Category: Composition & Progress

Research Can Be Entertaining

Every writer learns quickly how perilously deep the research rabbit hole can be. Perhaps it was better when we had to go to a library, or at least to a bookshelf, instead of being able to summon virtually any fact (often dozens of contradictory versions of it!) with a few keystrokes. Nowadays you can easily lose track of whether you’re writing or researching. Not that research is bad, just that it’s got a way of turning into procrastination.

We do our share of web research, for sure. But we supplement it with other forms of information. Since we’ve been working on the Ghost Series, our movie selections have skewed much more to supernatural horror. This way we can have movie night and count it as a work session — it’s research!

Books are great, too. We have one from 1908 that we got at a flea market, which deals with spiritualism. We bought it mainly for the gorgeous purple cover, but it turns out to be filled with words. Jen’s already read it, and now it’s Kent’s turn. We’re also about halfway through a mammoth anthology of “classic” ghost stories, mostly from the 19th century.

Of course, cinematic portrayals must always be considered suspect. It’s risky to use movies (or novels) as sources of historical fact. What they can provide, besides inspiration, is a view of the day-to-day norms from another time period. Incidental descriptions of the streets, clothing, and customs are reliable precisely because they were meant to be a backdrop. Contemporary audiences would simply perceive the context of “the normal world” and focus on the story.

A writing partner is someone who’ll bring the popcorn to “research night.”

Off To A Flying Start!

We have more progress to report on the Ghost Novel. Jen completed the first wave of stubs, and has now hefted a pickaxe and joined Kent in the prose mines. (We’d belabor that metaphor, but we need to save the true gems for the manuscript.)

Naturally, there was an immediate obstacle. Much as with the questions about the setting that we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Jen’s scene revealed that our specs for a certain “machine” were incomplete. We’ve known about this contraption ever since the early stages of planning and plotting the series, but now it needed to actually be described. Which means decisions must be made that will affect many scenes down the line.

We’re still trying to get back up to full speed with the whole actual-writing-the-book part of writing a book, so needing to pause and hash out details was frustrating. But having a writing partner means having someone to hash such things out with.

No, After *You*

A month ago we were lamenting how intimidating it’s been for us to reenter composition mode. “Oh, woe,” we cried. “It’s been so long since we wrote actual prose!” And “It’s been literal years since we began a new story world, how ever shall we remember how to do it?”

We can be quite melodramatic when it suits us.

In the weeks since that declaration, we came up with myriad excuses for not actually setting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. It was, frankly, getting ridiculous. During one of our daily forest snow strolls with the pooches, we finally diagnosed ourselves. We were each waiting for the other one to go first, each holding the door open, hoping the other half of the writing team would charge through into the unknown.

Whoever goes first makes a bunch of creative decisions that impact the rest of the novel. They set the tone with language use. They set the pace of the prose. They give us the first glimpse inside a new character’s head and heart. It’s a lot of responsibility!

Usually Kent will jump in and write the earliest scenes while Jen wraps up the last few stubs of the first batch. It’s a process that’s worked well for us, but at least the last 4 novels we wrote were all set in existing story worlds. There are a lot fewer unknowns in an existing story world. Kent wasn’t sure Jen wanted him to plunge in this time. Perhaps she wanted to be the style master this time? Please? No. Being the one to write 100% of the stubs (maybe 99.5%), Jen feels like she already has enough influence over how the story is told.

And so, with great fanfare, Kent slipped into his speedo and took the plunge! This very week saw the minting of the inaugural words, sentences, and paragraphs of the Rune Skelley Ghost Quadrilogy! And what words (and sentences and paragraphs) they are!

A good writing partnership is one where both partners are happy to either lead or follow.

Some Good Writing Advice From Our Dogs

We’ve put in a ton of work on the ghost novels over the past nine months or so. And we got a lot accomplished! All four books are outlined, we documented the cast and the setting, created backstories and histories for all of that, devised the rules of supernature that we intend to play by, etc. It’s our most elaborate and thorough rainbow exercise ever, by far.

What we haven’t done for quite a while is actually write. And now it’s pretty much time to do that, assuming we can remember how.

As we hiked through the snowy woods the other day with our assistants, Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord, our conversation focused on returning to prose-mode. We reminded each other of what that feels like, and we must confess that we fretted a little about how out of practice we are. Both of us were thinking about the size of the job we’re about to take on, writing a tetralogy in an entire new story world and playing with tropes we haven’t used much before. It was feeling a bit intimidating.

Fortunately, the Bandit Lord had some good advice. He told us not to obsess about it, to just stay loose and let it happen. Lady Marzipan then pointed out that we had probably already talked about it as much as we ought to. We had psyched ourselves up, and we didn’t want to psych ourselves out.

They might not be much help with grammatical issues, but those two assistants of ours really do earn their keep when it comes to moral support.

A great writing partner is, sometimes, someone who licks your face.

Fuck Cancer

A member of our writing group has passed away.

Helen Marie was smart, and funny, and friendly. And talented, and insightful, and generous. We loved hearing what she had to tell us about our work, as much as we loved reading her pages. We loved her tales of her travels. We loved her enthusiam for Dune. We loved her.

Because of one thing and another, we had few chances to see her over the past couple of years. We missed her. We got used to missing her, and now that’s how it will have to stay.

 

The (Too) Many-Worlds Hypothesis

Lately, we’re dividing our time between three fictional worlds (four if you count consensus reality). We’re brainstorming about the Ghost Novels, editing one of the Science Novels, and getting critique feedback about one of the Music Novels.

Back when we started this writing partnership, one of our policies was to avoid splitting our focus like this. We would dwell in one fictional universe at a time. Of course, that was a lot easier to stick to when we only had the one. Our concern, theoretical as it might have been, was that we’d waste too much mental energy switching between worlds. But you know what? It’s not been that hard, really.

A couple of years ago, we felt we had to bend our rules in order to accomplish our goals. It made us nervous, and there was a little bit of a learning curve. But like playing an instrument, or speaking a language, or anything else, it’s a trainable skill. We can do, now, exactly what we assumed wouldn’t work: hold three story worlds in our heads at the same time, and keep them straight.

As we flit about our various universes, we stay together. The critique notes about the Music Novel, we look at together and discuss. When it’s time to do Science Novel edits, we both knuckle down for that. Brainstorming about ghosties is a team sport. We find we can do just about anything as long as we’re doing it together. Probably the only time we’ve sent Kent off to one universe while Jen visited another is when there was cover artwork involved. (And, that worked just fine too. But we prefer to stay in sync.)

A writing partner is someone who’ll straddle three icebergs with you and help you not fall in.

Ghosts Have Become Less Theoretical

By which we mean, our Ghost Story is becoming more concrete. A preliminary prose outline is taking shape. Jen has taken point on this initiative, and is so far going at it bare-brained. Later, we’ll peruse all our notes and use them to fill in where appropriate.

At this point, the outline covers roughly 25% of the saga that we’ve generated and recorded in a mixture of typed and hand-written notes. The thing about the notes is, they reflect the chronology of our brainstorming sessions, not the saga itself. And they’re riddled with continuity bugs, because we’re still brainstorming.

Even at this early stage, though, arranging our facts into this more refined structure is providing us with new insights. (Insights about fuzzy plot logic, sadly.) Brainstorming is fun, but to do it right you have to be sort of willfully negligent about how any of the shiny ideas could be useful or if they even fit together. So, after several weeks of brainstorming, we’d become a bit attached to a vision of the narrative that’s just not feasible. Oops. It’s much harder to persist in magical thinking when all the pieces are lined up in the correct order. That’s what this prose outline has already begun to help us with. And it’s much easier to put something on the docket for the next dog walk once you know it’s there (or, not there, as is more often the case).

A writing partner is someone who helps you mend the holes in your plot.

Keeping Busy, Keeping Sane

A little too busy, sometimes. Not too sane, though. What would be the fun in that?

Now that we’re done with edits on Son of Music Novel, we’re taking a quick swing through Sibling of Music Novel to take care of a few odds and ends. And in fact, there’s only one odd (or end?) remaining, which is to punch up the sensorium of the piece by adding smells. And that’s nearly done!

Still using our nightly dog walks to develop the ideas for the Ghost story. World-building conversations in the dark in our quiet neighborhood, as Kent tries to keep his voice from carrying overmuch when he uses phrases containing words like “aphrodisiac.” So, yeah. That’s coming along nicely!

Because it’s been forever since our writing group met, we’ve recently begun trying to round everybody up for a Zoom call. The cats are proving as difficult to herd as ever… Maybe the gang’s all burned out from too many online meetings already.

We hope you’re keeping safe. (And not too busy, nor too sane.)

Pace Yourself

As we were finishing up the read through of Music Novel (Verdict: Awesome!), we suddenly realized that the second book in the series, Sibling of Music Novel, hadn’t been broken up into chapter-sized bites yet. It wouldn’t be strictly necessary, since it’s just the two of us reading it, but we wanted to take a crack at it to make it a little more like reading a real book.

It’s still a first draft, so it’s bloatier than it needs to be. It won’t read just like a real book, even with the chapter breaks, but it helps us assess the pacing.

Other writers that we talk to say they write their novels in chapter-long chunks. The concept seems foreign to us. We plan our novels scene by scene, and then later combine the scenes into chapters. Each scene could technically be its own chapter, but that would give us a crazy high number of chapters, and their lengths would vary wildly. We (especially Jen) don’t like that.

Jen took a stab at breaking this bad boy down into reasonable chunks. At this early stage she worked mainly by word count, with an eye toward ending each chapter with a hook. It mostly worked pretty smoothly. There were a few places where a two scenes in a row ended with particularly juicy, propulsive events, and she had a hard time choosing where the breaks would go.

That’s the point of the read through, though. We’ll see how the pacing feels. Where things are awkward, we’ll make a note of it. Perhaps on the second draft, certain scenes will need to be presented in a different order. Some might get cut altogether. Right now it seems impossible to think we’ll need to add anything, but never say never.

Writing with a partner, working in scenes rather than chapters makes more sense (at least to us). How do you approach things?

Nothing But Net

Last night we checked off the last few items on the To Do list for the first draft of Sibling of Music Novel. We’d given ourselves to the end of January to complete it, so we finished early, with an entire day to spare. The last word was typed quite late in the evening, which means we’re saving the champagne for tonight. (Some of us had to work today.)

With all the extra material we added to flesh out the story world, this draft of Sibling came it at a hair over 179,000. Once it has a good long rest we’ll whittle that down to a more manageable size.

Pop your own bottle of bubbly tonight and celebrate along with us!