask them to read manuscripts. If you have a book coming out for publication, your agent or editor can ask for blurbs. That's the appropriate time for contact. Before that, the author really can't do anything for you.

Most authors do not sell their first book. Or their second. It is perfectly normal to spend several years submitting. There's nothing wrong with this.

If you aren't ever submitting anything, you can't be published. No one is going to send your manuscript in for you and beg someone to publish it. You have to do it yourself. Yes, it's scary. Yes, do it anyway.

If you send in manuscript after manuscript that is rejected, there is no list of losers that agents or editors accumulate unless you are truly obnoxious and send nasty responses back. Keep submitting. Yes, this is how real people get published all the time.

It can be very tempting to sign a bad deal where you give up all rights or even sell your future books before they are written. I recommend against such deals. Don't sell your birthright for a mess of pottage.

Writing an author to suggest a collaboration unless you know each other very well personally is a bad idea. Don't say you're going to do all the work and you just want to use their name. Just don't.

There is no secret handshake. There really isn't. You just have to be a better writer. I know it hurts to hear that. Believe me, I know. I wrote 20 novels before I got one accepted. Every rejection hurt, but also please believe me when I say that none of those novels were ready. I wouldn't publish them now if someone offered, which they won't.

Don't quit your day job when you get your first contract. I've seen too many people who end up with problems because of this. Wait a while and see how it turns out.

Likewise, don't quit your day job before you get your first contract. Don't quit it to get time to write your book. You've got to figure out a way to work around other stuff because writing always has to work around other stuff. Real writers end up spending most of their regular hours answering emails or doing appearances. Many still write at night.

Keep up good health habits. If you have to lose sleep to write, don't do it every night. Try to get exercise in daily, and don't hunch over your keyboard for hours on end.

Your real life is still your real life. Just because people around you have reasonable reservations about a writing career is not a reason to dump them. Writers often need some grounding in the real world. You need your friends as a high and mighty writer, too.

Write what you feel compelled to write, but don't ignore the advice or response of others completely, either. It's possible no one understands your great vision. It's also possible you aren't communicating it well.

Read. If you're going to be a writer, you should love books. You should be able to talk about what books you love and what books you hate. Reading is excellent practice for writing. It's also great for when you need to talk about a book that isn't yours, just to be polite and not sound like a jerk.

It takes a long time to get a book out. Once you've finally sold a manuscript, it will likely take 2 years before it is printed and available in a bookstore. Those two years will be put to good use. Trust me. You still need multiple passes with the editor, then copyediting, a galley pass, and time for reviews to come out. And you want a good cover, not one slapped on at the last minute.

Don't be surprised if you spend several years getting ready to send a manuscript out with an agent.

Feel free to come up with new ideas, even write drafts. You don't know if the book that brought you your agent will sell, and you might need to talk about the next project at some point. Editors will also sometimes want to know about a second project. But don't lose focus on the prize.

When you get an advance, it is usually parceled out as either half on signing, half on delivery (when the manuscript goes to press after copyediting) or half on signing, quarter on delivery, quarter on publication or similar.

When you sell a book, people will ask you if the book will be made into a movie. Resist the urge to hit them. Books are rarely made into movies, and there's no reason that they should be. A book is a book. A movie is a movie.

If you are lucky enough to sell movie option rights to your book, that doesn't mean a movie will actually be made. In fact, it is pretty rare that it will be. Enjoy the money and write the next book.

When deals get reported to the press, they sound a lot bigger than they are. This is usually because they are multi-book deals. It's useless to explain this to your parents or friends, but most of the time, you get less than ¼ of the money up front and the rest is doled out over the course of several years as you write more books.

Just because you have a contract for two books does not mean that you and your editor/publishing house will ever actually agree on what the next book will be. Yes, this can be extremely frustrating. Yes, authors try to avoid it. It still happens.

Try to remember how much you want to be an author, because there will be a lot of things that will beat you down.

When you get a bad review—and you'll get at least one—everyone does—do what you need to do to move on.

Get some good, professional author photos to put on a book. Try to make them look as real as possible, not like a glamour shot.

Figure out social media, but don't obsess over it. Monitor your time on it if you notice you have a tendency to lose hours.

As Mom says, don't spend all your advance in one place. More importantly, don't rack up debt in anticipation of an advance that may never come. Seriously, even if you have a phone call and a promise, the deal sometimes falls through anyway. When the check comes, then you can spend it.

Always be working on the next book. You're a writer. That's what you do. Even if you're just thinking about it and not writing it, this is your new world.

12 Revision Suggestions Not to Follow

Make this more like Twilight, Harry Potter, insert trendy book title here.

Needs more sex, teen angst, or a love triangle.

Dumb this down because your teen readers won't be able to get it.

Make your villain bigger, badder, uglier—and generally less human.

Make this character white.

This fantasy needs more wild and crazy magic.

Add a climactic scene with world-ending stakes.

Make your characters more manly/womanly

Add more sword fighting

Make the character more perfect at the beginning

Start the story with action!

Add a prologue

Depression and Disassociation

As I look back on what I did and felt while I was depressed, I feel a strange sense of disassociation, as if all that was some other person. I wonder sometimes if I ought to feel more a sense of shame or responsibility for hurting other people, but for now, I don't. That wasn't me. That was a depressed person that I became without wanting to become her. Probably a health professional would say that isn't really what happened, but it feels like what happened.

I got tired of hearing people say that I had chosen everything that I did in reaction to the tragedy in my life. That may be true on some level, but it wasn't what seemed to happen. What seemed to happen was that I was doing everything I could to survive and there just wasn't anything else. I could survive or not survive and I chose to survive, but I didn't choose how to survive. I had this odd tunnel vision, black and white view of the world. There was life here, and death there, and most of the time, I thought longingly of death, but ended up choosing life. That was the only choice I made.

My interactions with other people were also very black and white. I processed things that people said either as attack or comfort. Mostly attack. I am sure that this is not the way that other people meant for their words or actions to be perceived, but it was nonetheless what happened. They were either friends or foes. I tried desperately to allow myself to see people as more shades of gray, and while I intellectually saw that they were, it didn't feel that way in some deeper core of myself. People hurt me or they helped me. That is all.

I have said before that for a long time I functioned as what felt like “robot Mette,” this version of myself that did what was socially expected while the other part of me hid away, afraid to come out because my real emotions seemed to be not allowed. I have gradually tried to integrate my real emotions into my social self, but it has been difficult because I still feel like most people don't want to hear what I have to say. I have a friend who also experienced the loss of a child, and sometimes when I listen to her, I feel like she and I had similar experiences, but a lot of the time I think that what she felt and what I felt are diametrically opposed. Sometimes I am even jealous of her, because she seems to be so poised and functional in her horrible grief, while I was just—gone.

I couldn't be sympathetic to other people. I couldn't feel sorry for anyone but myself. I couldn't really see other people as people. This doesn't feel like something I did on purpose. It feels like I was cut in two and spent a long time trying to put those two pieces back together, and while I was busy doing that, the rest of the world fell away. Whoever I was during that time, it was like a basic version of myself, not the full-color version. Or maybe it would be better to say that it was the animal version of me. At the time, I was angry that I wasn't who I had been. It felt like I would never be “normal” again and I hated that. I wanted to be me again, but I couldn't figure out how to get there.

Part of being the old me again has been me letting go of the intense anger, horror, and despair that I felt, and that isn't something I could just—do. It took a long time to figure that process out. It also sometimes makes me wonder if the me now is the really inauthentic one. I spend most of every day not thinking about my tragedy, and when I do think about it, I admit that most of the time, I feel nothing about it. It is as if it all happened to someone else, whom I feel sorry for, but whom I am not. I suspect there are other people who have dealt with tragedy completely differently, with more integration of selves, but this is how it worked for me. Probably crazy, but there it is.

Male Privilege at Cons Means

You don't have to apologize or minimize your accomplishments in order to make other people feel comfortable.

You feel free to interrupt any conversation at any time, no matter how big the names of the people who are involved.

You not only get to answer the question the moderator asks at the panel, but get to respond to every single other panelist who responds to the question, and who responds to your response.

Everyone else on the panel is wrong and you are right about everything.

You can say sexist things and expect to get no push-back because “it's just the truth,” ie boys will read about boys and girls will read about boys, so if you want to write a best-seller, it should be about a boy.

You never worry about whether you are taking up more time than you should be or if people will think that you think too much of yourself.

You are never intimidated by the fact that you are the only person of your gender on a panel.

You never apologize for promoting your own books because, after all, they're really the best ones out there.

You expect people to know who you are, and assume that if they don't it's because they're idiots rather than because you are one.

Your voice register is the normal one and anyone who has a naturally higher-pitched voice sounds “ridiculous” to you and everyone else, so let them know.

metteharrison @ 2014-02-19T15:16:00

A post for struggling parents out there. My daughter Sage is brilliant, talented, and kind. At 18, she is currently on scholarship to Berklee School of Music, and is also working 30 hours a week to pay for her own room and board. However, when Sage was younger, she was very difficult.

As a baby, she refused to let me feed her food. Ever. I had to put it on her tray and let her feed herself, which was messy, to say the least. She also would eat nothing unless the rest of us were eating. I often could not get her to dress herself, or to stay dressed. She had regular potty training accidents into--well, let's just say that it was longer than any of the other kids. She sucked her thumb until she was 11. She hated high school with a red hot passion, and nearly dropped out without graduating. Then she spent a year trying to figure out what to do with her life as we all wondered if she would ever go to college.

And you know what? She's awesome. She grew up and into a wonderful person. I always loved her, but she was often more trouble than all of the other kids put together. I have so many stories I could tell, but suffice it to say that whatever you are dealing with, it will get better. Your kid will grow up and will likely be a functional adult. You can't imagine it now, but it will happen.