Category: Revision & Editing

Reminders For The Reader

We have a lot on our mind (the single, shared Skelley hive-mind) as we do our read-through. Among the many things we’re keeping an eye on is whether we succeed in keeping the setting and the characters vivid and lively for the reader the whole time.

How much description is too much, and how many reminders should there be about certain details, is a challenge every author has to deal with. Description is a fundamental element of prose, but it can slow down the story. What you’re really seeking is balance. That search is a place where beta readers and critique groups can provide really useful feedback, but ultimately it’s the writer’s call to make.

There are no straightforward rules for this. The right answer depends on the type of story, what part of that story you’re looking at, and what your readers really want out of the book. Sure, if you figure out the right search terms, you’d surely land on someone’s list of rules for exactly this, but they’d be of dubious value. (Whereas if you keep reading our blog, you’ll get pure gold, of course. Anyway.) Rune Skelley keeps these two guidelines in mind:

  1. the less ordinary the details, the more reminders are warranted
  2. prevalence in the text should line up with what’s significant for the characters
  3. (bonus guideline) remember that you’re never going to please everybody

Point number one relates to world building. It’s not just important to say, somewhere, “oh by the way the sky has polka dots.” You have to keep the place and its denizens feeling real for the reader.

Point number two is one we pay careful attention to here in the Writing Cave. Just because something is a fact doesn’t mean it needs to be brought up. Focusing on which details the characters care about helps the reader really get inside their skin. This is also a way to bring a sense of wonder into a familiar or ordinary setting, by helping the reader see it through someone else’s eyes.

Point three simply acknowledges that this is all subjective. You collect your feedback, and Reader A tells you the recurrent descriptions are like a pleasant leitmotif running through the prose, while Reader B says he started skimming whenever it felt like things were sliding toward reminder-town. Meanwhile Reader C asks why you waited until page 200 to mention the sky having polka-dots, when actually by then it’s been described seven times. However, if multiple sources agree that something’s either too heavy or too sparse, then you should probably make adjustments.

All through the writing of the first drafts of these books, we fretted about this ongoing description issue. Kent was pretty convinced that we were going to need to add tons of reminders. But at this stage, almost three-quarters of the way through our reading of the trilogy? We’re both quite happy with the overall state. Editing will most likely involve sprinkling in a few more mentions of certain things, but it’s in a good place already.

A writing partner is someone who helps you get a feel for how to help readers inhabit the story’s world.

The Art of Reading Through

In our big Music Series read-through, we’ve crossed the midpoint of book two, which pretty much means we’re halfway through the trilogy.

Something we chatted about recently is that there’s a balance we need to strike between getting done reading the damn thing and not missing important points that need discussion. This one hasn’t been edited at all yet, or even shown to any beta readers, so there are things that need work. But we’re not in revisions mode yet. We need to complete the read-through of all three books first.

The whole point of the exercise is to get the entirety of the trilogy into our minds in order to plan our edits holistically. Increasing the interconnection across the books, and strengthening the payoffs in book 3 by laying the right groundwork in books 1 & 2. As we look for ways to tighten up the narrative, we need to keep an eye on scenes in all three books so we don’t orphan anything. The big structural adjustments have to be made first, then we can work on polishing the prose.

A writing partner is someone who helps you stay on track when you’ve got roughly half a million words to wrangle.

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?

Braiding Them Ever More Intricately Together

We’re still working on our epic read-through of the entire Music Series, which will help prepare us to do edits on books two and three. But, even though Book One has already had a lot of editorial attention, we are also on the lookout for a certain breed of change that we might entertain there as well.

Now that all three of the books are written, we have the ability to enrich the foreshadowing for key events and strengthen the themes running through the whole series. So-and-so ended up being a more important character in the later books? We can tweak how the early appearances are handled. These crackpots hanging out in the margins are just a random rabble, except, hey, maybe… Wait, is that a granite countertop, or stainless steel? (Oops.)

We have no intention of doing anything drastic. We have enough work ahead of us as it is, thanks. But small changes can sometimes go a long way to unifying the members of a series. The big attraction for us is that it makes us look smarter, but there really is a payoff for the reader as well. The story world feels that much more real, that much easier to fall into. And on a reread, clues will jump out that you didn’t know were clues at all the first time through.

A writing partner is someone who helps you do sneaky, crafty things for your readers’ benefit.

The Rereadening Commenceth

Now that the draft of Sibling of Music Novel is complete, we have begun our read-through of the entire Music Series, starting of course with Book One. We wrote and revised that one first, then Book Three, and then did a bunch of stuff for the Science Series, and then wrote Book Two (aka Sibling). We didn’t really do it all in that order on purpose, but the upshot is that it’s been a good long while since we really delved into that first book.

And you know what? It’s good!

Okay, we are a bit biased about that. But seriously, it feels so good to be reading that one again. As mentioned above, this book has already been through some pretty heavy editing, so it’s in a nice polished state. And the story is just a lot of fun! (Although, the point where last night’s reading session left off was decidedly tense. Our characters would not say there was anything fun going on at that particular moment. We tell them “Just doing our job,” but they still hate us.)

We’re really looking forward to the day when all of you can read this book, too. That day gets closer all the time!

2020 Vision

As we sit here in the Writing Cave, planning out our next writing moves, it’s becoming clear that 2020 might be a year that very little actual writing gets done.

We set January 31 as the deadline for Sibling of Music Novel, a target which seems easily reachable. There are two scenes in progress, and five more after that waiting to be written. Easy peasy. After a small champagne toast, the rest of the month will be spent going back through the manuscript and filling in the placeholders, fixing things we changed our minds about halfway through, and addressing all the other little fiddly things that we know need attention. It will still technically be a first draft, but it will be a pretty clean one. That’s how we like ’em.

To celebrate the completion of the Music Trilogy we’ll pop open the BIG bottle of champagne.

As of February 1 (assuming all goes according to plan) we will have four completed novels that are in need of major edits. For the past few years we’ve concentrated heavily on the writing side of the equation, and now it’s time to turn that around and get some things polished up and gorgeous.

We have two Music Novels and two Science Novels to edit, and we have yet to decide what order we’re going to do them in. On the one hand, we’re pretty immersed in the Music story world at the moment, so it makes sense to stick with that. On the other hand, Sibling needs some time to rest before we can effectively edit it, so it makes sense to switch our attention to the Science story world. Plus that’s the one that our critique group is looking at right now. But the Music Novel is the one our agent is shopping around, so maybe we should stay focused on that?

Around and around we go.

Wherever we decide to start, each novel will go through several stages of editing, and will rest in between.

And in the background we’ll still be tinkering with ideas for the Ghost Series. Jen is a little concerned about what our workflow will look like if we finish up everything else before we start on the ghosts. At various stages of our process we find it helpful to switch our attention to a different project to let our batteries recharge. What will happen if we don’t have anything else to turn our attention to? Kent is a little concerned about having an ever-increasing pile of first drafts that never get readied for publication, and he points out that there will inevitably be projects after the Ghost Series, so when we need a break we can figure out what the next one will be and work on that.

These best laid plans might all fly out the window when our agent sells Music Novel, because then we’ll have plenty of distractions, what with selling the movie rights, and going on all the talk shows, and hobnobbing with celebrities, and buying yachts and all that.

Happy 2020 to all of you!

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.

 

Fill In the ______

We’ve discovered a fun way to gain useful insights into your own prose. Want to know how many modifiers you use? Curious about how obsessed you might be with anatomical references? This one simple trick can help!

Make a mad lib from a page of your book.

We’re sort of kidding about this serving any real purpose. Sure, if you still have adjectives left over after setting up twenty blanks for them, you’ll want to trim a few. But don’t let anything like that get in the way of the hilarity.

Jen invented this and didn’t tell Kent. We do “real” mad libs all the time, so he didn’t suspect a thing. When she asked for a liquid Kent said “coffee” (which will become important in a moment).

The reveal was pretty priceless, and of course Jen made him read it out loud. It was based on a pivotal, though lighthearted, passage in Miss Brandymoon’s Device, which made it perfect fodder for such irreverent treatment. Remember about “coffee”? Take one guess what type of liquid was in the original text.

A co-author is the ideal playmate for this game, but it could also work among members of a critique group, or with a beta reader. Or a stranger on the bus, if you’re looking for novel ways to make friends.

Give me a verb ending in -ing…

The Next Chapter

This week we tackled the last of the items on our To Do list relating to the Science Novels. We’re ready to plunge into writing Sibling of Music Novel, and didn’t want a bunch of tiny tasks swarming around us like gnats.

Kent whipped up a nice batch of epigraphs for the third novel, while Jen divided said novel into chapters so that he’d know how many he needed. (Answer: 28) Additionally she gave the chapters names.

We’ve mentioned before that Jen is our resident namer, and it’s a job she really enjoys. There was no chance that Kent was going to get his grubby paws on this task. Don’t get all riled up in his defense, though. Jen does ask for his opinion, and he has veto power.

During composition, we tend to give the scenes that we write goofy or overly spoiler-filled titles. They’re full of inside jokes and terrible puns. In short they would make egregious chapter titles. Would you read a book with chapters called “long day at the business factory”, or “emotionpalooza” or “merrily merrily merrily merrily” or “poopin’ in a bag” ? Of course not.

For the Science Novels, the actual chapter titles all relate to places in the stories. It was easy to come up with a couple dozen of those for the first book. As we moved through the series it got more difficult, largely because we don’t want to just repeat all the same place names from book to book. The thinking cap got a good workout, and in the end we came up with a nice, evocative batch of about 70 names, to cover all three books in the series. Now the whole series has proper chapters, with names and epigraphs and everything.

Having a writing partner means always having someone to share an inside joke with, even if it won’t make a good chapter title.

Holiday Sanity Check

We are still toiling away toward the upcoming release of Science Novel, and it’s going well. Jen’s innate knack for project management has again risen to the fore, and Kent has been able to take down nearly one-third of the neon-orange sticky notes that she put up on the board to track his editing progress. The cover is resting comfortably, as is one of its siblings, with the remaining one nearing completion as well to round out the trilogy’s wrappers. (More about the covers in next Friday’s post!)

Also, we have a houseful of (very welcome!) distractions, and tons of baking and cooking and cleaning to do, plus visiting and shopping and, well, you get it. This season is a really tough time to try to cloister ourselves for a final push to complete a project. Work continues, but life goes on. There must always be a balance.

Thus, because we absolutely will not release anything that feels rushed, we have chosen to buy ourselves a bit of breathing room and push the new book back until January. Once we have a firm date, we’ll schedule a cover reveal.

Meanwhile, enjoy your holiday rituals, feasts, and companionship, along with anticipatory tingles about our new novel. Delayed gratification will be our gift to you. Hope you like the color!