Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 9

There's no easy part

when it comes to writing.

I’ve heard other writers say that they think certain parts of writing are the “easy” part. Some say it’s the first draft, because revising is so difficult. Others say it’s the revision that’s easier. And some say the easiest part is copyediting. They’re all wrong. There is no easy part.

1. Outlining (if you do this part consciously or not, I think all writers do it) is about trying to take hold of something as intricate and subtle and huge as a whole novel and get your head around it. It’s trying to plant beats in the right places and figure out some of the big problems in advance. While you’re outlining, you’re constantly taking off and putting on the writer hat and the editor/agent hat. And you’re not even writing scenes. You’re approximating writing without having any of the fun that comes with it.

Outlining sucks.

2. Writing a first draft is all about letting your imagination go wild, putting in all the parts that might be totally and completely wrong, knowing it isn’t working and pushing forward anyway, dealing with daily fears about not being ready to write this, and sometimes feeling like you’re going backward faster than forward.

First drafting sucks.

3. Working on a revision means you have to deal with feedback from someone who sees all the problems in your first draft. They make lists of them, sometimes in great detail, and then send them to you. Sometimes they expect to get paid by you for this. When you get an editorial letter, you will likely want to hide or murder someone, or both. And then you have to figure out how this thing there affects that thing there, and fix them both at the same time. Your head will feel like it’s about to explode.

Revision sucks.

4. Copyediting is about the tiniest details that the reviewers are going to hound you about that honestly no one really cares about, except that you have to. You can’t hire out this job no matter how tedious it may seem because it’s your last chance to change your book. Of course, you can’t change it too much no matter how enormous the mistake you find in it is because it’s likely already gone to press for ARCs, and that’s what reviews are going to based on. So good luck fixing everything in a sentence or less! And let me say again that you will never be able to change this book again, even if you see the perfect solution ten years down the road.

Copyediting sucks.

5. Waiting is after the book is sent out to reviews and there is nothing you can do but bite your fingernails and wish you could live in a cave where there is no internet access. You have no control anymore. The book is written and sure, you’re also supposed to be working on a sequel or a second book or something, but who can do that when your nerves are jangling like that? But you have to because otherwise you’re going to go mad and you’ll drive everyone else mad right along with you.

Waiting sucks.

6. Self-promotion is just before your book comes out (no one knows the exactly right time, but it’s not too soon and it’s not too late) and you have to go out and be the most interesting, sparkling personality on the planet. Everything you say has to be not only correct, but kind. It has to be wise and accurate. It has to be what will sell your book, too. No pressure or anything!

Self-promotion sucks.

Getting Back on the Bike

I talked last year about the bad bicycle crash that happened on my birthday during a race. I was broadsided by a racer who wasn’t paying attention and who was DQ’d for hitting me. Nonetheless, I ended up in an ambulance with a concussion and a lot of other injuries. My bike was also badly damaged, though I repaired it. I hold no grudges toward this racer and wish the best for him in the future.

But …

The result of the crash has been that I am increasingly nervous about cycling outdoors. I forced myself to do a race in October, about 6 weeks after the crash, in hopes of overcoming my problems of replaying the accident repeatedly when I was on the road. It did help a little, but I continue to worry about crashing in my races this year, to the point that I find myself wondering WHY I signed up for any races. I like being fit, but do I really want to keep racing?

A lot of these same anxieties struck me for a couple of years following a contract cancellation in the publishing world. I kept writing, but I sent fewer manuscripts to my agent because I was so pessimistic about them. My wonderful editor kept trying to get me to send her proposals, but the fear of being rejected was something that was always in the back of my mind, and it can be deadly to being truly creative, taking risks, and being true to yourself–all of which are the basis of continuing to work in the arts.

Rejection is painful for everyone. I collected a lot of rejections for my work in the early days of my career, and each one hurt. Sometimes the ones that I knew were good signs, personalized notes, hurt even more than the form rejections. I think what I have to say about how to get back on the bike will apply to people who are at any stage of an artistic career.

First of all, you don’t have to get back on the bike. You can be finished. You can do something else with your life if that is what you choose, open-eyed, not allowing fear to be the only deciding factor.

But if you want to get back on the bike, some ideas:

1. Try writing something different, something you’ve never done before. Like riding your bike in a completely different venue, this may help open up your mind and stop you from replaying old, negative scenarios.

2. Create a group or reconnect with writer friends, as you might ask friends to bike with you in a group and help you conquer your fear of the road together. Friends can help read your work, but if you’re not ready for that, they can simply talk about the business, about their own struggles, and generally make you feel like less of a crazy person. This can be vital to facing the blank page again.

3. Read. Watch TV. Or do whatever else recharges your creative battery. Now is a great time to attack your TBR pile or to binge watch favorite shows. This will remind you of why you wanted to do this in the first place. For a cyclist, it’s like watching old reels of you on the road, or reminding yourself of your previous victories. But it pushes you forward. It may not seem to be working at first, but trust me, keep at. It will.

4. Be protective of your work. You have every right to ask people to treat you with special kindness, and if you don’t trust that they will–don’t share with them. Don’t go back on the road with people who may crash into you again.

5. Spend time doing nothing. Meditate. Go on long walks. Sleep. Sit with quiet. Your mind needs healing and your body may need it, as well. Give it what it needs.

6. Try small goals that seem ridiculously easy, like writing one sentence a day. For me on the bike, I think I need to actually get out and ride just a few minutes and see how it feels.

7. Draw or sing or do something else creative. This is akin to number 1. It may actually feel safer to do something completely different. Instead of riding my bike, I sometimes try to do Cross-Fit or weight-lifting or sign up for a swimming race.

Writers get hit a lot. We don’t always talk about it because people who aren’t writers don’t understand and if we’ve had any success at all, it can sound like we’re whining about not getting even more. But if you’ve been hit, there are a lot of people who’ve been there and can relate. You’re not crazy if you can’t just bounce back. It may not even be wise to keep working in the state you’re in. There may be more productive things for you to do. But give yourself permission to recover from your crash. Get angry if you need to get angry. Feel sorry for yourself. Cry. Take your bike apart and put it back together. One day, that crash may end up being important to your future.

Or that’s what I hope, anyway.

Relationships and Power

Relationships are about power. They aren’t only about power, but trying to take power out of relationships ends up making them feel false to me.

Sure, you can have a character who refuses to engage in political arguments. That character may say that she does it because she doesn’t want to ruin the relationship. But this is a kind of power and a declaration of superiority. I refuse to engage because I am not going to sink to your level.

Characters are always going to be jockeying for power. They may do it unconsciously, but they are still doing it. Best friends forever who would do anything for each other are still seeking for power in every interaction with each other. Siblings even more so.

Power is so much a part of the way that we see the world that we create power relationships even when there are none. Thinking of someone as a father figure is creating a power relationship where there was none.

The way that people often see same sex relationships as heterosexual (one is the guy and one is the girl) is because heterosexual relationships are about power on one level or another. Feminism is about women getting power, often by taking on masculine characteristics because the binary is all about power.

Anyway, as a writer, when you are developing the relationships between your characters, think about how to depict the power grabs as they play out. No one character will always have all the power. That is boring. Even the most downtrodden characters will try to take power back in one moment or another. And they will succeed, too. For just a moment, maybe, but it matters.

Too cynical of me? I think relationships are also about love, about common goals, about humor, and other things. But yeah, don’t try to pretend that power isn’t there or you’ll end up writing something flat and unreal.

Meaningful Story

I was talking to a friend recently about a book we’d both read part of, and then put down. If you’d asked me about the problem, I’d have said that I felt like the characters lacked depth. The writing worked well at making me turn pages and move from chapter to chapter, but I reached a point where I realized that I didn’t really care what happened at the end. There was a big build to a climax, but I was kind of meh about it. I could take it or leave it.

My friend described the problem as being about meaning. There was a lot of stuff going on and the story was written well. But there wasn’t any depth behind the story events. There wasn’t a deeper meaning. The author hadn’t thought carefully about why the world was the way that it was. There wasn’t, in the end, a thoughtful, philosophical perspective on life. There were no bits that were quotable because they related to real life.

There is nothing wrong with a book like this, I hasten to add here. Sometimes I am in a mood for a book that is just a story. But I wasn’t then.

What I think writers need to be aware of is that there is a line between telling a fun story and being preachy. You don’t want to turn your book into a screed about your political point of view. You don’t want to put in so much research that the story gets lost in your historical fiction. You don’t want your characters to become talking mouths for you and your best friends. But you may also want to have a bit more depth in your book than it “just” being a fun, rousing adventure.

So how do you do that?

Well, a lot of it has to do with world building. Some of it has to do with plot. If you have already written your book, think about what the rules of the world are that you have set up. There are rules in every world, whether or not you are writing speculative fiction with stated magical or science fictional rules. The rules of your high school world might be that the meanest person wins, or that the underdog is going to come out on top. Or they might be that magic always costs you in your heart, or in your life. Or that the universe will continue on long after mankind is dead.

These rules are important to the deeper meaning of your story. You have to know what your rules are before you can figure out what you have to say about them. First, you may want to check and see if the rules of your world are rules you actually want to write about or that you believe in. If not, think about it. Could you change your story so that it says more what you believe in? How would you enact that change?

Now, onto the plot. Think about what your plot is saying about your protagonist. Are you writing a plot where the protagonist is fully in charge of every action? Is there free will? How often do things happen that are entirely unexpected? Does the plot end with something outside of anyone’s control? Are events often random? What are you saying about the world with your plot? Are you saying something consistent?

Being aware of what you are saying is the first step in saying something deeper. Once you are aware of what your character, world building and plot MEAN, then you can do a few light touches that make it so that the reader will be able to figure it out without too much work. Don’t overdo it!!! Two paragraphs is often enough. You are allowed to choose ONE symbol (a flower or maybe an image of a star) and you can talk about it twice. That’s it. Don’t hit your reader over the head.

Lots of writers are able to tell a deeper story without ever intentionally using symbols or other devices. Lots of writers use stories as vehicles for political messages and they think that’s the way it should be done. For the rest of us, there is a middle way.

When you’re writing the book you’re not ready to write

I’m working on a book I first conceived of nearly 20 years ago. And it turns out I still don’t feel ready to write it. Here are some of the symptoms of that:

1. Procrastination. I spent a week doing nothing, telling myself maybe I should think of a different project to work on.

2. Distraction. Every morning, I think of new, VERY important pieces I must write which keep me from working on the thing I’m not ready to write. Also, the internet.

3. Telling myself it’s not good enough. This is also a reflex, I suspect, to protect myself from continuing to have to do hard work that doesn’t feel good because it takes a long time to produce something that’s worth working on.

4. Because I’m not good enough. This means in particular that I’ve been replaying conversations with my agent about other books that I failed to rework in a productive way. If I couldn’t write those books, what makes me think I can write this one, which is much harder?

5. Wondering if my main character is likeable. Because MCs have to be likeable, you know.

6. Reminding myself that no one will buy this book. It’s too experimental. It makes people think too hard. It talks about things people don’t want to have to think about.

7. Telling myself that I need to figure out what the climax of the book is going to be, even if I’m not writing that part yet. Because anything would be easier than trying to write the part that I’m supposed to be writing right now.

8. Getting up to get a snack. Then planning out lunch. And also my workout for the day. Anything that isn’t writing.

9. Wondering if I should use a different pov, someone who is more likeable. Less angry.  Also, a male pov. A nice, likeable white cis hetero male.

10. Telling myself that no one wants to read a scene like that so close to the beginning of a book. What are you thinking? It will make every reader put the book down.

11. Wondering if this is a young adult book (with a 13 year old pov) or an adult book or neither. Because no one will want to read this book.

12. Can I make this story less grim? It isn’t a dystopian, not really. Is it?

13. What is the happy ending to this story going to be? Does it have to have a happy ending? What about all those rules about readers wanting to feel like they’ve been on a journey that pays off for them?

14. Wondering where this twitch in my eye came from?

15. Thinking about taking the religion out of this book.

16. Trying to figure out who the good guys are.

If this series of excuses not to work on the book you’re not ready to write sounds familiar, join the club. And keep working on it anyway. Because the only way to be ready to write a hard book is to write it despite all your fears. Tell yourself it’s an experiment. Tell yourself you’re just playing around. Tell yourself you’re doing a hard thing and that you’re allowed to fail when you’re doing a hard thing. And then get back to work!

Accessibility

One of the most overlooked writing skills is accessibility. This is the quality that makes it easy to read and that is precisely why it is overlooked. Critics in particular imagine that a writer whose prose is easy to read is simplistic in thinking, has a small vocabulary personally, and is simply writing down uncritically what is to hand. But the ability to convey complex ideas and backstory, to use dialogue that feels real and is easy to understand, to show just the right detail in just the scene—these are skills that not every writer has and are proof of talent, not luck or lack of thought.

In particular, writing science fiction and fantasy with high accessibility is one of the most underrated skills of the current day. Young adult fiction demands this skill, and it is almost universally seen as a sign that young adult science fiction and fantasy is dumbed down for the younger audience. The assumption is that the writers and editors of this fiction are similarly incapable of understanding the more “complex” adult versions of science fiction and fantasy. What a backward idea it is to assume that someone who can make the rules of a science fictional world understandable to a wide audience must therefore be unknowledgeable.

I frequently tell writers of sf/f in my writing classes that I have a rule that you can only use one “new” word per page, especially in the first chapter of a book. I use this rule for adult genre writing as well as for YA, because I think accessibility is a skill that more genre writers should cultivate. Throwing ten new words (whether they are made up in fantasy or are simply dictionary words in science fiction) shouldn’t be the way to prove that you know your chops in the writing world. If you truly understand your world and the rules of your world, you should be able to explain them to a very small child using words of single syllables.

I also have a rule that you are not allowed to make up a word (or use a four syllable one) if there is already a word in English that would be perfectly well suited to the meaning you intend. Ditto for spelling words “dyfuruntlee” in order to show that you are writing science fiction or fantasy. This is a massive pet peeve of mine, since the meaning is the same, but if the spelling is different, you are going to make readers stop and have to think before they move on. This decreases accessibility and will make some readers put down your book. If you are using “magic” in your world, then say “magic,” not “torble.” You can explain your magic perfectly well using an ordinary word.

I spent years in academia, specifically in a literature program, and believe me, I know a lot of big words that are used for simple ideas purely so that the writer can prove that they have read all the big names in modern criticism. It took me several years to recover from that program and to start writing again so that normal people could understand my meaning. In criticism, you use terminology that links back to other critics and you are writing only to an audience of similarly trained readers, which is honestly about two hundred people in the world. So, your accessibility to a wider audience isn’t very important. No other readers are going to care about a nuance of meaning you’ve discovered in a Goethe poem that no one has ever read, in the original German dialect that it was scribbled down in Goethe’s own hand. But real people don’t talk like that.

In writing programs, you frequently hear of students being given the assignment to go out and actually transcribe real dialog, to hear what it sounds like. Well, doing this is a great exercise in linguistics, but I don’t know how useful it is for writing. If you write down as many “um’s” “you know’s” and simply incomprehensible incomplete sentences that happen in real conversations, you may feel like you’re being authentic, and you may even get some great critical reviews, but I suspect you will also have very few readers.

The funny thing about writing accessibly is that it appears to be transparent. You are deliberately erasing yourself as a writer from the act of writing. You take out any details that your pov character would not notice. You immerse yourself in the mind of your protagonist, such that it may appear to critics that you have become your protagonist. This is never true, but it’s a criticism that is often leveled against women writers, because of course, women can’t write about anything but what they experience themselves.

If you’re interested sometime, go look at how many best-selling women authors (for instance, Stephanie Meyer) are accused of simply writing about their own lives or experiences in a way that best-selling male authors aren’t. Writing with a prose that erases you as an author is something that is deliberate and allows your readers to experience a book more immersively. It is a style choice. It isn’t a sign of bad writing. I suspect it is a sign of humility, a decision not to use your writing as a way to insist that you are a good writer.

The more I see writers “showing off” by using big words, flowery descriptions that don’t fit the pov character they’ve chosen, or giving long explanations of things that aren’t necessary, the more I am happy to sit back, invisible, and write books that lots of people want to read and think that I just write unconsciously, letting the words flow from my fingertips without considering every one of them as carefully as someone who uses fancier words. I suppose I would say it’s like someone who cooks a meal that has ingredients that no one has ever heard of. It doesn’t mean that you’re a better cook than someone who cooks with all the ingredients your average family will have in their refrigerator at home. It just means you’re more interested in making a show than in people actually enjoying their own food.

Teaching Writing

Years ago, my daughter went to a special writers day for the school district, and when i asked her about the author who was the special guest for the day, I had never heard of her. I ended up looking her up on-line and discovering she hadn't published anything in about twelve years. At the time, I shook my head and said something about "real writers" that I am embarrassed about now. I had the attitude that a writer who hadn't published recently and who wasn't writing what was currently in vogue didn't have the chops to teach writing. Oh, how things have changed!

After spending many years in the world of publishing and meeting many writers, I have found to my surprise and chagrin that the writers who are current best sellers are not always the most interesting speakers about writing and often do not know how to teach writing at all. This is, I suspect, partly because they are new to the field and haven't spent a long time thinking about writing, but are spending a lot of time writing and touring. (I wonder if they might be better speakers about self-promotion and being celebrities.) And writers I've never heard of, or who did their most commercially successful work years ago are often the wisest, kindest, most giving people I've ever met.

The old saying about teachers being the people who aren't able to do what they teach for a living is really backwards and insulting. The truth is that there are very different skills necessary for teachers of writing and writers. Some writers develop the skills to be great teachers and others don't. Some writers think a lot about how writing works, analyzing it and verbalizing it to other writers. Others just don't have the interest or capacity to do this. But there's no need to make judgments (as I did) about who is a "real" writer and who isn't.

At Writing For Charity last weekend, I sat in on a couple of panels with Matt Kirby and every time, he made an effort to tell people in the audience that he considered them all professional writers, whether or not they had published anything. Being engaged in writing to the level that you pay to go to conferences is all it takes. Publication is about a combination of luck and skill and taking chances. It's not about effort. And teaching writing is about kindness, openness, and a lot of experience.

How do you find time to write?

When my 5 kids were little, a Kirby vacuum salesman came to the door and said he would vacuum one room in my house to prove to me how clean he could make it with his awesome vacuum. I invited him in, thought for a moment, and led him to the master bedroom because I cleaned the living room and kitchen when guests came over, and the kids’ bedrooms when they made a mess, but my own bedroom didn’t get clean often.

An hour later, the Kirby salesman was still vacuuming. At one point, he thought to ask me how long it had been since I had vacuumed that room. I considered the question for a long time before realizing that I had NEVER vacuumed that room. When we moved into the house two years earlier, we replaced the carpet and since it was new, I just kept thinking it was still pretty clean and ignored it.

To give credit to the Kirby guy, who probably should have run screaming from me at that point, he nodded and said, well, if you’re only going to vacuum once every other year, you should definitely use a Kirby vacuum because it’s sturdy enough to do the job. He ended up having a short cell phone conversation with his boss when he was finished. I was pretty sure the boss chewed him out because, well, someone who doesn’t vacuum a room for two years might not have the kind of priorities that would make her choose to pay $2000 for a vacuum cleaner.

If you’re going to be a writer, you’re going to have different priorities than other people. And at some point, they are going to be horrified by that. But the real question is, will they still buy your books? I think they will.

Your Writing Apprenticeship

You hear a lot as an aspiring writer that you should write what you’re passionate about, that you should write from the heart, that you should follow your dreams and not cave to commercial pressures. You hear that you should dig down deep and be brave and spill your heart out. And I do believe all of those things.

But . . .

I don’t think any of those mean that you get to skip the process of learning that comes from rejection and rewriting. Just because you have written something that is deeply personal doesn’t mean it’s good writing. It doesn’t mean that you should ignore all criticism.

Which is why I sometimes wonder if it makes sense to work on practice projects for the first part of your apprenticeship. In the old days, apprentices were frequently given the task of copying something the master had done, in order to learn better skills. In our modern times, this is seen as somehow insulting or beneath any artist. I don’t know that it is.

I am glad I wrote and published the novels that I wrote and published in the early part of my career. I am even more glad that the novels that were rejected were rejected before I started publishing and even after I started publishing. So, so glad! I have a few friends who published early books with local presses and wish they hadn’t, simply because their writing skills weren’t very good.

There is nothing wrong with working on projects that aren’t your heart and soul. There is nothing wrong with doing things just for fun, or doing writing that you will get paid for that isn’t what you live and breathe and die for. You can use your writing skills to write advertising copy, websites for businesses, and even to write books for packagers if that’s what you need to do to survive. Those can be part of your apprenticeship.

When I was starting out, I went to a workshop by a big name author. One of his suggestions was to skip writing the smaller books and just go straight to the mega bestsellers. He had some advice on how to figure out which of your ideas was going to be a mega bestseller. But the problem I think about more and more is that most writers when they are publishing smaller books need that time to develop skills so that they can write the bigger books (and I mean bigger in more than just best-selling). They are developing storytelling skills that go beyond grammar and punctuation.

And guess what? They are developing other skills today. I can look back at my early career and see so many things I had to learn. I needed to learn how to present to a large group. I needed to learn how to capture the interest of a group of school children. I needed to learn how to talk about writing to other writers. I needed to learn how to do a newspaper interview, a radio interview. I needed to learn how to schmooze people in a bar (still learning that one, actually). I needed to learn how to cold call people. I needed to learn how to be kind to someone whose writing wasn’t very good.

I couldn’t just skip over all those parts and go straight to writing “the book of my heart.” I had no idea, frankly, what the book of my heart was. I didn’t know what my heart was. It’s like asking a high school kid what they want to do when they grow up. A lot of them think they know what they want and will tell you. And most of them will be wrong. The ones who are honest admit they might have some idea, but it’s pretty vague. And this is just fine. It’s fine not to know what you love and who you are. Even if you are a grown up. Even if you know you love writing and you love the book you’re working on, but aren’t sure if that’s the place you’re going to be in for the rest of your life.

So, yes, write what you’re passionate about. Write what you can’t not write about. But accept that it can change at any moment. *You* can change. That’s one of the joys of being alive. We are changeable. Very changeable. And doing the work that is given to you now doesn’t box you into any corners. Just because you write smaller books doesn’t mean you can’t write bigger books later, when you’re ready. And the reverse is true. If you’re writing big books now, you can write small books later if that’s where your heart takes you.

Writers on Writing: When Bad Stuff Happens

I was on a panel at LTUE last month and I think we all ended up being surprised to discover the recent bad stories that people had to share. Three of the five of us were Egmont authors, and we talked about what it meant to have books canceled by the closing of Egmont USA. But everyone had a story to tell about being treated badly by publishers (and I don’t mean to say publishers are always evil—just that sometimes a business decision can feel very personal).

It could have been a really negative part of the day, but instead it turned out to be really inspiring. One author talked about how she had spent the year before really figuring out how to love writing again. And because of that, she had already made a lot of the changes that she needed to have made before she moved forward with changing houses and re-branding herself.

I talked about moving from YA to adult, and how being in a place where I had started to send out job applications made me cherish what I thought were my last few months of writing. I decided to write a couple of books that I had never dared to write before. They were books I didn’t intend to send to anyone because I was sure they wouldn’t be any good. But The Bishop’s Wife was one of those books. I didn’t think anyone would be interested in such a weird little book. I wrote it purely for myself, and that taught me a lot about the difference between writing a good story you think other people will enjoy and writing a story that you need to write. If you’re not writing the book that only you can write, then why are you writing?

Another author talked about working full-time as a lawyer, being fired, and then realizing that his severance package gave him a couple of years to figure out if he could finally get down that novel that had been in his brain for a while.

And then there was an author who talked about figuring out how to market herself after being dropped by her publisher.

Basically, these were all stories about people triumphing over a terrible setback. I suppose we were lucky to have gotten us all at the right point, so that we could talk about the past moment with a bit of perspective. But I also think that writers are often plucky people. We don’t get a lot of outside feedback or cheering for our work, so we have learned how to give ourselves what we need to keep going. That’s an important part of being a writer, I think.