Category: Characters & Setting

Naming, research, maps, and other fun.

How Would You Describe That?

r-avatarThe heavy lifting is done in our revisions of the Music Novel, aka Novel #4, but we still have miles to go. We’ve set up a list of global revision issues, each of which pretty much necessitates a separate pass through the full manuscript.

For example, one of the major characters is British, and we identified the need to make that more evident through the usage choices in her scenes. Not just within her dialog, but also the narrative if the scene is from her point of view — we want her point of view to really be the camera lens for those scenes. In other, subtler ways, each POV character needs similar attention. Some of them are less optimistic about life (especially later in the tale…) and some of them are just wired differently. We want certain foibles to be evident in which details the character’s notice, and in their choices of inward adjectives and similes.

And on top of all that, we also need to make the locale more vivid. This one’s set in New York City, primarily Manhattan, and we apparently got lazy about describing the place. After all, it’s on TV a thousand times a week, so everybody knows what it’s like, right? Lazy! Our real wake-up about this issue was when we heard reader feedback on Novel #5, and people repeatedly praised the job we did on the setting. In that case, it’s a fictitious city and because we made it up we were eager to tell folks all about it. So to fix things in the Music Novel, we came up with this simple strategy: pretend we invented New York City. It makes the writing more fun, largely because of the frequency with which we realize just how weird a place New York actually is, probably weirder than anything we would have concocted!

To deal with so many global changes, we split up the list between us. Kent is focusing mainly on “inventing NYC” at the moment, and Jen has moved on from the Anglophonic project to physical traits of the characters. It’s humming along pretty well now, but it’s taken the past week or so for Kent to get back into the swing of things now that we’re back from Europe. Jen must be more resistant to jet lag.

Did we mention we were going to Europe? Prague is a devastatingly gorgeous city. We insist you visit. Go. Right now. Eat trdelník and schnitzel. Drink hot wine and Pilsner Urquell. Visit the astronomical clock and the Museum of Sex Machines. We couldn’t invent a better city if we tried.

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Method Acting

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A character in Novel #5 is a novelist. Her works take place in a harder-scifi story world, more disconnected from consensus reality than Rune Skelley likes to have things. Excerpts appear as epigraphs with each of our chapters. It gives us a way to sneak in thematic messages and accentuate events going on in the main narrative, as well as helping to flesh out the character who “wrote” them.

The person who actually wrote them is a character, all right, and he got into character to do it.

Our fictional novelist, for reasons too complicated to go into here, prefers not to see her output. To emulate her process, Kent put his wireless keyboard in his lap and turned his chair to face away from his monitor. Not seeing the words made it easier to resist tampering with each sentence too much, and promoted a more deliberate style of composition. It did slow him down, though. The impact on productivity might be too severe to apply this trick for an entire novel, but when focusing on short passages it is a simple way to alter the way you relate to the words.

We wanted the epigraphs to sound like they were written by someone else. Changing the work conditions helped ensure that the output was distinctive. Matching the conditions faced by our character made it easier to think like her.

Rolling with role reversal

r-avatarAlong with “every word of this book is in the wrong place,” and “we must use every word, twice if possible,” one of the discoveries we made about the music novel was that our main characters’ relationship needed more tension. They get thrown into a harrowing situation that exposes myriad hurtful secrets about their past, and we had them moping for about ten minutes and then laughing it all off. (Well, not exactly. But it was too easy.)

Upshot: one of our jobs during revisions is to roughen up the emotional tenor of their conversations, and shed a little more light on the second guesses and loss of trust that accompany such upheaval. Weirdly, it’s falling to Kent to handle most of it.

We’ve talked before about how each member of a writing duo should focus on their strengths. It’s one of the selling points for having a writing partner: it’s someone who’s good at things you might struggle with. Traditionally, the Rune Skelley partnership divvies up the chores along appallingly stereotypical gender lines. Kent brings the jargon and the action sequences, while Jen humanizes things with emotional cues that are as subtle or as devastating as the situation demands.

That’s why this time through is weird. After we lined up the scenes and made some notes about where the tone was too light or just too vague, it was Kent who felt drawn to those particular edits. Jen not so much.

It seems to be going pretty well, despite the oddness. Kent thinks it’s going a little slow, compared to when he’s in his technobabble wheelhouse. It’s probably healthy for him to get a bit of practice with earth-human feelings once in a while.

Yoink!

During our read-through of Novel #4 we diagnosed several problems, and have been working to fix them ever since. Unfortunately for one of our characters (we’ll call him Mr X), the prescribed remedy calls for him to longer be a Point of View character. He’s still in the story, and (sad to say) suffers through pretty much the same series of unfortunate events, it’s just that now we don’t get to hear his side of it. He’s a bit miffed at us for silencing him.

A potential upside, from Mr X’s perspective, is that his plot line is now slightly less complicated, which will make his time in the story a smidgen less unpleasant. For Rune Skelley characters, that’s really the best they can hope for: a smidgen less unpleasant.

One of the reasons X got the rug yanked out from under him is that he only had a couple of POV scenes to begin with. We determined that the reader needed more insight into another character (to highlight our creativity we’ll call him Mr Z), which meant making him a POV character. X and Z shared most of their scenes, so it made perfect sense to simply shine the spotlight in the other direction.

That doesn’t mean it was easy, though. Before we could make Z a star, we had to get to know him better. Firstly he got a new name. His original name was “borrowed” from an unpleasant person we dealt with long ago. In the years since, our anger at this person faded and it became less important to do horrible things to his effigy. We also thought better of name-checking an actual living person. So, Z got a new name, and then he and Kent spent some quality time together, discovering what it was like inside Z’s head. Kent emerged unscathed, and now the novel is all the richer.

Swapping Messrs X and Z on POV-duty will make the novel better, which is good because it’s making a lot of extra work. It was among the discoveries we made by retroactively laying out a rainbow for this book, because it showed us in living color that we hadn’t made proper use of Mr X and also highlighted how important Mr Z’s state of mind was to the climax. Even so, it took walking a few laps around the neighborhood to really make up our minds that it was the right move. A writing partner helps you through tough decisions, so you know that all the rework entailed by a major change is really taking you in the right direction.

Felicity and Smedley 4evah!

r-avatarAs we mentioned previously, we recently spent a few days sprucing up the blog. While reading through all of the Monday and Wednesday posts where we share our bizarro microfiction writing prompts, we learned something uncomfortable about ourselves. Namely, that we favor a certain breed of names. They tend to be old-fashioned and a bit snooty, at least to our ears. Felicity is used most often, by both Jen and Kent. Is it the same Felicity each time? That seems unlikely, and it’s probably safer to say no. If it was always the same Felicity, that would probably nudge Jen back toward the quagmire of trying to concoct one epic plot that could encompass everything. That way madness lies.

No, it’s better to not impose order, even if it means living in a world populated with many a Felicity, Winifred, and Gertrude, and their boyfriends, Smedley, Archibald, and Reginald.

We also have a penchant for saddling couples with matching names: Emilio and Emily, Phil and Felicia, Felix and Felicity.

Regular readers of the Skelleyverse will know that Jen is almost entirely in charge of naming the characters in our novels. In light of that, it was interesting to see proof that, when winging it, she makes choices just as questionable as Kent’s.

Genre Unconventional

r-avatarWhen writers look back at their old output, they can experience a variety of feelings. If it’s really old stuff, then they’ve probably forgotten all about it and can see it almost like a “real reader.” Touring through all the posts on the Skelleyverse recently, we got to ride the ups and downs of seeing so much of our writing as if for the first time. We also discovered some things about ourselves as writers.

While our novels stick to a certain sub-set of science fiction, our prompted posts inhabit many genres. We added tags for the most frequently used, including romance and horror. And we added the gonzo tag, exclusively (so far) for Kent’s use. Either he routinely gets stuck with the more difficult stichomancy prompts, or Jen is just a little bit better at beating hers into coherency.

Exactly what kind of science fiction is found in a Rune Skelley novel?

Our stories aren’t set on alien planets or at distant points in time. Monsters and wizards don’t stroll the streets; the laws of physics apply, as far as the general populace can tell. But there’s a secret ingredient, something sliding under the veneer of normalcy. The protagonist is (un)lucky enough to be aware of this hidden reality, which is of course unique to each Rune Skelley universe. These things aren’t hidden as in being buried or masked. They’re intertwined with the familiar environment. In some cases, there’s no way for the protagonists to share the secret even if they want to. Other times, protecting that secret is the protagonists’ main goal in life.

This setup saves us a bit of labor on traditional world-building, because we don’t need to tell you what color the sky is. But the trade-off for that lies in needing more demonstrations of the deeper nature’s implications.

We’ve alluded a few times to our recent project being further toward the hard end of the scifi scale. The main reason it ended up that way has to do with what type of secret ingredient its world needed. In the trilogy and in the music novel, the special nature of the story worlds is a paradigm shift, an everything-you-know-is-wrong proposition. But in the latest book, it’s a what-if question on a less cosmic scale, but with staggering consequences. The tale’s plausibility relies more on technical points of known science than the others.

None of which is meant to suggest we have any kind of problem with other sub-genres, or other genres for that matter. But if you peruse the prompts for examples of how we cope with those other forms, you might see why we like to stick to what we know best.

Fictional Fiction

r-avatarJen and Kent work hard to blend their writing styles into a seamless Rune Skelley voice. Rune Skelley, though, is not content with a single voice.

Each of our books has called for the inclusion of writings by authors in the story’s fictional universe, and we’ve had a marvelous time differentiating those voices. The fictional authors have writing styles that don’t sound like Rune Skelley. Neither do they sound like Jen, or Kent. Or like our other fictional authors.

As we’ve mentioned, our current novel started out as an idea born of Kent’s fevered imaginings, an idea that didn’t really speak to Jen. We found a way to work around that, and now Kent gets his reward for compromising.

In the story world, there is an author whose novels embody Kent’s original idea, and now Kent has free rein to bring that idea to life. He is encouraged to dive as deep into the hard scifi well as he wants. And since we’re only going to be including excerpts from our fictional author, he doesn’t have to worry overmuch about plot.

Lest it sound like Jen never gets to do the fun part, she already came up with the titles for all ten of our latest made-up author’s novels (and one short story). That “idea that didn’t really speak to Jen” seems to have been whispering in her ear over the past couple of days. Having the names of all the books that will provide the excerpts gives Kent inspiration for the story lines and themes they contain. It’s a neat example of the symbiosis in Rune Skelley’s writing process.

Field Trips

r-avatarIt’s good to get out of the house now and then. Kent and Jen will be taking a trip this weekend to go to a concert, which should be exciting and give them a bit of a break from their routine.

The last time we went to a concert in another city, we used the travel time to brainstorm the ideas which led, ultimately, to our current novel. Jen had a few tantalizing images rattling around in her head; a character’s name, a predicament for her to face, and a quirky trait for a different character. Kent had a pseudoscientific premise. During the bus ride, we found the connecting thread. Not long after that, we had our outline.

Since then, we’ve also traveled to visit the real-world site that our book’s setting is based on. We had looked at photos and read the historical info online, but being there in person is an exponentially richer experience. (Sorry, not telling you where it is. You’ll have to read the book!)

What will this journey offer by way of inspiration or synthesis? We can’t wait to find out!

Retcon Done Right

r-avatarFor those of you unfamiliar with the term, “Retcon” means Retroactive Continuity. It is the alteration of previously established facts, usually in a long-running comic book series or TV show, but it can happen in book series also. Or worst of all, within a single novel.

Retcon can take the form of additions to the backstory, subtraction from it, or alteration of specific facts.

The most egregious example of alteration retcon that we can think of right now: Greedo shooting first. By changing the sequence of events in the Mos Eisley cantina, George Lucas hoped (presumably) to make Han Solo a more sympathetic or heroic character. Instead, he gutted Han’s entire character arc. Never forget: Han shot first!

Retconning early in the editing process is a necessary evil. If you do your job right, no one will ever be the wiser. Kent and Jen are at the point in their editing process where they’re reading through the first draft and making notes about things to change and improve. A first draft is, by its very nature, rough. There will be things that the author changed on purpose partway through, and there will be other inconsistencies that were inadvertent, especially when you have two authors working together. Whether or not you changed Bob’s eyes from blue to brown on purpose, now is the time to go through and make everything line up.

In our current case, it’s a little more involved than eye color. We have an elaborate setting that is based, in part, on a real location. In our brilliance, we visited this real-world location when we were thisclose to finished with the first draft, instead of at the beginning. Couple our more intimate knowledge of the location with the fact that we now know what areas our characters will visit, and what actions they will perform there, and we are faced with quite the editing task.

Jen fired up PhotoShop and updated the map and the floorplan to reflect the changes to the layout. We discussed at length which doors are always kept locked, and developed a backstory to account for why any particular door is or isn’t. We simplified certain things and complexified others, all with the goal of having a world that makes sense for the story we have chosen to tell. We went through the whole manuscript and marked all the passages that feature description of this location, and we are now faced with the unenviable task of retconning all of it into one big ball of consistency.

Hold us.

 

The Chaos Machine

r-avatarWhat kind of story world are you creating? Never mind genre conventions, this question is deeper than that.

If there’s any one thing universal to all writers, it might be the fear of being caught making stuff up. It’s all we do, ever. Even when our work draws upon our real-life experiences, we’re curating and manipulating those events in the service of our plots.

All fiction is a tissue of contrivances; it’s pure artifice. The art lies in preventing our readers from noticing. So, we try to imitate life’s messy blend of the mundane and the outrageous. We construct our machines and wind them up, and then take notes. We don’t want too much of a predictable, clockwork machine, because that equates to a boring story. It needs some chaos, just not too much. Curated chaos, just the stuff that works to create verisimilitude.

A pinball machine is an interesting metaphor for striking that balance in the writerly creative process. It’s mechanical, yet unpredictable. Different writers favor different models, and different partnerships lend themselves to different approaches to the chaos problem.

Rune Skelley’s story worlds tend toward a lot of regulation. Maybe they’re more Rube Goldberg than pinball, where complexity and indirection give the illusion of chaos. Jen and Kent work together on constructing the outline and finessing all the beats along the way, and they know where it’s going to end up.

Jen’s collaboration with Reggie veered much deeper into chaos mode, perhaps too far for a machine-based metaphor to describe it. They made a game out of trying to trip each other up, but they found a shared voice and vision all the same.

Is your story world a pinball machine? Or is it some other kind of device?

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