Listening by Johanna Harness

In my last post, I opened my heart and talked about all the ways I’ve been boxing myself in as a writer.

Too often, we see our available choices as a series of either/or options.  I either do this or I do that.  I’m either moving forward in my career or I’m moving backward.  I’m either on a traditional publishing path or an independent one.  I’m either obsessing over writing all the time or I’m not a writer at all.

Hmph.

Also: bah.

We have so many more options than our dichotomies allow. In fact, the world is just bursting with choruses of YES.

After my last post, more than one reader reminded me that I can still be a writer while putting my personal life first.  ”In fact,” one friendly voice whispered, “you will probably be a better author if you do.”

Two more sage and respected readers pointed out that my writing will always be with me, but this time with my mom is fleeting.

At LeakyCon this week, an agent I admire very much told me that she hears this all the time.  A writer says, “but my agent needs this now.”  She shook her head.  ”Your agent—your editor—no one needs your work so much that you don’t have time to take care of yourself.”

Another agent said, “No one is going to judge the quality of your work based on how quickly it was published.  No one ever mentions speed of publishing in a book review. You have time.”

The gentle advice always makes me cry.

Tell me to write through the pain, to suck it up, to keep a punishing schedule—and I set my jaw and go.  But tell me to take care of myself?  To trust my writing voice? To be faithful to myself?

Well, to be honest, I usually ignore the gentle voices.  Thanks, but no thanks.  I’m tough. I can handle it.

Maybe it’s an Idaho thing.  I remember—years ago—my dad coming in the house from working on his truck, a viscous red trail forming behind him.  Woozy at the sight of so much blood, I told him I’d drive him to the hospital. He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Then, brow furrowed, he lifted the balled-up shirt from his hand. I know damn well he saw the glint of white bone as clearly as I did—before he jammed the shirt back down.  ”Just needs a bandaid,” he said.

Throughout my life, I’ve settled for bandaids in all kinds of situations, physical and emotional, choosing to be tough over all else.

So I suppose it’s as big a surprise to me as it is to you that I’m actually listening this time.

This time, I’m NOT doing the all-or-nothing thing.

I’m rearranging my schedule with flexibility in mind.  Yes. I still plan to write every day, but I give myself permission to ignore the 5AM alarm if I’ve been up all night.  Yes. I still plan to blog on my personal site, but this will be my last regularly-scheduled post for Gem State Writers. Yes. There will continue to be an #amwriting site, but changes are afoot.

It’s funny.  I thought pulling back would feel like giving up, but it doesn’t.  It feels very much like learning how to breathe again—like I’m fulfilling an essential step in moving forward.

Gem State Writers, I will miss you, but I know good things are in store for all of you.  I wish you the very best.

 

Rejoice by Johanna Harness

Writing is hard. That’s not a whine or a complaint.  It’s a statement of fact.  Writing is hard.

My daughter participated in National History Day again this year—writing a paper—and I watched her go through many of the stages I go through while writing a novel.

Research?  Gleeful.  Narrowing the topic? A little more difficult, but still good.  Writing her first draft—yay!  Polishing? Even more difficult, but she made it the best she could for regionals—and this earned the chance to go to state. Staring at the suggestions of the regional judges, she realized she had more work to do. The paper could be better.  So she revised.  Over and over and over, she revised.

For the first time in four years, all this revision earned her a place at the national competition at The University of Maryland.  It also meant listening to the state judges and revising more.

Since we homeschool and I’m her teacher, I saw all those drafts.  I saw her aim for marks she did not hit and then aim again.  I saw her tears and felt her anguish and I patted her back and I told her, “writing is hard.”  And then she revised again—not because I made her do it, but because it’s what she does.  It’s who she is.

For better or worse, I’m the same way.  I write every day not because I’m particularly driven or superstitious or willful, but because it’s what I do.  It’s in the fabric of who I am. A day without writing is not a vacation; it’s a broken day, a muddled day, a day without caffeine, a day without learning anything, a day without <gasp> an internet connection.  Writing is what I do, so I do it.

All the same, as we prepared our trip to Maryland and on into Washington, D.C., I looked forward to scaling back on my writing and enjoying other parts of my identity.  As a teacher and a mom and an explorer of new things, I knew this trip was a Very Big Deal.

Every year more than half a million kids start out in the regional History Day competitions and fewer than 3000 qualify for nationals.  Of those who make it that far, only the top 15% make it to finals.  Kids don’t make it to that level of competition without talent and determination.

And yes, my daughter does tell me the same is true for where I am in the writing process—that I didn’t end up with an agent and good feedback from a first round of editor subs because I’m a mediocre writer. It’s a tough lesson when she pats me on the back and recites my words back to me: “Writing is hard.”

We spent nine days in College Park, Maryland and Washington, D.C., including:

• two full days of travel, just to get there and back
• five days of history day activities (watching student performances and documentaries, perusing the exhibits, being judged, going to receptions including the big one at the National Museum of American History)
• sight-seeing with other Idaho students (meeting our senators in their D.C. offices, touring The Capitol, touring The Library of Congress)
• sight-seeing in every other spare moment (National Gallery of Art, International Spy Museum, Ford Theater, Georgetown Harbor tour, Chinatown, Union Station, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, Arlington Cemetery, Embassy Row, Washington National Cathedral, National Museum of Natural History, National Sculpture Garden, National Air and Space Museum).

There were so many things to do and see.  We couldn’t possibly get through everything–and yet our appetite to see more and do more kept us going.

And oh our poor little feet.  They hurt.  And then they hurt more.  And we said, you know, this is a little like getting through the horrible rewriting phase.  It hurts like crazy, but getting where you’re going is important, so you keep moving forward one step at a time.

The awards ceremony was amazing.  Not only did my sweet girl make it to finals, but her historical essay placed ninth in the nation.  She brought home a medal for the best junior entry from the state of Idaho. My husband watched the webcast from home and we both cried, but my sweet girl held her head high, thrilled with what she’d accomplished, and already thinking about next year.

So, okay.  Fast forward a few days and we’re back in Idaho.  I came home exhausted and I kept dreaming about monuments, trying to remember which was which and what I saw at each.

Eventually I lost my tether and fell into Monet’s Seine, only to be pulled out by a double agent who handed off a micro-dot containing the whereabouts of Amelia Earhart’s final resting place–somewhere near the mummies in the Museum of Natural History.  Oh yeah.  Overload, baby.  My mind was still sorting it out.

But then an interesting thing happened.  The more I worked on my book, the more my characters started cropping up in my D.C. dreams.  As I looked up from the Hope Diamond, one of my shadow characters studied me from the opposite side of the case.  As I examined gowns belonging to the first ladies, I heard a character behind me explaining what each would need for accessories, if they were to fit in at a ball in the world next door.  As I looked down from the sight-seeing bus, there was a whole band of my characters climbing all over the Einstein statue!

I called out to them, but they either couldn’t hear me or they wouldn’t listen.  I suspected the latter, so I called out again—and, in the calling, I half-woke myself.

And I’m sure the sweet euphoria of that moment had something to do with theta or delta or some kind of sleepy-dreamy brain waves, but it was an awesome moment.  I looked out over the entire D.C. trip with one realization:  I could remember everything perfectly, enjoy the ride, and I no longer had to experience the exhaustion of the trip.

And then my characters were there again, waving from the Einstein statue and below them were young readers, holding my finished book.  And, just like that, the pain of writing evaporated.

Walking miles a day, every day, mostly on marble? That’s hard. But owning that experience is painless and wonderful. Writing history is hard, but hearing national judges discuss the value of a suffragette of whom they’d never heard?  Oh wow. That’s a profoundly important moment in a young historian’s life.  And yes, writing a novel is hard, but creating a story that looks and feels and reads like it was easy, that’s an amazing joy.

In John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines, Colin asks, “What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?”

Yes.  That.  You try, even when it hurts.  You push through and release the best of your work into the world, making way for the creation of the next possibly-remarkable thing. Whether competing in National History Day or writing a novel, or building The Washington Monument, there will be set-backs.  Persevere to the end.  Endure the pain. Celebrate the completion of your work. Be ever thankful if the fates smile on you. And then? Let it go.  Rejoice and do it again.

 

Disappointed Writers by Johanna Harness

I’ve heard it said that sheep spend their time at pasture looking for ways to die.  They’re relatively stoic creatures, so by the time they act sick, it’s often too late. They seem fine one day and they’re dead the next.

Writers are apparently the same way with disappointment.  While not writing, we look for ways to feel bad about ourselves.

Last week I attended a conference with a wildly-successful writer who just turned in her eighteenth book.

“Wow,” I said.

She held thumb and forefinger barely apart. “They’re thin,” she answered.  “I’m actually getting dumber with every passing day.”

She’s not, of course, but she swears she is.

Another writer on twitter tells stories that tunnel right through to my heart.  I laugh out loud.  I cry.  His explorations change the way I see life and enrich my perceptions of my Kansas heritage.

And yet he worries about apostrophes and sentence structure.  He thinks he’s not good enough to be a “real writer.”  I tell him that he damn well is and that writing is so much more than a sum of grammatical parts.  Any editor can fix those tiny things.

And I’m sure he thinks I’m humoring him–because he is, after all, a writer.  The only thing we fear more than rejection is false praise.

Another friend confesses that, despite glowing reviews, she worries because she’s been often nominated, but never selected, for any prestigious award.

Another with a Ph.D. worries she’ll look stupid because she does not have the vocabulary to talk about novel writing.

I can shake my head, but who am I kidding?  I’ve been writing long enough to survive multiple episodes of dark days and doubt.  My last had me wondering about famous writers and that stroke of genius that makes them who they are.  No matter what they write, we hear that quality in their voice and we love them.  And so, just like a sheep contemplating lethal ways to get her head stuck in a fence, I ask myself, “What if my writing has an opposite effect on readers?  What if that thing that makes me special is the one thing no one wants?”

And yet we persist.

This week at Idaho Writers and Readers Rendezvous, Mary Clearman Blew reiterated the importance of tenacity for writers.  She said you can often tell when writers are going to give up.  ”You can just feel them veering off and thinking they’d rather have a life.”

I laugh because I’ve cornered myself into such a negative ending.  As a writer primed for disappointment, having a life sounds amusing and fun. So what was my point?

Oh yes.  Not every stoic sheep is dying.  And not every disappointed writer wants to quit.  Some of us are just really good at getting our heads stuck in fences and wailing about it. It’s what we do. And then we write about it.

 

Writers: Can You Pass The Silly Putty Test? by Johanna Harness

I recently bought my kids some Silly Putty.  It was a nostalgic whim that turned out to be pure magic for them.  They’ve played with Play Doh for years, but they’d never seen anything like this wonder ball of goodness.  The more they played with it, the more impressed they were.

So you know me and you know where this is going. Yes. I started comparing the semi-plastic goop to my writing life and I developed this Silly Putty test.

Let’s start with hours and hours of fun.  Are you having fun when you write?  Okay, maybe not all the time—but overall—do you enjoy the work?  If so, give yourself 1000 points.  If you have hours and hours of fun at one time, without interruption, we’re all jealous.  Deduct 100 points.

Moving on to craft:  can you press your mind against the words of a writer you admire and come away with something inspired, but not derivative?  If you said yes, deduct 100 points for hubris.  If you said no, deduct 200 points.  You’re gonna need some hubris.

So let’s assume you’ve written this amazing book. You’ve sent it off to your agent or editor and you hear back that they love it, but would you mind scrapping the B plot, changing the buddy character into a unicorn and adding a love triangle?  Can you stretch those characters into something totally different (and yet oddly the same)?  Yeah?  Add 500 points.  If you can stretch one of the characters into a lovable, supernatural being, add another 100 points.  If all your stretched images turn into talking animals, deduct 100 points.  Unless you can actually make that work.  Then add 300 (see comments on hubris).

Still with me?  Okay then. Only two more tests.   Next: the stretch-break factor.  Can you pace yourself for the slow stretch—the element needed to move your writing from where it is now all the way across the years to where it can be?  Add 1000 points.  Are you prone to sudden breaks instead? At the first sign of adversity, do you drop out of critique groups, dump your agent, or snap at reviewers?  Lose all your points, including the ones for hubris.  You may have over-internalized that factor.

Now your last test: when you’re curled tightly into a ball, sure that you cannot be reduced into anything smaller or more insignificant, is this when you bounce?  If so, add 5000 points.  You have what it takes.  You’ve passed the Silly Putty test for writers.

 

Satisfy Me by Johanna Harness

I just plunked down $17 for your book.

I’ve suspended disbelief.

I’m hanging on your every word.

I’ve committed time and energy to your work.

I want to like you.

No—you know what?

I want to love you.

I want to love your story.

I want to believe in you.

I want things to work out between us.

*

Don’t destroy all we have with a cliffhanger ending.

*

*

I adore a good series.

I love revisiting

favorite characters.

I love knowing

I can trust an author

to deliver

one satisfying story

after another.

*

Provide that for me and I will order everything from your backlist.

I will pre-order your next book, no matter how long it takes you to write it.

I will be devoted to you.

I will tell my friends about you.

I will gush and embarrass myself with how much I love you.

*

Play games with me?

*

*

Toy with me?

*

Withhold until. . .

I feed your publisher another $17. . .

or maybe another $17 after that?

*

Forget it.

*

Not only have you lost the sale, you’ve lost the fan.

*

*

I have a great deal of sympathy for beginning authors who don’t quite nail the ending.

Some of my favorites wobbled a bit with their first books.

I savored the improvement of their writing

from one novel to the next

until finally

they wrapped their stories

around me

so completely

I reread the ending over and over

and cheered for them.

*

*

I’m not talking about the new author who may be a bit clumsy, but endearing.

*

*

I’m talking about the skilled professional

who could write a satisfying ending,

but chooses to court the dollar

and frustrate the reader.

*

I’d rather have the earnest, awkward fumbling

of someone who wants to please me

over and over again.

*

Now that’s a series.

*