All Things in Moderation

Many times we’ve touted the advantages of the scene-by-scene synopses that we call stubs. They’re great, especially when you’re working with a coauthor. We could just use the outline, treat it as a scene list, but in our experience it’s better to flesh things out a bit further than that before divvying up the work. For one thing, a line-item in our type of outline isn’t necessarily a scene. For another, the stub format prompts for mood, setting and sensory details, and characters’ interior states. Taken all together, our stubs could be considered a first draft. A rather slapdash first draft, with a ton of tonal variation, but still.

So if stubs are so great, why don’t we spec out the whole novel in stub-form before we begin writing? In our experience, certain plot and character issues don’t present themselves until the actual writing is happening. If we race ahead and make stubs for the whole novel, there will be a lot of reworking to do when we set fingers to keyboard and discover in the fifth scene that something doesn’t work the way we envisioned.

As a recent example, we were going to use Saks Fifth Ave as a location. “Hey,” we thought, “all those big NYC department stores are pretty much interchangeable, right?” Heh. No. So even though we liked the physical locale of Saks better, we ended up switching things over to Bloomingdale’s, for reasons. That cast ripples through a whole bunch of scenes, but since Jen hadn’t made stubs for more than a handful of them, it saved a lot of work. We pulled up the outline and untangled things there.

You’ll find your own rhythm, of course. What works best for us is to make stubs in batches of about 20. Beyond that the details get a bit too hazy.

Having a writing partner means having someone to hold your European Shoulder Bag™ while you’re trying on clothes at a crowded Manhattan department store.