Category: Brainstorming & Inspiration

Big ideas and how to get them.

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.

You Get 100gp and 125xp!

If you get that, you’re old-school.

A few days ago, Kent took one of our dog-walk story development sessions in a slightly different direction. Instead of our usual writerly shop talk, he ran it like a D&D game. We’ve played a variety of RPGs together in the past, so the basic format came pretty naturally even when being sprung without warning.

“You reach the top of the trail and see some mysterious ruins ahead,” Kent said.

Jen synced right up with the bit, exploring the locale of our Ghost Story as if it were all new to her, and interacting with the creatures she met. We didn’t use any maps, character sheets, miniatures, or dice, but it was fun all the same. And it was a neat way to come at the material from a different angle.

A similar trick we’ve used before is to each assume the role of a cast member and go out “on a date” in character. That’s also a form of role-playing. In that mode, we tend to act out an actual scene (in a restaurant!). This latest adventure was looser, and ended up helping us with world-building more than characterization.

A writing partner is someone with whom to make a public spectacle of yourself, unless you make your saving throw.

A Spooky Realization

Wait, what? Ghost stories are supposed to be eerie? Maybe even scary? Why weren’t we told this at the beginning!

We kid. Sorta. We’ve been happily getting to know the characters and exploring the plot and devising the physics engine that will run the whole thing, and not worrying too much about genre conventions. It is coming along great, we gotta say. It’s just that every couple of conversations, one of us will point out that our goal when we set off was to “write a ghost story,” and remind us that there’ll be an expectation of more than just alluding to the occasional spectral visage in the fog.

So we’re putting more focus on the atmosphere for a while. The story will be a Rune Skelley tale first and foremost, and a ghost story also. This is no different from the approach we’ve always taken with science fiction, but we never seemed to need reminders about putting in enough sci-fi.

We’re also upping the amount of horror in our diet. We’ve never really gone in for the slasher stuff or heavy gore, but there’s so much great material out there with a more cerebral take. Thinky can still be scary!

A writing partner is someone to hold your hand during the scary parts.

Life Imitates Art That We Haven’t Even Made Yet

As loyal readers know, we are ably assisted in our fiction by Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord, for it is they who demand nightly treks around the fiefdom, and those excursions give us much opportunity to converse about our various projects.

 

We do these walks rather late, mostly. After dark. We take flashlights with us, but unless a car is coming or there’s some other reason, we don’t turn them on. To really set the mood, people in our neighborhood have begun decorating for Halloween, and this year they’ve really brought their A-game. And, the project that’s occupied our attention on these night-time promenades of late is the Ghost Story, in all its otherworldly splendor.

A few nights ago we had an unexpectedly stimulating ghost-talk walk. About halfway around the neighborhood, as we chatted about ways in which beings from other dimensions could make their presence known, a blinding white light suddenly appeared fifty feet ahead of us. It floated about six feet above the ground, and held us for a few seconds before turning red and then moving laterally, crossing to the opposite side of the street. Still eerily hovering several feet up. There was no sound.

Then came the bark of a small dog. A gentle human voice told the dog everything was alright. It was our neighbor, wearing a headlamp as he engaged in his own canid-equipped nocturnal peregrinations.

A writing partner is someone to share a briefly terrifying but inspiring encounter.

It Has 1,001 Uses Around The Home

We’re still devoting our dog walks to conversation about the Ghost Story, and focusing on the early portion of the tale. Enlarging what we know about the setting and the characters.

Something we established fairly early was the existence of a special substance. We even gave it a name, and tossed out a few ideas about what it might look like. And then we didn’t really mention it again for a couple months, until just this past week.

Well! When we revisited this material and started brainstorming its properties, we hit a gusher! There are so many possible ways we could use it to twist reality, and not only are they just prima-facie really cool and fun, and they reinforce the desired atmosphere, but this stuff seems to give off plot like a form of radioactivity. We’re taking scads of notes!

A writing partner is someone to do mad science with.

Strange Corners

Now that we’ve taken the Ghost Story all the way through to an ending (of sorts) it’s time to circle back to the beginning and take a second look at the people and events that kick the whole thing off. And it’s turning out that these people are much more interesting than we realized.

It’s like this is a place that we’d driven past on the freeway, which allowed us to spot a few landmarks but not really get the feel for it. So, this time we took the exit so we can tool around some of the neighborhoods. It’s allowing us to look around lots of corners, and we’re seeing unexpected sights down many of these side streets. On our next visit, we’ll get out of the car and wander around, really soak up the atmosphere.

Our main point of original inspiration for the Ghost Story was, as it happened, characters who figure in the middle-to-late portion of the saga, so as we sketched in their history it led to sketching in the histories of the preceding generation, and then sketching in their ancestors’ stories. So stuff was getting pretty sketchy.

Thing is, what we knew initially about those earlier characters was just what our later characters knew of them — or, thought they knew. Once we focused on them we discovered  that the most interesting moments from their lives were the ones they were least likely to tell their nieces and nephews about. They tell us, though. If we give them the chance.

The biggest worry at this point is that the timeline will keep growing backwards and we’ll never be able to pick a starting moment for the story. When all the history was sketchy, it didn’t feel like we had to incorporate much of it. But now it’s more vivid, and we want to tell that part of the story. Which means we need to sketch in a deeper layer of backstory, which we’ll want to enrich, and then the temptation will be to tell that part, too. And deeper down the well we could tumble.

A writing partner is someone who’ll go deep with you, but who’ll also guide you back to the surface when it’s time.

Do You Prefer Tetralogy or Quadrilogy?

Both terms refer to a series of four books, and it seems like that might be where our ghost story is headed.

Our writing output so far consists of three trilogies. A trilogy of trilogies, if you will. It’s all very tidy. But now that the prose outline for our spectral saga is nearing completion we’re faced with a story that seems to want to break neatly into four pieces. And we’re not sure how we feel about that.

Our main work sessions are currently devoted to editing the Science Novels. Since we’re only brainstorming this spooky bad boy part-time, we still have a lot of detail to fill in, but the parts that we do know (and are quite attached to) include four momentous events. The sort of events that would make resounding, satisfying finales. It’s certainly possible that one of them could be adjusted and made into a tentpole moment, the sort of mini-climax that shows up in the middle of a novel to keep readers on the edge of their seats, but we’re hesitant to jump right to that.

We’re still exploring the story and interrogating the secondary characters for exciting backstories. This new story world is expansive and the last thing we want to do is hem ourselves in prematurely. For now we’ll keep talking during our nightly dog walks, and keep expanding everything. By the time we’re ready to make this project our main focus, we’ll have oceans of material to work with. At that point we’ll be better situated to tell whether there’s enough material to fill the spaces between those four big events and make our first Tetra/Quadrilogy.

Let’s hope we don’t have to figure out the word for a series of five.

Ghosts Have Become Less Theoretical

By which we mean, our Ghost Story is becoming more concrete. A preliminary prose outline is taking shape. Jen has taken point on this initiative, and is so far going at it bare-brained. Later, we’ll peruse all our notes and use them to fill in where appropriate.

At this point, the outline covers roughly 25% of the saga that we’ve generated and recorded in a mixture of typed and hand-written notes. The thing about the notes is, they reflect the chronology of our brainstorming sessions, not the saga itself. And they’re riddled with continuity bugs, because we’re still brainstorming.

Even at this early stage, though, arranging our facts into this more refined structure is providing us with new insights. (Insights about fuzzy plot logic, sadly.) Brainstorming is fun, but to do it right you have to be sort of willfully negligent about how any of the shiny ideas could be useful or if they even fit together. So, after several weeks of brainstorming, we’d become a bit attached to a vision of the narrative that’s just not feasible. Oops. It’s much harder to persist in magical thinking when all the pieces are lined up in the correct order. That’s what this prose outline has already begun to help us with. And it’s much easier to put something on the docket for the next dog walk once you know it’s there (or, not there, as is more often the case).

A writing partner is someone who helps you mend the holes in your plot.