Category: Bumps & Bruises

Things don’t always go as planned.

Multitasking Made Easy

r-avatarIt was a bit like herding cats, but we are finally back into the fiction writing we allegedly love. We were away from it long enough to convince ourselves we had forgotten how it works. Following the read-through of the existing 75,000 words, we procrastinated with discussions about modifying the ending (some of which were fruitful), and then we procrastinated some more with movies to “reward” ourselves for completing unrelated projects.

Several times we sat down to work and were stymied. Months ago when we stepped away from the project, we didn’t leave ourselves set up very well to step back in. Kent had a few cryptic sentences at the start of his scene. Jen simply had a document called “Deja Vu.” It was blank. The fear of the blank page got so bad that we even put off writing anything new in favor of backfilling a retaining wall with 4 tons of gravel.

In the end, we had to lock ourselves in the writing cave and stare at the flashing cursors on our monitors until we remembered how to make our fingers push all those tiny little buttons with the letters on them.

It felt good to produce something again, and we’re falling back into our old rhythms, which reminds us why it’s so nice to write with a partner. Jen is composing prose like a demon while Kent is busy learning all the important aspects of mouse breeding. If there were only one of us, progress would be slower. The writing would have to stop while the research into how temperature affects the genders of mouse fetuses was accomplished. With two of us, no such work stoppage is necessary. Kent can gather all the information he needs for future scenes while Jen works with the characters who are not elbow-deep in rodents. It’s a win-win.

In case you were wondering, colder = more female mice.

back in the saddle, almost

r-avatarThis week we finally took some serious steps back toward writing. Because of the lengthy interruption in our routine, we couldn’t just dive straight back in. We needed to do a read-through of the existing material first.

Our current novel is about half done, standing at 75,000 words. That doesn’t mean it will definitely be 150,000 when it’s finished, just that we’ve dealt with roughly half of the events defined in the outline. World-building can be dialed back now, but on the other hand there’s a lot of complicated action coming up. And it’s a first draft, so who knows what might happen in revisions. What we do know is it was a very wise move to get reacquainted with the text, because with that much of it there were a lot of details we had forgotten.

The experience of reading the whole thing rapidly was very enjoyable; dare we say we were pleasantly surprised. It got us talking about the curious tension between author and manuscript. You have to be in love with it, because some powerful force needs to motivate you to take on so much work. But you also need to be your own work’s harshest critic if you really love it, because excising the merely good to make room for something great is also a ton of work. When you’re wrapped up in the crafting of prose, sometimes the big-picture aspects of the project become hazy. You need to get some distance once in a while. In that respect, our longer-than-planned hiatus had a silver lining.

We were each going to read it separately, but instead Kent wound up reading the whole (half) novel aloud. Jen was very appreciative. We made notes as we went, often discussing the book during our evening strolls. We did spot some gaps we’ll have to fill, and we agreed that some of what’s there will need significant changes. Some writers might opt to tackle those revisions by way of resuming the writing workflow, but we’re not going to do that. Now that the whole thing is again fresh in our collective mind, and we have good notes about the things we were concerned about in the first half, we’re going to move forward. That’s what nearly all the writing advice books say, and it’s one case where we firmly agree with them.

Getting back up to speed after a layoff is always tricky. Jen and Kent find that having a writing partner helps tremendously with overcoming the inertia that inevitably sets in. Even if you write solo, it’s a really good idea to connect with other writers somehow, such as through involvement with a critique group. You’ll feel a bit of peer pressure, which in this case is a good thing. With a collaborator, that incentive to be productive is always there.

Tentative Steps

r-avatarAs we mentioned a few weeks ago, we’ve been distracted from our fiction by an unrelated project. That project is finally in its death throes — finally! — and we will soon turn our eyes and brains back to writing.

As the title of this post suggests, we’ve taken a few hesitant steps back into our imaginary world already. On our walks, we’ve started to talk about the characters again. It feels like we’ve been away from them forever, and I suspect that it’s going to be a little tricky to get back into the flow. We plan to finish kicking the side-project’s ass, then take a little break to watch the new season of Arrested Development (our carrot through this whole process). Kent has a week off, so the timing is excellent.

Once the Bluth family is done with us, we’ll recommit to the fiction. We’ll start by rereading the unfinished novel, to get our sea legs back, and then we’ll push through and write the rest of it.

A writing partner can make it easier to get back on track with a project, because you are responsible to someone besides yourself.

The right partner can also take on the majority of the work when you have other obligations, thereby minimizing downtime. Just be sure to return the favor when your partner’s life gets hectic.

In the Rune Skelley case, being married means that this intrusion impacted us both equally, and derailed the entire novel. Maybe we need to hire an intern to take up the slack.

Beautiful Music

r-avatarAs collaborators, you and your writing partner should strive to make beautiful music together, or least beautiful prose. But what happens when you can’t decide on what music to play in the work room?

Jen and Kent have a lot of overlap in musical tastes, most importantly agreeing on what sort of music should never, under any circumstances, be played. That’s a nice, solid base to build on. There are bands that we both enjoy, and that make pretty successful seeds for Pandora stations (although all Pandora roads seem to lead to the Strokes, who are not a favorite of either of us).

We eschew headphones in the writing cave, because we like to be able to talk to each other easily. The problems arise when Kent wants to get his prog on, or when Jen falls a little too far down the Jack White rabbit hole. When your background music becomes a distraction for your coauthor, a change must be made.

Here at Skelley Co we’ve found that The Beatles’ Love, or classical music makes a good compromise.

That or we just wait ten minutes until our son starts practicing his drums. He effectively drowns out the world. Problem solved.

Creative Drought

r-avatarWe’ve reached the point in the lifecycle of every Rune Skelley project where we have to put the manuscript aside and do other things. Through our years writing together we’ve identified this as our main weak spot, and we’ve developed a system for dealing with it without losing all forward momentum.

I imagine that every writer encounters problems of the same ilk, where you’ve written all you can and there is no more creative spark. A coauthor can often help cover for minor bouts of writer’s block, as we talked about before. But sometimes you both deplete your compositional resources at the same time. When we first started writing, this led to us walking away from the project for months at a time while our batteries recharged. These days we have several novels that are in various stages of being finished, and we try to shuffle between them as needed. If we can’t write anything new on Project 4, well Project 3 needs to reread and edited.

This time is a little different though. We hadn’t quite hit the wall when we decided to put the novel aside. The excuses were creeping in, and the output on any particular evening was waning, but we were both still chugging along, noses to the grindstone. Life intervened, tossing us a huge project that requires a lot of time and focus. Apart from attending our weekly critique group and updating this blog, we haven’t done anything writing related for nearly a month. It’s a very unusual position to find ourselves in.

The outside project is starting to wind down. We’re not ready to set quill to paper again just yet, but hope to get back to it in another week or two. And we hope that having a partner will ease the transition back to the writing life.

The Time Jen Lost Her Mind

r-avatarWe talk a lot about the importance of having a careful outline when working with a coauthor, but today we’re going to talk about the time Jen did the exact opposite.

If you ever glance at the comments on this blog, you are familiar with our good friend Reggie. Before she moved away and left us bereft, Reggie was a member of our critique group. For a few glorious months, Jen and Reggie were both fortunate enough to have employment that left them a staggeringly huge amount of unsupervised internet time. Instead of taking up online poker, or developing porn addictions, they took to throwing stichomancy writing prompts at each other, dozens per day, with the goal of maximizing the absurdity. As was perhaps inevitable, they developed a shared cast of characters that roamed at will through all the prompt responses. What began as a lark rather abruptly developed into a novel. Jen roped Kent into writing one single scene so that it could be said to be truly coauthored by Rune Skelley. The female coauthors appear in the novel as a gay male couple writing an opera about the alleged protagonist. In rough draft form it was nearly 200,000 words, many of them filthy.

Some of you probably read the preceding paragraph and got excited at the prospect of such unfettered creativity leading to something so monumental. Sad to say, this is a cautionary tale.

The entire Saga of Hieronymus Warhol was written in small bites of insanity, completely out of order. That impressive (and bloated) word count is made up of snippets of micro-fiction, averaging less than 500 words. It has a cast of, literally, almost 100 characters, all of whom have peculiar backstories and character traits that the reader is expected to keep track of.

Once the many plot lines were tied together with an improbable bow, Jen and Reggie spent a few weeks wrangling the pieces into chronological order while laughing their asses off. It may be considered gauche to laugh at your own jokes, but that never stopped these two. After that came identifying the plot holes that needed to be filled (as opposed to the ones that were purposefully ignored), assigning the prompts to fill those holes, and then the Sisyphean task of editing such a beast. Entire characters were excised. Sub-plots were fed to the wolves. It’s a process that is still not complete, years later.

With great glee, Reggie and Jen submitted their ugly baby to the critique group and snickered at their consternation. And to this day, the still-unwieldy beast sits on Jen’s and Reggie’s hard drives, gathering digital dust and wondering why nobody wants to publish it.

If you’re an agent or a publisher and you’re interested in some highly experimental fiction about an insane artist, his many lovers and family members, a pair of centuries-old incestuous sibling sorcerers, several satyrs, a sex spy, a large, strange man, and university politics, drop us a line!

Professional Crastinators

r-avatarCollaboration can lead to amazing synergy, the end product being greater than the sum of its parts. You and your writing partner cover each other’s weaknesses and inspire each other to great heights. When it works, it is a thing of beauty.

The downside is something that could be called synergistic procrastination. Every writer has experienced the work session where nothing gets done: blame writer’s block, or video games, or phone calls, the weather, YouTube. Perhaps you have every intention of banging out a couple thousand words, right after you check email, and then it’s suddenly quitting time. Or you just need to do a little research, but get distracted by the whole wide internet. Unfortunately, when you have a co-author, the potential exists to feed into each other’s procrastination. It might start off as a necessary conversation about a plot point, but it snowballs out of control.

Something that we grapple with from time to time is a sort of anti-competetiveness. If he’s not going to work tonight, then neither am I! If she can get a hot beverage, then I can too! I haven’t heard any typing from the other side of the room for awhile, I had better stop being productive and look over to see what the problem is! It’s a very juvenile mindset, and luckily we don’t succumb to it too often. When we do, the work session is usually shot. We try to go have fun and not brood about it, and try again the next day.

tl;dr – a longwinded explanation for why today’s Collaboration Post is going up so late.

Finishing each other’s sentences

r-avatarWith our workflow, the basic building blocks of a first draft are scenes. The outline gives us a very rough scene list, and then we move on to making stubs, which for the most part correlate one-to-one with scenes.

We divvy up the stubs, and normally each scene is written wholly by one or the other co-author. Things sometimes call for a bit of improvisation, though, like the other night. We each pecked away until we got almost to the ends of our respective scenes, and then both of us felt stuck. So we swapped scenes. What stymied Kent turned out to be easy for Jen, and vice-versa.

Either one of us writing solo would have just stared at the screen. Separately, we’d have been blocked. Together, we barely broke stride.

Our “official” process would place this type of cross-fertilization in the second-draft phase. We know that the rough scenes come off the conveyor belt with a bit too much of the particular flavor of the collaborator who took care of it. Or, perhaps a bit too little of the other’s seasoning, as the case may be. Either way, we fix it by revising each other’s scenes. We do that on successive drafts, until sometimes we don’t even really remember who originated a certain scene.

In this case, we got a jump on that part. Now that we’re working on our fifth novel together, we’ve internalized the Rune Skelley voice to such an extent that we no longer need to explicitly merge our individual styles. But we do still rely on each other to augment strengths and cover for weaknesses.

 

An Equal And Opposite Reaction

r-avatarEvery writer has to deal with occasional bouts of writer’s block, or lack of motivation, or distractibility.

Squirrel!

This week has been just such a week for Jen. She wants to keep the project moving, but can’t seem to find her way into any of the scenes that are already in stub form. Usually that would mean that it’s time to write more stubs, but we are currently well-stocked. More of the scenes need to be fully written so that we can make sure we’re still heading where the outline says we are.

Luckily for Jen, she has a writing partner. Kent is not suffering from the same malaise as Jen, and has been writing some great stuff, if he does say so himself. Jen happens to agree. But that’s part of the problem, actually. Lately Jen feels like Kent has been using all the good sentences and she’s just randomly smashing the keyboard.

This compare and contrast mindset can be one of the downsides to collaboration. When the stars align, the co-authors drive each other to brilliance. Other times, someone feels like they’ve been left in the dust. Right now it’s Jen’s turn, but Kent had a similar episode as we were finishing up the rewrites on the previous project.

The two of us trust each other enough to talk about these feelings and reassure one another that everything’s golden. As you embark on a collaboration with a new partner it’s something you should keep an eye out for. Collaboration is not competition. You and your co-writer should cover for each other when necessary, and celebrate when everything goes smoothly.

But it’s research!

r-avatarThe new book, like its predecessor, is turning out to require significant research. Whereas the previous one was set in a real city, which meant we needed to get the details right, the new one registers a greater hardness on the sci-fi scale. That means more technical details to get right. So far we’ve needed in-depth information about algaculture, DNA chemistry, prison architecture, and single malt Scotch. (Not to mention a few Russian phrases.*)

This has led to a sense of bafflement at the idea of trying to accomplish anything without the Internet. But if Kent doesn’t soon get some sense of proportion about things, he might have to do just that. Jen threatens to turn off his Internet access a couple of times per week, in hopes of getting him to focus on the actual writing.

Being able to do research on any topic right from your desk saves hours that would otherwise go into trips to the library and other activities. It frees you to do spur of the moment “research” on any incidental question or topic the moment it arises, so you needn’t plan ahead what subject areas to explore.

The downside is that when research is so available it becomes a slippery slope. One quick search for the names of the four whisky producing regions of Scotland turns into a whole afternoon of reading articles, studying maps, and of course shopping for the perfect dram (something just a wee peaty). Staying productive means having the discipline to get in and out of research mode efficiently. In a collaboration, sometimes one partner needs to give the other a nudge back toward the manuscript.

How do you approach research for your fiction? How do you know when you’ve collected enough information to write your technical scenes convincingly?

*Oops! Now we’ve given away the whole plot!