Category: Bumps & Bruises

Things don’t always go as planned.

Unlocking the Door Versus Finding the Key

r-avatarOur plots are complex. We strive to get our readers following the flow and being invested in the characters, but we don’t agonize over whether they can recite back all the beats. It’s nice to see people getting most of them, though. We’re not monsters.

In the reader feedback for the third book in our trilogy, we saw a clear trend that certain specific events got away from people. Characters end up making choices based on things that were opaque to most of our audience, which is the same thing as characters just doing crazy stuff without any apparent motivation. Not good. Jen and Kent agreed about where the trouble was, and agreed that it was something that really needed fixing.

The comments came up fairly late in the manuscript, but clearly the place to deal with the problem was earlier. The topic should also be revisited a few times, letting different characters’ impressions shape what the readers learn, so later on it’s just something they know and it doesn’t need bulky explanations. Again, Kent and Jen were in total agreement on all of this.

So we started talking specifics and suddenly were talking past each other. There was a major disconnect in how we were viewing the problem, of which we had hitherto been unaware. It was frustrating as hell and it took a while to diagnose why communicating about this issue had suddenly become so difficult. We threw metaphors at each other until we finally got it sorted out.

There were actually two issues.

Basically, the characters need to unlock a special (and very complicated) door. The readers were asking “what’s this supposed to do?” Whereas Kent perceived their confusion as relating to how the key works, Jen saw them being puzzled over the purpose of getting the door open. When we launched into our discussion of “the” issue, we each jumped directly to how we wanted to address it, assuming we were in agreement about what “it” was, so naturally our suggestions made no sense to each other.

In the end, it was a case of two heads being better than one. Together, we were seeing twice as much opportunity to enrich the experience of the story. Along the way, it was a case of the left hand not knowing what the right was talking about. Working in a partnership can offer fantastic advantages, but it adds complexity by requiring communication. A good partner will stick with the discussion.

You Think Italicized? You Should See the Other Guy!

r-avatarIt’s easy to decide when to put speech in quotation marks. For us, it’s much less obvious when to put characters’ thoughts in italics. You’re probably saying right now, “Direct thoughts go in italics, and indirect thoughts don’t.” Duh.

Helpful as that is (and here’s a great writeup on the direct/indirect thing), it still leaves Rune Skelley at loose ends. One of the telltales for direct thought is viewpoint. We write in a very tight third-person, deliberately blurring the distinction between the POV character and the narrator. With that line blurred, we have a judgement call about when something should get italicized.

If that sounds like it’s a problem of our own creation, that’s only because it is. We do it on purpose, and we do it to ourselves. And before you ask, it’s not that we just haven’t realized it should be in first person. We’d typically end up with eight or ten first-person narrators, and that’s not how we roll.

So, okay, you think this is how it needs to be, and it makes the decision hard. Fine, it’s hard. Just make the decision and move on. Well, you’ve just gotten to the heart of the matter. (Thanks!) Making the decision.

This is one way that working with a partner becomes more complicated. A soloist author needs to fret (maybe) about where to draw the in/direct line, and then just go forth and make it happen. Whereas for us, in addition to the fretting, there’s debate and sometimes disagreement. We struggle to agree on where the line should be drawn, and then we struggle over where it actually winds up. Mostly, this problem is Kent’s fault. He admits it (that’s the first step, so maybe he’s not beyond help). He really dislikes the appearance of italicized text, and finds it very distracting. He also wants to point out that, unlike quotation marks, italics are used for multiple things — foreign words, titles, emphasis, excerpted text — all of which come up in Rune Skelley’s fiction often enough to make it an issue. Jen has a far less complicated relationship with oblique letterforms and is a paragon of patience. She just wishes we could settle on a technique and stick to it.

Bad Advice: nano edition

r-avatarTwo words: hell no.

November is upon us again, which makes this a good time to throw some shade at National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo.

Let’s agree that it’s well-intended. The idea, apparently, is that lots of people can’t have the experience of writing a novel unless a climate is set up to encourage them. It’s contained within a calendar month, so it gives you a deadline for motivation and it promises not to drag you into a bottomless pit — come December, you are released! Add a dash of gamification and hey presto, we’re writin’ some novels now!

If you’re someone who took the plunge because of NaNoWriMo, and you’ve gone on to develop your craft and you do the work, for realsies, which you might never have tried without the push that this annual event provided, congratulations. None of this is directed at you.

But if you’re less of a statistical anomaly, then NaNoWriMo has encouraged you in all the wrong ways, save one. It encourages writing without a plan. It uses word count as the sole metric of productivity. It’s the worst kind of democratization, the kind that achieves inclusion by lowering or eliminating standards. For certain definitions of “writing a novel,” anyone really can do it. So for the unserious wannabe whose sole aspiration as a writer is to claim to be one, it’s ideal. (What’s the one good thing? It demands that you write every day. [But it only cares during November.])

To write something good, don’t do it in a mad sprint between two preselected dates. Being an author requires dedication. It requires that you write every day all year. It makes you smarter, because it’s such a workout for the thinking-muscle. Set yourself some standards, and then revise them upwards every so often. Define your own schedule, with milestones and medium-range goals.

Finding motivation in the November event is fine. Giving this whole writing thing a shot during NaNo is fine — gotta start sometime. But there’s a much bigger world, and fixating on artificial deadlines and scorekeeping will keep you from reaching it.

Bad Advice

r-avatarWriters get a lot of advice. Most of it is bad.

Because of basic economics, the bulk of the advice that’s available is aimed at aspirants and novices, and that turns out to be the biggest factor in why so much of it’s awful. Some of the bad advice starts off life as good advice for neophytes, which goes bad once you progress to a more advanced level. It holds you back.

Grammar pedantry accounts for a giant pile of iffy admonitions, but as we gain confidence most of us tune that stuff out. Novices do need more structure (sorry, novices) but we should all aspire to start breaking the rules someday. On that day, you will find it’s suddenly a lot harder to locate any kind of guidance (sorry, no-longer-novices).

Some bad advice is just bad advice no matter who you are, and the beginners accept it because they don’t know any better. We were all beginners once, we all heard these toxic notions over and over, and as our craft develops we tend to keep believing — and spreading — these horrible ideas anyway. So, let’s try to not do that so much anymore.

What’s the worst advice writers get?

“Write what you know.”

If you happen to know things that are fascinating, then by all means write them. Otherwise, follow along as we think this through and see how it can drag you down. Let’s say you used to work in a restaurant, so you know the details of a working kitchen. You think you should be able to render it quite vividly, so you include it in your story. The fact that you spent all those hours in that environment actually has nothing to do with your skill in portraying it, but let’s agree that the scene-setting you produce is marvelous. Is it really all that interesting? Did your story honestly need to have a line cook character, or did it bow to your urge to write about his workplace? Readers need a reason to care about it, and “it’s a thing the author knows” doesn’t qualify.

Certainly we’re allowed to write what we know. But the better advice would be to write what you don’t know. Go learn! Stretch! Take wild guesses, make stuff up. That’s what writing is. Look outward, not inward. Write what someone else knows, letting it become something you know. And then it will become something your readers know.

 

Critically Distant

r-avatarNovels #4 and #5 are both in resting phases, which gives us a chance to circle back to the final volume of the trilogy. It’s been sitting patiently for quite a while, and this seems like a good opportunity to consolidate the feedback from our most recent critiquers. Of course, we want to know our own minds about the text before we try to make sense of what other people said about it, so we’re doing a read-through.

This wasn’t supposed to be a difficult thing. It wasn’t supposed to stir up disagreements.

A perennial challenge for authors is getting an “honest read” of their own stuff. Knowing what’s going to happen, and knowing what’s supposed to be symbolic, gets in the way of appreciating it the way a “real” reader would. That’s one reason it’s important to let work rest. What seems to have happened to Kent, in this instance, is that he failed to put aside his anticipation of certain later events in this book, but exceeded recommended dosages of forgetfulness about how the previous books led up to it. As a result, he raised awkward questions that baffled Jen, and the conversation wasn’t productive. But we pushed through, which is good because otherwise we might not have reached the point where Jen saw what was happening and steered Kent back on course.

Now everything seems to be going much better. There is a bit of a hangover though: Kent feels spooked. It’s a get-back-on-the-horse situation, and that’s what he’s doing, but his confidence isn’t yet fully restored.

Working solo, a writer might wreck a good manuscript trying to fix illusory problems. The chances that two of you will be having the same kind of off day are pretty slim (hopefully!) so you can be confident that anything you agree on is a valid concern.

Reinventing The Wheel

r-avatarOur process is now firmly established and fairly predictable. But every book is different. And when you forget, they remind you. Just when you think you know what to expect, it’s back to the drawing board.

The later stages of revision, for us, include deweaseling and line editing. Both are fine-grained views of the text, and we’ve discussed the possibility of combining them so we can save ourselves one whole pass through the manuscript. So far, at least, we feel it’s worth the additional time to do it in two passes because they’re really not all that similar, mentally. It’s beneficial to look at every sentence several times, in different lighting.

When we went through this process with the Music Novel we trimmed out a significant percentage of the words. Now, we’re going through it with the Science Novel and finding that those results are inapplicable. There are fewer weasel words in it to begin with, apparently. The line editing is also much more challenging, and it’s leading to more… negotiations than last time.

All authors see changes in their style over time. More practice should mean cleaner, crisper writing at each stage. When two people write together, their combined experience is reflected in the manuscript. What Kent and Jen have found is that they can each now “do the voice” whereas in the early days they had to go over each other’s work to bring it into line. Interesting that this maturation seems to be leading to new difficulties during revision.

Overall, though, it’s a huge win. We might be finding issues in our workflow that weren’t there before, but we’re also getting from concept to completed draft to polished manuscript with much less effort and in far fewer iterations. Working well as a team has a lot to do with that.

Partners in Crime

r-avatarWriting collaboratively with your spouse can be a very rewarding experience. We’ve talked numerous times about how we do it. I won’t bother with links, because it’s the topic of, like, nearly every Friday post.

There are times, though, when being married to your coauthor isn’t great for the project. One of the best things about having a writing partner, being able to cover for each other, becomes infeasible — if not impossible — when dealing with certain interruptions.

For instance, we recently celebrated our anniversary. Yay us! But that meant that we both took time away from working on our fiction at the same time. We also recently took our son on a college visit. Again, yay family time! Yay smart kid! And again, the manuscript sat idle.

Birthdays, vacations, anniversaries, family outings, weddings, medical emergencies. When you’re married to your writing partner, life hits you both at the same time. You need to accept that there will be times in the life cycle of a manuscript when neither of you is able to advance the work. In our partnership it’s Jen who feels stress when the project sits idle for too long (“too long” being a very relative term). Luckily for her she has Kent to talk her down and dive in with her when it’s time to get back to work.

Madness In Our Method, But Not Like Back Then

r-avatarWe recently devoted an entire meeting of our critique group to the Rune Skelley Method. Jen and Kent brought the rainbow, and a hard-copy of the outline, and a few sample stubs. Our fellow authors were keen to hear details of how we use all these components in our process. How we do things, of course, is not necessarily what will work best for you. (But details are available at the links above, if you’re interested.)

The key is that we have a process.

You know you’re supposed to have an outline. You know that the more you road-test your plot before you start writing prose, the less likely you’ll get stuck. You know you’re supposed to get enough sleep, and eat your veggies, and not run with scissors. We certainly hope you’re heeding at least some of that advice, but knowing what you should do and doing it consistently are not the same thing.

That’s another hidden strength of writing in a partnership: you can’t get away with winging it, which forces discipline upon you. It makes you actually do the things you know you’re supposed to.

The conversation at our critique meeting spanned the entire Rune Skelley career. We didn’t always have a defined process — we didn’t know we wouldn’t get away with winging it, and wing it we did. We ran, with and without scissors. We wrote much of our first novel from inspiration, letting the characters find their ways into more and more trouble with little supervision. It built up effortlessly into a top-heavy mess. There was no outline, just a vague sort of mission statement for how it was all supposed to end. For a while, it ended in tears and an abandoned manuscript. We had to put it aside for a year. A year. We just stopped writing it. When we did go back, we largely started over. It took a long time and a gigantic amount of work to figure that book out.

What we know now is that all those impulsive maneuvers our characters came up with, which we spent months transcribing into elaborate prose, should have been explored in brainstorming sessions where they could be be debugged quickly, and where potentially better alternatives could more easily be considered. By doing all the exploration in long-form text (written longhand, BTW) we gave ourselves a huge disincentive to think about changing it. So when it became clear that we didn’t have a way forward from where we were, that something had to change, we needed that year off before we could face the task.

In contrast, Novel #5 worked the first time. There’s still work to be done, but it came out the proper overall shape in one go. We devoted a considerable amount of time up front to documenting what was supposed to happen, and fleshing out the setting, and analyzing the characters’ psyches. Considerable time, but way less than a year. And we didn’t have cry about it.

Mutual Back-Slap Society

r-avatarOne of the great things about having a writing partner is that you can pat each other on the back, so neither of you has to risk a sprained elbow doing it for themselves.

Not everything you write is going to be pure gold, and the same goes for any human writing partner you might have. It really is important to show support and encouragement, but it’s equally important to call bullshit when necessary. Even when the offending idea is something your partner is deeply in love with. Especially then.

There are two ways to go wrong with this kind of feedback.

You might be too soft about it. You don’t want to be mean, and you don’t want to come off like you think your own work is flawless. Who are you to criticize? You’re the co-author, that’s who. If you don’t speak up, then either the defect will remain in the writing, or else later when you do finally raise the issue it’ll be that much harder to deal with. (Maybe your partner will realize on her own by then? Don’t count on it.)

The other pitfall is fixating on the things you don’t like to the exclusion of what’s good. Even if you’re not rude about it, the cumulative effect will wear your partner down. You might train him not to overuse passive voice, but you’ll be smothering his creativity while doing it. “Dull, but free of errors,” isn’t what anybody wants for a log line.

Positive reinforcement is more effective than negative. To help each other improve, and to improve as a team, you need to praise the good stuff. Offer that pat on the back, and hope to earn one for yourself.