Category: Composition & Progress

Show Your Work

As January runs out of days, we’re running out of items on Sibling of Music Novel’s To Do list. We’ve already checked off all of weird little oddball things we’d left dangling, and filled in the placeholders with actual prose. And we decided that there’s a certain level of punching up that will wait for the second draft, and we agree on where the cutoff is for that. Which leaves just one more bit of business we need to accomplish before this novel officially goes into hibernation.

Some of our characters are professional musicians. We’ve talked in the past about writing some of their lyrics. Now we’re working on other supplemental material that fleshes out the world: record reviews, fan chatter, things like that. Things written in the story world about or by our characters. It’s something we’ve done in every novel so far, and it’s a part of our process that we really enjoy. It’s really fun to try on other voices and to write in different styles.

The novel itself needs to have a consistent tone and voice. Even though there are two of us writing, we don’t want that to be obvious. But with this ancillary stuff we’re allowed — nay, encouraged! — to take sharp stylistic turns and explore idiosyncratic voices. We want these pieces to be distinct, both from the novel itself and from each other.

A writing partner is someone you can harmonize with, but who also lets you play a solo every now and then.

Pop The Sparkling Blackberry Mead!

Last Saturday afternoon, we finished writing the final scene of Sibling of Music Novel! Yay, it’s done! (And, Yay, we’re still tinkering around with it until the end of the month because there are a couple dozen notes sprinkled through it and that’s our official deadline!)

The action in the Writing Cave was a little spotty over the holidays, with lots of extra people around the house (not to mention renovations in the auxiliary writing cave). We surged back into it upon the newness of the year and cranked through the final portion of the outline, wrapping up with a word count just shy of 168k.

But as mentioned, we are still working on it for a little while yet. Whether or not we’ve knocked off all the outstanding comments, we will lay this book aside on Jan 31 so it can rest. Most of 2020 will probably be taken up with editing rather than writing more new stuff, because we now have four first drafts that require a trip to charm school (and in once case few lost weekends down on the docks) to bring out their full potential.

A writing partner is someone with whom to toast your achievements. (By the way, the mead was very interesting stuff and made us nicely squiffy, but when the official deadline comes there will be proper champagne. In case any of you were worried.)

Beginnings and Endings

As we close in on the end of both our novel-in-progress and 2019, we’ve been thinking about endings. And beginnings. The opening and closing scenes of a novel are arguably the most important. With two of us writing, how do we divvy those up?

Fairly evenly as it turns out.

Of our nine novels, Jen has written three 1st scenes and six last scenes, while Kent has written six 1st scenes and two last. If he writes the last scene of Sibling of Music Novel when we get there, we’ll have a lovely sort of symmetry.

We didn’t consciously set out to divvy things up this way. Kent more often writes the opening scene due to logistics. After the plot rainbow, the prose outline, and the traditional outline, the next step in our highly structured method is for Jen to write the stubs. Once she gets a couple of those lined up, Kent can jump in and start the actual prose composition while Jen knocks out a bit more of the pre-writing.

As to the endings, Jen seems to be drawn to them. She’s better at wrapping things up (just ask Kent who’s better at wrapping presents), and since Kent’s shift started sooner, it makes sense for Jen to be the last one out the door.

Of course no scene is ever the property of just one of us. We both edit. We both poke and prod and add and clarify and remove. As our unpublished novels make their way through editing, it’s possible that the beginnings and endings will change and this whole beautiful symmetry we’ve got going on will fall apart. We’ll find out next year.

Happy Solstice!

“As They Head Into the Final Turn…”

Recently, Jen completed the stubs that will take us all the way out to the end of the book. Being done stubbing meant she was able to rejoin Kent in the prose trenches. And, having both of us working in parallel increases our output, of course.

This time, the speed boost has felt particularly dramatic. Kent’s nightly word count is up compared to normal, and we’re both knocking out scenes at a great clip. Jen observed that, “Having the finish line in view seems to have lit a fire under us.”

Indeed. While we were somewhere in the middle, it felt like we weren’t gaining on it. For a really long time it seemed as if we were halfway done, and it was a bit demoralizing to add pages to it and still be halfway done, over and over. It was just an illusion, like when you go to New York and decide to walk to the Empire State Building. “It’s right over there,” you think. So you hike for blocks and blocks and still it’s right over there. And you start to wish you had taken a cab. But you do get there eventually! You were gaining on it the whole time, even though it didn’t look that way.

The completion of the stubs gave us perspective. It felt like we suddenly jumped from 50% complete to 85% complete. And that’s been quite energizing.

Deadlines Are Spooky — Sp•°ky!

Late October might seem like a fine time to talk about ghosts a whole bunch, but here in the Writing Cave it’s time for us to lay aside the Ghost Story and resume our focus on the current WIP, aka Sibling of Music Novel.

We really do need to knuckle down and get this draft completed. We recently took stock of how much of the outline remains, and determined that we’re about 75% of the way done with the writing. This was happy news, because from down in the trenches (what, your writing cave doesn’t have trenches?) it was hard to tell exactly what point we had reached. It’s felt like we’ve been “about halfway” for a long time now. Getting a better handle on our progress has also made it easier not to be stressed out over the burgeoning word count. It’s a big’un, sure, but probably not destined to be as outsized as we feared.

But no matter how much closer to done we find ourselves to be, it’s not done done, and unless we do that knuckling down thing it never will be. So, without much further ado, we must get back to it.

A writing partner is someone who buys the Halloween candy ahead of time so you don’t end up handing out individual frozen peas to the kids on your doorstep.

The City That Doesn’t Sleep

As previously mentioned, it’s been roadtrip season for Rune Skelley. Our most recent jaunt took us to the Big Apple for a little research, reconnoitering and relaxation. While there, we went to our favorite Turkish restaurant, did our part to revitalize the retail sector, and took in three shows, but none of those things were the highlight of the trip.

The coolest part was when we got to meet our agent, Trodayne Northern! Our visit lined up with his schedule and we got together for an early lunch. When we reached the restaurant we had picked, it needed another half an hour to open, but we rolled with that and popped into the vintage poster gallery across the street to chill and peruse artworks until the eatery was ready to provide us with sustenance. It was really breakfast for Jen and Kent (so of course Kent ordered a cheeseburger).

We hung around for a couple of hours, never running out of stuff to talk about. Trodayne, if we made you late for your meeting we are sincerely sorry.

Being In Tune

When we reached the end of a recent writing session and Kent read aloud what he had written, Jen said, “I like when you approach things from angles I never would have thought of.” The feeling is mutual, and that’s kind of the whole magic of writing with a partner: the synergy that comes from aiming two imaginations at a challenge.

Of course, in another recent Writing Cave conversation someone made a comment along the lines of, “Good to touch base before running too far ahead, in case your vision and mine turned out to be totally different.” There’s a famous song lyric about words having two meanings sometimes… the point is, just because you’ve talked it through and think you’ve agreed on how things should go doesn’t mean you’re really in sync.

There’s no magic pro tip for ensuring a perfect mind-meld between partners. You just have to practice. There will be misunderstandings and disagreements from time to time. Ironically, the better you are at processing disagreements, the fewer of them you’ll end up having.

Here are some non-magical tips that might help, though.

  • talk to each other about the story and the characters, a lot — what would take hours of rewriting to fix is often fluid and instantaneous in conversation
  • err on the side of more structure in your process, rather than less — spell things out thoroughly in the prewriting phase
  • maintain a win-win mindset — unexpected ideas from your partner are a good thing!

A writing partner is a source of frequent pleasant surprises.

Milestones

Despite all of the traveling we’ve been doing lately, and all of the switching back and forth between projects that that entails, we’ve managed to inch Sibling of Music Novel up over 100,000 words.

Crossing such a momentous threshold feels great, especially since not too long ago we had a first draft that came in mysteriously short (for a Rune Skelley first draft, anyway).

We have a hard time not trying to anticipate how long our drafts are going to be, and this one is no exception. The short answer is, we really have no idea. All we can say for certain is that we’re more than halfway done.

Lately we’ve been batting around the idea of setting a deadline. We’d like to have it done by the end of the year. That ought to be doable if we can keep our butts at our desks for a while.

A writing partner is the one who gently reminds you that there are still a couple more roadtrips on the horizon.

Retroactive Relativity

As we work on the middle book of our music trilogy, we need to refer to the other volumes from time to time, especially the first one. The bulk of the information flow is from the already-written books toward the in-progress book, but occasionally that gets swapped around. Which is the major advantage of working on a whole trilogy all at once — you can retrofit details that strengthen the thematic and plot links across the series.

An instance of that occurred recently in the Writing Cave. Naturally there’s plenty of pseudoscience in these books, but there’s some actual science as well. The other night, Kent came up with something of a you-got-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment regarding the pseudo and the legit science imagery. Although the idea arose while working on book two, the best place to incorporate it is in the first book. So we added a note about it for when we go back to do revisions and tweaks.

We love our surprises too much to spill details here, but Kent’s still sort of giddy about his brainwave, because (in our story universe, at least) it provides a solution to one of the major conundrums of modern physics. In lieu of a fictitious Nobel, he received an even greater honor — he got to write the sticky note for the project board!

A writing partner is someone who forgives you for getting peanut butter on their chocolate.

 

High Altitude Viewing

There are two kinds of series in the book world (okay, there are probably more, but play along for now) — the episodic kind, where each novel is its own complete adventure, and the serial kind, where each novel tells part of a larger story. We write the second kind. Our novels, while each having a satisfyingly complete story, are parts of a larger whole.

We’ve been on the road a lot lately, and as we talked about last week, that’s pulled us away from composition of our current work in progress. As we find our way back into the writing, we took the opportunity to pull back from the minutia of scene-by-scene storytelling and take a look at not just the novel, but at its place in the trilogy.

Due to our weird, inside out process on this trilogy, we’re writing the middle book last. It was really interesting to look at the bigger picture and make sure that the edges are still lining up with the existing books. The last thing we want is for the railroad we’ve been building from both ends to fail to meet in the middle.

We were really pleased with what our aerial view showed us. There is a nice escalation of stakes from one book to the next. (Or a really unpleasant one, if you’re one of our characters.) The phenomenon that makes our story world unique gets explored from a new angle each time, by different sorts of characters. It felt really good to see our kingdom laid out beneath us just the way we’d pictured it.

A writing partner is someone who you can enjoy having your head in the clouds with, but will also help you land the plane.

and without even meaning to, we included planes, trains, and automobiles in this post!