Category: Bumps & Bruises

Things don’t always go as planned.

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.

Lights, Camera, Quarantine!

What’s the last movie you saw in a theatre? For us it’s either Knives Out, or the most recent Star Wars.

SKELLEY TRIVIA ALERT: Back before we were married, we worked together at a movie theatre for about 4 years. During that time we saw a lot of movies (we were each allowed to see one movie for free per week at any theatre in town — and bring a guest —  so we saw two free movies a week for four years). The downside was a growing hatred of the smell of fresh popcorn. In the years since, we’ve cut way back on our trips to the cinema, but we usually manage half-a-dozen a year. This past year was a big ol’ goose egg. To scratch our cinephile itch, we took advantage of our DVD Netflix subscription. Yes, those still exist, and yes, we still have one. There’s tons of older movies available there that aren’t streaming anywhere.

After finally making time to watch Get Out, and quickly following that up with Us, we turned our attention to a new genre — Classics We’ve Never Seen. Turns out there are a lot of them. It’s been a mostly rewarding project. We’ve enjoyed the majority of what we’ve seen, and it’s been a nice change of pace. Here’s a sampling of what we’ve watched during quarantine.

  • Harvey
  • Some Like it Hot
  • Lawrence of Arabia
  • Dial M for Murder
  • Sunset Boulevard
  • Blow Up
  • Thief of Baghdad
  • City Lights
  • The 39 Steps
  • Double Indemnity
  • The Day the Earth Stood Still
  • Anatomy of a Murder
  • The Sting
  • Ministry of Fear
  • To Catch a Thief

This is one habit we’ll likely continue, even after we’re allowed to venture back into the world again, so let us know which classics you recommend.

Happy Quaraversary

So, it’s been a year. We’re not going to rehash all the terrible stuff that happened in 2020. You know how bad it was. Instead, let’s talk about how we spent our time. Like everyone else, we watched TV. But unlike most other people we didn’t really up our consumption much. Our writing projects kept us happily occupied. The only real increase came from Kent working at home and that allowing us to pop on a half-hour diversion during lunch.

In August we started a list of what we watched during quarantine, but of course that was half a year in, and we certainly forgot some things. Since then we’ve sporadically kept up with it. Given how long this incomplete list is, we’re sort of horrified and amazed at how much TV we do actually watch. If we didn’t have our writing it would easily be twice as long.

What have we been watching? Let’s break it down.

Comedies

  • Schitt’s Creek
  • Mythic Quest
  • Space Force
  • Truth Seekers
  • Ted Lasso
  • What We Do In the Shadows
  • Danger 5 (season 1 is better than season 2)
  • Mighty Boosh
  • Bojack Horseman (but is it really a comedy? discuss)
  • Middleditch and Schwartz
  • Auntie Donna’s Big Ol’ House of Fun
  • Staged
  • The Goes Wrong Show

Dramas

  • Devs
  • Dark
  • Umbrella Academy
  • The Great
  • Unsolved Mysteries
  • The Haunting of Bly Manor
  • Killing Eve
  • Supernatural (we’re through the first season already!)
  • Mandalorian
  • WandaVision

Specials

  • Kimmy Schmidt choose your own adventure
  • Psych movie
  • 30 Rock special NBC fall preview adverpalooza
  • Various comedy specials (James Acaster’s Repertoire was a fave)

Comfort shows

  • Great British Baking Show
  • various architecture shows (Grand Designs, etc)

Rewatched

  • 30 Rock
  • Community
  • Better Off Ted
  • Batman (1960s series)

We also watched some movies, but we’ll talk about them another time.

Why Even Bother With The Rainbow?

All of the semi-serious content on this entire blog could be boiled down to “we believe in the process.” We pretty much never shut up about it. Of course the process has evolved over time. It’s workflow, not dogma. But in our Friday posts we’ve really hammered the point that we think it’s important, and of all the steps it comprises probably the one we’ve nattered about the most is the rainbow.

Recent experience has further solidified our confidence that the rainbow is effective. Because, you see, we almost decided to skip it this time.

The ghost story is something we’ve been brainstorming about for quite a while, long enough that we really feel we’re getting to know the characters. We have tons of notes, which Jen has somehow collated into a synopsis that doesn’t contradict itself. Reading that made us so excited about the story, it was tempting to jump ahead to outlining, or maybe even start generating prose.

We didn’t always have the rainbow. Way, way back when we began writing novels together, we had nothing like our current process. But we did have some guidelines and rituals. For example, we originally did our first drafts longhand, and the act of typing them up created the second draft. We don’t do longhand drafts anymore. Even though it seemed important at one time, we came to see it as unnecessary.

Maybe the rainbow would fall into that same category. Maybe it was time we outgrew it?

Fortunately, we stuck to the process. Converting the information about our story from one form (synopsis) to a different form (a grid of colorful paper squares arranged on the floor) in this case revealed major gaps in the plotting. But, it didn’t turn into a major problem for the project. All it took was a little unscheduled brainstorming and we got the pieces to fit.

Would it have been a disaster if we’d skipped over the rainbow? Probably not. We probably would have seen the issues when we got to that part in the writing, and we still could have devised a solution. Of course, fixing it would have required rewriting a bunch of scenes, and reluctance to make so many changes might have made us less willing to consider taking the best approach. And, when you’re head-down cranking out prose is not the best time to notice large-scale issues. It’s quite possible that we wouldn’t have caught a problem like this until an entire draft was written. Ouch.

We like having a process that keeps us on track. Another thing we clearly remember about our very earliest collaborative experiences is the months-long droughts we would fall into because we’d written ourselves into a corner. Getting stuck might be a sign that your process is letting you down.

Calling a Timeout

On Team Skelley, Jen is the project manager. That means she’s the cheerleader, or the taskmaster, depending on your point of view. She’s the one who sets deadlines and holds our feet to the fire. Except that last week she started not doing that. And if Kent tried to step in and direct us toward the Writing Cave, she’d find excuses not to go. (And when those excuses are ice cream sandwiches, it’s hard for Kent to argue with her logic.)

Turns out that editing multiple large manuscripts back-to-back can get a bit wearisome, and Jen was ready for a break. It took Kent by surprise, because Jen is almost never ready for a break. But here she was, actually suggesting that we set the current project aside for a couple weeks and work on something else (and yet also somehow make the deadline she pulled out of her butt for editing this plus the third Science Novel, and had neglected to tell Kent about). Clearly something was up.

We wrote the second and third Science Novels back-to-back, and by the end it was like a death march. We vowed never to do that again. Yet somehow we thought that editing three novels in a row would go smoothly.

We are very smart people, honest.

So we took four days off (in a row!) and let our brains unwind a bit. Kent proposed that we spend some time in the Cave on Sunday and see how it went, and it went well. Since then we’ve been back at it. A mini-break might be all that was called for. That surprise deadline might be reachable after all.

A writing partner is someone who helps you keep your sanity. And feeds you ice cream sandwiches.

Duck Season! Rabbit Season!

One of the great things about writing with a partner is that it gives you two ways to see everything.

One of the trickiest things about writing with a partner is that there are always two ways to see things.

We’re doing revisions on Son of Music Novel. The method we use has us each take a turn editing every page in tandem. Jen goes first, and at the end of every work session Kent approves her changes. We let her get about five chapters ahead before Kent started, so Jen’s fresh edits have faded a bit in his mind, and now every night she approves his changes, too. It’s a good setup for us. Two sets of eyes and all that. And, Jen can leave a note for Kent if there’s something she’d like him to fix when he reaches that point.

Of course, that works a little less well when he isn’t able to see the problem he’s meant to address. Language is ultimately subjective, and a phrasing that “strongly implies X” for one reader might feel utterly neutral about X vs Y for the next.

What happened in this case was Kent rolled his eyes a little (if he sighs, it resonates throughout the Writing Cave and breaks Jen’s concentration) and made his best effort at repairs. When Jen approved the new version, she stipulated that it hadn’t really made the issue go away. It seemed to be an impasse.

So, she used a colorful metafor to describe what she wished was on the page, to which Kent said “Why didn’t you say so?” And he promptly put the colorful metafor, verbatim, on the page. The duck-rabbit waveform collapsed and harmony again reigned in the Writing Cave.

Weasel Hunting

One particularly efficacious way to tighten prose is via the systematic removal of the so-called weasel words that tend to infest one’s writing. Digressions that add little to no new meaning should be avoided. Be clear and concise, rather than cluttering your page with rambling verbiage, and cut out extraneous and superfluous modifiers.

Every author has their own bad habits of wordiness. Could be stating and then restating ideas. Could be tacking on cliché figures of speech to puff things up with faux-authoritative air. Could be excess jargon. Could be lists that go on too long.

For us it’s qualifiers. It’s been a sickness, honestly. We made a list of specific crutch words, and we use the software’s search function to comb through looking at them. It used to be, in our first drafts, nothing ever quite actually was anything. It was “almost” or “seemingly” something. All. The. Damn. Time. Our other bad habit was redundant modifiers. “Crept slowly” was a favorite, as if there is any other way to creep.

We do a much better job these days of keeping that stuff out of the prose from the start. Not that we’re completely cured, just that we see it when it’s happening now and rein it in. But that doesn’t mean our first drafts are perfect. We still need to revise them and tighten things up, it’s just that there’s less low-hanging fruit to be harvested. It used to be we could count on about a 5% reduction in word count from weasels alone. But not these days.

It’s a good problem to have. We’re feeding a higher grade of ore into the smelter, so the purity of the metal coming out is that much greater. (On our planet, low-grade ore is that which contains too many weasels.) A writing partner is someone who’ll take a turn pumping the bellows on your weasel smelter.

You Gotta Love What You Do

It’s surprisingly common to find remarks from writers to the effect of, “if you don’t hate what you’re writing, then it must not be any good.” In a world awash with bad advice for writers, this stands out as perhaps some of the worst. (Especially if what you’re writing is a novel.)

Writing a novel is a commitment. It will probably take years. The writing itself will likely take many months, and then there are revisions. A novel-in-progress is often likened to a child, which is a fair analogy. If it’s more like an irritating roommate, maybe things aren’t going to work out. The idea that throughout such an undertaking you should expect to feel powerful negative emotions about the thing you’re creating… no.

You do need a certain critical distance. Saying you love the work doesn’t mean you don’t want to see it improve. That’s what the revisions are for. Allow it to be flawed, and don’t hate it for its imperfections. Circle back and put in better words.

So, why would anyone say such a thing? Why would they want you to hate your work? They don’t want that. What’s really going on there is that the writing process is often frustrating. Especially if your goals are ambitious, it’s likely that the early drafts will not really work, and it’ll be hard not to feel discouraged about that. Many novices expect the perfect flowering of their thoughts to just land on the page. That’s not typical. A common mistake is trying to combine the modes for initial creation and fine-tuning, which puts you into a very stressful bind of not being able to please the internal editor.

If you find yourself genuinely hating what you’re working on, lay it aside. Put it in time-out and give yourself a break from it. Maybe it’s not what you should be trying to write. Maybe just move on. But maybe giving yourself some space will help you see its strengths and weaknesses objectively, in which case you might feel inspired about it again.

Another thing to reflect on is your process. If you’ve always been a pantser, and you seem to spend a lot of time resenting your works in progress, there could be a connection there. Try giving yourself a rough outline, or imposing some other light framework, and see how it feels. (Full disclosure: Rune Skelley has a highly developed and structured process. That’s what most of these blog posts are about. But, we’re all different, so what works for us might not be the answer for you. If you’ve used a detailed process and you’re still having trouble? Maybe what you need to do is write without a net sometimes, take a break from planning.)

The final point to make about this “hate your own work” ethos is that it’s probably often borne of isolation. Writing is generally seen as a solitary occupation, but Rune Skelley is here to tell you it doesn’t have to be that way. Working with a co-author inoculates you from the creeping doubt that can afflict someone toiling alone. If you don’t have an actual writing partner, form a good partnership with some beta readers, or participate in a critique group. A network gives you support as a human being, and (hopefully) constructive input about the issues in the work.

Quarantine Edition

*washes hands*

Perhaps you’ve noticed that world events are, well, not awesome at the moment. If everything hadn’t turned to shit, we would currently be in Romania, exploring Bran Castle.  Obviously that’s been postponed.

Instead of hunting vampires in Transylvania, we’ve been holed up at home. We’re both fairly introverted, and we generally spend our free time chained to our desks anyway, so we’re weathering things well so far. Ask us again in a couple of weeks.

Download some good books, stay inside, and stay healthy. We’ll get through this.

Lightly Carbonated Research

Oh, the things we will do for our art.

The main character in the Music Novel has numerous quirks and foibles, but part of his pre-show ritual ended up putting us in a bit of a spot.

He drinks Red Bull.

Spoiler alert: he doesn’t drink it for the taste.

Neither of us had ever had the stuff, but that never felt like a problem. The person we show consuming it is used to it, and, as mentioned, the taste isn’t the point for him. This makes it effortless to just not say anything about the qualities of Red Bull as a beverage.

Until.

The rest of the band consumes some of this iconic energy drink, for the first time. This event pushed us over the line, into a world where our ignorance of Red Bull’s particularities would become conspicuous. The cure for said ignorance? Why, Red Bull, of course.

We bought one can and split it. Everything about it was unexpected. Jen anticipated cola flavor, while Kent for some reason thought it would be like a frappuccino (it most certainly isn’t). Neither of us would have predicted the aroma. We toasted our protagonist, whose fault all this was after all, then stood in the kitchen sipping Red Bull and trading tasting notes like it was an expensive wine or an ancient cognac. (It most certainly isn’t.)

We don’t want to provide details here, because we apparently believe we can force you to read our books to find out what the stuff tastes like. As if millions of you don’t already know, and as if it’s not sold at every gas station in North America and beyond.

We will tell you this: it has a kick. Kent scoffed about that, being a champion coffee drinker of long standing, but half a can of Red Bull made him talk really really fast for the rest of the evening.

A writing partner is someone who’ll drink the rest of the Red Bull.