Category: Characters & Setting

Naming, research, maps, and other fun.

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.

Lavishly Illustrated Plans for World Domination

r-avatarAs co-writers who work together in the textual medium, Jen and Kent are somewhat unusual. However, there are other storytelling forms wherein laboring in solitude would be the exception. In the case of film, it’s nearly unheard of for one person to create the whole thing.

We’re fascinated by other storytellers’ processes, and recently we had the chance to bask in the genius of Alejandro Jodorowsky (not in person, sadly, but still). By now you certainly have heard about Jodorowsky’s Dune, the documentary of the almost-making of the greatest movie that doesn’t exist. (No? Search it now, then come back. You’ll thank us.)

In particular, we were captivated by the book. (And here we don’t mean the novel he was adapting.)

Jodorowsky compiled his team’s fabulous concept art and shot-by-shot storyboards into a mammoth book for presentation to Hollywood studios. He knew that a vision so audacious would seem unattainable, thus the meticulous (and gorgeous) documentation of how he planned to bring it about.

iu-1 iu-2

The photos don’t convey the book’s immenseness. It’s the size of a shoebox.

For Rune Skelley, Jodorowsky’s presentation book for Dune is inspirational. We have a fairly detailed (and occasionally colorful) process of our own, which is not going to seem very impressive next to what’s mentioned above. But we do put in a lot of effort up front because, when you’re working as a team, whether on a novel or a film, it’s crucial to know that you’re sharing the same vision.

In addition to the used-up steno pad, and the rainbow, and the prose outline, and the nearly-but-not-quite traditional outline, and the stubs, we also pull together piles of other notes and images that connect us to the story world.

Early in the process, we “cast” every role in the book by tracking down pictures of people who could play them. Often these are photos of famous actors, but we don’t limit ourselves when searching. These photos become incorporated into the character sheets that list out other basic data about each person in the story.

Another thing we do is “scout locations,” choosing real-world buildings to serve as templates, or sometimes to play themselves. In son-of-music novel, a family purchases a certain well known landmark mansion. Jen has been doing a little nip and tuck on the floor plan to bring it into line with the new occupants’ needs, while respecting the historical character of the structure of course.

Kent’s done a fair bit of research, most of which is classified. The most enjoyable part was putting together a gallery of fractal images and coming up with a categorization system for them. (He realizes fractals have already been categorized, but not in a way that meets Rune Skelley’s requirements.)

As with everything else about writing our books, we’re mad planners where world-building is concerned. And even when our settings resemble consensus reality — superficially — we devote the energy to make sure we can feel them under our nails.

Roleplaying In Public

r-avatarOne of the great joys about working on a new novel (#6!) is getting to know the new characters. It’s also one of the biggest hurdles to clear before the prose will come together. Until you bond with these imaginary people, writing feels like putting words in their mouths. They say the lines, but after delivering each one they look over at you to see what’s supposed to happen next.

Kent and Jen have a few tricks they use to speed up the getting-acquainted stage with a new cast. Of course there’s tons of discussion and note-taking, filling out character sheets, learning the facts of their backstories. But facts can be dry and uninspiring. To get a richer feel for these characters, Rune Skelley likes roleplaying.

The other night, two characters from Rune’s upcoming sixth book strolled into iHop. Sure they looked like Jen and Kent, but rest assured that’s not who they were. Something even less obvious to casual observers was the temporal distortion bubble: the two individuals conversing across the booth were younger versions of themselves. A phase when they were closer, compared to the present-day events of the novel. When they could relax around each other, just chillin’ and being fictitious at a pancake joint.

Jen and Kent use roleplaying quite a lot. Another new character is a killer with a particular technique, which needed to be, um, road-tested. (A little.) It’s also useful for debugging dialogue and validating motivation, things that can come up in later stages of the writing.

Both Kent and Jen have a bit of theater background, and spent years playing Dungeons & Dragons and other FRPGs. Adopting another persona might be a bit easier because of that experience, but it’s just a matter of practice to get comfortable with it.

A solo author could of course make like Travis Bickle and role play in a mirror, but having a writing partner means you always have a costar on hand to make you feel less ridiculous.

Do you use roleplaying as part of your writing process?

Substance Over Style

r-avatarOur current round of brainstorming is pointing out yet again why having a coauthor is such a marvelous thing. We’ve been kickin’ it old school, writing out notes longhand in a steno pad. It’s a great way to wake up different parts of the brain, but it’s also a great way to get a hand cramp. On those days when your fingers need a break, your collaborator can pry the quill from your gnarled fist and take over the scrivening duties. As long as you both have moderately legible handwriting, you’re saved!

A good writing partner has many uses besides that overly literal interpretation of the term. We know in broad strokes how the plot of our new novel will go, so right now we’re concentrating on fleshing out the major characters, filling in their backstories. Most of what we’ve been talking about won’t appear on the page, but it will inform the characters’ actions. We need to know who these people are and how they got that way. It’s the only way to make them feel real and fully formed. Details from their pasts often prompt plot points when we get to the outline stage.

So we’ve been flitting from character to character, having a grand old time gossiping about their secrets and what-have-you, until last night. That’s when we realized we’d been avoiding talking about the villain. He’s not a total stranger, mind you. We know several very important things about him, like his name, and what he’ll be doing in the novel. We know that he’s a very bad person, we just didn’t know how he got that way.

After chatting and throwing out wild ideas we whittled our list down to two possibilities. Option 1 has a really striking visual, and can probably be made to play nicely with the facts we already “know” about this guy and his MO. Option 2 is a bit more mundane, but opens up some really nice avenues for a character arc and some theme elements.

Obviously we chose Option 2, but the striking visual of Option 1 was very enticing. It’s over the top and gross and operatic. It represents a chance to really show off. It’s got style. Repulsive, dangerous style. Jen was having a hard time letting go, but luckily she has a writing partner. Kent was able to stuff his fingers in his ears and ignore the siren song. He argued for Option 2, for boring old plot momentum and character cohesion. And he’s right. The story overall will be much better if we opt for substance over style.

Never fear, Option 2 isn’t actually boring. It’s plenty disturbing and violent and sick. It’s just tame in comparison to the much bloodier Option 1. And we’ve filed Option 1 away for future use.

So maybe fear a little bit.

We Can Be Taught

r-avatarFor a while now we’ve been flirting with Novel #6, naming the characters, talking about their backgrounds, even brainstorming up some cool ideas for (gasp!) plot. We have a few more loose ends to tie up with Novels 4&5 before we can really immerse ourselves in the outlining of #6, but there’s one big step we were smart enough to take now.

As we mentioned, we took a field trip to the inspiration location for the Science Novel after we finished writing it, and that meant a certain amount of revision. We weren’t slavishly devoted to the real world location, but having visited it we had a better idea of how our version should feel. We could have saved ourselves a lot of rewriting if we’d been smart and taken the field trip early on.

So that’s what we did this time. Even though we don’t have the whole plot mapped out yet, we have a particular location in mind for a lot of the action. Last weekend we visited it, took a bunch of pictures, asked a bunch of questions. We went before the weather got gross and cold, and more importantly, we went before we wrote anything. Before we even plotted the whole thing out. That means that we have a clear picture of what we want to work with. We know what it’s like to move around in our location, what it smells like, how things are laid out. It should help immensely with outlining, and will probably inspire ideas we wouldn’t have had if we hadn’t visited.

And that means we can spend the gross, cold winter days in front of the fireplace, cozy with our slippers and hot buttered rum, brainstorming and working with our plot rainbow.

And if we’re really smart, we’ll set the next one in Prague so we have an excuse to go back.

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.

 

Ya Gotta Start Somewhere

r-avatarNovels #4 and #5 presented us with an unaccustomed obstacle: getting to know a new cast. Over the course of writing and revising the trilogy, we became intimately familiar with the minds and personalities of those characters. We were used to having the characters’ voices be second nature, so the need to readjust took us entirely by surprise.

This is a particular issue for Rune Skelley novels, because we use a very tight third-person viewpoint. Nothing is presented that the POV character doesn’t know, and that character’s worldview informs choices of adjectives and phrasing. The narration adopts the dialect of the viewpoint character.

Beginning the new books was like impersonating a total stranger, at first. It was a dilemma, because to write the scenes we needed to know the characters, and to get to know them we had to spend time with them, i.e., write the scenes. Which brings us to the title of this post. Ya gotta start somewhere.

With Novel #5, the science novel, we started at the beginning, and it wasn’t too long before the new characters became as real to us as the previous cast. Of course, the parts written earliest had the least character voice, but that’s what revision is for. The opening scenes got some retooling to let the POV character, the protagonist, shine through.

Mostly.

There are still a few pockets of “author voice” in the narration. (Kent’s supposed to deal with them tonight, so maybe by the time you read this they’ll be gone.) These mini info-dumps escaped our scrutiny until Jen hit the line edits. They have natural camouflage, because they sound comfortably familiar to us. They sound like Kent.

One of the hardest things for a writer to do is step back far enough to see the work honestly. Beta readers or critiquers are invaluable, but having someone else direct you to the troublesome paragraph is only useful if you can then see the problem, see through its camouflage. Working with a partner helps tremendously, because there’s an extra set of eyes.

Feeling Bad for Neil

r-avatarWe give our characters a rough time. They’d probably all feel like taking a swing at us, were we to somehow meet. Some of them inspire no sympathy, while for others we do spare a regretful thought now and then for what we’ve put them through.

At the moment, we’re feeling a little sorry for Neil. He’s a secondary character (and it feels unkind just pointing that out — “thanks, now you’re marginalizing me, too?”) in the music novel. Not quite 10% of it is from his point of view. He’s probably the nicest person in the cast, at least top three. He’s a sweetheart. And we’re cruel to him.

The latest ignominy to be visited on Neil is that we cut one of his scenes. Not just any scene: this was his Emmy Moment, a cathartic, self-revelatory monologue. It’s tranquil, but not boring. Peaceful. Stuff that we kept includes some truly brutal events, things Neil might have voted to cut instead.

Sorry, Neil.

In a previous draft of the book there was substantially less Neil POV, as in one scene. Rune Skelley doesn’t have a lot of rules (not strict ones, anyway) but we really do try to avoid giving anybody exactly one POV scene. In this case, it was a really good scene that performed important functions in the story, and it worked because of Neil’s POV specifically. Our solution was to find at least one other beat that could be shown from Neil. We knew we were already bending our “rule,” so we took special care not to create a pointless scene just as an excuse for the POV. That’s how he got his chance to grow as a human being right before your eyes.

swish pan!

Now we’ve made huge revisions (resulting in a borderline-huge manuscript!) and, in this draft, Neil gets point of view several times. That cathartic moment of discovery we set up for him is still a lovely scene, but, well, there’s pacing to consider… A good writing partner offers suggestions for what to cut as well as what to add. Suggesting cuts is easy when the material in question is shoddy, but that wasn’t the case here. Sometimes it has to come out even though there’s nothing wrong with it. Those are the difficult choices.

It’s not that we suddenly decided Neil was slowing things down, rather the story beats had shifted due to all the restructuring. We no longer wanted the stillness of Neil’s big scene in that particular spot. So, Neil loses out in pursuit of the greater good for the book overall. The events still take place, just not on the page. (See, Neil? It’s not so terrible.)

We also cut a short scene from one of the other secondary POVs, but we have no sympathy for Darren.

Future Looks Bright

r-avatarWhen you’re writing about the far future, you can get away with practically anything. But the shorter your jump forward in time, the trickier it is to portray. You’re on the hook to describe what’s happened with cars and phones, and offer some social commentary. And you have to do it all with a fine-bristle brush, no broad strokes allowed.

We like to stir up a brew that closely matches what we encounter when we’re brave enough to venture forth from the writing cave. That is, the consensus reality of our characters is a close match for that of our readers. We’ve delved a few decades into the past, and ventured sideways somewhat, but our novels have all avoided the future.

Soon, though, that will have to change. The sequel to the music novel will concern a new generation of characters, and the plot sort of demands that they not be little kids. And wouldn’t you know it, that lands us squarely in the “trickier” kind of future.

Perhaps it will feel like a natural step for us. Novel #5 was, after all, significantly harder sci-fi than anything else we’ve done. Working together we’ll create the future our characters must struggle in.

He Looked at Her Comma

r-avatarThe revisions on the music novel keep moving, not very fast, but moving. Our focus has been on heightening descriptions. Jen is concentrating on the characters, and Kent is working on the setting.

At least that’s the theory. Funny thing when you scrutinize your text, you keep finding things that could be better. Little sentence structure improvements, little punctuation tweaks, wordiness, these are all things you should be on the lookout for. Of course, they are a perennial distraction from the task at hand.

We sync up our edits verbally at the end of the night, which is a technique we find very helpful for keeping both writing partners hooked into the text as it’s evolving. Lately our work sessions have culminated in conversations like this.

Kent: “Add a comma after ‘her’ in the fourth paragraph.”
Jen: “Wow, that really makes the city come to life.”

Hard to pin down which of the five senses is invoked by a comma.