Category: Composition & Progress

Don’t Double-Team

We tend to each “adopt” a certain subset of the cast. Then as we sort through the stubs, we know which of us is the default assignee based on whose viewpoint each stub is from. But that relies on one of two things: either one of us feels strongly drawn to that POV, or one of us has written several of that character’s scenes already to establish a pattern. Well, the current batch of stubs brings in someone new and it’s making our load distribution calculations rather interesting.

It’s sort of a perfect storm, because there’s a POV that’s new, and we both sort of vibe on it, and also it has several scenes. In the end, we did split them up between us.

But we gave ourselves one rule: we couldn’t both be working on the same new POV at the same time. We’d each be inventing this person’s voice, and they wouldn’t match up, and then we’d have the challenge of getting them synced. The restriction really only applies in these very early appearances for the new viewpoint.

So, as it happened Kent jumped on his new-POV scene first. Jen is working with one of the existing characters’ POV in the meantime.

It’s possible to imagine making the opposite strategy work — both writing partners could deliberately work on the same voice in parallel, and then use syncing them up as a chance to see the character from unexpected angles. We feel there are too many pitfalls lurking in that approach, but different things work for different people.

A writing partner is someone who harmonizes with your voice.

All About Give and Take

A member of our critique group has sent pages out, and we’re very excited to read their material. It’s great to have something to analyze besides our own words once in a while.

The obvious way you benefit from being part of a critique group is that you have extra sets of eyes on your pages. Getting feedback about your work is crucial. But, you can also learn a lot from being the one providing the feedback, if you put forth the effort to do a quality job of it.

Good critique isn’t proofreading. It gives the author a map of where their words took you at each stage of the journey, where you felt different emotions, when you had felt like the logic didn’t add up, which moments were your favorites. Why you love (or love to hate) the characters. And by articulating these thoughts about another’s manuscript, you’re sharpening tools for use in your own writing.

Do you have a critique group? Use the comments to tell us what you like best about belonging to it.

Stub Resistance

Last week we extolled the virtues of stubs. Everything we said about them is true, but they aren’t magic. So this week we’ll talk about how sometimes it’s challenging to apply the stub system in practice.

Some stories seem more resistant than others to having their parts written out of sequence, and Untitled Ghost Novel Number One is such a story. The stubs themselves are not unduly difficult to create, but during our conversations about how to assign them, we got stuck a few times. It felt a bit like trying to assemble a piece of furniture without the instructions. We wondered why that might be happening this time around.

One possibility is that there are fewer parallel plot threads in this one than in many of our previous projects. It’s pretty much all one thread geared around the main locale. So, we can’t have Jen take care of the scenes on Bespin while Kent deals with the action in the Dagobah system.

Another potential explanation is that so much about it is new. It’s the first time in long while that we’re creating a new story universe for ourselves, and it’s a pivot into a new genre for us. Whole new cast, new plot, and new world-building with new constraints. So, it feels like asking for one thing too many to also jump ahead in the timeline.

As noted in a recent installment, we’ve had some trouble keeping to our writing schedule. Apparently sometimes writing at all is kinda hard, so perhaps it’s not the story. Maybe it’s us.

It’s quite possible that we just occasionally get a little precious about things, and blow momentary setbacks out of proportion. The good news is, we got over ourselves and got on with the job. Stubs really do work. Even if they’re not magic.

A writing partner is someone to help you line up the pieces when your Pröze-Eppik seems like it came from the meatballs-and-furniture emporium.

Ghostly Progress Update

We are back to actual writing again on Untitled Ghost Novel Number One. The new batch of stubs will take us up through some significant turns in the plot, with new characters arriving and a few new avenues of conflict opening up. Plus, of course, hauntings.

The first thing we did when they were ready is make Kent read them aloud. We discussed them to make sure there were no glaring holes that should be filled before moving on to the next step. (There weren’t.) Then we divvied up the first few of them. Sometimes we both have our eye on a particular scene, and sometimes we’re both hoping the other will pick up certain ones. This time, though, it was easy. We agreed right down the line and got a fairly even division of labor. As we check these off, we’ll have quick chats about who should do which ones next and keep rolling down the list.

One big advantage of our stub-based workflow is how it facilitates writing scenes out of order. Stubs contain enough info about each scene to protect continuity as we jump back and forth. Especially in a co-authoring situation, it’s essential to have that flexibility. With both of us writing, something’s always being done out of chronological order. Right now, for example, Kent’s in the middle of the scene that comes after the one Jen’s writing.

A writing partner is someone who helps keep your system running smoothly.

A Stub By Any Other Name

Here on this blog, we like to sing the praises of the components of our writing process. One that’s particularly helpful to us, and thus gets a lot of mention, is stubs. Which means we get to say “stub” a lot. “Stub stub, stubby-stub stubs. Stubbed stubbing stub stub. Stub.” It’s concise and descriptive, but it’s really not a very pretty word.

Maybe we should do a little rebranding. If it had a sexier name, maybe we’d get invited do guest lectures. Let’s see… if prose is the flower, that makes this a bud. Hmm. “Bud bud buddy-bud” isn’t much of an improvement. Perhaps it could be a scene seed? Or a sceneling? Perhaps not, on both counts. Well, a good stub has a lot in common with a good recipe. Should we call it a prose recipe? We probably should not.

Maybe there’s a way to make the existing name seem hip. What if it was a clever acronym? Technically a backronym, but we don’t need to dwell on that.

S.T.U.B. = Story Template Unit Block
S.T.U.B. = Short Tactical Utility Belt
StUB = (St)ory Unfinished Bit
STuB = Synopsized (Tu)lip Bulb
S.T.U.B. = Synthetic Text in an Unlit Basement

What is becoming increasingly clear is why we focus on the writing, and seek help from others for the marketing.

It doesn’t really matter what they’re called — stubs are great. A good stub makes you feel prepared to write the right scene, much the way a cook can rely on a recipe. It tells you what you’re going to need and why. In a partnership scenario it’s especially valuable, the same way the recipe can assure success whoever’s turn it is to make dinner. (All joking aside, stubs really could be rebranded as “prose recipes.” We just aren’t going to be the ones to do that.)

Balancing Act

Have you heard the good news about stubs? The scene-by-scene synopses that form a handy-dandy bridge between the outline and the finished prose are invaluable to our process. Think of them as the beta version of your first draft.

In addition to obvious things, like blocking scenes and deciding where they will be set, stubs are a great way to debug the plot before it’s written. Take our current Work-In-Progress, the Ghost Novel. The section of the outline that we’ve reached could appear on the page in any number of ways. As Jen wrangles its ungainly shape into stubs, she’s working hard to streamline it. Most scenes will end up doing double, triple, (quadruple?) duty, providing a much richer reading experience. The process also allows us to make sure point of view is distributed fairly evenly among our characters. Sometimes there’s a legitimate reason to stick with a certain character’s take on events for a good long stretch, but quite often it’s more interesting to switch it up and see through someone else’s eyes. Working in stub format, it’s a lot quicker to play around with structure until we hit upon the most exciting option.

A writing partner is someone who encourages you to experiment until you get the right answer.

The Season of the Stubs

We’ve got about 20 scenes in the bag so far on the Ghost Novel. With the two of us both creating prose, we’ve made decent progress despite the ceaseless distractions of the world today and the summertime schedule disruptions of road trips and family get-togethers.

In the past week, however, this double-fisted writing approach has not been available to us. The first batch of stubs had 21 of them in it, so we’re very nearly out. Therefore, while Kent plugs away at those last couple of scenes we have stubs for, Jen has shifted her focus and is generating the next batch of stubs.

We always have the entire outline written first, so in theory Jen could do the stubs for the whole book all at once. In practice, though, we’ve learned that it’s good not to get too far ahead of ourselves with that. Our understanding — of the characters and of the story world’s physics — deepens as we write. Which means, the assumptions baked into a stub get farther and farther off-base the farther downstream we go, until eventually we would have to just throw the rest of them out and redo them.

It’s paradoxical that the outline stays fairly solid while the stubs go astray. Yet that’s what happens.

So, Jen does them in batches. How many in a batch? There’s no set number, but it’s generally in the 15-20 range. That’s enough to keep us busy for a while, but not so many that we have the sort of problem mentioned above. We like it when a batch gets us up to a landmark event of some kind in the plot. The quicker the stubs are locked down, the sooner she can get back to writing prose alongside Kent.

A writing partner is someone who can shift gears based on where you are in the project.

Search, Then Search Again

A novel set in the vague “present” allows the author to, for the most part, write what they know. You might need to dig into the details of a profession your character has, or a location they’re going to live in or visit, but you don’t need to research everyday life. Pretty much everyone knows what modern cars and airplanes are like. You can drop in a reference to Netflix or Uber or Joe Biden without needing to explain streaming entertainment, ride sharing, or the state of politics.

Still Untitled Ghost Novel #1 is set in the past, which has required us to do more research than usual. We want to be as accurate as possible, but we’re trying not to get too hung up on minutiae. No one wants to read a book that sounds like it was written by the most anal people on IMDB who take it personally when the train seats in a movie are the wrong shade of brown. Plus, it’s a ghost story. We’re allowed to take liberties.

Some of the research we’ve done for the Ghost Series will come as no surprise: mausoleums, funerary flowers, tarot. Some of it will give you a hint to the time period we’re working in for the first book: telegrams, livery stables, the British Raj. And some of it will hopefully have you scratching your head: world record for underwater breath holding, the history of welding masks, Gloria Vanderbilt.

Put all of that in a pot and stir. Sprinkle in some teen heartthrob magazines, circuit breakers, and the tunnel through the redwood tree, and voila! You’ve got yourself one heck of an untitled ghost novel!

A writing partner is someone who doesn’t let you fall too far down the research rabbit hole.

Getting to Know You

Sometimes characters’ personalities change once you start writing them. Your villain turns out to have a sense of humor. The hero’s loyal ally proves to be secretly sort of a dick.

Outlining is based on plot kinetics, concrete events. To the extent that anyone’s interior state is represented at all, it’s very broad. Probably based on the role or archetype of the character more than details about their motivations. “Bob opposes Alice, so when she enters the bake-off he… switches her sugar and her baking powder.”

Writing the prose is when you start to see out through these people’s eyes. The antipathy between Bob and Alice becomes something you can feel, not just a specification for the project. And, that ingredient switcheroo is easier said than done. Bob looks up at you and asks, “How do I not get caught?” and you sternly order him to figure it out. He does, or when he gets caught he talks his way out of it, or he invents a completely new way to sabotage Alice, and in the process you figure out how his mind works.

There’s also the grit of everyday life, sensorial stuff like clothing choices or a favorite snack, little challenges like too much traffic or too little coffee, and so on. Small-scale things that reveal so much more about this person than we get from the macro plot structure.

Here at SkellyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises, each of us tends to “adopt” a subset of the cast. This spreads out the load, so each of us only has to learn to wear half as many heads. The initial adoptions have a tendency to stick, but we rarely make formal assignments — Kent might take the lead with a given character, but Jen can step in to write later scenes in that POV, which helps round out its voice.

A writing partner is someone who gets to know you a little more on every page, as you get to know them better, too.