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?

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.