Category: Brainstorming & Inspiration

Big ideas and how to get them.

Our Heads Are Haunted Now

The fancy new whiteboard now houses our Ghosts, Book 4 rainbow. Barely — it flows across both sides already and we have a lot left to add. (hooboy!)

Not only are we fleshing out the fourth and final volume, but we’re also creating a text synopsis of Book 2 simultaneously. Which puts some of Book 3 in the mix as well, because we have to keep in mind how events span that interval.

We’ve crammed at least three novels’ worth of ghosts into our brains, is what we’re saying. It’s really all four, although Book 1 hasn’t come up too much recently.

But, this is exactly why we wanted to handle all the outlining and storyboarding and other pre-writing for the entire series up front. It’s hard work, but it’ll spare us from getting halfway through the fourth book and wishing we’d done a bunch of things differently in the earlier ones. In other words, it will save us from needing to rewrite the whole tetralogy. Our revisions will be focused on how to sharpen up the telling, not trying to get the shape of the tale itself.

A writing partner is someone who’s willing to let their skull become a haunted house so you don’t have to face an army of spooks all by yourself.

Fjords

One of the neat things about how we use the rainbow is how it encourages us to really examine everybody’s through-line. We just study the whole thing color-by-color and it helps us make sure everyone’s accounted for.

Of course, we focus on the principle players first. That means by the time we delve into the second half of the cast, stuff’s pretty well defined. We don’t want to add padding, or make excuses to mention these characters. But we don’t want to just dismiss their arcs either. It’s tricky to find things that are worthy of inclusion and also won’t require us to revise our major characters’ actions too much.

Once all the big plot landmasses are established, the goal is to fit stuff into the crinkly bits around the edges.

As you’ve surely guessed, we are currently examining the parts of the rainbow concerned with not-so-major characters. One in particular, whose activities are severely constrained. The way he’s limited is interesting in its own right, but there are only so many times a reader wants to be reminded, “Yup, dude’s still stuck.” For various reasons, we knew it’d be a wrong choice to just skip his parts. It was a bit frustrating. But, we did eventually hit on a setup that ticks all the boxes. It dramatizes the central desires of this person, and intersects with the primary characters’ paths in a non-interfering way. Huzzah!

A writing partner is someone who loves doing all the crinkly bits as much as you do (and helps you remember where your towel is).

In Search of a Different Kind of Inspiration

Ideas are not something we struggle with, usually. That’s one of the advantages to being a writing team. Between the two of us we’re almost always able to come up with fun complications for our plots, and, after letting our characters struggle with them for a bit, fun solutions to those complications. It’s pretty awesome.

We’ve encountered a snag, though, in something tangentially related to the writing: redecorating the Writing Cave. Jen says it’s time. The Writing Cave is the first room we did anything to after buying our house. Back then we just called it the office. Writing wasn’t something we were as dedicated to, and we just needed a good place to set up our computer desks where the kids couldn’t casually smear peanut butter all over the keyboards. They do that less often now, what with one of them being in grad school and the other the proud owner of a shiny new PhD.

When we bought the place, the office was carpeted in plush, vibrant blue — a wall-to-wall Cookie Monster pelt. The rest of the house had hardwood, and we knew there was hardwood under all that Muppet fur, but we worried about what shape it might be in. It must be pretty bad for the previous owners to have kept it covered, right?

Wrong. When we pulled it up we discovered that the underpadding was pieced together from a million little scraps, all stapled into place. But other than that the floor was fine.

We stripped off the mattress-ticking wallpaper and put up a nice rich blue, speckled with whimsical stars and moons. It looks a lot less Lucky Charms than that sounds, but it is perhaps a little too whimsical and there are a few spots where we tore it a little moving furniture. When we had new windows installed, the paint we got to do touch-up doesn’t quite match the original.

The ceiling fixture doesn’t give as much light as we need, and is constructed in such a way that it’s hard to find bulbs that fit inside it with the cover on.

So — we’re all agreed, then. It’s time to redo this room. (Well, we’re not *all* agreed. Kent is indifferent. But he’s willing to follow Jen’s lead.) We know we want to make a change, we just don’t know what we want to change it to. It’s a strange place for us to be. We’ve done a lot of home improvement, and we usually have no shortage of ideas there either. But this time we (read: Jen) are kind of floundering. We’re most likely going to get new desks that can convert to standing desks with the touch of a button. Other than that we’re happy with the furniture. That’s good for our budget, but doesn’t leave a lot of room for creativity.

All we know for sure is that we don’t want the walls to be white. And we want a new light fixture and window covering. What those will look like, we have no idea. Oh – and we’re going to clear out the closet and install some sort of organization system, once we sort through all the junk and see what we actually want to keep.

If we get it figured out while we’re still outlining the Ghost Books, we can talk through plot points while we paint. Otherwise we’ll have to divide our time between writing and acting out our HGTV dreams.

The best writing partner is the one who supports you, even when it means applying liberal helpings of elbow grease.

Twist the Knife

Our characters hate us. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. It’s a hazard of this job we’ve chosen, and it’s one we usually accept without complaint. But this time some of our characters are ghosts, and, well… we don’t want to be haunted, you know? Nevertheless we persist — for you, dear reader. It’s all for you!

We know that, intelligent and discerning bibliophile that you are, you don’t want to read a novel about pleasant people who experience nothing but joy. Apart from being unrealistic, it wouldn’t be very interesting.

So when we’re hammering away at the plot rainbow, and we reach a decision point like, “Should Istvan Von Rupert crash his custom zeppelin, or get food poisoning from eating raw snails?” the answer is usually “Yes.”

The above example introduces physical peril for poor Istvan, but in our books he’s actually more likely to face emotional or psychological turmoil. So, “Will his wife leave him, or will he lose his job?” might be a better illustration. And again, the answer is probably “Both.” No matter how much we might like Istvan (which really isn’t very much, but that’s beside the point), we need to complicate his life for our own amusement, and yours. The scuzzier the decision feels, the better it generally is. And anyway, aren’t ghosts supposed to have tumultuous backstories?

A writing partner is someone who will help with the exorcism that will inevitably result from pissing off the ghosts as much as we’re planning to.

 

A Ghostly Outline

The rainbow for Book 2 is proving to be a lot of work, but we’re certainly glad to be identifying all these gaps now rather than later. With as many times as we’ve done the rainbow process, the challenges of this series have been something of a surprise.

We think a big part of it is the fact that all four books are in play during this pre-writing stage. It means that when we lay out the rainbow for any one of the books, we’re also aware of the other segments that make up the whole, giant thing. It’s like the ghosts of the rest of the books haunt the discussion.

Too bad we don’t have a room in our house that’s big enough to lay out the entire tetralogy-spanning Bifrost. The Auxilliary Writing Cave is sufficient for only one at a time. On previous projects we’ve spread out rainbows on the dining table or down the hallway, but those aren’t wide enough this time around. Oh well.

A writing partner helps you keep track of hundreds of colorful paper squares and the supernatural realms they represent.

When “Mysterious” Doesn’t Cut It

Ghost Story progress update: we have preliminary rainbows for all four books, and the Book 1 rainbow has been expanded considerably. We are now working on building out the rainbow for Book 2. It’s going very well, but we have discovered that we struggle to make firm decisions where a particular character is concerned.

This person’s column tends to be a bit sparse when we first lay out each rainbow. It’s someone we originally pictured as an enigmatic background figure, who would just turn up to chuckle darkly now and then. Turn up at significant moments in the story, of course. Well, we need to understand what’s responsible for the timing of those appearances, which means we need to know more about this character.

It hasn’t been any problem at all to invent fun backstory. The problem has been winnowing down the fun ideas to just those that don’t contradict each other, and arranging them into a coherent line through the plot. Those conversations are filled with too much “maybe this” and “maybe that” and not enough “okay, that’s settled.”

But we are getting there. It’s just turning out to be tougher to get to know this person than most of the rest of the cast. Which isn’t surprising, considering that the first thing we pinned down was “enigmatic.” How right we were.

A writing partner is someone who’ll help you dig up all the dirt about your most uncooperative characters, and then sift through it for treasure.

Once More, From the Top

In broad strokes we know how the Ghost Series will end. Broad strokes don’t quite cut it, though, do they? Endings are important, the final ending most important of all.

There are, generally speaking, three different ways to structure a series. The first approach is to take a big story and cut it into bite-size pieces. The second is one in which each book is a self-contained story with a distinct beginning and ending, with little forward movement or continuity from installment to installment. Third is the approach we prefer to write, a sort of hybrid of the first two. There’s an overarching story told through the whole series, but each novel tells a distinct section of that story. It’s not that each book stands on its own, but that each tells a satisfying story on its own. But that means that, by the time a reader gets to the end, it needs to build to something truly spectacular. The ending needs to mean it.

As we talk through the four books we’re planning for our Ghost Series, we keep circling back to the finale, filling in more detail. The most recent time we talked about it, we hit a bit of a wall. The fresh insights weren’t flowing. So, heeding our own advice, we set the ending aside and circled back to the beginning again. And lo! Looking at those two points back-to-back was just what we needed to do. It shone a spotlight on some thematic things that were there all along, just below the surface. As soon as we dragged them out and dusted them off, it sparked all sorts of ideas. Concrete ideas about actual actions our characters will take! Not that they’ll be happy about it, of course.

We’re certainly not done with the ending. It will continue to grow and evolve as we work our way through the four books. By revisiting it from time to time throughout our process, we can refine it, and keeping it fresh in our minds gives us something to aim for as we plot.

Four novels worth of story is a ton to keep track of, but having a writing partner makes it a little easier. And a lot more fun.

A Rainbow Is Multifaceted

Plotting out the Ghost Series continues, which lately has consisted of intense bouts of rainbowing. We found a story beat that we could beef up, and in the process of adding it we had a minor epiphany about what makes the rainbow such a powerful tool.

Each POV character gets a column/color, and each story beat gets a row. That means for one beat we need to make cards for every character who participates. In this case, that was three characters. It might feel like inefficiency to have to jot things down in triplicate, but that’s the thing — it wasn’t just writing out the same info multiple times. The cards were all different, because they represented the event from different points of view: the character who tells the lie, the character who believes it, and the true target of the subterfuge.

Having to account for events from these various angles really helps us envision their impact. It also helps us plan whose POV to use for the actual prose. We wrote up three cards, but we won’t need to write the scene three times. (That would be inefficiency.)

The rainbow is inconvenient sometimes. It takes up a lot of space. The dogs walk on it, and shed on it. (And one of them will eat it, if given the chance.) Inserting a story beat means shifting lots of other cards to make room. But it’s worth it to get an adjustable visualization of the story that you can look at together with your writing partner.

How to be a Bad Writing Partner

Sometimes, despite everyone’s best intentions, a writing partnership doesn’t work. Maybe you can’t agree on what genre you want to write in. Maybe you have vastly different ideas about how gritty your prose will be. Perhaps one of you wants to write in first person while the other wants to use third person omniscient. Or maybe one of you sneaks into the Auxiliary Writing Cave and chews up the timeline. Or the other other one of you walks back and forth across the plot rainbow while wagging your tail, scattering the carefully constructed grid into chaos. What we’re saying is, maybe dogs don’t make the best writing partners.

Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord are great at getting us out of the house for a daily walk-and-talk that would make Aaron Sorkin proud, but beyond that they’re pretty lousy writing partners. They insist upon pats and belly rubs, which keeps us from typing. The Bandit Lord enjoys lap time at our desks, but only if he can monopolize at least one hand, again interfering with typing. They both enjoy snuggling on the sofa while we brainstorm, but get offended if we need to move in order to reach a notebook or laptop.

We even need to use restraint when reading our work aloud. The Bandit Lord is a very sensitive young man, and if Kent puts any emotion into a scene where a character is mad or upset, he gets very concerned. Lady Marzipan once stretched very exuberantly and managed to poke the power button of our battery backup with her toenail, crashing both computers instantly.

On top of all that, they’re lousy editors.

Despite the nightmarish conditions here at SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises, we’re actually ridiculously fond of our furry tyrants and wouldn’t trade them for any other writing partners. We’ll just have to start using the baby gate to keep our papers safe.

 

The Bandit Lord hard at work at his desk.
Lady Marzipan in a staring contest with her laptop.

Crop Rotation

Coming up with a story and all the people in it and a whole world where it can happen is a lot of work. There’s so much stuff that needs to be figured out. Working with a partner, that mostly entails talking about it. With enough talking, we can figure anything out. (Talking to yourself can work, too.)

Naturally, it’s not quite that simple. In any given conversation, we’ll pick a topic and make good headway, but getting a given thing totally solved doesn’t usually happen all in one go, or even in a linear manner. We reach a point where we’re not making progress anymore, and lay that idea aside. At some point we’ll revisit it and move it ahead. Eventually, after lots and lots of talking, we get everything we need.

It’s like crop rotation. You need to switch things up once in a while and let the soil rejunvenate. That might mean staying within the same story but shifting your attention to a different plot thread, or a different character’s arc, or it might mean working on a completely separate story. The point is, don’t strain harder and harder if your yield is dropping. Spending that energy on something else will be much more productive.

A good writing partner doesn’t let you end with an overwrought farming metaphor.