Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 82

Thursday Quotes: From Sarah Beth Durst's Drink Slay Love

"You messed up my life in a high-handed, daddy-knows-best, alpha-male way and reshaped me to suit your own ideals without any regard for my culture or my family background, not to mention my personal wants and needs—and that if I'm being charitable. If I'm not being charitable . . . nor matter how rationalize it or how wide you open those shining eyes of yours, you treated me like a lab rat. Worse, like an expendable lab rat."

As with any romance novel in the vein of Pride and Prejudice, this one has the heroine telling the hero off about his arrogance. Loved that it worked both as spoof and real.

Wednesday Writing: Originality

I talk to a lot of writers and other artistic types about what it is that makes the difference between someone who is merely competent at an art and someone who is outstanding and makes people think--that is what it is all about. We call it "originality," I think, but I often wonder how useful it is to tell a writer who wants to improve to be more "original." Maybe not much.

Let's say you have a student who wants to be a writer and all of her verse ends up sounding exactly like a poor imitation of Dr. Seuss. Or even a good imitation of Dr. Seuss. Both are equally unsellable. Why? Because only Dr. Seuss gets to be Dr. Seuss. A student might argue, saying that Dr. Seuss was a great writer for children and trying to imitate Dr. Seuss is just like an art student going through Europe, imitating all of the great artwork there.

Yes, it is like that. But that is what an art student is doing. Learning the craft. An art student will not sell copies of the greats as original work. Such an artist might be hired to produce artwork to hang on the walls of wealthy people's homes who want to pretend they have the original or in hotels or restaurants. It's certainly a living. But no one will ever go up to the imitation and think of the art student's name. No one will ever imitate the art student herself. Because that is still student work.

What is strange about our current system of learning about art is that those people who are most likely to succeed in the classroom are actually the ones least likely to succeed outside of the classroom. And vice versa. The student who cannot for the life of her sit down and bother to imitate The Mona Lisa, but instead creates a completely different piece of art that is a critique of that one, but that no one else would understand without some help, is actually the far more interesting artist. Also the artist most likely to get an "F" in art class.

We Americans say that we value originality above all else, and maybe we do in some way. But I'm not sure that it is in any way that is useful to the artist in terms of surviving to keep creating art. The sort of originality that we value is more like outrageousness, with an underlying dose of mediocrity. That's the way I see it, anyway. And maybe that's all that originality really is. Or rather, maybe there really is nothing that is truly original. I'm willing to accept that. I'm not sure that I like the sort of pretend originality that forgets to draw attention to its roots, but that might be a quibble.

I copy everything I do. In that sense, I am still a student. I copy Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Lois Bujold, Jim Butcher, Holly Black, and just about every author I have ever read. I do it by reading a book, loving it almost all the way, but not quite, and thinking--if I tweaked that, then I would like it more. Or thinking, I would do it this way. I suppose this sometimes makes it look like my "retellings" are more like inspirations. I'm OK with that criticism. I start off somewhere and then let myself go wherever the inspiration takes me. I hope that this means when people look at my versions, there is NEVER any question that the version is my own. I'm pretty sure I'm the kind of art student who couldn't for the life of her sit down and copy a previous great. I know there's something to be learned in imitation, but it is so BORING! I would make a bad student in some ways.

It's easy to teach other writers craft. What I have found is that the impossible thing to teach is that refusal to copy, the need to make everything stamped with your own special fingerprint. And then, to recreate that fingerprint over and over again in a thousand different ways that no one expects, on things that no one would think you are interested in. I don't know how to teach it. I see some students who seem to do it without thinking and others who come to it slowly, gradually growing in confidence, then others who seem to never grow anywhere and I don't know what makes the difference. I like to say that everything comes with hard work, but this may be one of those things that doesn't.

Tris and Izzie is now out!

To celebrate, I'm linking to a vlog of me talking about "Are You My Romantic Partner?"

Also, here is a nice review of Tris and Izzie from Booklist:

After an opening involving contemporary teen issues such as high-school pecking orders, best friends, and young love, Harrison’s latest takes a surprisingly satisfying turn into fantasy. Izzie’s mother is a witch, and when Izzie tries to use her mother’s love potion on her best friend, she accidentally administers it to both herself and the school’s handsome new hunk. In short order, it turns out that the new high-school hunk is also magic, Izzie herself is a sorceress, and the monsters in the magic world are out to get her in our nonmagic one. As to the best friend and Izzie’s once-perfect ex-boyfriend? Their roles in this are both plot advancing and thought provoking because Harrison’s ethical and moral questions reach to even the smaller characters (as do snarling two-headed dogs and stinking giants). There are a few bumps of incredulity in the behaviors of adults here, but overall this works well as a riff on the magic of romance. Francisca Goldsmith

Annoying romance tropes #13 #14 #15

#13 Forced marriage

This was SO common back in the 70s, and it honestly makes me shake my head in wonder. I would understand if it were common in the 1400s but in the modern day? So, so weird. And that it continues to be part of ANY romance into the current century? Like in The Proposal, seriously? Yes, at least they were reversing it so that the proposal was suggested by the woman but it was still so very, very odd. There are variations on this, like forced weekend together, alone, when the snow begins to fall and they are stuck together for a month--or not quite so long. I have an author friend who calls this the "crucible," when characters are forced to deal with each other under intense circumstances and figure out what needs to be done, but I think the romance version is a little different and sqeeks me out. I see exactly why it is done. As a writer, you want your characters to have a chance to experience what it would be like to be intimate together, but you still need them to keep up the tension of not being together yet. So voila--fake marriage. Um, it's not that easy. I much prefer romances where the characters take it slow and are friends first. There is nothing wrong with a slowly developing intimacy. In fact, everything is right with it.

#14 The Makeover

I'm stealing this from a friend from Sirens this year, who reminded me of the old romance comedy standard of the ugly woman who takes off her glasses, pulls her hair out of a bun, shakes it, and suddenly, she is transformed and is the most beautiful woman ever. This in insulting to both women and men on multiple levels. The idea that it had never occurred to the woman before means that she is an idiot. Also, the idea that the guy can't see her real beauty without needing the makeover is annoying to me. Is he so superficial? Really, I suppose it is the audience who is superficial, to insist upon seeing the woman with the come-hither look and in suddenly revealing clothing. Oh, really? She has breasts? I never noticed before?

#15 Perfect Sex

I recognize that romance novels also serve to some degree as how-to books for women, but nonetheless I am bothered by the insistence on perfect sex the first time for every romantic couple. Is this really what we expect or even want? Of course, we want great sex, but the idea that you would find it on the first encounter seems to me putting up such a high bar on something that is actually more related to trust and communication than it is to some kind of deep connection. Maybe I am just old-fashioned here, but I think I would really love some romance novels where the first attempt at sex is awkward and well, funny. Really, really funny because a sense of humor about sex is an important element in making a relationship work. TMI?

Friday Tri: Sleep

When I was in high school and into graduate school, I was one of those stick in the muds who would not stay up all night or even late at night. Not for a party. Not to study. Not for anything. This is partly because I was--and am--a person of habit. But it also might be because I was a swimmer and had to be at the pool at 5 in the morning every day. I just tired very easily.

The last few years, I have really struggled with insomnia. It was frustrating when I would read that one of the most important elements of a plan to improve athletically was getting more than 8 hours of sleep a night on a regular basis. Even in my best days, I only got about 7 hours of sleep a night and with the insomnia, it was more like an average of 4-5 hours a night. I tried to deal with the insomnia by having VERY strict hours, but honestly, I was already keeping on a pretty regular schedule. I don't drink alcohol and I don't consume caffeine on a regular basis, so those weren't the problem.

What was the problem? Not listening to my body. In the last month or so, I have given up almost completely the idea of an alarm to wake me in the morning. I know that obviously not everyone has the luxury to do this, but somehow mentally giving myself the permission to sleep as late as my body wants to has solved a lot of the lingering insomnia issues of the last few years. Yes, there are still some days when I have to set an alarm. I can't avoid those, but the other days somehow seem to make up for it. Maybe I am just getting older and need more sleep, but I suspect that if I had been listening to my body all along, I would have been getting more sleep for years.

Listening to my body has become a theme of late. Listening instead of telling it what I want it to do. Not that I ever had that much success making it go past its limits, but the mental energy of the attempt made things worse. I have also had some success taking mini naps in the day, a couple times a week. I do think that it makes sense that our modern life has made us so divorced from the natural sense of rhythm that is part of a normal human life. We think about what has to get done, instead of thinking what is best to do for ourselves. We are so rush-rush and so oriented on completing tasks that we forget sometimes that the tasks might be done more slowly and more completely with more sleep. We act as if there is no other choice than being stressed all the time.

The reality is that the more we are stressed, the more we NEED sleep, though the less we seem to take it. If you can't give permission to yourself, then here I am, giving you permission. Sleep in one day this week. Or two. Or take a nap instead of doing that one last thing. Your body--and your mind--will work better.

Thursday Quotes: Kate Morton's The Forgotten Garden

"The Princess grew to be a beautiful little girl, full of joy and light. She bewitched the ocean with her singing and brought smiles to the faces of all throughout the land. All, that is, except the Queen, who was too plagued by fear to enjoy her child. When her daughter sand the Queen did not hear, when her daughter danced the Queen did not see, when her daughter reached out the Queen did not feel, for she was too busy calculating the time left before the child was to be taken from her."

This comes from one of the fairy tales in the story, "The Changeling." I found myself feeling very sympathetic to this mother. My two oldest seem ready to leave the house at any moment and every day, I am a little sad thinking about the future without them. But what I should be doing is enjoying the present with them in it with great gusto.

Writing Wednesday: Setting and Character

I was talking to a friend about a manuscript she was struggling to revise this week. Her agent had told her that she needed to have a better sense of setting in the book, but she didn't know how to do that. She said that the story happened in a very average town, and she didn't really want to make the town itself something more different than that. It was the character's story that mattered, not where she was when it happened.

I thought about this for a while. I am not a huge fan of long descriptive paragraphs of setting. I spent some time with my daughter recently, helping her with her English homework. Ah, the good old days when people talked about "the theme" of a story, or "the ambiguity of the ending" or "the meaning." Ha! Not that it's not interesting to talk about such things. But it's just so impossible to get agreement on them, and I wish that somehow students had the right idea, that being able to talk about such things is the point, not finding the supposed answer in "Cliff Notes." But my math-minded daughter also did not want to hear "there is no right answer, only lots of wrong answers."

Anyway, I read through some of these famous short stories, now deemed good enough to be read by high school (and perhaps college) English students. A dubious honor, I suppose. They all had a "rich" sense of setting. Meaning, lots of words devoted to telling you where the story happened and lots of the writer showing off how elegant and fluid their voice could be, how poetic a descripion of something as lowly as a wagon or a barn could be.

To all this I say: Phooey!

I still don't care about setting. What I care about is character. But setting is always part of character.

What I told my friend was that when I think of my childhood experiences, they are always grounded in a place. I can remember the giant lilac bush that we would play "Annie Over the Lilac Bush," a game where you throw a ball over the top, and wait for it to come back. There is no telling how soon that will happen, since you can't see if the other side caught it or not. You always have to be ready. But for me, childhood is always near that lilac bush, the smell of it, the gorgeous, hot beginning of summer when the flowers came out, the promise of the rest of the heat to come, the happiness that the end of winter was here and that no longer would every day have to be spent inside, being pestered by brothers or cajoled into doing chores for Mom. Childhood was the tire swing that I could smell in the heat, and could feel melting around me. It was the barn in the back of our property, in front of the forest that was cool and dark and scary. The wood of the barn was old and weathered, the grain easily visible, and tactile when I walked barefoot over it, and full of the smell of our small pony Romeo. Childhood is the swimming pool that had once been the foundation of a house by ours, which turned into an ice skating rink in the winter. Childhood is the blackberry bushes our neighbors grew and which we were allowed to pick and eat as much as we wanted. It was our chicken coops and the friends I made with feathered chicks who grew older and more cantankerous.

This is just to say that we are grounded in our place, and that even if it doesn't matter to you, the author, where the place of a story is, it matters to the character. To your main character, that place is her whole world, and her relationship to it tells you everything about her you may need to know. When it's done properly.

Someday, I will write a list of all the writing elements that I think in the end are just about character. The plot, the voice, the magic system, and everything else. I read for character and I write for it, too. All problems in writing, and all solutions, come back to character for me.

More annoying romance tropes #10 #11 #12

More annoying romance tropes:

#10 liquid metaphors

I don't know why, but this bothers me to no end. I don't want to hear about how everything about the heroine liquifies the hero or vice versa. I don't want to hear it over and over again. I think that what is going on here is that there is an attempt to make the argument that when the hormones take over, there is no more reasoning left. When you go liquid, that means you don't have free will anymore and so you're not thinking about whether or not you and this person are a good match. I don't buy that for a minute. I also don't find it romantic to feel that my free will has been taken away. Vampires do this, too, and freak me out for the same reason. Not romantic. This is an extension of the rape metaphor, that when we can't "choose" anymore, then our choices can't be held against us. We're not to be held to a moral standard. I understand that women have often been criticized for choosing to be sexual, but I don't want to see it continued.

#11 heroine slapping the hero

I suppose that there is nothing wrong with some role reversal, allowing the heroine to show power. What I think is annoying is that men are vilifed for striking women and women get to do it without any consequences. If violence is wrong, isn't is always wrong? Yes, generally speaking, women are somewhat smaller than men and can be physically overwhelmed by them. But this seems somehow to be unfair. Sure, you want a man who has self control. But you also want a heroine who isn't being a brat. Not to say that this never works. One extreme example is The Queen of Attolia, where Gen gets his whole hand cut off.

#12 letters gone astray

I am astonished at how often this still pops up in romance novels, despite the fact that writing letters is pretty passe with the internet and email. Nonetheless, there are lots of novels where letters go astray and a romance ends, only to be rekindled years later with all that extra longing involved. I suppose that the metaphor behind this is that we often have problems communicating with the one we love. Fear prevents that, and sometimes real differences that keep us from understanding how we could be misunderstood. But the letter going astray makes me feel like the characters are leaving things too much to chance. Wouldn't they follow up? Why would you leave your future dependent on something as unreliable as snail mail?

Monday Book Recs--Morton, Hodkin, Card

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton

I read this book for my book club, but I liked it a lot. As a writer, I was intrigued at the way in which I would continue reading to find out the answers to the big questions the novel began with and the smaller ones that come up along the way. As in a detective story, I found myself trying to guess what the real ending was, sure that the author wouldn't reveal the truth too soon. Indeed, the secrets continue to be revealed to the very last page. This is about a four year old girl who comes off a ship in Australia alone and with no memories of her family. She is adopted, and then told the truth later, returns to England and tries to find out the answers about her past. Who is she and why was she abandoned? I loved the feel of the book, sprawling, but never bogged down. There are several different times going on at the same time, but I honestly had no trouble telling them apart. If I had a tiny quibble with the book it would be that I felt like the ending erred a little on the side of plot rather than on the side of character. That probably makes no sense, but you know when an author wants an ending to come out a certain way and maybe the characters don't act true to form because of the need to have the final perfect surprise?

The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin

This book does a fabulous job of teasing the reader, doling out little bits and pieces of the all important back story in paragraphs here and there, and also in startlingly real hallucinations. The main character is "Mara Dyer" (not her real name) who has been in a terrible accident with her three friends and moves to another state to get away from her memories and to start over. But she can't start over, because she doesn't remember what happened, and she is very afraid that she had something to do with it. She becomes involved with a hot English guy (rolls eyes) who is ultra rich (more eye rolling), but she is also a loner at school. She ends up seeing a therapist and being put on anti-psychotic medication. Her hallucinations seem to disappear for a while, and then things grow more sinister, and death is lurking in every corner. At the end of the book, I wasn't sure what parts of the story were real and what weren't real and I liked that. I've tried to do it myself in novels, and it's damned tricky to pull off without making your story seem trivial. I liked these characters and I cared a lot about what happened to them. I will definitely be picking up the next book for more. I have my own suspicions about what is going on, but I won't share them here. The writing is fluid and fun and the pages turned at a quick pace. A great read for people who love mystery and high school. And a huge helping of dark on the side.

Laddertop by Orson Scott Card and Emily Janice Card

I wish that there were more graphic novels. I really like them, but my understanding is that they are simply too expensive to produce and readers are not buying them in large enough numbers. This was a fun story about a girl who wants to go up to the Laddertop Academy, a sort of space elevator that all-knowing, benevolent (?) aliens have offered to Earth. The first volume is how she gets there. Presumably many more secrets are yet to be revealed. I liked the characters, but I have to say I struggled not to make comparisons to Ender's Game, good and bad. The idea of children going into a school in space obviously is part of it, and it may not be more than that. Some parts about weightlessness were maybe just necessary to set the stage. It's a girl instead of a boy and the cast is multi-racial, which I liked. I liked the testing process, and I felt really bad for the girl who was left behind and interested in what would happen to her next.

Friday Tri: DNFs and revising your goals

I don't like to DNF (Did Not Finish) at races. I suspect almost no amateur athletes do. After all, we're paying to be in the race. We don't want to go home without finishing it. But certainly many professional athletes DNF at races for reasons that make sense to me. They end up with too many mechanical problems to make up the lost time or they end up getting sick and feel it would be unwise to stress their bodies farther. I try not to make judgements about them being spoiled and all that (thought sometimes I am frustrated at the fact that I ALWAYS carry my own tubes and they seem to expect race vehicles to save them.) Still, they are in a different world than the one I am. Their priorities are different. They really can't afford to waste energy on a race that they're not going to win.

I've had multiple problems at races and finished anyway, including most recently a rather painful and scary crash on the bike at full speed into another competitor. I've had two tire problems (and was only carrying one tube) at Ironman St. George last year. And of course, I've experienced the more general problem of simply not being able to keep going at the pace that I thought I could. I've never, for example, been able to continue running through an entire Ironman marathon. In fact, I haven't even been able to keep running at any half Ironman half marathon. I set a goal to do this, and end up revising my goals on my feet. Sometimes this kind of revision is simply telling myself that if I keep walking, I will get to the finish line before the cutoff time is over, and allowing myself to decide if I will be able to run again later. Inevitably, I end up being able to run again after time has passed.

I have DNF'd once, though. Looking back, I regret the fact that I wasn't in good enough shape the morning of the race to finish it, but I don't regret the decision to quit once the race had started and I had given it a good try. For reasons I still do not understand, I was simply not able to go at the speed that normally would be easy. I ended up taking a bad fall because of balance problems and nursing a shoulder injury rotator cuff injury for months afterward. Maybe someday I will try that race again. Maybe not. But I have been through enough races that I trusted my feeling that this wasn't a race I could finish (there was a cut-off and I was growing increasingly away from the pace necessary to reach it).

What I have learned, though, as I keep at this, is that one of the most valuable things for an amateur like me to be able to do to finish a race is to continually accept that race conditions and my own health conditions will dictate my mental self-talk, and that no amount of shouting at myself or telling myself I'm not working hard enough is of any value at all. I am pretty much always working hard enough. I think I've earned at least that amount of respect for myself, not to doubt. I don't take it easy, and if things don't turn out well, I still did my best. Once the race is over and I've crossed the finish line, there is no purpose in trying to go back and figure out if I could have worked harder. Of course, I always try to think of things I could have done better, usually before the race started, but sometimes during. But it's not about me working hard enough.

This morning, I ran 40 miles on my treadmill in preparation for my annual 50 mile race. I've done it 5 years in a row now, and this year, I was determined to train for it better. In previous years, I have done the 50 miles over two days of running, and while that got me through the course, there was always a point when I hit about mile 35 that I hit a wall. I thought that if I ran more on a single day, I might be able to get over that wall. We'll see whether that was true or not in a few more weeks. But today, I was struggling. My legs are tired because last week, I ran 35 miles, then 15 over two days and the week before that, I ran 30/15 and then did an Olympic race three days later.

I hit mile 25 and realized that my plan of walking 1 minute every mile was not going to work. I was too exhausted. So I changed the plan. I gave myself 1/2 mile rests every 5 miles, and then walked 1/4 mile for every 1/4 mile I ran. Two or three minutes on, two or three minutes off. It was frustrating because it felt like everything was slowing down and I wanted the workout to be OVER. But looking back on it, I am really proud of myself for being flexible enough to change the plan while in the middle of the workout. Instead of giving up entirely (which believe me, I considered over and over again), I found a way to keep going.

There's an important lesson in there somewhere about life. I'm not saying there are never times to give up. There really are. Some things truly are not meant to be. But being able to accept that things might turn out as you expected, but that you still did well--I think that is one of the most human and most laudable outcomes possible. We are tool builders, yes. But more important than that, we humans have this incredible ability to anticipate the future and to mold ourselves because of this imagined world. There is nothing in the world that is making me (or any other amateur athlete) run 40 or 50 miles. I'm not being chased by enemies with weapons. I'm not saving my children. I'm not hunting food for survival. But nonetheless, I do this.

Why?

Because I want to be always improving myself. I want to throw away my old vision of myself and make a new one. Making a new me as I come up against my own limitations--isn't that the most human thing of all?