Category: Composition & Progress

Floor Plans! They’re Everywhere!

A couple of scenes that Kent recently finished writing take place in the same location. Halfway through the second of them, he started adding notes about furniture that should have been mentioned in the first. Soon it wasn’t just furniture, but major architectural elements. By the time both scenes were written, he’d become unsure that the locale’s form was consistent, or even coherent.

So, he drew a map of it. Two maps, actually, because the characters do some remodeling. Result: yes, the shape of the room works for the action as prescribed, without needing to factor in any extra dimensions where dwell the Old Ones.

It might have been better to have the drawing available before he started writing, but it will certainly come in handy for the second draft. It’s quite possible that he was actually better off not having a map to look at while writing. Referring to a map can trigger his dormant dungeon-master training, which can bleed through into the prose if no one is keeping an eye one him. Then the narrative starts to sound like, “The room is a rectangle, twenty feet by thirty. Seventeen feet from where you’re standing there’s a fireplace. Roll for perception.”

Speaking of incoherent locales, we’ve been browsing a lot of house plans online. For now it’s mostly for entertainment, but we will want to create our forever house within the nigh-foreseeable future. It needs a dedicated office writing cave, and we’d really like to have some kind of demarcation for that so we can “come home from work.” The house has got to be in a modern style, and it needs to have certain other specific features. The problem, of course, is not that this combination of traits is hard to find. The problem is that there are so many possibilities, but we only need one house. (Right?) (Yes.) A good percentage of the designs make us scratch our heads, but that still leaves way too many to make it an easy decision. We don’t really expect pity on this count.

A writing partner is someone who shares your ideas about the perfect writing cave.

Summer Update

For what seems like an age, Jen has been writing new stubs while Kent continued with prose composition. (That’s one huge advantage to having a writing partner, the two-pronged attack.) In reality it’s only been a couple of weeks, and she got about 24 of them done. They normally go faster, but this part of the outline was a bit scattered and she had to find ways to consolidate, so that we didn’t end up with twice that many scenes. Now we’re set up nicely for our next big push.

With both of us working (and with Stranger Things 3, Veronica Mars, and Archer all used up, leaving only Legion, What We Do in the Shadows, and Harvey Birdman in our current rotation) we ought to be able to advance well into enemy territory this month.

Kent’s solo efforts recently pushed the manuscript total over 80,000 words, and if we’re dedicated we ought to be able to top 100,00 by September. Stop laughing, it could happen.

Having a writing partner means having someone to share the load, someone to binge quality TV with, and, in our case, someone to help when it’s time to move your kid for grad school.

Anatomy of a Stub

Here’s the template we use for our stubs.

Placeholder text

Keeping it simple allows this template to work for just about any story we want to tell. But it’s easy to customize if you want to. Adding the date of the scene might be handy, for example (especially if you’re writing a time-travel epic).

You fill in as much or as little of the table as each scene requires. If you want to pin things down more before you move ahead, the structure is there for you to use. If you don’t feel a need to specify what the weather is like, no one will scold you. The value in using a template is so you don’t have to waste mental energy stressing about what you might be forgetting. You can just fill in what you feel is important.

But, that innocuous line that says “placeholder text” is the most important thing.

Think of the stub like a recipe for the scene. The table is the ingredients list, but you still need the instructions for how to bring the dish together. That’s what the synopsis provides.

We tend to write them in present tense. They’re pretty much just a flat recitation of events, and they include a lot of glib statements about characters’ interior states. We don’t try to get fancy too much here; we save that for the real prose.

When it’s time to follow the recipe and write the scene proper, we often find that the stub’s synopsis started earlier than we really need. There’ll be a paragraph or two of backstory and then a phrase like, “So now he’s running for his life and wishing he’d kept his mouth shut.” That’s typically where we begin the scene.

What do we leave out of stubs, apart from fancy expressive language? Dialog, for the most part. But it’s not rare for lines in the stub to get pulled verbatim and put into our characters’ mouths. We say we save the flashy stuff for the “real” writing, but you know, you listen to the muse when she sings. The other big thing we omit form stubs is description. Here again, though, it does creep in. Plus we have the “sensory details” line in the table.

Bottom line: do what works for you. Let your tools evolve with your process. If you don’t work scene-by-scene, then stubs don’t relate to your workflow at all. But for us, they’re a perfect fit. We find stubs to be an indispensable aid in working with a partner.

All Things in Moderation

Many times we’ve touted the advantages of the scene-by-scene synopses that we call stubs. They’re great, especially when you’re working with a coauthor. We could just use the outline, treat it as a scene list, but in our experience it’s better to flesh things out a bit further than that before divvying up the work. For one thing, a line-item in our type of outline isn’t necessarily a scene. For another, the stub format prompts for mood, setting and sensory details, and characters’ interior states. Taken all together, our stubs could be considered a first draft. A rather slapdash first draft, with a ton of tonal variation, but still.

So if stubs are so great, why don’t we spec out the whole novel in stub-form before we begin writing? In our experience, certain plot and character issues don’t present themselves until the actual writing is happening. If we race ahead and make stubs for the whole novel, there will be a lot of reworking to do when we set fingers to keyboard and discover in the fifth scene that something doesn’t work the way we envisioned.

As a recent example, we were going to use Saks Fifth Ave as a location. “Hey,” we thought, “all those big NYC department stores are pretty much interchangeable, right?” Heh. No. So even though we liked the physical locale of Saks better, we ended up switching things over to Bloomingdale’s, for reasons. That cast ripples through a whole bunch of scenes, but since Jen hadn’t made stubs for more than a handful of them, it saved a lot of work. We pulled up the outline and untangled things there.

You’ll find your own rhythm, of course. What works best for us is to make stubs in batches of about 20. Beyond that the details get a bit too hazy.

Having a writing partner means having someone to hold your European Shoulder Bag™ while you’re trying on clothes at a crowded Manhattan department store.

The Areas of Our Expertise

One of the fun things about being a writer is all the research. Wait! Come back! We’re serious. The classic advice is to write what you know, but even if you knew some really cool and exciting things, you’d have to reuse them over and over and they would cease to seem so cool and exciting.

Kent and Jen want their characters to be well-rounded people with varied interests, and they want them to be distinct from one another. While we do draw some from our own lives, neither of us is a villain, and we’ve found that our novels work better when there’s some conflict. We’re also not scientists, or rock stars, or psychically gifted. When our characters are, it requires some reading on our parts to make it all feel real.

We also don’t want to set all of our novels in our boring little home town. Even when we invent a new setting, it still draws heavily on the real world. We like to visit sites we’re writing about, but that’s not always possible. So again, we hit the books. And the internet.

To give you a taste of Sibling of Music Novel, here are a few of the things we’ve been researching lately:

  • the ingredients list of Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts
  • the immersive sensory details of eating said Pop-Tarts
  • the Burmese alphabet
  • old Agfa cameras
  • sesame allergy symptoms
  • how quickly a pot seed can reach maturity
  • postmodernist painters
  • home computers of the 1980s
  • the lunar cycle in 2008
  • the original floor numbering of the Empire State Building
  • old dentist chairs
  • the salinity of the Hudson river
  • audition monologs

Now that we’ve spilled so many details, you have to promise that you’re not going to write the novel faster than we do!

Singing For Our Supper

Something we enjoy here in the writing cave is looking for recurring patterns in what we write. There’s some stuff that we do on purpose to give our story worlds and plots a consistent flavor, and then there’s stuff we’ve noticed recurring in subtle ways even though we never had a meeting and decided it should be in there. We’re fascinated by this, because our stories are all very different yet contain these common threads.

Among the recurring elements in our work is original song lyrics. Not every book has them, but they’re not limited to just the Music Series. The trend began with our very first novel, Miss Brandymoon’s Device.

Writing lyrics is very different from writing prose. It can take as long to come up with a few stanzas as it does to write a couple of pages, for us at least. But it’s fun to shift gears, and it’s good exercise. Both of us have taken our turns as songsmith with great results. What we hadn’t done until this week? Collaborate directly on lyrics.

Crazy, right? We’ve been at this for nine books now, lots of which contain song lyrics, and our whole deal is collaboration. Yet all those lyrics had been written by Jen or by Kent. The new ones were the first time we teamed up to craft the words to a song.

What was different about this case was that we had more constraints to deal with. The words had to come from a certain album, and we’d already nailed down its themes and mood in considerable detail. These lyrics also had to catalyze some specific actions, almost instructing the characters to do a certain thing. Note, this perceived instruction is not at all the meaning intended by the singer. Jen tackled this job, but the phrases she found that fit the desired meanings all felt trite to her. So, over dinner out, she and Kent analyzed the situation, brainstormed imagery, and jotted down a few snippets. And when we got home, Jen cranked out exactly the lyrics we needed.

A writing partner is someone you can still find new ways to collaborate with.

Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

Events in the Writing Cave are progressing with blinding speed. At a smidge over 31,000 words we are running out of stubs, which in this case is a good problem to have. It means the first draft is zipping right along.

Jen wrapped up the scene she was in the middle of, then turned her attention to crafting more stubs. We timed it well. There are still 4 stubs from the previous batch waiting to be written, so that’s what Kent will do while Jen bakes the new ones. Stubs are much quicker to write than the fleshed-out scenes, so she ought to be able to crank out the next couple dozen before Kent runs off the end of the runway.

Things are getting really juicy, and we’re having a blast with this story. We can’t wait for you to read it!

Like a Well-Oiled Machine

We had hoped to have Sibling of Music Novel up to 20,000 words by the time we made this update, but between dog birthday parties, driving our son to the airport. and a power outage, we only managed to hit 17,000. Not that we’re complaining. We’re actually quite pleased with our progress.

It had been a while since we were in composition mode, and it sometimes takes us a little fishing around to find the right gear when we switch things up. Apparently this time we were away for the Goldilocks amount, because all we had to do was adjust the mirrors a little bit and we were ready to go. This is even though we’ve only used one recurring character as a POV character so far, the rest being brand new to this outing. We found the new voices quite quickly, and are really enjoying the stuff we’re coming up with. We’re patting ourselves on the back over here.

A lot of writers say that you should never be happy with your works in progress, but that’s not a belief we subscribe to. We generally enjoy the writing process, and genuinely love sharing our work with each other at the end of every session. The immediate feedback is great! No worries: we’re not so in love with the work that we think the first draft is perfect. It will all need to be polished and finessed. But for a first draft, it’s pretty fucking great if we do say so ourselves.

Having a writing partner means hearing the laughter right away when a joke lands, hearing the suppressed sobs when the knife twists just so in a beloved character’s emotions, and just generally knowing if your prose is on the right track.

And They’re Off!

Composition has commenced! Sibling of Music Novel is under way! We hit the ground, if not exactly running, then at a leisurely jog. We’re 3,000 words in, and are really pleased with which 3,000 words we’ve chosen, and the order in which we’ve put them. We say “we,” but so far Kent has done all of the writing of the actual novel proper. Jen’s been writing stubs (which we’ve talked about at length before). She’s got the first 16 scenes specced out beautifully for whichever half of Rune Skelley picks them up, and four more after that roughed in.

It’s just about time for her to put that project aside and join Kent in the prose mines, at which point our daily word count output should double. Sometimes it’s difficult to decide how many stubs in waiting is enough. Right now Jen has her eye on a particular event in the outline, and she’d like to get the stubs finished up to that plot point. It should only be another 5 scenes or so. The problem being that her target keeps shifting. Originally she was only going to do a dozen stubs to get us started, and now we’re looking at at least twice that. It’s not hard to imagine her making excuses to keep going and going. Which wouldn’t be the end of the world, since it’s work she’ll have to do eventually anyway. But it’s not unheard of for things to shift as we write the actual scenes, and if things shift too much then the stubs from the far future have to be scrapped or completely rewritten.

All that to say that Jen has, at most, two more work sessions of stub writing before she has to put on her mining helmet and join Kent in the pit.