Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 44
May 22, 2013
Writing Wednesday: 10 "Secret" Ways to Get Your Manuscript Thrown Out
2. Turn one of your pages upside down to see it is read that far.
3. Send it in with a bribe of some kind, like chocolate.
4. Declare that your kids love your book.
5. Threaten, in a joking way, what you will do if it isn't published.
6. Describe the publishing industry as a waste of time.
7. Diss books published by agent or editor you are querying.
8. Talk about your book in vague terms, with no specifics.
9. Compliment yourself on how great your book is and how many copies it will sell.
10. End your letter with the words "You don't want to miss out on this once-in-a-lifetime chance" that sounds like what a car dealer would say.
Writing Wednesday: 10 "Secrets" to to Make Your Manuscript Stand Out
2. Show you read in the genre by naming a book that hasn't been made into a movie.
3. Use good punctuation.
4. Proofread your manuscript.
5. Don't ask the agent to read the new version a week after you've sent the first one.
6. Pitch one book at a time.
7. Have a killer setting.
8. Have good dialog.
9. Show, don't tell.
10. Do something uniquely well.
May 21, 2013
21 Reasons You Think You Don’t Have Time to Write
1. You are letting people tell you that you should be doing other things with your time.
2. You can’t live with the level of clean that your family accepts as normal.
3. You haven’t decided to treat your writing seriously and so no one around you treats it seriously, either.
4. You haven’t made yourself a writing space.
5. You haven’t realized that you need help.
6. You do what is urgent rather than what is necessary.
7. You don’t let your kids and other people solve their own problems.
8. You think that someday you will have more time for writing.
9. You are spending time doing things you actually don’t care about.
10. You are actually using distractions as an excuse not to write.
11. You are terrified of writing, of actually sitting down and putting yourself on the page.
12. You are too busy criticizing the best selling books that you are reading to write something better.
13. You don’t know what to do with a blank page.
14. You don’t know how to turn off your internal editor.
15. You talk a good game, but you don’t play it.
16. You need to do a little planning and research before you start.
17. You don’t actually like writing. You like having written. (Join the club.)
18. You need to write the first line of the next chapter before leaving for the day.
19. You need to spend time remembering what it is you love about writing.
20. You have convinced yourself that you need 2 hours to write and don’t know how to use the 20 minute chunks you actually have.
21. You don’t have notebooks scattered through the house, including in the bathroom, to jot down inspiration.
The Rose Throne: Timeline
Timeline is one of the trickiest things for me as an author. This may be because I don’t outline or it may be a problem for all authors and all books. For me, there were two distinct tasks involved in this.
1. Condensing events
My first draft of The Rose Throne had Issa and Ailsbet begin as pre-teens, about age 11. They met each other briefly, became friends, and then spent another 6-7 years apart before meeting again at age 17. I think I did this in part because I was used to spending a lot of time building backstory for my main characters. In The Princess and the Hound, Prince George begins as a young child and ages up through about 70 pages of the book.
But The Rose Throne was a very different book than The Princess and the Hound, in part because there were two viewpoint characters who grew up in different kingdoms and had very different views of the magic system which they actually share. But in addition to that, I think The Rose Throne is for an older audience than The Princess and the Hound. And there were other reasons for me to condense the story, which included the fact that if Issa and Ailsbet had met and become friends as younger figures, a lot of the narrative tension around their relationship was taken away from the rest of the book.
I cannot say how often I have done critiques on manuscripts in which I tell the author that the timeline needs to be condensed. It’s a major change, but increasing the tension often makes other narrative problems disappear or at least become easier to fix. It improves pacing enormously and makes the structure of the novel really pop out and make itself obvious. If you are meandering through your plot slowly, more tension will help you find your climax and move toward it more easily.
2. Day by day
So the second timeline issue was a chapter-by-chapter day-by-day issue. This happened at a much later stage in the process, at nearly the final revision before copyediting. After I had condensed the book events into one year, I needed to make sure that the seasons were right for each chapter and scene, and that events happened in the right order. You would be surprised at how often I had to shift things backward or forward in time so that one event that caused another didn’t happen chronologically after it in my narrative.
What I did to fix this problem was make a chart for each chapter and then type in a date. Now, the kingdoms of Rurik and Weirland don’t have our Roman calendar and I purposely never referred to our months or days of the week. I always feel like fantasy loses its sense of other-worldliness if it relies on our conventions too much (unless it’s set in our world, in which case, it’s fine). So instead I used seasons and day numbers. Each event happened on a given day in a given season. When I put them all together with a short one-sentence explanation of each chapter, I could glance through and make sure there weren’t any long, unexplained absences (which, of course there were, but I had to fix). I also could see whether too much happened in one stretch. This visual was a useful way to make sure the scenes were organized properly and that the events happened in a measured fashion.
I still have trouble with timeline in most books that I am working on now. Maybe one day I will figure out a way to hold it all in my head and not make a mistake. Ha!
May 16, 2013
What is YA?
2. YA is usually shorter than adult fiction (60-80k, though fantasy can be longer).
3. YA is usually more quickly paced, with more dialog, less exposition, and fewer subplots.
4. YA tends to be in first person or very close third, and it tends to have a single viewpoint character, sometimes two.
5. YA has plot. Adult fiction sometimes doesn't.
6. YA tends to have a more hopeful outlook on like. (Despite what you hear about how dark and edgy YA can be, compare with Cormac McCarthy)
7. YA has VOICE. This may be the single most important feature of YA. Adult novels may have narrators who are invisible. YA rarely does.
8. YA is about becoming. There is no ennui.
9. YA often has a first real love, and not a sweet love as in MG. Love in YA is physical, even if it is "clean." There is a sense of smell, taste, and touch when it comes to love. Everything is sexy, sweat dripping down the face, and the smallest touch.
10. YA is about finding power. Adults may have accepted that there is no real power for them in the world. Teens don't accept this, and largely, when you think you have power, you do.
May 15, 2013
Davis County Literacy Night
Writing Wednesday: TRUST YOUR CHARACTERS
I recently went to a talk by Victoria Curran of Harlequin on writing for her line. One of the things she talked about was the frequent problem of writers trying to follow formulas and ending up short-changing the story, the emotional impact, and the characters themselves. I was really impressed to hear her say a lot of things about romance formula that I have said myself. TRUST YOUR CHARACTERS, she said. Let them lead you to interesting plots.Let them lead you to new places that other romances don’t go.
I have been thinking for almost a week now about this idea of trusting your characters and what that means for writers. I know that we have this idea that there are writers who outline and writers who discover. But I am not sure this is really a different thing. I suspect that writers who discover-write can have just as many problems forcing characters to do what will lead to the “right” plot as writers who outline do. And writers who outline can outline based on character rather than based on the “right” plot as much as discovery writers do. It’s not really one way or another, once you have written fifteen drafts of a manuscript. You are moving back and forth between plot and character, tweaking character so plot works, and tweaking plot so character works.
That said, I still like the idea of trusting your characters to lead you to interesting plot. I think sometimes we are scared to let our characters veer off script. Even if you don’t have an outline written down for a particular novel, you still have an idea in your head of what is done and what isn’t done in your particular genre. And when a character might have a chance to do something that you have never seen a character do before, as a writer you might have a tendency to reel that character in because you will have an easier time writing the next scene and indeed the rest of the book if the character stays within the kinds of plot that you have seen done before.
For instance, if you have a character in a fantasy novel who decides to leave the magical school s/he is enrolled in, what happens next? That’s not the way those stories are written. If you have a character in a romance novel who decides to leave town just when things get hot and heavy on a year-long world cruise, well what next? You don’t usually have a year gap before the resolution of your romance. If you have a character in a science fiction novel who does something stupid and gets killed, well then who is going to be your main character for the rest of the novel? You put a lot of time and effort into developing this great alpha character and now all you have left is the beta characters running around.
But often the most interesting thing about a novel may be the ways in which it disobeys the formulas and rules of convention. Yes, there are probably rules you can’t circumvent. In romance, do you have to have a happily ever after? Well, actually no. I’ve read romances that didn’t. But readers are not always happy. Still, it can be done and if your characters demand it, then you may end up writing a much more satisfying story that way than by making your characters act in ways that serve the HEA, but take away all the uniqueness and power of the character development you have worked on.
Still thinking about this …
May 14, 2013
Free ebook stories now available for The Rose Throne
The Rose Throne is out now! If you are interested but not ready to buy the book, here are some free ebooks you can sample:
E for Ekhono, about Kellin, a deleted scene from The Rose Throne:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/315878
Kedor’s Match, a sequel about Kellin’s brother Kedor:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/315881
Or on amazon:
May 13, 2013
Monday Book Recs: Doll Bones by Holly Black
Doll Bones is a delicious fantasy adventure about three children on the verge of their teen years. It’s about not knowing who you are and being afraid to be who you are. It’s about having friends who aren’t cool and dreams that are even less cool. It’s about wanting to stay a child and yet hating the lack of power that comes with childhood. And it’s also about the bonds between us that never die. I cried several times as I read and I could not put the book down once.
I am really amazed at how deftly Holly can move from her YA novels to the middle grade voice of Doll Bones. I never once doubted the age of these kids. Instead, as I read it, I felt myself sinking back into my own childhood, remembering what it was like to hide in the tree so I could read a book and escape from the never-ending list of chores my parents seemed to have for me, and the other siblings who teased me no matter what I read. I remembered old friendships from childhood that were long gone now, but how I cried over them, and felt like they were things that were being stolen away from me as I grew older. I remembered how I felt confused at kids who were becoming teens around me and seemed to become completely different people. I also remembered reading John Bellairs’ books, and the delight of feeling terrified, but also the assurance of knowing that any time I wanted, I could put the book down and wait, take a breath, and keep going.I don’t want to tell too much about this story, but I did love the story of “The Queen,” the doll for whom the book is named. I loved how it was resolved, and I loved the sense that I had that the girl who had been harmed had found a way to power, even if it was only through haunting other children. I also loved the other story of loss, and it made me think about how often we tell ghost stories to comfort, and how little it makes sense to those who have had loved ones go on who don’t haunt them. I loved the way in which the library and the librarian in the end become such a pivotal part of solving the problem of the book. I love libraries! I love librarians! I think all authors do, and it’s great when a book can just tip the hat to our heroes. I also loved the made-up stories the children told themselves.
This is a book I suspect our children’s children will be reading to their kids. Or at least, I hope they do.
May 10, 2013
Friday Feminism: Introductions and Prevarications
Why, then, do we women so frequently undersell ourselves? Pretty simply put, this is how we are socialized. Women who lead with their accomplishments, and who value themselves highly are quickly taught a lesson that this is inappropriate. Men are not taught this generally. Women also internalize this to the point that even in all-female conversations, the same self-deprecating talk prevails. The only kind of one-upmanship in conversation I have seen with women is reverse one-upmanship, like if you think you are stupid, then I will tell you a story about how stupid I am. Or how clueless. Or how hopeless. Or how incompetent. Or how pitiful.
See, the funny thing about this is that I am so oversocialized myself that I don't particularly want to change this. That is, I only wish that men would be less arrogant, not that women would be more so. But this isn't really getting outside of the expectations of gender. I have been told on a couple of occasions that my conversational style is slightly male. Not in the sense that I tend to lead with my best foot (I don't usually), but in the sense that I don't end every sentence with a question mark in my tone and I don't apologize for my opinions as much as others do. I'm aware that a woman with opinions can be taken the wrong way, but I've just stopped caring.
However, I have spent YEARS learning how to introduce myself. I tell some groups of people I am a writer, and if they insist, I will tell them a couple of titles (though rarely are the titles recognized). Most of the time the title "writer" is far less socially intimidating than some of the other things that I might use to introduce myself. Like PhD from Princeton University at age 24. Or #163 nationally ranked triathlete in my age group. Or (now that my kids are older), a daughter at MIT and one at Berklee School of Music. I have found that women don't want to talk to other women they consider above them in status. But men have no problem with this. I have a dear friend who enjoys leading with all of my most impressive accomplishments the first time he introduces me to anyone else. He's proud of me, even if I'm not proud of myself. Maybe I need to learn his strategy. I think probably all women could stand to look at the way in which we introduce ourselves and consider changing it.
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