Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 97

my favorite literary couples at 16 and 40

My favorite literary couples at 16:

Rhett and Scarlett
Cathy and Heathcliff
Jane and Mr. Rochester
Emma and Mr. Knightley
Liza and Henry Higgins
Romeo and Juliet

My favorite literary couples at 40:

Gen and Irene from Megan Whalen Turner's books
Aral and Cordelia from Shards of Honor (Lois McMaster Buold)
Henry and Clare from The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet
Anne Elliott and Mr. Wentworth
Beauty and Beast--Robin McKinley's version
Aerin and Tor--The Hero and the Crown
Harry and Corlath--The Blue Sword

I'm surprised my new list is so short, but there it is. Those are the books that I seem to reread on a regular basis, for romance. There are books I reread for other reasons, and I could argue whether or not a brother/sister relationship of even a platonic friendship could be called romance or if a romance that turns out not to work can still count on my list of favorite romances (like in The Actor and the Housewife by Shannon Hale). Or a love triangle (which I usually hate) that is never resolved like in Guy Gavriel Kay's Lions of Al-Rassan. But for Valentine's Day, I'm sticking with the traditional guy/girl romances.

Also, I didn't intend for Robin McKinely to get three slots, but she did. She just writes the kind of romance that I still love today (and wasn't reading at 16, for whatever reason.)

Many of the romances on my 16 list I shudder at the thought of today. Henry and Eliza, for example. (Go with Freddy, Eliza!) It's sort of obviously a teen list, with doomed love high on the favorites. I am not sure why I like Emma and Mr. Knightley instead of any of the other Austen I had read. I seriously hated Pride and Prejudice at that age. Did not ever warm up to Mr. Darcy. But Mr. Knightley I liked and I liked Emma in her blindness, probably because I was just as blind. Obviously, I didn't like Persuasion because I wasn't old enough to see myself in the role of Anne Elliott. She just seemed plain to me.

Romeo and Juliet don't seem so romantic now, just young and stupid. I suppose I am a little embarrassed that I like Henry and Clare so much. Doomed love for 40 year olds, I suppose. And doomed for reasons outside of anyone's control. Not social problems, but biological ones.

I love Gen and Irene for reasons I mentioned before. I have to say, I don't know of any author who makes me feel that romantic tension for a married couple that I felt before they married. I wish there were other books like this. Pride and Prejudice for married people. It should be a whole category on its own. Not about divorce and finding someone new (which is fine), but I'd like a story about falling in love again, and again. I think that's the way successful marriages really work.

Happy Valentine's Day #2

eternal love

I'm going to do a series of posts leading up to Valentine's Day, all on love/romance topics. So, question for you: Do you believe in eternal love? Second question: Is eternal love romantic to you? That is, even if you don't believe in it in real life, do you fantasize about it? Is it something you like to read about?

When I was in my teens and twenties, reading my 10,000 romance novels, I became pretty cynical pretty quickly. I actually think of those novels as a kind of innoculation against stupid mistakes that women make in love. Honestly, people used to shake their heads about me reading romance and say that I would get the wrong "ideas" (my mother, for one). But it didn't work that way. Readers sometimes actually *learn* from reading, not to do what the people in fiction do. Readers don't always unconsciously duplicate the actions in fiction. I would recommend that anyone who is afraid her daughter is going to make stupid romantic mistakes to start feeding her romance novels at an early age and then talk about them.

So, one of the common tropes, especially of the big, sweeping epic romances is "eternal love." Scarlett and Rhett. Bella and Edward. Romeo and Juliet. Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester. Even Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth, if you read it standing on your head. Certainly Heathcliff and Cathy. And yes, I read the classic romances along with trashy ones. I was not a very discriminate reader. I gloried in not being a discriminate reader. The idea of eternal love is that you are "meant" to be with each other. That you were made for each other. That only that one other person can make you happy, no one else. That you will continue to be in love with each other after death. Also, strangely, that there is no escape from love. Even if you want to escape from the pressure, you can't. It will always haunt you.

Um, yuck.

Yeah, are you feeling the stalker vibes yet? There is a love song about a guy who says that the woman of his dreams was made out of his imagination, just for him. *Creepy*

I think that there was a tendency in the romance novels of yesteryear for women to describe sexual desire as "impossible to resist." Blame it on not bodily urges but fate, the course of the universe, and well, eternal love. That's safer than saying that women are sexual beings, just like men. Well, that's sort of over now, isn't it? Except it remains in our cultural mindset with the idea of "eternal love." We don't understand the subtext of eternal love, which is that women aren't allowed to be sexual, but it's still there, lurking beneath everything else.

You know what I think is sexy? Choosing someone who wants you to be free. Also, choosing someone. As in, I choose you because I like you and also because I like who I am around you and who you are around me. I choose you because this is the right time in my life. I choose you because we fit together nicely. I choose you because I think you would be a good parent and a stable spouse. I choose you because you show me respect. Or maybe, I choose you because you make me feel hot. (Hey, at least it's honest, right?)

I don't believe in the kind of eternal love that is fated to happen. I only believe in eternal love if it is chosen, and not just once, but day after day, moment after moment. I hope that is still romantic. I think it is. One of the reasons I love The King of Attolia is that it is romance about a married couple who are doing things day by day. And it is hot. But more on that later . . .

Yes, there are times when I still find myself interested in a couple who are "destined" to be together. It doesn't last long, but it happens. I don't know that I can totally rewrite my cultural mindset just because I want to.

Happy Valentine's Week--Day 1

two problems with today's paranormal

OK, at the risk of people throwing things at me virtually, I am going to explain two of the problems I have with almost every paranormal book I pick up these days. And by paranormal, I am going to be including what people are calling "dystopian," because it has the exact same problems.

#1 colorless heroines

When I read a novel, I want to read about a heroine who is distinct, with a personality that is so clear that I can imagine her in my head, and sometimes find myself hearing her tell me her opinion about things that happen in my life, and not inside the covers of her own book. I want a heroine who knows exactly who she is, at least at some point in the book, and who has a vision of what she wants in the future. I want a heroine who has a purpose in life, who likes and dislikes certain things, who has strengths and weaknesses that are unlike anyone else.

What I get in most paranormals is a heroine who could be anyone, and is in fact, no one. She doesn't know what she wants. She doesn't know who she is. She thinks she may be falling in love with one guy, but she isn't sure because maybe it could be someone else instead. She isn't sure who she likes or who she hates. She's weak, and she has no strengths except that she's beautiful or some other superficial quality.

#2 world building building problems

Believe me, I know about world building problems. I have plenty of my own. I struggle to make my world unique, and then to introduce it in a way that makes sense to the reader. I struggle to make sure that the rules of my world are consistent throughout the manuscript and that the climax involves a dilemma that does not turn out to be absolutely ridiculous. I sympathize with world building problems to a certain degree.

The kind of world building problems I am seeing that annoy me are

a--info dump

If you read a lot of science fiction and fantasy you start to see how you can describe a world without ever stopping to tell the reader information in a big pages-long stop of the plot. You also learn how to avoid Butler and Maid dialog, where characters tell each other things that everyone already knows. School scenes are only slightly better than this. They're a cheat. They are the author admitting that they need to get information in and they can't see a better way to do it quickly.

b--stupid worlds

I'm including in this also uninteresting worlds, or worlds that seem entirely cribbed from a well-known novel which is never referenced or given credit. Hey, I know that we borrow from each other and nothing is new, yadda yadda. But if you're going to take from The Giver, you'd better do it better than the original. And if you're going to have a world where a catastrophe strikes, you'd better make sure it's not so bad that people would never have survived it. If you're going to have vampires everywhere, figure out why they haven't taken over the world. Make sure that you're not assuming that everyone is stupid. Yeah, lots of people are. But not everyone.

I can certainly see why B&N has decided that Paranormal deserves its own section. I suppose I even like to be shelved there, if what "Paranormal" means is--books that sell well. I like romance. I like fantasy. I like science fiction. I like dystopias and apocalypses. I really, really do. I like the idea that we are reinventing things that have been going on in the adult genre world for years. I like that we in the YA world can make them better, and more hip. But let's actually make them better, eh?

what not to do when an agent calls

This happened about two years into my five year journey to publication, three years before I got my current agent. I am spilling the full truth so that you can all laugh at me (I know that's the real reason everyone reads this blog), and perhaps so you can avoid doing the same thing yourself.

The manuscript in question was The Stepmother's Story, a retelling of Cinderella from the stepmother's point of view. It was my first attempt at a retelling, and I honestly couldn't tell if it was YA or adult. (Still can't, come to think of it. It's one of those books that is neither fish nor fowl.) I hadn't done a lot of fantasy up to that point, but I had done some.

I have always found Cinderella's stepmother to be the most frightening of all Disney villains, and she's pretty bad in the fairy tales (though, of course the worst parents ever award has to go to Hansel and Gretel's parents). The scary and interesting thing about the stepmother is that she doesn't believe in magic. She isn't scary because she has mystical power. She's scary because she has regular, everyday power. And she hates Cinderella because Cinderella is good. There's no hope of convincing her that she and Cinderella can be friends. The better Cinderella is, the more the stepmother is determined to fight her. So the manuscript was a story about a woman who is faced with magic and won't believe it, but fights it anyway. And loses. It's told in first person and it had--well, it had a few problems.

But it was good enough that an agent who is now a fairly big name but was then an assistant at a fairly big name called me on the phone to discuss it. She wanted a revision and she talked to me for about an hour about some of the problems she saw in the novel. She told me to take my time on the revisions, that she was excited to see what I would come up with, and offered to talk to me again if I felt I needed to.

I had never had someone call me on the phone before. So that was a huge thrill. It was great, really. A boost to my sagging worries about being a writer. I had quit my (admittedly horrible) teaching job at that point and wondered if I was a fool. I was, but not because of that. I was a fool because I spent the next six weeks revising the book, and then sent it in to her. A completely different novel. Well, some of the names were the same. And the general idea was the same. But not a single word remained of the original manuscript. None of the same scenes or dialogue, none of the best bits clipped out and preserved. All gone.

You can imagine what happened. Nothing. A great big nothing for a couple of months. I think I called her back eventually and she said in a rather hesitant tone that I had rewritten the entire novel in six weeks and that it just wasn't what she had hoped it would be. She recommended I go back and spend some more time on it, which was good advice. For someone else, maybe. Someone I would later become. But at the time what happened was that she and I both discovered I couldn't revise to specification like that. I could see a whole new novel, but I couldn't cut and paste and hone and refine. I didn't know how to listen that carefully or share my world that well with someone else. It actually took me a long--LONG--time to figure out how to do that. Even after I was published, I was still struggling with this one.

On the one hand, an editor doesn't want an author who caves with every suggestion and does what is demanded. On the other hand, the editor doesn't want an author who insists the manuscript is perfect as it is. But the place in between is like a magic passageway. You don't just stand between the two to get there. There's magic and a secret spell to be learned, and you have to practice a lot.

I don't spend a lot of time wishing that the past were different, and I don't particularly wish that I had done this differently. I just wasn't that person yet, so I couldn't. I suppose I would have had a different career path if I had been a different person then, but I wasn't. I was who I was and now I am who I am. I am content with what is now, and I suppose that is why I don't wish I could change the past. But it still makes me cringe, and maybe I can laugh at myself a little, too.

getting stuck

For a long time, I used to give the advice that if you are stuck in the middle of a book, unsure what happens next, you should continue to push through and just get it finished. I still think is mostly good advice for beginning writers. Not because it will produce a really great novel, though. Mostly because it is what you need to do to get experience in writing a whole, completed novel. Your next one will go better because your brain will be used to thinking early on how to set things up and you will actually start reading differently because of your desperation. Actually, your tenth novel will probably be a whole lot better. But you don't want to hear that, I know.

For me lately, say in the last three years, I have found that when I get stuck on a novel, it is time to put it aside and work on something else. I don't actually know if I am going to figure out how to finish writing that novel, but I have faith that I will. I just don't know how to do it yet, and I trust in my subconscious to start gathering the necessary information to figure it out, while I am unaware of what it is doing, and then suddenly a couple of years later, I will sit down at the computer, working on something else, and I'll feel this rush of inspiration and go back and work on that novel I had put aside.

But if you've never finished writing a novel, I don't know how to describe the difference between the terrifying feeling of not being sure if what you are writing is going to be any good and the terrifying feeling of emptiness because you're not ready to write this book yet. Does that make any sense? I suppose there are other terrifying feelings about being a writer, too. There's the terrifying feeling of writing a second book after a first one has been successful. Or writing a book after the last one has been unsuccessful. Lots of terror.

Of course, it's also true that everyone has to find their own way to getting their novel finished and no one can tell you what that way is. It may be that you need to go on vacation to Mexico with all your writer friends and spend 24/7 thinking, eating, breathing, pooling your book, and you'll find your way to the end. But for me, I write the book that keeps me up at night, planning the next section, figuring out who is going to be named what, and how they are going to meet, and what they are going to say to each other. If the book I think I'm supposed to write isn't doing that, it isn't the right book.

more do's--less don'ts

Listening to women around me, I am once more reminded of how often we think negative thoughts. All the things that we have done wrong seem to remain in our heads forever. New Years can be an especially bad time for lists of things that we aren't doing. We aren't exercising enough. We aren't starving ourselves enough. We aren't skinny enough. We aren't cleaning enough. Sometimes I feel personally like the number of voices shouting at me that I am not doing enough is going to drive me insane.

Today, this is what I think:

more do's--less don'ts

(The grammar witch in me is very confused by this, by the way--any better ideas?)

What I mean is that instead of focusing on all the things we are doing wrong and should STOP doing, I think we should focus on things we are doing right and should do MORE of. Does that make sense?

It's like when my daughter had first been diagnosed with ADD, the doctor told us that we shouldn't worry about her becoming a functioning adult who contributed to society. She just had to find one thing that she was good at, and focus on that. All the things she was bad at that bothered the school wouldn't matter as long as she found the one thing she was really, really good at. It turns out that she is good at more than one thing, but I think the principle works for more than just kids with ADD.

As a writer, it is important to remember what I do well, and to continue to do that to have success. Reviews can be devastating for this, because they make us forget what we do well and focus instead on what we may possibly not do well. But not doing those things badly may in fact do very little to contribute to success, if we forget what we do well.

As a parent, there is a long list of things I don't do well. Managing homework, keeping kids from fighting, showing them how to get along with others. But I do some things very well. I am not sure that I am ever going to do the things well that I do badly right now. Maybe I shouldn't just give up on those. It's one strategy to try to fix them. But it's another strategy to try to fill my kids' lives with more things that I do well.

My thoughts on how to fix the world, anyway.

January Reading List

Books Read and Recommended:
Bone Crossed by Patricia Briggs (a)
A Tale Dark and Grimm by Adam Gidwitz (i)
Huntress by Malinda Lo
The Dark and Empty Places by Carrie Ryan
Lost and Found by Shaun Tan
Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld (a)
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by NK Jemisin
The Pericles Commission by Gary Corby
Hold Me Closer, Necromancer by by Lish McBride
Nightspell by Leah Cypress

This is the first time I have read more books that I am not recommending than books that I am. Why did I finish them? Well, I enjoyed them anyway. I don't know what that means, just an interesting fact.

Also, here is a photo of what I think is an adorable "love potion" necklace as a promotion for Tris and Izzie:

a sad and happy realization

Last year I set a goal for myself (I am always doing that--when I promise not to!) that I would not write anything new unless I was ready to give up on something old that I still liked. I had a list of four manuscripts that I was still attached to, and anytime I had a new idea, I just got out that list and told myself that I couldn't write on the new thing unless I really and truly liked it better than one of my old projects.

So, in January, as I was wishing I could work on a new project, I forced myself instead to get out old manuscripts and at least read through them to decide which one I wanted to work on for now. What did I discover? (Hi, Barry! I know you are cheering right now!) They are all bad. I didn't really want to work on any of them. Well, I won't promise that I won't go back and revamp some of the old ideas. There are one or two ideas generally that are worthwhile. But the writing? Nope.

This is a useful lesson for all writers, I think. It is impossible to judge your own work when you are too emotionally attached to it. That means within several months of having written it. And maybe longer than that. It may be possible to evaluate your own work after that time. Or it might not. That's what writers groups are for. And friends who tell you the truth. And well, agents and editors who are known for being blissfully blunt.

The problem is that you aren't writing down the experience you are having in your head. Or perhaps the experience you thought you had while writing changed while time passed. (Memory is such a tricky thing, which I have noticed a few times when I discovered my certain memory was dead wrong.) I had this vision in my head of the novels that I loved, and it just wasn't written down like that. It was so clear to me, so perfect. But somehow the work didn't happen yet to get to that. As I changed and got to be a better writer in my mind, the work changed in my mind, but not in actuality. Weird, weird.

I am sure this happens to other writers. Why? Well, besides the fact that I happen to have a lot of writers as friends, I remember when I was still a beginner and reading voraciously other author's works. And there would be these unhappy moments when I would read something by a favorite writer that was simply dreadful. And I would wonder how it was possible for the brilliant writer of this book to write that one? Sometimes, I would think it was a ghost writer. Or a trunk manuscript. But no, probably not. Probably just he or she didn't have the honest people around that I do. Honestly, I am so glad those books are not published. So, so glad.

metteharrison @ 2011-02-01T12:26:00

It shouldn't have taken me so long to do this, but after the LAWKI months I have done, I realized there were lots of people who had no idea how much food we could possibly have in our house. There is no risk of us starving to death. I promise! And to prove it, here are some photos of my home storage:




You can see the ubiquitous white buckets of wheat, rice, flour, sugar, and oats that we have. Over a thousand pounds. Yes, some people have said we better have guns to protect this in an emergency. We do not have guns.

Another photo,




And here you can see the TP, cans of TVP, fruit, vegetables, the containers of water (for a short-term emergency), potatoes and onions in the winter, our food dryer and canner, jams, shampoo, and on and on. Not pretty, but there's a lot:

not reading the ending

I have a few friends who claim that they read the ending to a book first, just to make sure that everything turns out well, or to prepare themselves for anyone who is going to die. I never do this. A part of me feels like it is not fair, because the author has designed a book to be read in a particular way, with events happening in a particular order, in order to create a certain experience. Mixing it up is a refusal to give the author this authority, and it seems like it is your own fault if you end up not liking the book after that, not the author's.

But of course, this attitude is silly. Good books, like good movies and good TV, don't have to be watched in order. It may not make the same sense, but a well-written scene is riveting no matter what else you have seen or read leading up to it. But I have no intention of starting to read books ending first after this revelation. Why? I'm thinking about this.

I really like the beginnings of books. I like to read the setup. I like to have that "first" experience with the character and the world. Even books that are bad are often good enough in the first few chapters that they are worth reading. But I find that the middle of the book is very telling. When I start to want to turn pages faster just to get to the end, that is a sign that something is going very, very wrong for me as a reader. It means I have become impatient with the way that the author is laying things out, and that I don't trust that I will enjoy the gradual unfolding of things. It also means that I can predict the ending of the book fairly easily.

That is when I don't bother to read the end of the book. I close it and move on to another one. It means the book isn't worth me caring about the ending anymore.

If I don't finish a book, 99% of the time, it is a bad thing. But there is a small 1% of the time when I postpone reading the ending of a book, sometimes for days, simply because I don't want to turn the final page and be finished with it. I don't want the experience to end. I don't want to have to come out of the world of the book and take a breath in the real world and realize that now I have to find something else to do that is not as all-consuming as that book.

A few times a year, this happens and it feels like a drug. If I could sell it, I am pretty sure that I would be addicted to it. It would be dangerous because I would want to have it all the time. Maybe the truth is, it wouldn't work that way, because I have to be in a particular place for even the best book to work on me that way.

So what about you? How does your book-drug feel? And why might you not read the ending to a particular book?