Sometimes We Can Have Nice Things

There is no shortage of story in As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #2, and no shortage of cast members either. That doesn’t stop us from coming up with more. We just need to keep it from getting out of hand.

One good way to control proliferation is by giving characters multiple jobs. Recently, we had a chance to apply this to our work-in-progress. We’ve known since pretty early on that one of our characters was going to need an accomplice. The plot doesn’t really work otherwise. Much more recently, we came up with some very colorful individuals that we wanted to put on the page because they’re a lot of fun. There’s no contradiction implied; we absolutely could have taken the “more is more” approach. As noted at the top, though, we already had probably more than we needed, so we had to be mindful about throwing in stuff that we just wanted.

Our way to have it all is that one of the colorful new people becomes the accomplice. It’s an elegant way to combine something that we need with something that we want.

A writing partner is someone who looks for ways to make the fun stuff work as an integral part of the story.