The Season of the Stubs

We’ve got about 20 scenes in the bag so far on the Ghost Novel. With the two of us both creating prose, we’ve made decent progress despite the ceaseless distractions of the world today and the summertime schedule disruptions of road trips and family get-togethers.

In the past week, however, this double-fisted writing approach has not been available to us. The first batch of stubs had 21 of them in it, so we’re very nearly out. Therefore, while Kent plugs away at those last couple of scenes we have stubs for, Jen has shifted her focus and is generating the next batch of stubs.

We always have the entire outline written first, so in theory Jen could do the stubs for the whole book all at once. In practice, though, we’ve learned that it’s good not to get too far ahead of ourselves with that. Our understanding — of the characters and of the story world’s physics — deepens as we write. Which means, the assumptions baked into a stub get farther and farther off-base the farther downstream we go, until eventually we would have to just throw the rest of them out and redo them.

It’s paradoxical that the outline stays fairly solid while the stubs go astray. Yet that’s what happens.

So, Jen does them in batches. How many in a batch? There’s no set number, but it’s generally in the 15-20 range. That’s enough to keep us busy for a while, but not so many that we have the sort of problem mentioned above. We like it when a batch gets us up to a landmark event of some kind in the plot. The quicker the stubs are locked down, the sooner she can get back to writing prose alongside Kent.

A writing partner is someone who can shift gears based on where you are in the project.