Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 8

Protecting Your Creative Self

“If you’re going to be a writer long-term, you need to learn to actively protect your creative self. Many people have no idea what a creative self is because they don’t cultivate it. I sometimes envy these people, because they also have no idea how vulnerable that creative self is, and how difficult it is sometimes to take it out again and let it take chances when it got hurt so badly just yesterday. “

This essay is based on a talk I gave at Sundance One Day Writing Retreats in March, in connection with the yearly charity, Writing For Charity. It is probably my favorite essay ever at IGMS.

See the rest here:

http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=columns&vol=mette_ivie_harrison&article=076

Start a New Book

I meet aspiring authors all the time and talk to them about their work or even read some of their first pages. I have been surprised at how often I find out that they have been working on the same project for a decade. They've taken it to a dozen workshops, have sent it out in various forms to every agent they are interested in.

Some writers have literally only been working on one book since they were teenagers. Some of them have been working on the same book for years and simply haven't finished it yet. They're trying to get the first half of the book right before they write the last half. They're trying to make sure they have the plot absolutely right in their heads before they get it down on paper.

Sometimes I'll talk to aspiring authors who have sent off this precious project to an agent they've been corresponding with for years. And then they sit and wait. Because they want to be ready the moment the agent responds to rework that project.

While I think there are reasons for each of these impulses, I don't think the reasons are genuinely helpful to a career as a writer. Mostly, the reason is fear. When you've been working on a book for a decade, it's more comfortable to just keep working on it. The idea of putting it aside and trying to start from the beginning again can feel terrifying. I get it. And the idea of sitting down and working on a book without knowing precisely how you're going to get from point A to point B is also pretty scary. So you tell yourself that you're "thinking" about it. Equally frightening is the idea of accepting that agent X isn't going to accept this book and you might as well start on another one while you're waiting around.

I believe that it's important as an author not to remain too attached to any one single project. Now, don't take this as meaning that I think authors should be detached from projects while working on them. You should be passionate about every project. It should be the only project that matters to you--while you're working on it. And then you send it out and start on something else. Because you are a writer and you have lots of ideas.

When I was an aspiring author twenty years ago, Lois McMaster Bujold (still my all-time favorite author) agreed out of her great magnanimity to read the first 3 chapters of a book I was working on. And she told me in the nicest possible way that it was time for me to put this book aside and work on something else. It stung. Boy did it. But looking back, I can see how that book was trying so hard to be someone else's book. It was an imitation. It wasn't really *my* book. And I needed to move on. I did move on. I moved on a lot, until I got to the book I eventually published first.

You might as well hone your skills at both writing and letting your work go. And by the way, there is no reason to think that you will be less able to work on something that someone jumps on just because you've started another project. Believe me, that's not going to be a problem.

No Problems Ever Again

It’s so easy to look at people who seem to have achieved all the success you dream of and imagine that if you get *there,* you will never have problems again. It isn’t true.

As a beginner, you are anxious all the time about if you will ever be published, ever earn any money, ever be taken seriously by people around you. The worries don’t go away as you become more successful. The targets just change. Instead of worrying if you will be published, you worry about reviews and awards. You worry about sales numbers living up to expectations. You worry about editors changing and the vision of your project shifting.

As a beginner, you often struggle to fit work time in around a job, around childcare, around personal needs. But this doesn’t change, even if you are able to quit your day job and be an author full-time. Suddenly, you have to answer more emails, do events (often without much or any compensation), travel to do events, keep up social media, and make sure you actually have a wardrobe that looks decent. You might have to deal with deciding if you want to take a movie deal, if you are interested in working on someone else’s project and on and on. You are asked to produce more and more quickly, too.

Very few full-time authors I know can actually devote more than a couple of hours a day to actually sitting down and writing (listen carefully and you can hear them laughing right now–a couple of hours? if they had a couple of hours every day, they’d be thrilled!). And even when they do have time to write, this is often on an airplane, in a hotel room, or in the middle of a convention.

As a beginner, you want to make sure you make a good impression on people in the business. You cultivate friendships. You make sure you don’t burn bridges. But it only gets more difficult because you are meeting more and more people, and you are meeting them more often. You go to cons and everything you do is watched and noted, sometimes put up on social media. You are never “off.” You never have time to just rant without thinking about how it looks to other people. You can never have a day when you get to be mean to everyone because you’re tired or feeling sad about a death in the family. You are always a persona.

As a beginner, you try to convince people that you are a “real” writer. Your parents, your spouse, your children, your friends. Your high school alumni, your college roommates. On and on. And then you get a book published and you think everyone will cheer for you. But they don’t. People turn on you precisely because you’re successful (not everyone, not the ones who really matter, but still … ) People you barely remember come out of the woodworks and start assuming you will do things for them that you don’t have time for. And then there are the people who think you’ve become too “big” for them simply because you can’t go out to lunch as often as you once did. Sure, they think you’re a real writer now, but you’re a bitch.

I’m not trying to complain about success or say that I wish I was still an aspiring author. I don’t. I’m happy with where I am in my career right now. But it’s not all roses and ice cream, that’s all I mean. Wherever you are, that’s where you are. There are good things and bad things about being there. Moving up means you also get to learn how to deal with new good things and bad things. Sometimes they’re easy. A lot of the time they’re not. Just take it easy and don’t be angry with yourself if it turns out success is harder than you thought it would. It really is. It isn’t just you.

Organizing/Prioritizing Your Life as an Author

What is most important? I try to do my most important things first in the day. That means I rarely answer emails first. I write first. I finish my writing and then let myself do other things. And my writing is rarely contracted. I always have things I am working on that are for me, and I find those very important. I think it is vital to a writer to keep a Chinese wall between what you’re being paid for and what you live to do on your own.

What is most urgent? When I am finished with my writing for the day, I deal with what is urgent. Emails, conference details (I’m a conference organizer—Writing For Charity), business phone calls, taxes, etc. Basically, the urgent things are the things that other people think are important and these are people who matter to me and who make my life as a writer possible. I might also add to this category things like necessary errands for writing and family life.

What are your deadlines? Deadlines should be consulted regularly, but I don’t live my life by deadlines. I have confidence I will meet them and I make sure that I schedule time regularly to finish my work early. But it’s not my be all and end all of existence. I think this actually makes me work better and more efficiently. I don’t tend to put off deadlines because I’m nervous about them, either.
What are your obligations? In this category, I would put things that I have agreed to do but that are not vital to my career, for instance, talks I am giving at upcoming events, book signings I’ve agreed to do, reading for blurbs, reading for friends, etc. These are things I would like to do, but if I have to drop them, I will. They happen when I have time for them.

Calendaring. I keep a calendar with all my business information on it. It has deadlines listed, any events I’ve agreed to go to. It also keeps track of the time I’ve spent on various projects. I put up goals for each month and then keep track of time spent on those goals. But I can add things as necessary. I also put up lunches with writer friends or others, and mileage and other expenses so I keep track of those all in the same place.

Leave time for emergencies. This is something I tend to tell people who are like me, and who overschedule themselves because they are full of energy. I am juggling a lot of balls at any one time and I guess that must be the way I like it, since my life has always been that way. But even for someone like me, I can’t schedule every hour of every day because life isn’t like that. I tell my kids that they need to make sure they always leave at least 10% of their energy each day for unexpected things that come up.

Schedule twice (or thrice) as much time as you think you need for any project. My husband works for a small company as a robotics/programming engineer. He often has to project how many hours he thinks a project will take. It always takes 2-3 times as long. At best. This is true for everyone. Yes, even for you. If one project comes out to what you thought it would be, another one will go so long that it still makes this rule true. Problems will come up. Deal with them properly.

Deal with anxieties. I haven’t met a writer yet who didn’t have anxieties. Even the ones who seem to be arrogant are dealing with them—maybe that’s why they seem arrogant, because they’re compensating. If you don’t learn to deal with your anxieties in a healthy way, they will destroy your productivity. Seriously. They only get worse as you become more successful, so don’t think that at some future point you will get rid of them. Figure out why you write and make sure that it doesn’t have to do with money, fame, or your mother’s approval.

Meditation and focus. You need time to let your brain rest each day. Live with some silence. Turn off the internet. Turn off the TV. Turn off all the voices around you and listen to yourself consistently. Doing this will improve the engine you need to keep going daily.

Where do I get my ideas?

People ask this all the time and I tend to be flip because it's a complicated question to answer and to many authors, it's such a beginner question. Most of us have TOO many ideas, not too few, and we'd like to get rid of them. Nonetheless, I do remember a time when I didn't have too many ideas, so here's a hint of where you might go to find some if you need them.

Authors with too many ideas--look away!
Other novels that you wish you could change or twist in some way
TV/movies that you want to translate to a different medium
Emotions you want to create through your story
News, whether tragedy or sensational, feel good, science, history
Random people’s conversations you overhear
Friends/family lives (this is why it’s dangerous to have a writer in your circle—nothing is sacred to them).
Passions/obsessions (yes, you can write about this weird stuff and your work will be better for it).
Your own life history (though it can be tricky to be able to analyze and change it in the way necessary to make good fiction)
Fairy tales/folk tales/religion/myth
Questions you have about life
Mix and match genre tropes
Write what people tell you not to write
Be defiant, gloriously in love, angry—on the page

Do More/Stress Less for Writers

1. Find your best time of day for writing and try to arrange your day around that. But also be aware that you can write anytime, anywhere.
2. Realize your limits and don’t push past them so that you have energy the next day and week.
3. Fuel your body well.
4. Protect your mind (however you need to do that, ie. therapy, medication, keeping away from the internet/reviews, choosing the right people to keep around you).
5. Finish your work as quickly and give yourself off time when you’re done.
6. Do it now instead of later (your future self will thank your past self).
7. Give yourself rewards for finishing, every day. Be a great boss—it will make you work harder for yourself.
8. Celebrate successes.
9. Keep friends who hold you accountable—or at least ask you about your work.
10. Exercise daily.

Best Advice for Aspiring Authors:

Keep expectations reasonable about how long it takes to publish, advances and marketing, etc.
Make goals that are in your control (ie how many words you write a day, not when you will be published).
Network—which means basically, make friends in the business.
Keep sending things out.
Write something new—don’t wait around once you’ve finished something and sent it out.
Try lots of genres to see what fits best with your unique style.
Set creative challenges for yourself throughout your career. Write the thing you think you can’t write.
Don’t worry about social media.
Have a simple website with a bio and bibliography.
Write what you love, not what you think will sell
Celebrate as much as possible
Live life fully in the meantime.
Tell stories, don’t preach.

Be a Quitter

You see signs up along the freeway encouraging kids not to quit. And sure, I agree that kids should keep going to school, should keep trying hard things. But I feel like we are a culture that sometimes uncritically assumes that continuing to throw yourself at the same thing again and again is a good thing and a sign of determination and courage. It is not necessarily true. Continuing to do something that isn’t working for you may be stupid and unproductive.

There is a time for quitting. There are a lot of times for quitting, in fact. This weekend at a race where the weather had turned dangerously bad, one of my Ragnar teammates, Marion Jensen, was out on a muddy trail, wishing that the race officials would call the race so he could turn back. At some point, he acknowledged to himself that the conditions were dangerous. He realized that hoping for someone else to tell him what he already knew was stupid. He turned around, and ended up bringing 40 people back with him who might otherwise have had to have been rescued from the course that night (others DID have to be rescued).

The rest of the weekend, we drove home and talked about why we are driven to do things that we know are dangerous. I myself had been lying in a tent, listening to the rain and hoping that somehow I wouldn’t have to go out in the cold because my team was counting on me to be the “tough” one. It was much the same as Marion’s situation as our team captain.

The need to not be the one who quits is a cultural one, driven by our culture’s obsessive heroicizing those who persist under difficult circumstances. We lionize these heroes with TV coverage and tours. We rarely talk about the people who did nearly the same things and died. They must not have been as tough or as strong. They don’t have lessons to teach us. Or do they?

Choosing to “quit” or not is an important moment, and it’s not a good thing that our rational nature is being overwhelmed because of the need to appear in a certain way to those around us. Quitting is not inherently less smart or less valiant. Choosing to circumvent social expectation is brave. Choosing to speak out against the choices others are making is not going to make you likeable, but it’s courageous.

I quit teaching at the university level to follow my dream to become a writer. It was one of the most difficult things I had ever done, emotionally and psychologically. I remember someone told me, “No one gets a PhD and then does nothing with it.” Like it was an obligation, once I’d started down a certain path, to continue going down it. But it wasn’t the right path for me. I don’t regret starting down the path, but I also don’t regret quitting. I had gotten far enough along it to learn a lot, and to see that I needed a new path.

I’ve DNF’d (Did Not Finish) in very few races in my life. But both times, I knew I was right to quit. If I had kept going, I would have risked more serious injuries than the ones I already had, and possibly would have endangered others. Do I sometimes wish that I could change the course of time and go back and “fix” those races so that I was able to finish them? Yes, I do. But it’s stupid, really, because those races taught me important things about my body and its limits, things that have served me well over the years.

Sure, quitting because something is difficult or because of one bad experience isn’t a good idea. You also shouldn’t quit just because other people tell you you’re not good enough. But quitting because you’ve made a rational choice not to continue is a good thing and we should laud it more. Think about some of the great quitters in the history of the world. Here’s a list of school dropouts who went on to do important things: http://www.buzzfeed.com/ashleyperez/23-famous-dropouts-who-turned-out-just-fine#.sm3j0QQZjZ

Silence

I’ve heard writers talk about going off-line for a while to work on a book, but I’d never done it myself. For years, social media has been a kind of on-line café experience for me. I’d write a page, then go to twitter as a reward, back and forth for 4-5 hours a day. I have found this to be an extremely productive process, and I’ve met a lot of people on-line that I’ve built relationships with.

This weekend, I spent a full day off-line, not because I planned to, but because I was at a Ragnar race in Zion, Utah, where there was virtually no coverage. I was annoyed for most of the time, because I was used to just switching to my phone when I was bored. It was quick, easy stimulation for my brain. Instead, now I had to just sit with silence or make conversation. My brain tends to spin if I don’t force it to think in a particular way, so it did a lot of spinning.

At the end of the weekend, I found myself brimming with story ideas, solutions to a lot of the problems I’d been working on for my current WIP. I knew exactly what needed to happen next, and was excited to get back to work on Monday. So, maybe it wasn’t related to the time I took off of social media. This is definitely not a double-blind experimental study. But I will probably try it again if I get stuck on a project.

The experience has made me wonder how often writer’s block is caused not by a lack of ideas, but too many ideas by too many voices. It has made me think about what it means to find your voice. I have always believed that when I write, I am synthesizing a lot of ideas that I’ve inputted at other times in my life. But what if other people are doing that for me?

I am someone who tends to put in earplugs a lot. I get overstimulated easily by noise, and I am aware of that. Why didn’t it occur to me that I could become overstimulated by psychic noise on the internet, as well?

Sure, there may be an element of nature inspiring me here, but I think it’s more that when I am forced to experience real silence, I become more creative to fill it in my own way. Silence is important to creativity, it turns out.

Don’t Follow Your Dreams

My parents were none too happy with my insistence at a young age that I was going to grow up and be a writer. I was perfectly capable (they thought) of finding a “real” job. I got good grades in math and science. I was competent at organizational skills. Just about the only thing I was really bad at in high school was sports.

I was angry at my parents for a long time because of this. Looking back, I’m pretty sure that they never meant to suggest that I wasn’t *capable* of becoming a writer. Maybe they didn’t even mean to suggest that being a writer wasn’t real work or a worthy aspiration. And so when I had my own kids, as I struggled to develop my career as a writer, I was fiercely protective of their dreams.

One daughter wanted to be an opera singer. And then a pop star. I took her to competitions, got her the best teachers, drover her everywhere. Another daughter wanted to get into MIT, which I really wasn’t sure we could afford and wasn’t sure she could manage. Nonetheless, we paid for science fair projects, competitions, robotics league and equipment. We made sure she got an internship at a programming company. And so on.

Meanwhile, my career as a writer seemed to stall. I had some initial success, but hadn’t seemed to be able to follow it up for reasons that weren’t apparent to me at the time (and which I’m still unraveling, I think). I was frustrated as you sometimes get when you hit 20 years after high school. My ambitions seemed to have been larger than my abilities. And I wondered a lot of the time if maybe I should have had smaller dreams, if that would have made me happier, because I could have achieved those.

This year, I found myself saying out loud to my kids that the one piece of advice I had for them was not to follow their dreams. I had one of those appalling moments you sometimes have, when you realize that you have become your own parents, and not necessarily their best parts, either. I had become cynical about the world of commercial art and I wasn’t sure I much liked the bitter sound of my own voice.

So I have spent some time thinking about it and this is what I have decided:

Don’t Follow Your Dreams Unless …

1. You can’t do anything else with your life because this is the only thing that matters to you.

2. You find you are sabotaging yourself in any normal career because you don’t want to be there.

3. You have seen from the inside what it’s really like and you still want it.

4. You have a network of allies and friends who can help you get up when it gets tough in there.

5. You have a sensible plan for a back-up in case it doesn’t work out and you don’t want to starve.

6. You can take the unbearable heartbreak of rejection and get stronger from it.

7. You have a million ways to find success.

8. You are willing to completely reinvent yourself every other year.

9. You can laugh at yourself and the whole process now and again.

10. You are actually happy doing the work all by yourself, day after day, week after week, year after year.

When I am asked in conferences what I would say to writers who are starting out, I still tend to be cautious and say something like “Don’t quit your day job.” I can’t say I recommend writing as a career. It really isn’t for everyone, and I don’t mean that as a slam to non-writers. I think writers are a special kind of crazy.

But you know, after all these years and after all the knocks and the successes, I think I love writing even more than when I started out. And I admire all the writers out there who have all been through pretty much the same thing, more than I can say. While I mock them and tell them that they really should have listened to their parents and gotten a “real” job instead.