Category: Bumps & Bruises

Things don’t always go as planned.

When Real Life Intrudes…

r-avatar…which it did this week, it’s good to have a partner to rely on. We had to make a couple of road trips, and as always we tried to use that time productively. It worked pretty well.

We’re also playing with index cards to debug the new plot. These aren’t the color-coded, character-specific rainbow cards, but no-shit index cards. By now we have a fairly long list of events that we want to include in the book. So we made a card for each one that we could recall off the tops of our heads and started laying them out in different configurations. It’s a quick way to look at what-ifs, and it’s a great exercise to do together. It just doesn’t work too well in the car.

It’s been a little bit of a challenge to unknot the middle portion of this plot, and it’s taking longer than we’d like. But it’d be much worse to discover these knots by writing our way up to them in prose. And with a partner, at least there’s someone to talk to out on the road.

A Little Pantsing Can’t Hurt Too Much, Right?

r-avatarMan, we are closing in on the conclusion — make that the action-packed conclusion — of Son Of Music Novel. We’re so close. The scene Kent is working on is that last big chunk of writing, although we have stubs for a few more scenes that are mostly denouement. (Also, there’s a feature of the Music Novel that recurs here, and for which we need a significant amount of text. Jen’s made an excellent start on that.)

All this adds up to a strong likelihood that our manuscript’s completion will fall during NaNoWriMo. Ah well, if our baby’s a Scorpio we’ll love it anyway.

Kent’s working from a stub that turned out to be a little light on details. It was fine up to a point, and then it got vague. The way we chose to deal with that issue (once we figured it out) was to have Kent beef things up in the stub first, rather than just winging it and going straight to prose. Either way could work, and our way we knew there was a small amount of extra writing to be done. It was tempting to see that as nonproductive and skip it, but experience has taught us that we’d end up with more rewriting if we succumbed to that temptation. Better to do a few hundred words up front, knowing they’ll never be read by anyone outside of the writing cave, than to write thousands of words thinking that they’re counting toward completion only to find that they don’t work, and then do another batch.

You might be wondering how we ran into this problem, given our fervor for a stub-based methodology. It was kind of a perfect storm. The later in the story we get, the less need for worry over derailing things. This lack of worry is great from a stress-management perspective, but it can lead to cutting corners. And as it turns out, there is a second edge to that “close to done” sword: things need to start coming together, not keep ramifying. You’re on final approach, and you have to make sure you won’t run out of runway. Another factor here is that the vague area of the stub was mostly kinetic, which makes it easily glossed over. But the action in question incorporates thematic elements and needs to cover specific beats for the character arcs. It’s not just, “make up something exciting and interesting,” it’s “do that, within all these nuanced constraints.”

It seems glaring in hindsight, but until the prose was well underway we thought the stub was pretty solid. Fortunately our work style involves lots of conversation and we figured out the issues without losing any ground. Kent does seem to have a Zeno’s Paradox thing going on, where each evening he manages to write half of the remaining words in his scene. Jen’s not the kind of co-author who’ll sit back and let that run its course, so one way or another that cycle will break pretty soon.

Happy Friday the Thirteenth to all our triskaidekaphobe friends! And all you triskaidekaphiles, too.

It’s Not Safe To Go Alone

r-avatarThe end is in sight!

Son of Music Novel is nearing completion. We only have to write 5.5 more scenes before we reach the finale. That means that we really need to figure out the ending now.

Gasp! You say you don’t have an ending? That’s not entirely accurate. Months ago when we were brainstorming and outlining this beast we had a vision of the ending. We knew in broad strokes what would happen, and that vision has not changed. But now it’s time to fill in the details.

We’ve talked in the past about the importance of having pretty much every detail planned before you start writing, which is especially important when you are writing with a partner. Endings are a little bit different for us, though. We like to leave a little wiggle room so that as we develop the characters throughout the novel we can tailor the ending to them.

Well, now it’s tailoring time. Kent was finishing up a scene and Jen had just filled in all the stubs leading up to the grand finale. Since Kent was occupied, Jen got out her measuring tape and her pin cushion and scissors and took a stab at brainstorming the ending. Alone. It did not go well. She was coming up with brilliant insights like “When the disaster strikes, the characters can be inside or outside.” She was not wrong.

By the time Kent finished his scene, Jen had found a different little project with which to occupy herself, so Kent took his own stab at storyboarding the ending. Alone. Like an animal. His contributions were something like “The disaster could be a fire. Or a flood. Or a tornado. Or a volcano. Or a giant squid attack.” All exciting scenarios to be sure, but he wasn’t really getting anywhere with his list.

So then we started talking to each other. We’ve said a million times that communication is the key to a successful writing collaboration, that two heads are better than one, and we’ve just proven ourselves right. Go Team Skelley!

As soon as we started talking, the ideas started flowing. In less than half an hour we’d devised something brilliant. And it still looks brilliant a few days later! At the end of August we set ourselves a goal of having the first draft done by the end of the year, and it looks like we’ll actually be done much sooner than that (if this didn’t just jinx us). Either of us on our own would be screwed, but together we can work miracles!

Manuscript Out of Order

r-avatarThere’s no rule that scenes must be written chronologically. There are cases, though, where that’s what works best. Scenes that link tightly, places with fast pacing, or sections of the outline that leave things a little too vague (yup, that even happens here in the writing cave sometimes).

Our current chronology constraint has to do with the emotional tenor of the material. To know how the characters should treat each other in Scene D, we must first write Scene C, which is dependent on Scene B, and ultimately Scene A. None of which is an issue for a solo author; the scenes all have to get written at some point. But when two people are coordinating their efforts, it becomes a problem.

This longish series of interdependent scenes impacted our workflow by interfering with our usual habit of divvying up the work so Kent and Jen both have scenes to write. Those four scenes became a one-lane bridge, because the work in the queue had to be assigned to one person.

By happenstance, the scenes in question were assigned to Kent. (Actually, they were assigned that way by Jen, but there was nothing malicious about it.) This somewhat aggravated our workflow dilemma because he is the less-speedy member of the writing team. It started to seem like Jen might be stranded on her side of the river for quite some time.

Fortunately, Jen is resourceful. While Kent wrote all those scenes, she flitted throughout the first draft to take care of things we had in our notes. Punching up theme, keeping the continuity in line, honing the characters’ voices. Now we have that much less to worry about when it’s time for a second draft. And Kent has passed the baton; now it’s Jen’s turn to write the next scene, if she can remember how.

 

The Hidden Dangers of Fiction Writing

r-avatarEver hear of sleep paralysis? It’s a terrifying state between sleep and wakefulness where you are starting to become aware of your surroundings, but your muscles are frozen like they are when you’re dreaming. It often feels like there’s a menacing presence in the room, looming over you, or even pressing down on you.

Sleep paralysis is the origin of stories about ghosts and succubi and other nocturnal monsters, and can also probably be blamed for more modern tales of alien intruders.

In the past Jen suffered from sleep paralysis, so when it came time to write about one of our unlucky characters having an episode, she stepped in to provide the vivid details.

Which it turns out was not a good idea. After not having any sleep paralysis events for several years, she got hit with one after writing the scene.

Luckily for Jen, she sleeps in the same bed as her writing partner. After Jen’s total freakout, Kent got up and did a perimeter sweep, making sure there were no lurking bad guys in the bedroom. And then he came back to bed and let Jen cling to him for the rest of the night.

Drawing on real experiences is a way to add power to your prose, and getting the words out can even help put past pain behind you (e.g., therapeutic writing). But there can be a dark side to “writing what you know.” Sometimes when you look down into the depths, they look back up at you.

Don’t Get Too Comfortable

r-avatarAt the writing conference we just attended, someone presented on the topic of cowriting. It was a married couple who write SF together, but it wasn’t us. Honest. Their excellent presentation was itself a collaborative enterprise, sort of a tag-team slideshow.

One’s comfort zone, specifically leaving it, came up in the context of how having a writing partner differs from writing solo. They mentioned having originally listed it as a drawback then moving it over to the plus column instead.

We agree all around. Let’s take the positive side of things first: new challenges are good for us. About a thousand more homilies could go in here, and we all know them by heart. The difficulty is taking them to heart, and willfully stepping over the line that defines that zone of cozy security. That’s the beauty of what a writing partner gives you, someone who’s invested in your success but who nevertheless sometimes nudges you out into scarytown. Ideally that’s symmetrical, with your partner’s comfort boundaries getting smudged just as much as your own.

The basis for discomfort over entering a cowriting partnership is trust, and trust comes in different flavors. It’s entirely possible to respect someone’s integrity and honesty but still not like how it feels when they want to look at your work in progress. That’s a perfectly human reaction to a new partner, and you have to practice with each other for a bit to get over that first hill. (And maybe another couple of hills.) When it’s working, you’re both more concerned with the quality of the work than with your individual contributions.

Now, for the negative: you might be uncomfortable with the person for fundamental, personal reasons. You might be incompatible, and the amount of effort it would take to overcome that isn’t worth it. You could be the fastest of friends and still not be compatible as cowriters. The dreaded artistic differences. You might, on the other hand, find that working with a particular person makes friendship impossible. Maybe the art is flowing, but it’s at too high a personal cost. How high is too high? That’s for you to say.

Writing with a partner will necessitate going outside your comfort zone sometimes. But a good partner will never shove, just nudge.

It’s Just Like Riding a Unicycle

r-avatarThey say that you never forget how to ride a bicycle, and in our experience that’s true. The problem is that sometimes novel writing feels more like riding a unicycle, and neither of us ever figured out how to do that (Jen does get bonus points for actually owning one when she was a kid).

The manuscript currently checks in at a little over 23,000 words, which means yay! we’re making progress. That’s double what it was the last time we talked about it. But the last time we talked about it was several weeks ago and that’s really not a ton of progress when you consider that there are two of us.

The current speed bumps are thus: Kent keeps falling down research rabbit holes and trying to write scenes to incorporate all of his new learnings, but those scenes are far ahead in the outline and haven’t been stubbed yet, and this causes angst and rewrites. Meanwhile Jen is trying to check the work we’ve completed so far against the stubs to make sure that every important detail has been included before she files the stubs away. That wouldn’t usually be a very time-consuming job, because usually we’re meticulous about following the blueprint presented in the stub. Right now, though, we’re still trying to remember how to balance on one wheel, and some details are falling through the cracks.

Why doesn’t Jen just go ahead and make the necessary changes? That was the plan, until she got into the thick of things and discovered that she’d forgotten how to steer something with no handlebars. It took many reassurances from Kent that, yes, she is allowed to — nay, is expected to — make changes, even to stuff Kent wrote, before she felt comfortable doing just that. It was a strange headspace for her to be in, and she seems to have figured her way out of it, finally.

We might not be ready to ride our unicycles in the circus, but at least we have each other around to help balance.

Working Without a Net

r-avatarIt started off as research notes. We need to nail down the methodology of one of our characters, incorporating a bit of near-future seasoning.

Then Kent said, “I should write an apocryphal scene depicting all this stuff, to get a feel for it.” The next bright idea was, “Why not consult the outline and find a beat that belongs in the novel, so the prose doesn’t just get discarded?”

That’s fine in theory. Economizing effort. Thing is, the stubbing process hasn’t progressed that far into the outline yet. So, it became an object lesson in our dependency on stubs. When Jen heard the first draft, she said, “It’s well done…”

Uh oh.

Some of what Kent invented on the fly wasn’t right for that moment, or for that character. We both liked the imagery and the conceptual basis, though, which gave us a minor dilemma. The whole idea had been to avoid discarding the practice-prose, but now we had something that wasn’t working.

Fortunately, we have each other to talk to. In short order we determined that what Kent had come up with makes more sense if it’s attached to another character. And it does — it’s more in line with her personality, and it dovetails more smoothly with some later plot developments. One wonders how things would have taken shape had we played by our own rules. We’ll never know, but we know we’re pleased with how it’s working out.

Less-Than-Perfect Telepathy

r-avatarWell, that was no fun. (But we’re feeling much better, now.)

For the new book, we’ve bestowed an odd trait on some of the characters, something that alters their subjective take on the world. As we’ve been mentioning a lot of late, the current priority is getting our ear in for the new cast. We want all the characters’ experiences to shine, but it’s crucial that this one odd trait be vivid, and that it be portrayed consistently. It’s a key piece of pseudoscience and needs to mesh with the flavor of the other speculative elements in the story world. We’re mad planners, and we like to know going in that all the edges are going to line up.

So after several conversations, and a few hours of image searches and other web research, we agreed on the basic parameters. A handful of provisional scenes were already in the can, but for a lack of that odd subjective flavor that we had just defined, so Kent went about retrofitting it.

Turned out that our agreement about the parameters was a bit of a mirage. Kent’s take went way out of bounds compared to what Jen had in mind. Of course, Kent had his reasons for doing things that way, and thought at the time that it was exactly what had been established.

This led to the conversations with no fun in them. It’s uncomfortable to be in disagreement over something you’re really invested in, and Jen and Kent don’t get a lot of practice disagreeing. (We like it that way, but it makes for extra friction when things do go south.) Both partners must seek what’s best for the fiction, and not give in for the sake of harmony. That would be false compromise, which not only hurts the quality of the writing but it also weakens the partnership over time. It’ll make you want to keep score, and you can’t keep score. You can’t carry baggage. You need to find the better answer, the thing that makes you both happy.

Which is what we did. Jen shifted to a different metaphor to articulate what she hoped to see on the page, and suddenly the vision clicked in Kent’s mind. We knew we couldn’t really say “That’s it!” until at least one scene existed incorporating the new idea, so Kent got right to work. Success!

50 Shades of Bad Advice

r-avatarWe’ve been enjoying Jenny Trout’s 50 Shades recaps: all of the shadenfreude and none of the actual slogging through those books. (Thanks, Jenny!) And in the course of those recaps, something that’s always seemed frustratingly opaque has now started to make a lot more sense. While bad advice certainly begets bad writing, bad writing in turn begets bad advice.

The 50 Shades books are written in first person, present tense. And, they’re poor examples of craft. Correlation is not causation, but it’s painfully clear that in this case an inexperienced author got in over her head with the constraints of that mode. We look upon this and see that if someone had just told her not to do it like that, some of the problems could have been avoided.

Some of them, probably. But wouldn’t the world be a better place if, instead of blanket prohibitions, our newbie writers had guidance about how much additional work they give themselves when they choose a first-person viewpoint? (And how to tell if their particular first-person narrator is sufficiently compelling to carry an entire book.) How the use of present tense impacts plot development?

With writers so vastly outnumbering editors, we really need to up our game. We need to see the cause-and-effect of bad advice accurately and break the cycle. Telling novices, “Yeah, don’t do that,” isn’t helping them.