Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 74

Wednesday Writing: "Streamlining" Your Career

At LTUE last week, I was on a panel about what mistakes we had made as authors (and one illustrator) and what we would do better if we could do it again. I thought it was a good idea for a panel, though it left things pretty loose. I talked a bit about editors and agents. Then an audience member raised his hand and asked, "Tell us how we can streamline our careers by not making the same mistakes you did."

Now, I'm all for getting advice from the people who have been there. It's a great way to get a glimpse into the real world you want to enter. But streamlining you career? There is no streamline. Thinking that you can streamline your career is one of the biggest mistake you can make. Probably thinking you can avoid mistakes is another mistake. Mistakes are fun to talk about precisely because they teach you so much, mostly about yourself, but sometimes about other people and the world. Trying to live a life without mistakes is just crazy. You're going to end up walking a tightrope.

Worse than trying to live without mistakes is the idea that you're going to rush your career along. The publishing world works at a snail's pace. If you want a streamlined career, you are going to go into self-publishing because that's where you can make things move quickly. But even there, you will quickly discover the millions of self-pubbed ebooks out there that sell less than a book a year. Most of them have never sold a single copy. Why? Because there are too many and consumers don't know how to find what they want and you don't know how to market your own book.

How do you market your own book? I have no idea. Because that's not what I do. I write books, see? I know how to do that. And as I am frequently telling my kids, if you can find one thing you are really good at, do that one thing. You can't really do more than one thing well as an adult. There's too much else going on. If you spend all your time figuring out how to market your book, then you'll know how to do that, but I will suspect that you may not also know how to write one as well. It's a time issue.

And wanting to streamline your career shows me that you may not be the kind of person who will do well in the book publishing world. I can write a full-length novel in a month in a first draft. But it will take years for it to get to the point where it's worth publishing. That's the way good writing is. Like molasses. Like Heinz ketchup. You learn to wait for it.

Even while I am saying this, I know how impatient I was for a long time. In college, the head of my department sat me down and gave me this lecture on how he knew I was starting with lots of AP credit, but he wanted me to stay all four years and really get an education that other people couldn't get. Guess what I did? I graduated in two years instead, and hurried along. I don't regret this necessarily, but that's partly because I wanted to be a writer, not a professor. The professor thing was a side job.

I spent years getting an agent and choosing just the right novel to publish first. I think it's a good thing to have some time to wait and gain perspective. If you want to write one book and be famous and rich, I'm not sure I want to talk to you and give you any of my hard-won wisdom about what matters in life and how to be comfortable as a writer and how to accept yourself and your flaws. Just go write your book and have at it. Maybe I'll talk to you later when you've figured out things that you think don't matter now.

Book Recs--Theodora Goss

The Thorn and the Blossom by Theodora Goss

I read about this book and knew I had to have it. The gimmick is that the book is a romance written from both the male and female point of view. The book has no spine, so you can read the male romance on one side and you flip it over for the other. It is just the kind of book I love because it is about two characters in an academic department coming to understand that the fantastic literature they are writing about is real.

I had to decide if I wanted to read if from the male point of view or the female point of view first. I decided the male pov mostly because what was natural to me was female and I wanted to subvert that tendency. I wonder how it would have felt to read it the other way around in terms of suspense. It was interesting because the male pov leaves some gaping holes in the story which were filled in. I'm not sure as many holes were filled the other way around. I admit, I think I liked the female pov better.

Something about this writing style felt so clean to me, so easy to read. I love that. So melodic and yet not self-consciously so. I also liked that the female character is mostly the one who experiences the magic. It felt right to me, but as I analyze that, I do wonder if that shows my prejudices. Why are women more naturally magical than men? I don't know. That's the stereotype that women are closer to madness and don't fit into society as much.

I loved the part of the story about the male pov's wife. I don't want to ruin it, but it made sense to me that this was a difficult dilemma. I've had friends face this more head on, but I absolutely understand not being able to do that.

Obviously, I only write about books that I loved, but I loved this one in a special way. Try it. I love it also for the innovation. I wish more books were like this.

Writing for Charity: March 17

Every year for the last several years, Utah authors have banded together to do Writing for Charity, where every penny you spend goes to a local charity. This year, I will be doing critiques of your manuscript and a class with Tracy and Laura Hickman on fantasy. And you can come for only $45. I think this is a steal. I can't imagine any conference this good for twice as much, but we're doing it for those of you who can't afford other conferences and who want to feel good about spending your dollars twice.

Go here for more info and to register.

Friday Tri: What have you left unfinished?

I've talked about DNF's before and how painful it is for someone who thinks of him/herself as an athlete to go to a race and discover not only can s/he not do as well as expected, but cannot even finish it. This has only happened to me once, but it's still something I think about a lot. And I'm an amateur. I don't primarily identify myself as a triathlete. It's fun, not exactly a hobby anymore because I think of hobbies specifically as activities you do so that you don't have to compete, don't even really have to be good at.

But as I've been thinking about the DNF in my life, the race that eluded me, it occurred to me how the idea of a race that hasn't been conquered yet can be applied in any pursuit in life. So I ask you, what have you left unfinished in your life? What do you say to yourself often (or maybe only now and again)--I wish I had done that? I wish I could do that? I wish I had learned that? I wish I was better at that?

I'm not saying making a list. Actually, please don't make a list. I'm one of those people who has to fight against the list making tendency because then the list rules my life. If I don't make the list, then I can go to bed at night. If I do make the list, the list will be accomplished, but I may not sleep. So don't make a list. Only think of one thing. One regret you have. Focus on that and think about how different your life would be if you could do what you couldn't do or if you had finished the thing you started but failed at. If your life really would be better, then do it. Go out and do it.

It will be hard. It will take time and energy away from the other things you are doing now. But those are just excuses you are making to avoid the pain of facing your past. If something is really bothering you, you can't pay attention to the voice that tells you that it's past and gone, that you're over it. If you are still thinking about it, you are not over it. The longer you let it sit in your mind and corrupt your opinion of yourself, the deeper the wound you have made in your heart. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Yes, you are older now. Yes, there are certain things that you may not be able to finish that you started as a younger person. But don't immediately dismiss them. If you can't do exactly what you wanted, be creative and think of ways that you can finish things differently, but that can still satisfy you. You deserve to be the you that you wanted to be. You deserve to finish yourself.

It still surprises me sometimes when people make the assumption that I have always been athletic. I haven't been. I started training more seriously about eight years ago and every year I've had a different balance. Some years have been more intense than others. But the real change isn't in my body. It's in my mind. For twenty years, I lived with the failure of my high school swimming career. That sounds so melodramatic when I put it like that, but I told myself "you're just not an athlete," and that statement became ingrained in me. That's why it is still surprising when people see me and see an athlete. I'm not sure that that word is my default yet. But slowly, slowly, I am finishing what I left unfinished. Slowly, I am finishing the self I want to be.

Writing Wednesday: Waiting to Share

When I was a beginning writer, I heard about a much more experienced writer who had left our writing group and rarely shared her books with people until she had finished them. Even then, she tended only to ask for her agent and editor to read her book. This seemed a little arrogant to me. We talked a bit snarkily about it in the group and said that she should really be taking more advice from us, and we really thought her books would benefit from a wider audience's reading. Later, I heard her explain that she felt that sharing her books too soon often led to her losing her passion for them and so she just waited.

Fast forward ten years and I found myself today giving the advice to a friend who was struggling with a novel that she was perhaps sharing her novel ideas too soon and with too many people. I explained that for me, it is hard to change easily from my editor side to my creative side. I have to protect my creative side from my editor side. This often means that I do not do much critical work on my writing while working in a first draft mode. I find that if I go back and ask myself too many critical questions about if the characters' actions make sense and so on, I lose all interest in going on. I end up thinking that there is something wrong with the book and I put it aside. The creative part of me just doesn't get along with that critical side and goes into a corner and hides.

I find that I write a full draft much more easily if I just get it down very quickly and uncritically. Now, I will admit that this first draft sometimes bears very little resemblance to a final draft. The ideas are there, maybe the sweep of the book, sometimes a character or two is right or just needs a little tweaking. But they are very, very rough. I do that because it keeps my creative side protected and motivated to keep writing day by day. Then I let others read the book and let my creative side rest for a while.

The hardest stage for me is actually the third or fourth draft stage where I am still needing to use my creative side a lot in changing things, but the critical side is also very active. I still don't like to have comments about the language when I am at that stage. It just focuses my energies on the wrong things, makes me too critical when I should be trying to dream still about the manuscript and think how great it is going to be.

I think Orson Scott Card talks about how a writer has to hold simultaneously in her mind the faith that she is the best writer in the world and also the humility that this book is the worst piece of crap ever written in the English language. I think that is what I am getting at, in a way, only for me I can't hold them both in my mind at the same time. I have to hold them in my mind one after the other, in different stages of writing.

More and more, as I give advice to other writers, I find that I am focusing less on the mechanics of writing, the skills, and more on the psychology of writing. I don't know what that means. Maybe it's just because that's the part I am still struggling with.

Gender Masquerades #6: Miles Vorkosigan

Miles is introduced to the reader in The Warrior's Apprentice as he tries to take the physical portion of the test to get into the Imperial Academy and follow in his father's footsteps. The problem: he is physically damaged from an attack on his pregnant mother that has left him a dwarf with very brittle bones. He is, however, so brilliant, that he can get a very low score on the physical portion of the test and still get into the Academy. But at 17, he is impatient with his body, lets himself fall down a wall and breaks a number of bones. He is taken away by his minder Bothari, knowing he is a failure.

The rest of the first novel is about his attempt to prove himself not a failure by taking over a mercenary space fleet and becoming its "Admiral Naismith." He is a master of masquerades. He has been masquerading his whole life, pretending that things don't hurt, and more than that, he has been learning how to twist people around his finger, manipulate them into doing what he wants them to do, and making them believe that it is what he wants them to do. All of these sound very much to me like feminine attributes. Women who are told they have to do twice as much as men to compete in the same job, women who learn how to read people's body language because their place in society means that is the only way they have of getting power, obliquely. And the physical problems he has, being more "fragile" physically, as well as appearing to be much "smaller."

There are some times in the course of this series when his size is actually an advantage, but not many. There are also a lot of very interesting romances, including my favorite, with Taura, a woman who has been genetically engineered to be a soldier, who is enormous, and partly animal. She falls for Miles hard, and this is very much a reversed gender Beauty and the Beast. Miles also falls for Ellie, a woman whose face is shot off and whom he gets repaired. But she loves him because he treats her the same when she has no face as when she has the beautiful one he pays for.

You could argue that he's just a guy with some feminine characteristics, but it's obvious that Bujold is playing with gender in her books. She has a whole group of hermaphrodites on the planet Beta, and she writes an entire book about a society of homosexual men whose main purpose in life is caring for children. I don't know any author who I think is smarter about dealing with the sociological consequences of technology. Her ideas about uterine replicators are probably going to become real and then what will happen. AS for cloning, Bujold has the most obvious, matter-of-fact answers there, too.

For me as an author, what I wonder to myself is--what would have happened if Cordelia and Aral had had a daughter. For one thing, this would make their lives a lot easier. Everyone would have assumed that they were hoping that the young Emperor Gregor and this daughter would be married one day and their power could be consolidated. But having a son--a damaged son--makes everything trickier. He's in line for the throne. He's a count's heir. And he's damaged.

Having him be male is really the only choice, I think, in Barrayar. Yes, Bujold does interesting things with Kou's daughters. But they are not Miles, the hyperactive little shit who can take over the universe. He is interesting because he is male, but with all the disabilities that women face. And none of the advantages. Miles can't rest on being pretty. He can't get married and make his parents happy. He is a woman who has to become a man.

The telling moment in the series for me is when Dono appears. Dono used to be a woman, but for the sake of her county, she becomes a man to inherit. She goes to Beta and has a sex change operation beyond what we can do, that actually changes her DNA. And Miles accepts this in a rather blase fashion. Why? Because he is Dono, in another face. He has been changed in the womb, damaged. But he has to still try to become what he was meant to be. He refuses to see his own limitations, refuses to accept his society's view of himself as damaged--sometimes to ridiculous conclusions.

I'm not the first person to argue that Miles is a woman masquerading as a man, I'm sure. I'm not the first female reader who picked up Bujold's books and thought--oh, finally here is a male character we can identify with completely, without having to do translations in our heads or looking at the side character of Hermione the friend. He is me, the me I am trying to be, too. Salute to Bujold.

Book Recs--Shannon Hale's Midnight in Austenland

I have been waiting with great anticipation for Shannon Hale's sequel to Austeland. I loved the first, but I wasn't sure how she would manage to write a sequel that didn't feel like a retread. I should have trusted Shannon's brilliance more. She wrote both the sequel I wanted and a new book that was surprising all along the way. The problem is that saying too much about the plot truly ruins it.

I will say that I think Shannon writes about modern family life better than anyone I know. She is best known for her YA fantasies and of course those are great. But I think she may even be better and more unique as a contemporary adult writer. She combines fun and real-life fantasy in a way that no one else does. There are romance writers who try to do the same thing but often end up annoying me with cliches. Shannon doesn't do the cliches but she touches on all the notes that chime for me as a romance reader, plus she has so many fun touches.

She tips her hat to Austen's Northanger Abbey here. She tells a story about a woman finding love again after a terrible marriage. She also does a great job of twisting romance expectations. This is the perfect beach read, but it's also a great book club read. I can just imagine all the women arguing over when they knew the moment that the "real" romance was obvious. Or when they knew who the killer was. Or when they wanted to lynch the ex-husband. Once again, I wish I was Shannon Hale. The best I can do is that my oldest daughter is named after her. (Well, she's Shannon, anyway.)

Friday Tri: Running Tips

Lots of people obsess about running mechanics. For me, I just want to make sure that I'm not doing anything terribly wrong. I'm not planning to go to the Olympics as a runner. I just want to get through the run.
1. Keep your arms at a ninety degree angle. Too acute and you risk shoulder pain. To obtuse and you may not be running as efficiently as you could be.
2. Don't let your arms overswing in front. They should swing back and forth, but not side to side.
3. Keep your stride rate between 90-100 at all times even when running easily. Try to shorten your stride and see how much easier it feels.
4. Your feet should land fairly flatly in the center, but if you land on your heels or toes, make gradual changes, not sudden ones.
5. At a running store, you should be able to find out if you pronate in or out. If you do, get some shoes to help with that problem.
6. Keep your head and neck loose. You don't want to cramp up there.
7. When you go up hills, increase your stride rate. Also keep your head steady and imagine yourself being a puppet on a string. Don't lean forward. Don't try to go up a hill at the same pace as you would go on a flat surface. You will go slower, and then you will have the energy to go fast down the hill.
8. When going downhill, don't take such huge strides that you lose control or that you pound too hard. Let yourself float lightly down the hill.

Writing Wednesday: Voices on the Edge

I've been known to say that voice is the part of your writing that is wrong, the mistakes you make in grammar, the "faults" that take your particular story out of the norm, that your English teacher would correct. The part of your writing that your copy editor is telling you to change and that you have to have the courage to "stet."

As I've been watching American Idol this year, I've felt more and more confirmation of this theory. The contestants that sing perfectly well are the ones that are least memorable. They have the "skill" down pat. They've trained their voices to perfection. Which should be a good thing, shouldn't it? They should make it all the way because they've learned all the rules and they should just be given golden tickets because they can tick off all the little marks on a checklist.

Maybe some of those perfect singers will succeed. But if they do, I still think it is because of something other than their perfect voices, some quality that makes them stand apart, some part of their life history that is tragic or weird or quirky, that just doesn't fit the mold. "Voice," in the end, is the opposite of skill. It's what takes you to the places that skill can't get you, and it's the same in many ways in writing as it is in the music world.

I do critiques of manuscripts for people a lot and I have realized more and more than the two ends of the spectrum are both important. On the one hand, I am trying to help writers increase their set of skills. I point out where they have made mistakes, where the clarity of what is happening needs to be increased. I point out where the plot logic doesn't work, where characters do things that make no sense. These are all skill-based, problems that almost any trained writer can point out.

Then there are the "flaws" in a manuscript that should not be fixed. This is where as a critiquer I have to be really careful. You can fix too much in a manuscript, correct a writer to the point that the uniqueness is lost. Instead, I try hard to let the manuscript be what it is meant to be, to see where the writer's unique flaws should be intentional, where a voice that is rough needs to be left alone. It's tricky. You can over-edit someone else just as you can over-edit yourself.

This helps me sometimes when I think about writers who have success but do not necessarily have the same skills that other writers do. Readers connect with that flawed voice and the story it has to tell. Sometimes--often--voice trumps skill and readers will overlook plot flaws if there is enough else going on that they don't care. If they feel at home in your writing is if they feel transported brilliantly enough, they may notice flaws guiltily but shrug and keep reading.

I am not saying that as writers, you don't bother with skills, but know that there is a line, a balance that you need to find for yourself between skill and voice. And of course, each project may have a different line. You never stop learning as a writer. You don't just say, I have the skills I need, now I don't need to worry about it. But you also need to remember what it is that made your last book work, and that part of it was what you hadn't yet learned in terms of skill. It's a paradox, like a lot of things in life. Good luck with it!

Gender Masquerades #5: Cordelia Naismith

Cordelia is presented to the reader as a female commander of a crew. She ends up in a tricky situation with an enemy and has to go o a forced march to protect one of her crew members who has suffered a terrible brain injury. Over the course of this forced march, she falls in love with Aral Vorkosigan, the captain of the enemy. In some ways, it's a typical romance plot. In other ways, not so typical because of the political fallout that happens when Cordelia rescues her crew and gets home.

Cordelia is obviously competent. She's capable of calm in charged situations. She's also smart. She finds out when she meets Aral a second time that he is a former bisexual. Her being part soldier, part woman is described as a kind of solution to Aral's indecision regarding his sexuality. She ends up rejecting her home world of Beta and moving to Barrayar in the second book, when she marries Aral.

She is obviously physically female, but she is a woman who refuses to stay within the stereotypes of women that Barrayar offers (or Beta, for that matter). She tends to surround herself with other women who have the same difficulties and creates new possibilities for them as much as she can. It would be easy to read Cordelia as a man caught in a woman's body, but I'm not sure that is what Bujold is doing. She seems to carefully skirt around that, instead insisting that Cordelia is a woman who does man's things and is unapologetic about it. She sees around social convention, beyond it, and while she is sometimes caught within it, she is always trying to use it for her own purposes. It's more as if she sees what is, and decides how she can do what she wants to do around that.

I love Cordelia. She was one of the first sf heroines I read about in college. I looked for a long time for other heroines as good, and there aren't many. I think one of the reasons I like Cordelia so much is that she isn't butch at all. She isn't trying to be a man. She's not interested in changing her gender definition. She's interested in getting what she wants out of life, in changing the world in the ways she thinks of as good. I love how she is constantly thinking not just odd ideas, not just blasphemous ideas, but ideas that are just outside the box. It's not just about gender. It's about class and race and everything else.

In Barrayar, she comments that unless they have genetyping no one knows whose ancestors were theirs. Aral calmly remarks that she has just suggested that all his ancestors were bastards, which isn't a very nice thing in his society. Cordelia blinks, realizes this, and seems apologetic. But she didn't see things that way at all before and she still seems to think it is a stupid way to look at things.

I love Cordelia when she is given the chance to oversee young Emperor Gregor's education and goggles at how much power that gives her. Aral tells her that most people don't see this as power, but she clearly changes everything on Barrayar through her relationship with Gregor, who ends up marrying an off-planet wife just like Aral did.

On the one hand, I could argue that Cordelia is a man. She acts in many ways as a symbolic man, but that is probably just because our symbols are so gendered and stupid. Why should a "man" have to be the active character in the plot who foils the evil villains and saves the day? Another interesting thing here is that unlike many romances where you have some role reversal going on, there is almost nothing I can think of that is feminine about Aral. Cordelia's strength does not seem to take away from his. Her saving the day makes his life a little easier, but he is no less heroic for her heroism.

I want to write like that. I want to have male and female characters like the ones that Bujold develops. More next week on Miles.