Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 35

Make Me Feel It

If you are writing a book and you’ve plotted it all out perfectly with the right twists and turns and you have funny dialog and great description and maybe even a few beautiful lines, you are still missing something. A big something. You have to make the reader feel it.

I like movies, but the cinematic point of view of the camera limits my emotional attachment to characters. A book has this enormous advantage over a movie. Everything that happens in a book happens with the language of the character from whose viewpoint the scene is experienced by the viewer. Even an omniscient viewpoint character (unnamed, unknown) choose language to tell the events of the story.

This changes everything! A camera can show us beauty and scope and color. It can make everything dark, or fuzzy or jumpy. But these are all attempts to do what a book already does so easily, in telling a story with voice.

If you tell me about the mountains outside the window of your protagonist, don’t try to tell me about them the way a camera would. Don’t aim for perfect accuracy. Tell me a story about the mountains and why the protagonist is looking at them. What do the mountains mean? What flashback do the mountains bring up? What beauty or terror does the protagonist see in them?

When you write about another character’s clothing or hairstyle, let us fall in love even more with your protagonist. Let the protagonist talk about the color purple and why it is the worst color, or about how fashion is a prison, or why she is above it all. Let the protagonist have a relationship with me, the reader, while telling me anything.

If you are writing about the history of the world you’ve invented, let that history be told in the mouth of someone who cares about it deeply, an old man who lived it, a history teacher, or even someone who is an enemy and knows a completely different version of the story.

When you write a book, you are doing many things at once, but if you don’t make me feel every word, you might as well be telling your story in some other way. I want to laugh and feel guilty and wonder at the hidden subtext and hate—with your viewpoint character. I want to feel as if I’ve got my heart sewn up in hers, because that’s what opening a book and looking at the pages allows me to do. Take my heart and make it yours.

Letter to a Broken Friend

There are going to be times when you want to quit. There will be times when there is nothing to look forward to. There will be days when you wonder why anyone ever thought they could produce anything that mattered to anyone else.

You may spend those days burning everything you ever wrote, reformatting your computer's hard drive and wishing your could reformat your own, telling every friend or acquaintance who will listen to you that you are done, finished, finito, kaputt. You can't write another word. You can't look at another book. You don't care anymore. You wish that you had never started this stupid dream to become a great writer. You will ask them to remind you that you're nothing, that you can't do this, that you're better off working at Starbucks and living like a normal person.

And the people who love you will say, OK in a bewildered tone.

But the people who have been there will say, Yes, I hear you.

We do hear you. I won't say we've all been there. Some people have faced more rejection than others. Some writers never get even a fraction of what their work deserves. Some think that a handful of rejection letters or bad reviews was all they ever got and that hard work and picking yourself up by the bootstraps was what got them through. But don't listen to them. Listen to the people who cry a little with you, and pick you up and help brush you off, and say they're sorry.

You don't have to try again. Maybe you will be better off if you don't. I'm not going to tell you you have to. People leave the business. People are happy without being writers and that's OK. You can be done if you want.

But if that hidden, wounded part of you wants to come back someday and play again in a safe place, come write near me. I'll keep from looking over your shoulder until you're ready. I will keep people away from you and your newborn, stumbling steps toward trying again. I'll put an arm around you when you say you don't think you're ready and you don't think this is a good idea, and you retreat for a little while again. I will tell you how much I love what you have done before and how anxiously I am awaiting what you will do again. I will miss all the great words you will never write.

There are words only you can put together, and books only you can write. They are waiting within you, under the rubble. I see bits and pieces of them gleaming. It is a lot of work to uncover them. I can only help you tangentially, encouraging you on, but the work is yours to do, I'm afraid.

The world doesn't know what it is missing, but I do.

13 Must-Read Authors to Be Me

1. Lois McMaster Bujold

2. Holly Black

3. Kate Elliott

4. Courtney Milan

5. Connie Willis

6. Franny Billingsley

7. Sue Grafton

8. JK Rowling

9. Anne Perry

10. Elizabeth George

11. Jane Austen

12. Charlotte Bronte

13. Edith Wharton

Anyone realize what is the common element in this list?

11 Books/Authors I Should Be Ashamed Not to Have Read

1. The Lord of the Rings. (I tried, but it was only medicinal. I made myself read 30 pages every night until nearly the end of the third book, and then I just gave up).

2. Dorothy Dunett’s Lymond books.

3. The Bertie Wooster books.

4. Anything by Georgette Heyer.

5. Most books by Dickens. I hate Dickens. What can I say? Boring.

6. Robert Heinlein. (Though from what I can tell, this is probably a good thing.)

7. Faust by Goethe. (As a PhD in German and someone who was forced to write her dissertation half on Goethe, this is pretty serious.)

8. Watership Down. (I have this thing about animal fantasies, which is pretty weird since I write animal fantasies).

9. Dune (I also tried, but just could not do it.)

10. Robert Jordan. (Tried for about 50 pages, gave up.)

11. Terry Brooks. (I get that people say he was ripping off Tolkein, but since I can’t read Tolkein either, I suppose this is no surprise)

Romance is Feminist #2: Twilight

I get pretty tired of hearing Twilight slammed at a lot of conventions that I go to, in particular by middle aged white men who talk about Twilight in the same tone they reserve for all “girly” romance fiction. Here's the thing: there are definitely tropes in romance that I find questionable. But romance in general is by women, for women, and is filled with feminist ideas. It's about girl power, about humbling powerful men, about women being taken as equals, and about girly stuff being just as important as (or more important than) wars and money—traditional guy writer topics.

So today I'm talking about Twilight and the feminist subtext. I reread the first book in the series (I read them all when they first came out and I found them some of the most deliciously readable fiction published at the time). I think that it's important to see that Twilight is first and foremost a romance, or else you end up misreading it. It isn't a fantasy novel primarily. The primary plot isn't about saving the world. If that's what you expect, you're going to be disappointed. But for all those people who think that Twilight is about a creepy old guy who falls in love with a teenager and that a guy that old who hangs around a girl's bedroom is anti-feminist, you aren't reading very closely. In fact, I suspect that people who dismiss Twilight are largely people who haven't read it, and who don't read romance regularly enough to see what it is doing.

Do you remember that the first time Edward talks to Bella, they are doing a chemistry lab? Bella is ready to “show off” to him, and she gets every single one of the slides right. She's competing with a hundred year old vampire who has probably done this lab dozens of times before, and she comes up to scratch. Think that this story is about a Mary Sue who is bland vanilla and has nothing going for her except attracting a vampire? Think again. This is a smart girl. This is what first intrigues Edward about her. She's his equal in intelligence, even though she's only 17. He's never had this happen before. The fact that Bella is the only person whose thoughts Edward can't read is—again—proof of her equality with him. He doesn't have that extraordinary advantage over him. She, a mere teenage girl, an ordinary kid, is somehow powerful enough to stop his vampire advantage.

Then, when Edward rescues Bella with his supernatural vampire powers for the first time from being hit by a truck in the school parking lot when it gets icy, Bella argues with him. She tells him he wasn't next to her as he insists, to cover up his supernatural powers. Edward tries to make Bella doubt herself. It doesn't work. Not for one minute does she think her memory is wrong. She's insistent that she knows he was far away, and then demands that he explain himself to her. Again, this is a girl in the tradition of Elizabeth Bennet who doesn't look at the powerful, rich, handsome guy and swoon over him. She takes him on directly and she doesn't doubt she has the right to do this and the capacity to understand what really happened.

When Bella is being “herded” by dangerous vampire types in the city, before Edward comes along, she is thinking about the best self-defense strategies. She isn't screaming for help. She's imagining herself kicking them in the groin, poking out their eyeballs, and using her hand to smash their noses in. “I wasn't going out without taking someone with me,” she says. Sure, Edward does save her. Romance does still require a few conventions, and the man being physically stronger is one of them. I will remind you, however, that by the end of the series, Bella is absolutely the equal physically of Edward. She doesn't need him to save her anymore. In fact, she is the one who saves him by being a girl, by refusing to deal with a conflict physically, and solving the problem with girl power—conversation!

“Trust me,” Edward says over and over again. He wants to have all the power in this relationship, to decide if they ever get to be friends, and every step beyond that. And Bella grits her teeth and refuses to let him have control. She is the one who is in control. She pushes Edward every step of the way. In one of the revolutionary retellings of romance, Bella is the one who initiates the first date, the first kiss, the first everything in the relationship. Edward is always trying to hold back.

I think critics underestimate how important it is for female readers to have a romance story in which the woman is in charge of each step of progression. It's one of the romance narratives that persists in modern versions that I find most disturbing. The rape narrative is alive and well in the trappings of feminist characters who expect the hot male heroes to demand a kiss first and then get permission afterward. This never EVER happens in Twilight. It is enormously empowering in my opinion, for a hot romance to be one in which a man doesn't push a girl physically into more and more again.

“I was wrong about you,” Edward says again and again. He underestimates Bella and her intelligence, just like Mr. Darcy at first underestimate Elizabeth Bennet and doesn't see how beautiful she is until he has gotten to know her personality. Bella keeps asking Edward questions no matter how he tries to evade her. “How old are you?” she asks. “Seventeen,” he answers. “How long have you been seventeen?” she asks again. She isn't going to take an easy answer. And when Bella asks Edward if she can drive the car because she doesn't feel safe with him, what does he do? He lets her drive the car. When was the last time you read a romance where that happened? It's a symbol, but it is also more than that.

“You never do what I expect. You always catch me by surprise,” says Edward. And then, “You are the opposite of ordinary . . . If leaving is the right thing to do, then I'll hurt myself to keep from hurting you.” Sure, this sounds like the uber-powerful male hero. But just when you think you have Meyer pegged as writing an alpha male, she turns this assumption around on you and makes Bella Edward's equal. Again. “And you don't think I would do the same?” asks Bella. She is just as ready to leave for Edward's safety as he is. And she proves it at the end of the novel.

Bella tells Edward that she wishes she wasn't afraid. Edward assumes she is afraid of him, but she assures him that wasn't what she meant. She is never afraid of him through the whole book. Not once does she think that he will bite her. Maybe you think that's stupid, but it's all a part of Bella's power, her equality with Edward. The smell of Edward is as intoxicating to Bella as her smell is to him. That is what she is afraid of, of losing control with him. Just like he is afraid of the same with her. Part of the narrative of almost every romance novel, for good or ill, is about the loss of control when truly in love. It may be effed up, but that is part of the narrative of the woman's power over the man and his humiliation at her feet.

Edward watching Bella as she sleeps is, I admit, a kind of creepy thing to do. But why he does it? It's insecurity. He listens to her talk in her sleep so he can hear his name mentioned. And he says that if he could dream, he would want to dream about her. Again, this is an equality narrative here. Finding the right person to fall in love with means finding the person who is your equal in everything, perhaps even in self-consciousness and insecurity.

“In the last hundred years or so, I never imagined anything like this. I didn't believe I would ever find someone I wanted to be with,” says Edward. “For almost ninety years I've walked among my kind, and yours . . . all the time thinking I was complete in myself, not realizing what I was seeking. And not finding anything, because you weren't alive yet.” Again, if you think Bella is ordinary, you are not reading this book right. She is not ordinary. She may be clumsy now and again, but she is never stupid. She is never powerless.

When they talk about the possibility of marriage, Edward says, “It's just that you are so soft, so fragile. I have to mind my actions every moment that we're together so I don't hurt you. I could kill you quite easily, Bella, simply by accident. . . . You don't realize how incredibly breakable you are.” “I hate to burst your bubble, but you're not really as scary as you think you are. I don't find you scary at all, actually,” says Bella. Edward tries to prove his physical strength to her, but is any of this about physical strength? Edward resists getting married to Bella every step of the way, and yet she wins. She is strong enough, after all.

At the end of the novel, Bella wants to know why Edward didn't just let her become a vampire. “It just seems logical . . . a man and woman have to be somewhat equal . . as in, one of them can't always be swooping in and saving the other one. They have to save each other equally.” She doesn't always want to be Lois Lane. She wants to be Superman, too. “Is that what you dream about? Being a monster?” asks Edward. Well, what's wrong with a woman dreaming about being a monster? It's what little boys dream about all the time, being Darth Vader instead of Luke Skywalker. Why? Because Darth Vader is the one who moves the plot. He acts, Luke and the Jedi react. And Bella is an actor. She makes the plot move. She is the one Edward has been waiting for, to move him into being different. She has all the power here.

My best writing advice

1. Finish the book.

2. Ask people to read the book and tell you how to make it better.

3. Take out the boring parts and the repetitive parts.

4. Get an agent.

5. Never pay anyone anything. The money should flow to you as the author.

6. Write a second book before your first book comes out.

10 Questions to ask an editor/agent when you meet

If you have a chance to pitch to an agent or editor, go ahead and talk about your book. But if conversation peters out or if you end up in a bar or at dinner or in some other social situation with an agent or editor, here are some questions you can safely ask without sounding like you are hounding him/her to accept your book RIGHT NOW:

1.What is the best book you read this year?

2. What books are you most proud of repping/editing?

3. What do you love about being an agent/editor?

4. What annoys you most about the publishing industry at the moment?

5. What genres are you looking for right now?

6. What do you think new writers should know that they don’t seem to?

7. What kind of social media do you think helps?

8. What do you see new authors making mistakes about?

9. What must-read book have you never read and why?

10. What kind of plot do you think has been done to death?

What is Voice?

1. Voice is the grammar mistakes that you make on purpose when you write.

2. Voice is what makes the narrator in the book you are writing not you.

3. Voice is the way that your plot unfolds.

4. Voice is the subject your book is about.

5. Voice is the theme of your book.

6. Voice is the balance of dialog and description.

7. Voice is the kind of magic system you employ, rule bound or not, metaphor or not.

8. Voice is the way you talk about men and women and the relationships between them.

9. Voice is the way you present your villains.

10. Voice is what you can’t stop doing if you tried.

Your Secret Project

I think all writers need to have a secret project, one they haven’t shared with anyone, not their agent, not their editor, not their writer’s group, best friend or partner. A secret project is often a book that you are “sure” would never sell, that is something just for you, a rebellion against the pressures of the marketplace.

Creativity works best for me when it isn’t under pressure. I know there are many writers who do not produce any work unless they are under deadline. I do not understand this at all. I actually think that deadlines are counterproductive for me. I need to believe that I have all the time in the world. I set goals and deadlines for myself, so I don’t need anyone else to give me extra pressure.

But giving yourself the permission not to work on the contracted project for an hour a day or even one day a month can make the difference between happiness and crazy for me. As soon as I’ve sold a project it suddenly becomes “work” instead of “play” and for me, a sense of play really helps me enjoy the process more.

I know that the publishing world exists around me, but I guess I try to close my eyes, hunker down and pretend it doesn’t. And I see a lot of other aspiring writers who seem to be running around asking people what the “new” hot trend is that they can follow, or what editors’ and agents’ wishlists are, so they can fulfill them with their next project. I don’t think that’s the way to great art.

So find out what your secret project is, something that you haven’t let yourself even dream of before. And carve out just a little bit of time when you can to work on it. For me, this helps me deal with deadlines and pressure. I work faster on contracted work if I have the reward of my fun project ahead of me. And I work really hard on the secret project if I know I only get to work on it occasionally.

I can’t promise that your secret project will ever sell. Maybe it won’t. Maybe it will always just be for you. But you know what? In some ways, that could be a good thing.

Always keep something just for you.

How to meet an author

If you are going to a book signing or a conference where you will meet authors, here are some tips for how to do it well:

1. Always begin with, “Hi. I’m Name Name.” Never EVER assume that an author will remember you, even if you’ve met several times before. I’m sorry to admit this, but for years I was great about remembering names and faces, and I can’t do it anymore. I meet so many people, it’s impossible to keep track of them all and I am so embarrassed about it. If you pity me at all, just reintroduce yourself and if you’re really kind, give me a heads up about where we’ve met before.

2. “I am a huge fan of yours. I think I’ve read everything you’ve ever written.” If this is true, feel free to say it. Authors never tire of hearing this kind of thing. I promise.

3. “I follow you on twitter/facebook/tumblr/lj and I really love what you have to say there about x.” This gives a context for your acquaintanceship. Sometimes it’s useful for authors to know that you’ve already heard what they have to say on line so they don’t repeat stuff. Also, it’s really helpful to know that the author hasn’t met you before, so they don’t feel weird.

4. “I loved your book x.” It’s always appropriate to start here. If you haven’t read the book, though, don’t say this. The author might ask you a follow up.

5. Instead say “I really appreciated your panel/presentation.” You can add possibly, “I’m excited to read your book.”

6. You can even say, “If I am starting to read your books, could you recommend which would be the best to begin with?” This allows you to open up a conversation while still maintaining enough distance so that the author doesn’t think that you already know anything.
A few other tips:

1. Feel free to chat with an author for 2-3 minutes after a panel or presentation. After that, let the author go. The author may be like me and desperately in need of a break after a stressful social event. Or the author may actually have to get to something else.

2. Bathrooms are neutral space. Don’t strike up a conversation with an author you see there. Pretend you have no idea who they are until the bathroom door is closed.

3. At a signing, limit your conversation to 1 minute or less if there is a line behind you. Keep looking back to check, just to be sure. If the line disappears later, you can come back.

4. Emailing an author after you have met is fine, but don’t necessarily expect they will be able to respond. Also give a few helpful hints about who you were/what you look like.

5. Don’t ask an author to read your manuscript. You can talk about it and if the author is willing, the author will offer (but this will only very, very rarely happen and even then it is unlikely the author will get to it). You can ask the author if they ever do manuscript critiques for a fee (which I do, by the way: mette@metteivieharrion.com $1 per page). But time is money here.