Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 31

Get Used to Offending People

I can’t tell you how many times I have talked to aspiring writers who have a big story they want to tell, but they’re afraid. Not that they aren’t good enough to tell the story (though that happens), but because they are afraid of offending people. Family. Friends. Co-workers. Old colleagues from school who might see themselves in certain portrayals.

This is what I have to say about it:

Get over it.

If you’re a writer, you’re going to offend people. Don’t do it casually. Don’t do it without it meaning something. Don’t do it just for fun. Do it when it matters, though. Do it to make a difference, to make people see themselves in a new light.

And just think about this:

As a woman (and all of the writers who are afraid of this are women that I’ve met), you offend people by:

1. Taking up space, air, and resources that could go to a man.

2. Having a thought in your head that wasn’t put there by someone else.

3. Wanting something more than what other people give you.

4. Daring to disagree.

5. Demanding your voice be heard.

6. Keeping a female writing name.

7. Changing a female name to a gender neutral name.

8. Using a male writing name.

9. Speaking about your book to men and women alike.

10. Not apologizing for everything you do.

Write what you were born to write. Write what you need to write.

Mean Tips About Beauty Pageants

Mean Tips About Beauty Pageants

1. Bigger really is better for hair. If you can make it poofier, do it. More curls are better. If you have short hair, you can pretty much forget about winning, no matter how cute you are at everything else.

2. If you have a choice between wearing formal wear, and wearing slightly more casual formal wear, always wear more formal wear. The more layers of skirt, the better. The more sparkles, the better. The longer the skirt, the better.

3. Fake smiling is always a good thing. The more fake smiles, the better. Don’t worry about being oversaccharine. Also, blowing kisses to the judges=cute and adorable.

4. Make sure you practice your pageant wave, pageant skirt twirls, and pageant hand on hip turns.

5. If you are asked questions at a pageant, do NOT worry about being original in your answers or about sounding superficial. And if they ask you for any “favorite,” make sure that you list three or four things, or as many as you can think of. Whatever you do, do NOT admit that you disagree with the premise of the question to begin with.

6. Remember, the best part of a pageant isn’t winning and proving yourself more beautiful and therefore more valuable than any other girls—it’s the friendships you form while primping in the bathroom and the fun you have on stage making eye contact with judges you have never met before, and learning how to feel “confidence.”

You Know You Live with a Writer When:

There are books dog-eared, opened, marked with weird bits of paper and perhaps fluids you would not like to think too clearly about strewn about the house.

“Just one last page,” lasts for two hours at night, and the light never goes off. Buy yourself a face mask because otherwise you will never get any sleep.

The annual family budget for books exceeds the budget for gas, movies, and cable television combined.

There is a “books are to be read at the dinner table” policy firmly enforced.

Having three copies of a beloved book is not too much of a good thing.

A book signed by the author can never be given away, no matter how bad it actually turned out to be.

The library is the most common destination for date night events.

The world revolved around release dates for books rather than movies.

You have to sit through an extensive revision of every book, movie or TV show you've ever admitted to liking.

You have never chosen a book yourself, because you already have a TBR pile nearly as big as a writer's, and if you don't finish the books suggested, you get that pouty look.

Bad Advice for Writers

I have heard every one of these bits of advice, and heard them insisted upon by writers far more celebrated than I.

1. Write every day.

2. Write only when the muse strikes.

3. Write for the market.

4. Write for yourself and yourself alone.

5. Write only by outline.

6. Outlines are for sissies. Write in the moment; be inspired.

7. Start writing short stories.

8. Write a novel first. A born novelist only writes novels.

9. You must have an agent to sell a book.

10. You must sell a book to get an agent.

You are likely somewhere in between these extremes, like most writers are. You will spend some time figuring out what kind of writer you are, and then going with that. Then for years you will think of yourself as this kind of writer. And you will be.

Except you will find that book you have to write that forces you out of the pattern you’ve always been successful at. Write that book. Be afraid of it and write it anyway. Tell the stories only you can tell. Write the words you know other people need to hear. Do it when you can, and give yourself a break when you can’t.

Being a writer isn’t all that much different from being a person. You do the work that comes to you and you do it as well as you can. And when life demands new work, you do that, too.

Life and Death

As I have been working on my own mystery series (The Bishop’s Wife, out about a year from now), I have been surprised to discover truths about mystery that I never realized before.

So often, when we think of mystery, we think of Sherlock Holmes or of CSI type shows. We think about procedure, about clues, about red herrings and fooling the reader into thinking it is the wrong person until the very end. And yes, those are definitely traditions within the mystery genre.

But some of my favorite mystery series often spend little time dealing with clues or showing how to prove one person “did it.” Foyle’s War, Wallander, The Boy in the Suitcase—these are stories not about the pecularities of death, but about life. There is no attempt to make the body itself a bizarre feast of the type that we see on Castle or Bones. And the story isn’t so much about the detective detecting and showing off brilliance as it is about community.

This has led to me making two theories of great mystery writing:

#1 Mysteries are about understanding the dead person’s life and making a shape of it. Everyone is interested in this because we are all going to die, and we all want to believe that there will be a final tragic and comedic story to be told that encompasses our life and makes us appear as the unique individuals that we are. We want death to finalize and measure us. We want to see our own good and bad and to know that our loss will be marked, that there will be friends and loved ones who will remember us, and that in some sense, we will go on. In this sense, a mystery is an extension of a religious ceremony of grief.

#2 Mysteries are about community and about how the people in that community fit together. As great detective detect, they interview people. They find out about motives beyond the murder itself. They discover that everyone in the community has a reason to kill, and that there isn’t a great distinction between the one who is guilty and the ones who aren’t technically. My husband complained recently that he doesn’t like shows where two people are planning the murder and only one does it. But that is the essence of mystery. We all hate and love each other. That is what a community is, and if you think that is too dark, well, you probably don’t like mysteries.

Beware of Writer Friends

If you are friends with a writer, you may have moments when you think that it is the best thing ever. You get to read books before they come out! You get to hear stories about the publishing world! You get to live vicariously the life of an author! You get to hear hilarious stories about school visits, book signings gone wrong, and famous authors who are jerks! You may even get invited to a movie premier based on your author friend’s book! Or you may meet that famous author you’ve always admired who turns out to be a nice person!

However, there are a lot of downsides to having a writer friend:

1. Writers don’t leave the house all that much. Because, well, they often have to write. When other people are enjoying vacations, writers are on deadline. And they don’t answer their phones. They don’t go out for lunch. They whine and complain about being on deadline. They have no life.

2. Writers will use you in their books. They may use your name. Or your physical description. They may steal the relationship you have with your mother. Or your ex-wife. They may write about that horribly embarrassing moment you had in eighth grade. And they may not even realize what they are doing until you call them on it and the book is in print and there is nothing they can do about it.

3. Writers don’t enjoy books, movies and TV shows the way that other people do. I mean, they don’t just sit down and let it flow. They don’t watch it for fun. Because any storytelling is their business. So when you are enjoying yourself with popcorn, they’re busy analyzing, and making it better. Or just making snarky comments because there’s nothing that can be done to improve some things. Really. And they can’t turn this off. They really can’t.

4. Writers are often lousy cooks, and lousy at just about everything except whatever they happen to be researching for their new book. And then they’re not even really good at that, even if they sound like experts. They think they’re smart, but they’re pretty useless when it comes to fixing a car, doing a science fair project, or just about anything but writing.

5. Writers will tell you what they really think about your first attempt at a short story or novel. They won’t hold back. You think you’ve done a pretty good job, and they roll their eyes and tell you every tiny thing you’ve done wrong and why this will never sell. Even though you didn’t want it to sell. You were just writing something for the church Christmas party. And if you’ve pretended a story that your child wrote was yours, the writer may be so brutal your child bursts into tears and refuses to ever speak to you again.

So the moral of this story is, be careful when making friends with writers! You may regret it!

I Don't Believe in Shakespeare

I’m not one of those people who thinks that Shakespeare’s plays were written by someone else. All I mean by “I don’t believe in Shakespeare” is that I don’t believe that Shakespeare was a genius who can never be reproduced in the history of the human race. Shakespeare is a genius who was crafted by what came after him. All the literature professors who taught him and admired him. All the writers who had read him and echoed his language and his stories. All the actors who played Hamlet because it was the hardest part, the prize to be earned after a brilliant start to an early acting career. All the translators who proved that they could make his works come alive again in their own native language.

There may never be another Shakespeare, but I don’t think it’s because no one else is ever going to be as brilliant as he was. It’s because the cult of Shakespeare has changed the English language at a particular stage in history and I don’t know if that confluence of events will ever happen again. How many other choices were there for the kind of lionization that Shakespeare got? A handful. And these days, how many choices are there? Thousands, literally, of writers who are working regularly, producing a large body of good to great work. And no one of them is going to end up changing the language the way that Shakespeare did. No one of them is going to end up being the influence that he was on generations afterward. It’s just the nature of our new world, which makes a lot of people educated and well-read enough to become writers.

In the German tradition, the figure who ends up being the most like Shakespeare is Goethe. There is this veneration of Goethe that makes me pretty sick as a PhD of German Literature who was forced to add an entire half of her dissertation so that I could bow down to Goethe and make any comparison to a female author obviously end with Goethe winning. The same thing happens with Shakespeare all the time. If you don’t admit he’s the best, you end up sounding like an idiot.

And let’s not forget that Shakespeare was a white man. Yes, he wrote good women roles into his plays (played by men). Yes, there are people of color in some of his plays. But there is a whole civilization of valuing white male literature above all others that uses him as the example of the best writer on the planet. Because the best writer humanity is capable of producing would have to be a white male, wouldn’t he?

I’m not saying I don’t like Shakespeare, either. I do. I think he is a genius. But I am aware of the ways in which society creates genius backwards in time. I suspect Shakespeare himself would be bewildered by the idea of him being the most brilliant writer of all time.

When You're Afraid to Be Happy

I think that when you have been depressed for a long time, you get used to it and it become the new status quo. So even if you try to get out of it and be happy, find things to be happy about, and seek happiness in yourself, it can backfire because it happy doesn't feel normal anymore.

For me, I still find myself worried that even thinking about a good future is a kind of jinx on it actually happening. Some part of me imagines that being miserable will protect me in some bizarre way from getting worse. But what is this "worse"? It can be anything from another tragedy happening, someone else I love being taken from me, to actually having to accept that my life is pretty good again, and that I don't have that many reasons to complain about it now.

I always took being happy for granted before. I worked hard. I sometimes got rejected and criticized. I didn't have life handed to me on a silver platter, but I also thought I had "earned" what I got in some way, and when it seemed like that had all turned bad, I told myself a different narrative.

Instead of being happy and innocent, I thought of myself in that happy time period as being stupid and naive. Lucky, maybe, but not in a good way. Selfish and unable to see all the terrible things around me that were happening to other people because I was so happy, happy, all the time that I just shrugged and figured other people would "get over it" and be happy again, like I was.

So, yes, there's a part of me that thinks that I don't want to be happy like that anymore. And yet there is a difference between oblivious happiness and the happiness that you know is only in the moment, and yet is still precious in that moment. I think it is possible to hold to happiness without being selfish and blind.

The other reluctance to be happy is that it hurts in a strange way to open up to those old feelings that I'd banked down. It's almost like putting salt in a wound, though it should feel good, shouldn't it? It's easier to feel nothing. And if you feel happy for a little while, and get used to it, will you be prepared for the next time--because surely there will be a next time, right?

This idea that you're preparing yourself for some future, unknown disaster is really a lie. That's not really why I push away unhappiness. I just don't want to feel anything. I don't want to change. I don't want to get up and get rid of the habits of depression I've come to know like old friends.

I am not saying everyone who is depressed is like this, but I think there are people who definitely are, who push away happiness on some level because they have become like PTSD survivors, afraid to move on past the pain, always reliving it, and at some point, happier with that than anything else.

Writer's Block and Life Block

Writer's Block and Life Block

I don’t believe in writer’s block. I only believe in life block.

If you find that you can’t write, think about what is missing or going wrong in your life. Think about what else you are unable to do. My guess is that you will find that it’s not just your writing that is blocked.

Sure, you may be able to still do the dishes, eat food, and get the laundry done. But are you struggling to call friends? To make plans for the future? To deal with problems that other members of your family are facing?

This is life block, not writer’s block.

There’s no point on obsessing over the pain of not being able to write when there is a bunch of other pain in your life that needs to be dealt with first. Once you deal with your life block, my guess is that shortly afterward (within a month or two), your writer’s block will disappear as if it never was.

If you’re in the middle of moving, you have life block.

If you’re dealing with a family member with a mental illness, a chronic illness, or a terminal diagnosis, you have life block.

If you are in the midst of a divorce or a new marriage, you may have life block.

If you are changing jobs, or have lost a job but don’t have a new one yet, you have life block.

If you are a writer who is used to working under contract and you don’t have one, or if your sales figures are crap and you may have to start writing under a pseudonym, you have life block.

Sure, there are writers around you who continue to write even when they are dealing with these things. That doesn’t matter. They may not have life block for whatever reason. They are able to remain optimistic under the worst of circumstances. But it’s not because they’re better than you are. They just don’t have life block.

Don't Listen When . . .

They tell you your book isn't commercial.

They tell you it has never been done before.

They tell you it's cheesy.

They tell you it's too dark.

They tell you kids won't get it.

They tell you it's basically just fanfic.

They tell you to write something else.

They tell you you bit off more than you could chew.

***

You tell yourself it's too hard.

You tell yourself you're never going to finish.

You tell yourself you never had the gift to begin with.

You tell yourself that you're crap.

You tell yourself that this project is too big or too hard for you.

You tell yourself that it's all over.

You tell yourself you're too old to do this anymore.

You tell yourself you don't know enough.

You tell yourself you have nothing left to write.