Category: Characters & Setting

Naming, research, maps, and other fun.

We Can Be Taught

The purpose of our recent trip to New York wasn’t to spend a lovely afternoon with our agent — that was an immensely enjoyable bonus. The true purpose of our visit was to scope out locales that figure in some of what we’re writing. What we’re currently writing, no less. Yes, we can learn — this time we didn’t wait until the draft was all the way done before heading out to do recon. This time we’re in the middle. Perhaps someday in the future we’ll be organized enough to conduct our location scouting before we start writing at all.

The need for this research took us by surprise. We’ve been to New York before — more than once! — plus, there are a million pictures online to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. We thought we were all good, but once we set fingers to keyboards we discovered more and more details that were a little too fuzzy for comfort. Details that our google-fu was inadequate to turn up.

The specifics of where we went and why are on a need-to-know basis, but we’ll share a tidbit that’s not too spoilery: verifying certain facts entailed renting a rowboat in Central Park. In the process, we verified that working a set of oars brings out the creative side of many New Yorkers.

We really do hope to be able to stay put for a while now, and focus on the actual writing. A writing partner is someone to enjoy a romantic getaway with under the guise of research.

Floor Plans! They’re Everywhere!

A couple of scenes that Kent recently finished writing take place in the same location. Halfway through the second of them, he started adding notes about furniture that should have been mentioned in the first. Soon it wasn’t just furniture, but major architectural elements. By the time both scenes were written, he’d become unsure that the locale’s form was consistent, or even coherent.

So, he drew a map of it. Two maps, actually, because the characters do some remodeling. Result: yes, the shape of the room works for the action as prescribed, without needing to factor in any extra dimensions where dwell the Old Ones.

It might have been better to have the drawing available before he started writing, but it will certainly come in handy for the second draft. It’s quite possible that he was actually better off not having a map to look at while writing. Referring to a map can trigger his dormant dungeon-master training, which can bleed through into the prose if no one is keeping an eye one him. Then the narrative starts to sound like, “The room is a rectangle, twenty feet by thirty. Seventeen feet from where you’re standing there’s a fireplace. Roll for perception.”

Speaking of incoherent locales, we’ve been browsing a lot of house plans online. For now it’s mostly for entertainment, but we will want to create our forever house within the nigh-foreseeable future. It needs a dedicated office writing cave, and we’d really like to have some kind of demarcation for that so we can “come home from work.” The house has got to be in a modern style, and it needs to have certain other specific features. The problem, of course, is not that this combination of traits is hard to find. The problem is that there are so many possibilities, but we only need one house. (Right?) (Yes.) A good percentage of the designs make us scratch our heads, but that still leaves way too many to make it an easy decision. We don’t really expect pity on this count.

A writing partner is someone who shares your ideas about the perfect writing cave.

Awkward Pauses

Our WIP is part of a trilogy with a sizable cast, including multiple POV characters. In this book, there are several new viewpoints. Some of them are new characters altogether, while two others in particular have been on the page before. But, we’ve never ridden around in their heads until now.

The brand-new characters’ viewpoints have turned out to be easier to write than the returning ones, which surprised us. But with one set it feels like being a stenographer scrambling to keep up as the dialog flows, and with the others it’s as if they keep glancing over to be prompted for their lines.

The reluctant duo are beginning to loosen up, though. The more scene-time they get together, the more their personalities solidify. It’s a matter of us as authors getting to know the characters better, but it feels more like the other way around. It feels very much as if the characters are becoming more relaxed around us.

One possible explanation has occurred to us for why it was the returning cast members we ran into this with, rather than the entirely new ones. Part of our process involves role-playing as our characters, typically when we go out for dinner. And this is something we made heavy use of with the newbies, but did far less of with those we had worked with before. It seems we slightly underestimated the magnitude of making someone a POV character. (Sorry, guys.)

A writing partner is someone with whom you can pretend to be fictional characters, in public.

Places, Everyone!

r-avatarOur first three novels are set in the same made-up town, which is strongly inspired by a real place. The music novel and (son-of) are set in New York City, which despite what you may have heard is an actual, real place. For the science novel and its successors we have once again invented cities, and the locations that inhabit them.

The science novel’s locale is practically part of the cast. We never considered setting the story in a known city. When it came time to plan its sequels, though, we worked very hard at tracking down a real place that could work. Neither of us can quite say why. Given the logistical constraints of the plot, as well as some crucial geographic and climate considerations, it was proving all but impossible to choose an existing location. Plus, we wanted it to have a cool name.

The desire to name the place was probably the signal that snapped us out of it. So, today we concocted a deliciously Russian appellation for the place where we’ll be making more characters’ lives miserable, and decided where to put its map pin. In this case, “we” means Jen of course, because names are her superpower. Now that we’ve chosen this route, it’s dawned on us how strange it would have been to have books in a series follow different theories of setting and world-building.

As an added bonus, creating a location from scratch allows Kent to stretch his D&D muscles to draw up maps.

The Name Game

r-avatarOn any team, different players have different strengths. In the case of Rune Skelley, one of Jen’s main strengths is naming — things, people, places, you name it (but not if she sees it first). This is good because Kent tends to be less than awesome at coming up with names.

This doesn’t prevent him from having opinions, though. So, once in a while, Jen will deliver a name that just doesn’t work for Kent. And it does matter if both writing partners aren’t on the same page about a name. After all, characters’ names are perhaps the most important things about them. No other aspect gets such heavy use, or is called on to signify everything else the reader knows in such a compact, almost invisible way.

These name-disagreement situations are uncommon, but we’re in the midst of one right now. They’re terribly awkward. There’s a sense of “Jen is the one who’s good at this, so she wins,” which we both know isn’t a solution. Kent is at a disadvantage to produce viable alternatives, so he feels stuck. We really don’t have a formal process for coping with them, other than trying to keep communications open and give each other time to adjust. So far it’s never led to arson.

Partnership is about trust and compromise. Working with the right partner, compromise can be a creative exercise.

Reintroducing, For The First Time…

r-avatarAs Son of Science Novel’s plotting continues, one of the things we like to do is pick one character and look at the story through his or her eyes. Especially for the new characters, this is a great way to get acquainted with them and figure out their reasons for choosing certain paths and forming certain allegiances.

For returning characters, we don’t expect the process to show us so much about them. We still do it, for other reasons. This week it turned out that one of our returning characters was sorta-kinda new, too.

This person has a minor part in the Science Novel. It’s not that we didn’t know him, but in this book he’ll be promoted to the POV cast. For that, we need to get to know him better. Looking at the story from his vantage helped us spot many small but important unanswered questions, which now mostly have answers. The issue also applied to the backstory, and for that we used our time-honored technique of going out to dinner as members of our cast. (Kent cheated a little bit this time by not doing the accent.) Mostly when we do that, the characters at the table are romantically involved. For this outing, they were parent and adult child. It was highly illuminating.

Having a writing partner means there’s someone to help out with every phase of the complex process of writing a novel. And, sometimes it means you have someone to take out for dinner.

Getting More Excited Every Night

r-avatarWe have turned a corner in plotting Son of Science Novel, and it feels so good. We no longer have to say, “Let’s try to focus on plot-level events instead of backstory,” because (as we knew would happen) our knowledge of the new characters’ histories is now sufficient that the story proper has started to come alive.

One key to reaching this turning point is that we’ve started to give our new characters some stressors and time constraints. The protagonist from Science Novel was, of course, our seed for the new story threads, but it took a while for other characters to really activate. Now they have pressing issues of their own, not just a static collection of wants that our returning protagonist will bump into. They’re not just waiting for their turn as a foil anymore, but are part of a story that would be happening even if this person from a previous book didn’t stroll through. (But of course, she does, and that makes things ever so much more interesting!)

Kent has noted of a couple of particulars, “That’ll be fun to write!” Those tend to be the ultra-geeky ideas. Jen is building up our repository of reference photos for the new cast members, a process that sometimes causes us to re-envision these people. It definitely helps us feel a connection to them.

The best part is, our momentum is building as our investment and excitement build. We still have a long way to go, but we’ve crested a steep hill and right now we’re picking up speed as we coast down the other side. The wind in our hair feels great!

Beyond The Edge of the Page

r-avatarReaders want to feel immersed, and they want to place their trust in the author to know where the story is going. These concepts shake hands through the magic of world-building: in order to help people forget that everything on the page is made up, you must make up a ton of additional stuff to give it context.

Despite the oft-touted genre influence on how much world-building is called for, the simple fact is that all narrative — nonfiction included — needs to create a compelling environment, a vivid arena where the action will unfold. And it needs to be expansive enough to feel unbounded, like the story could go in any direction and never hit a trompe-l’oeil backdrop. In a realistic story this might not, technically, count as world-building, but let’s not get hung up on technicalities. Whether it’s a beach in the Caribbean or a plateau on Mars, you want your reader to feel the sand.

This is sometimes described as the sense that the story extends past the edges of the page. Striving for that effect raises an important question: how far?

World-building is a type of research. You’re just creating information rather than finding it in other sources. As with all forms of research, there’s a risk of falling down a rabbit-hole. Erring on the side of thoroughness is probably wise, but stay wary of the point of diminishing returns. Questions that come up in the middle of writing a scene can derail your productivity if you fixate on them.

In Son of Music Novel, one of the secondary characters is on television, in a show we made up. We know what it’s called, but up until a recent work session we hadn’t filled in anything else about it. And, the show’s title suggested two possible kinds of show it might be. We know that the show needn’t be depicted on the page, so theoretically we don’t need to settle the question of what it’s about.

But we do, actually. Tossing off a title that’s not attached to anything calls attention to the gap. It makes a reader wonder. Wondering what’s behind that title turns into wondering if the author’s ever going to address it, reminds the reader that someone made all this up.

What we (probably) won’t do is make lists of episode titles. The band’s discography is documented in tremendous detail, but there’s a reason we call this book’s parent the Music Novel. It’s not the Television Novel. You need to prioritize, because the world you’re building truly is boundless. This is where it can be helpful to have someone (a writing partner, for instance) who can act as a sounding board and help you know when it’s time to climb out of the rabbit-hole.

Rune Skelley’s Women in STEM

r-avatarThe future well-being of humanity depends heavily — maybe entirely — on our net proficiency in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Viewed in that light, the under-representation of women in those fields isn’t just unfortunate, it’s disastrous. Half of our potential for advancement is stymied, when the species needs all the help it can get.

Here in the writing cave we try not to be too soapboxy about stuff. Rune Skelley writes about what fascinates Kent and Jen. We don’t make those choices based on any agenda beyond “make it awesome, and then add a bunch of amazing up in there.”

With all that being said, we looked back over our projects and discovered that Rune Skelley has a damn good track record of strong female characters who rock the STEM. These ladies include an electrical engineer, a computer programmer, a geneticist, and a pair of medical researchers. It wouldn’t count for much if these were just labels we stuck on them, just part of their backstory or shorthand for “she’s a nerdy chick.” These are not walk-on roles, either. We’re talking about protagonists and major supporting characters. And in each case, if not for their expertise, depicted on the page, the plot could not move forward.

Other female characters in our novels have brainy jobs outside of STEM: an author and an investigative journalist, for example. (And a couple of them are murderers with special powers. They make a formidable group!)

The guys in our books represent too, of course. But we’re not here to talk about them today.

Our team being gender-balanced, and biased toward the geeky end of the scale, probably goes a long way to account for all this. It’s just art imitating life: Jen has a BS, whereas Kent limps by on his measly BA.

To learn more about women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, you can start here.

What Color Is The Sky

r-avatarBy now, we have a fairly good handle on the background info, physical attributes, and overall personalities of all the major characters for the new novel. Jen has tracked down reference photos and filled in all the details on the character sheets. But there’s a big difference between knowing all about someone, and really knowing them.

We make use of multiple points of view in our novels, usually switching at chapter breaks and sometimes within a chapter as well. It’s third-person, but not omniscient. This goes well beyond just limiting the facts to those that the POV character could know and not letting any subjective details from the rest of the cast slip through. It’s important that each scene really convey what the world is like for that character. Being able to do that requires that we know them intimately, that they become real to us. And getting to know a bunch of people that well takes some time.

On this project, we’re making a conscious effort to mold our process around what we’ve learned on a few previous books. We really want to have the voices dialed in right from the beginning, because it sucks when you have a hundred pages of great material that’s riddled with a subtle, pervasive flaw. So we’re trying to avoid our past mistakes, like the time our readers didn’t feel connected to our protagonist (whom we absolutely loved and couldn’t get why anybody else could feel otherwise — we had neglected to put her feelings on the page) or the time we went back to the opening scene and discovered that that protagonist was behaving “out of character” (we got to know her properly only after the first part was written).

That’s not to say we had no successes, far from it. A particularly good move, which arose organically and then we recognized and formalized it, is the way we tend to divvy up scenes based on their viewpoints. This allows us to deepen our connections to certain characters, and also lets us each play to our strengths by adopting the characters that resonate with us more. There’s no rule that says “that’s a Kent character; Jen can’t write it,” and by the time we’re done there’s typically quite a bit of overlap, but as a guideline it works very well.

A few vignettes have been crafted for Son of Music Novel, things which might or might not get incorporated into the manuscript. Kent’s next project, now that there’s a bit of raw material and now that some psychoanalysis of the cast has been done, is to revise those maybe-apocryphal scenes so their POV characters’ personalities saturate them. This exercise will give us the benchmark for how the “real” scenes should feel once we begin composing the novel per se. We take a holistic view of getting the voices right. It spans all levels, from mechanicals to vocabulary to reasoning styles and even sensory inputs that are unique to each character. It’s a lot of up-front effort, but it will put us ahead of the game later on.