Category: Voice

Point of view, dialogue, tone, character internals, and so on.

Even The Best Advice

It is vital for writers to seek feedback, from beta readers and also from our fellow authors. Finding out what works and what doesn’t is the only way to get better. But, you need to bear in mind that all this input is coming through a filter, and ultimately it’s up to you to decide which notes to apply and which ones to disregard.

When you get input from another writer, it’s usually them saying you should do it the way they would do it. It might not be phrased with quite such blunt honesty, but when anybody gives advice about anything, how else can it work? Your colleagues are trying to share the benefit of their experience. They mean well. But if you’re not careful, you might get steered toward someone else’s voice and vision.

When you collaborate with a partner, you have someone telling you to do it the way you do it, only better. Your partner has an intrinsic sense for how things are intended to come across, and thus won’t offer advice that leads you astray. Jen and Kent are co-authors, but a similar partner dynamic could exist between, say, a writer and an editor. The key is that you’re teammates with a shared vision, so when you advise each other you’re honing in more strongly on the desired end-product, not diluting or distorting it.

Working with a partner is not a substitute for seeking outside feedback, and you really should listen with an open mind to the comments and suggestions other people offer. That same remove from your work that imposes a filter also lends perspective. They’ll see things that you and your partner missed due to being too close to it. Gathering and processing outside feedback together with your partner helps in identifying which notes are important.

A writing partner is like a voice inside your head, but in a good way.

Making Ourselves Believe the Make-Believe

A hallmark of well-crafted fiction is when readers effortlessly suspend their disbelief. Creating good fiction calls for writers to suspend their disbelief as well.

For instance, to write our ghost story we need to convincingly portray a world in which ghosts exist, so we have to embrace that alternate reality. In our Divided Man series, it was extra-terrestrials, nanotech, and psychic powers. In the Music series, it was something else (which you will not be able to guess, ever, we guarantee that), and in the Science series it was immortality. Each story we tell gives consensus reality its own unique twist, which on a certain level becomes “true” for us also. That immersion is crucial for us to bring richness to the setting, and to keep its physical laws consistent.

And that’s the easy part. Writing a novel calls for the author to see the world through potentially disturbing eyes. Could be a cult leader, a mad scientist, a serial killer, or a televangelist. If you’re a nice person — which we’re sure you are — the behavior of such characters seems unthinkable to you. Then again, you’d probably make a rather dull bad guy. Every villain is the hero of their story. They believe in what they’re doing. So the writer must be able to believe in it too, at least while they’re writing. This is still true even if the villain isn’t a POV character! Like an evil marionette, it’s relying on you to pull its strings.

A writing partner is someone who encourages delusional ideation, but only when you’re on the clock.

Writing In The First Person

Every novel we’ve written has had multiple POV characters, and we do a very tight third-person narration style. The attitude and the diction are shaped strongly by which head we’re riding in for any given scene, and of course only information that would be available to that person can be brought up.

So, we haven’t done a novel in the first person. But we do have a little experience with telling a story that way: our tag-team chain story, aka “Tune In Next Time.” That project is a place where we operate outside of our standard process and our comfort zone. Not only do we not plan any of it out or do any revisions, we use a random generator to create the prompts. And, it’s the sole first-person thing we’ve done.

Using the first person is not just a stylistic choice. There are logistical considerations, since in most cases there will be only the one viewpoint available. Telling events out of order, or even skipping over any significant periods of time, will be much more likely to feel jarring. So for it to go well, the story itself has to belong to the set of stories that lend themselves to the treatment. And (so far at least) the kinds of stories that Rune Skelley wants to turn into novels aren’t members of that set.

Not that we would be opposed to giving it a try if the right story came along. Silly as it is, with over 800 installments (and counting!) “Tune In Next Time” does constitute a lot of solid practice in dealing with the form.

A writing partner is someone who shares your point of view.

Don’t Double-Team

We tend to each “adopt” a certain subset of the cast. Then as we sort through the stubs, we know which of us is the default assignee based on whose viewpoint each stub is from. But that relies on one of two things: either one of us feels strongly drawn to that POV, or one of us has written several of that character’s scenes already to establish a pattern. Well, the current batch of stubs brings in someone new and it’s making our load distribution calculations rather interesting.

It’s sort of a perfect storm, because there’s a POV that’s new, and we both sort of vibe on it, and also it has several scenes. In the end, we did split them up between us.

But we gave ourselves one rule: we couldn’t both be working on the same new POV at the same time. We’d each be inventing this person’s voice, and they wouldn’t match up, and then we’d have the challenge of getting them synced. The restriction really only applies in these very early appearances for the new viewpoint.

So, as it happened Kent jumped on his new-POV scene first. Jen is working with one of the existing characters’ POV in the meantime.

It’s possible to imagine making the opposite strategy work — both writing partners could deliberately work on the same voice in parallel, and then use syncing them up as a chance to see the character from unexpected angles. We feel there are too many pitfalls lurking in that approach, but different things work for different people.

A writing partner is someone who harmonizes with your voice.

Privileged Info

Some people like having an outline, and some people don’t. That’s fine. We’ve already shown our hand a million times here on this blog: we like outlines. We like having them, and stranger still we apparently enjoy making them. Doesn’t mean everybody has to.

Although working from a solid plan offers many advantages, there can be some hazards as well. Many writers who eschew outlining say it takes away the feeling of discovery. They’re usually talking about their own motivation and productivity, but there’s another potential pitfall. Sometimes the author’s foreknowledge of events leaks into the characters.

That can cause a doomed character to come across as fatalistic, or make the whole cast seem skittish around the one who will eventually betray them. The outcome becomes predictable because the characters are collectively telegraphing upcoming events. And if the people in the story just seem to be reciting their lines, it’s hard for readers to feel invested.

The key is to have a clear image of what the world is like for each character. To take on their attitude. Here in the Writing Cave we talk about it as “wearing the right head.” This might mean reviewing your notes about someone’s backstory, or it might mean physically acting out mannerisms. Focus on inhabiting the present, as informed by this person’s past. Sure, the outline prescribes a certain future, but don’t fixate on that. In fact, let yourself forget about it; it’s safely written down. What you want is characters who don’t know that they’re in a novel. The guy who bites the dust in the second act? He’s got plans. He bought tickets to a concert, plus he’ll be giving a big presentation at work. You know those things won’t happen until act three, which means they’ll never happen at all, but he makes his choices with those goals in mind. He’s not trying to fall off a roof.

And the outline needs to be flexible, so your cast can have a bit of autonomy. See where they go. It might be really interesting.

A writing partner is someone who shares in your joy at building characters up so they can fall that much farther.

A Case of the Vapors

The Ghost Series spans a few different historical eras. While we do want the atmosphere of each age to come through, we decided early on that we’d be using modern prose. Dialogue is the main place where we have been giving things a more period slant, but even then it’s a balancing act. The line between authenticity and parody can be perilous.

It’s not just in the direct speech of the characters where we have such linguistic considerations. Even though we’re pointedly not adopting an antiquated style, we still need the story’s point of view to feel right. Which leads to debate now and then over word choice, particularly where the earthier words are concerned. English gives us lots of words to choose from, many having substantially the same meaning. But synonyms aren’t always completely interchangeable. Words give off vapor that affects the mood and the sense of place. (In the preceding paragraph, it originally said “… flavor of each age …” but it got changed to “atmosphere” to go along with our theme.)

Swearing gives off a very strong vapor, particularly when it occurs in the narrative.

People have used cuss words forever. When your great-grandparents were little kids, people swore. When their great-grandparents were little, people swore. (Not your ancestors, surely, but other people.) And, certain specific swears go way back. “Fuck” is centuries old, as is “cock” as slang for penis. So, it’s absolutely realistic to include such vocabulary in scenes set in bygone eras. Yet, adding it has a way of feeling anachronistic.

This perception probably comes from the disparity between how people really talked at the time and what it was historically permissible to publish. What’s in books, mostly, is a sanitized version of period speech. As a result, minced oaths like “balderdash” and “tarnation” sound olde-timey to modern ears, while actual profanity doesn’t. But in all likelihood, the words you’d have heard on a Victorian street would have been “bullshit” and “damnation.”

So, it’s something we need to feel our way through, and we’ll fine-tune it on a revision pass. A writing partner is someone to help you with your “cock” usage and adjust your “fucks.”

Smite! Smite! Ice Cream, Sunshine… Smite!

Within the world of the story, the author is God. You plant all the trees, paint the clouds in the sky, and breathe life into every inhabitant.

And then, you smite.

Your job is not to win the adoration of the creatures you create. It’s to make them hate you. If you let them fall in love, you must also tempt them to stray, or place vast distances between them. If you give them fortune, it cannot bring them joy. Okay, fine, they can get a taste of happiness now and then, but you can’t let them stay that way.

In the Writing Cave, as we discuss how to make some character’s fate more interesting, we know we’re on track when they give us the stink-eye and a sarcastic, “Gee, thanks.”

There is another side to this omnipotence gig, of course. If you grind everything down until it’s all just a gray paste, that’s just as boring as across-the-board sunshine and leisure. Monotonous suffering or monotonous bliss, either way is bad from the readers’ vantage. You have to let some characters off easy, relatively speaking, to give your hapless creations hope. Maybe they’ll be one of the lucky ones who doesn’t die in a fire! Maybe theirs is a love that can really last!

Well, maybe. Maybe not, though. Letting them hope is the key to making them really despise you.

A writing partner is someone to plot with against your own creations.

POV 2: Whose Do You Use?

Operating with multiple POV characters means that sometimes you have more than one of them in a scene. This presents you with a choice: whose eyes should we watch this through?

Of course, the answer is “it depends,” but that doesn’t mean you have nothing to go on. It might be easy. If one of your POV candidates carries vital knowledge that the others lack, it probably makes sense to go with them. Probably. On the other hand, maybe it would be richer for the reader to share in dawning realization, to hear the news with innocent ears.

The weight of what’s revealed or discussed in the scene might not fall evenly on those involved. Any given big moment is probably bigger for one character than for the rest. So, if you use that character’s POV you can spell out their inner state. This works well when the emotional reaction isn’t exactly what might be expected, or when the character’s surface response doesn’t give much away. If it’s the key gut-punch moment in this person’s arc, then using anyone else’s POV would be a missed opportunity.

But again, there’s no single correct approach. Using one of the other POVs creates a chance to observe how the primary recipient takes the news. Even if it is a crucial turn for that character, you might want to show it from one remove. This can allow tension to be prolonged or escalated, creating anticipation for circling back to their POV.

There’s nothing stopping you from rewriting the scene from a few different vantages to see what works best. Experiment.

A writing partner is someone who’s always ready to offer you another point of view.

Show Your Work

As January runs out of days, we’re running out of items on Sibling of Music Novel’s To Do list. We’ve already checked off all of weird little oddball things we’d left dangling, and filled in the placeholders with actual prose. And we decided that there’s a certain level of punching up that will wait for the second draft, and we agree on where the cutoff is for that. Which leaves just one more bit of business we need to accomplish before this novel officially goes into hibernation.

Some of our characters are professional musicians. We’ve talked in the past about writing some of their lyrics. Now we’re working on other supplemental material that fleshes out the world: record reviews, fan chatter, things like that. Things written in the story world about or by our characters. It’s something we’ve done in every novel so far, and it’s a part of our process that we really enjoy. It’s really fun to try on other voices and to write in different styles.

The novel itself needs to have a consistent tone and voice. Even though there are two of us writing, we don’t want that to be obvious. But with this ancillary stuff we’re allowed — nay, encouraged! — to take sharp stylistic turns and explore idiosyncratic voices. We want these pieces to be distinct, both from the novel itself and from each other.

A writing partner is someone you can harmonize with, but who also lets you play a solo every now and then.

Bottleneck! Dead Ahead!

The writing is mostly back on track now that we’re home from our epic arctic adventure (puffins!), with our word count standing at a fiendishly satisfactory 66,600. We still have a bunch of stubs laid out and waiting, so we can keep steaming along for a while. Jen just completed a scene in a particular POV, so while that voice is warmed up she’ll jump ahead a few scenes to that character’s next appearance. Kent is in exactly the same situation with another character. One of the (many) great things about writing with a partner is the parallel processing.

But, let’s not be hasty.

All this skipping around with the chronology is fine, as long as we’re paying attention. We have another plot thread, which involves a different subset of the cast and therefore will take a bit of a mental shift to pick up right now. That’s why we were thinking of skipping past it. But, the events in that thread’s next few scenes are tightly coupled, which means it doesn’t make sense to divvy them up. So, if we follow the plan where we each stick with the POV that’s warmed up, we’ll create a bottleneck when the third plot thread becomes the only option to work on.

And that’s why we’re not going to proceed that way. Jen will stick to the plan, but Kent will essay the mental shift and pivot to the other thread. Once its first scene is in the can, it won’t be able to create a bottleneck. At that point, Kent can stick with that thread or swing back to the other one (which has more sex in it).

This idea of bottlenecks doesn’t really pertain if you work solo. At most, it can dictate what order you write the scenes in, but you’re going to be the one writing all of them regardless. With a partner comes the need to coordinate. If Jen can’t write scene B until Kent finishes scene A, then we lose the parallel processing advantage.

A writing partner is someone who helps you figure out the most efficient way to tackle working with a writing partner.