Category: Plotting & Outlines

Essential blueprinting for your fiction enterprise.

Begin Again

r-avatarFinally! The first draft of Son of Music Novel is officially done. We wrapped up the lingering loose ends a few days ago and tucked it away for safekeeping. As we mentioned  a few weeks ago, we prefer to take things to critique group once we’ve sanded off the worst of the imperfections, which means that our new baby is not quite ready for its public debut. It’s all tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk, and needs a bit of a lie down while we work on other things.

Picking up a new project (or revisiting an old one) forces us to focus on something different and drives the details of the newly completed novel from our minds. That way, when we pick it up again, we can look at it with fresh eyes. Obviously we’ll never be unspoiled readers of our own work, but one does what one can.

Our new project will be a sequel to Novel #5, which we cleverly code-named the Science Novel. Most likely it will be known here on the blog by the nom de guerre Son of Science Novel, even after we decide on its real title. We dug up some existing notes on potential directions the sequel could take, reminded ourselves which characters survived the first outing, and looked at the pretty pictures of the not-so-pretty locations we’re taking inspiration from for possible settings. It’s been fun and refreshing to shift gears, and we’re looking forward to a deep dive back into the world we created for Science Novel.

That and watching The Man in the High Castle, and seeing Star Wars again.

 

A Little Pantsing Can’t Hurt Too Much, Right?

r-avatarMan, we are closing in on the conclusion — make that the action-packed conclusion — of Son Of Music Novel. We’re so close. The scene Kent is working on is that last big chunk of writing, although we have stubs for a few more scenes that are mostly denouement. (Also, there’s a feature of the Music Novel that recurs here, and for which we need a significant amount of text. Jen’s made an excellent start on that.)

All this adds up to a strong likelihood that our manuscript’s completion will fall during NaNoWriMo. Ah well, if our baby’s a Scorpio we’ll love it anyway.

Kent’s working from a stub that turned out to be a little light on details. It was fine up to a point, and then it got vague. The way we chose to deal with that issue (once we figured it out) was to have Kent beef things up in the stub first, rather than just winging it and going straight to prose. Either way could work, and our way we knew there was a small amount of extra writing to be done. It was tempting to see that as nonproductive and skip it, but experience has taught us that we’d end up with more rewriting if we succumbed to that temptation. Better to do a few hundred words up front, knowing they’ll never be read by anyone outside of the writing cave, than to write thousands of words thinking that they’re counting toward completion only to find that they don’t work, and then do another batch.

You might be wondering how we ran into this problem, given our fervor for a stub-based methodology. It was kind of a perfect storm. The later in the story we get, the less need for worry over derailing things. This lack of worry is great from a stress-management perspective, but it can lead to cutting corners. And as it turns out, there is a second edge to that “close to done” sword: things need to start coming together, not keep ramifying. You’re on final approach, and you have to make sure you won’t run out of runway. Another factor here is that the vague area of the stub was mostly kinetic, which makes it easily glossed over. But the action in question incorporates thematic elements and needs to cover specific beats for the character arcs. It’s not just, “make up something exciting and interesting,” it’s “do that, within all these nuanced constraints.”

It seems glaring in hindsight, but until the prose was well underway we thought the stub was pretty solid. Fortunately our work style involves lots of conversation and we figured out the issues without losing any ground. Kent does seem to have a Zeno’s Paradox thing going on, where each evening he manages to write half of the remaining words in his scene. Jen’s not the kind of co-author who’ll sit back and let that run its course, so one way or another that cycle will break pretty soon.

Happy Friday the Thirteenth to all our triskaidekaphobe friends! And all you triskaidekaphiles, too.

Have A Method, Or You’ll Have Madness

r-avatarMagical thinking sounds like something that would be very helpful in creative pursuits such as writing fiction. Instead, it’s the culprit behind many plot holes. Even if you work from an outline (which we recommend strenuously) — even if you use stubs — you’re not protected completely.

Stuff that looks fine from a distance can hide serious logical problems, things you sometimes don’t discover until you’re writing the scenes. A common form of this, from our experience, is when a conversation must cover certain topics (plot points) but the characters refuse to talk about those things. Didn’t they read the outline? In broad strokes it’s easy to say, “Jack and Jill chat about climate change,” but up close it might prove difficult for Jack to engage Jill on the subject because his beliefs are so radical. But that’s what makes them interesting, and the conflict here resonates with their later need to cooperate in order to survive, so you know you have to find your way through.

We’re not saying tools like outlines are worthless. Just the opposite. It’s even easier to get tangled up in problems when you have no structure to work from. Without an outline to put it in context, how would you know whether it’s worth it to chisel away at the climate change convo? How long do you have to let Jack and Jill ramble for them to get to something you can use? And whoops, Rufus is in two places at once. Fixing that means the boat chase needs to take place ten miles inland. That could be… different. Yeah. No.

Have a process, is what we’re saying. An imperfect process is better than none at all.

We’re coming up on the time of the year when aspiring writers are exhorted to just go for it. Write like a maniac. That advice has its place, but it’s not a good way to proceed if your desired end product is a salable manuscript. What is a good way? Find the right partner.

 

Son-of-Music-Novel Progress Report

r-avatarCounting the stuff from Wednesday night, we’re almost up to 43,000 words on the new book. We’ve done twenty scenes (one’s not quite finished, but it’s thisclose) which nearly depletes our stub stockpile.

While we don’t like to work on a scene without a stub, that doesn’t mean that we generate all the stubs before we do any of the writing. What we’ve found works far better is a sort of inchworm approach — stub it out up to some milestone, then write all that prose, then generate the next batch of stubs, and so on.

There are definite advantages to doing this. For one thing, even with a thorough outline such as ours, your plans will inevitably be overtaken by events. The outline has to be end-to-end despite the likelihood of needing to redo a lot of it. If we also ran ahead and created all the stubs, then that’d just be more rework. There’s also a purely logistical reason: we find it works best to have one person do all the stubs (that person is Jen), so if she had to generate the whole set before anyone could move on to the next stage, someone would be sitting around for a while (that person would be Kent).

How do you choose the cutoff point for each round of stubs? In this case we based it on a watershed moment in the story — it’s the boundary between acts I & II. You could also divvy things up based on character chronology: Jane as a child, Jane as a teenager, Jane in college, etc. Or just guesstimate word count and chop it into quarters or tenths or whatever you’re comfortable with.

Whatever size “inch” you make your inchworm, remember to take stock each time you start another iteration. Make the stubs your story needs, which might not be the ones prescribed in the outline. Stay flexible and keep moving forward.

Can’t Stand the Pressure

r-avatarAmong the most common recommendations thrown at writers is to always end a chapter/scene/paragraph/sentence on rising tension. Man, that makes for irritating prose.

Like most advice, good or bad, this is primarily aimed at those still learning. Limp plotlines are a common problem for newbies, so the impulse to remind them to keep us engaged is understandable. And even veterans are susceptible to info-dump and purposeless dialog and throat-clearing, all the bugbears that make the text drag. The problem here, as with all bad advice (badvice?), is not the intent.

The problem is that it’s the wrong prescription, and it’s overprescribed to boot. In some genres, a pell-mell dash with no letup is desired. But if you’re writing in that niche, you know that’s what you’re about. The reminder probably doesn’t mean much. No, this advice gets broadcast all the time as general-issue guidance. Did you think you were going for a somber tone, evoking loss and regret through imagery? Wrong — go back and punch it up. Laying the groundwork for a stunning reveal? Nope, we can’t allow that — tension only ever rises, haven’t you been listening?

Given the goal of reader engagement, writers have several options that are unrelated to the state of tension. Having something significant to say is a great start — wanting to write as opposed to wanting to be a writer. A strong voice will carry just about anything. An inventive premise will hook readers, as will rich world building. Stories do need tension, sure, but the art lies in managing and manipulating it. Requiring that it go up and up and up, always up, makes it predictable and wearying.

The reason most advice fixates on things like rising tension has less to do with whether it’s a common deficiency and more to do with it being somewhat empirical. Readers are likely to agree on whether or not tension is increasing, whereas tastes and moods determine our assessments of things like voice. But just because they’re difficult to quantify doesn’t mean you can’t get better at them. Let your story flow where it must. Never artificially raise the tension.

For more thoughts on the scarce good and copious bad advice writers receive, you can view our “advice” tag. Also, Reggie Lutz has weighed in on the matter recently, so go check that out!

Working Without a Net

r-avatarIt started off as research notes. We need to nail down the methodology of one of our characters, incorporating a bit of near-future seasoning.

Then Kent said, “I should write an apocryphal scene depicting all this stuff, to get a feel for it.” The next bright idea was, “Why not consult the outline and find a beat that belongs in the novel, so the prose doesn’t just get discarded?”

That’s fine in theory. Economizing effort. Thing is, the stubbing process hasn’t progressed that far into the outline yet. So, it became an object lesson in our dependency on stubs. When Jen heard the first draft, she said, “It’s well done…”

Uh oh.

Some of what Kent invented on the fly wasn’t right for that moment, or for that character. We both liked the imagery and the conceptual basis, though, which gave us a minor dilemma. The whole idea had been to avoid discarding the practice-prose, but now we had something that wasn’t working.

Fortunately, we have each other to talk to. In short order we determined that what Kent had come up with makes more sense if it’s attached to another character. And it does — it’s more in line with her personality, and it dovetails more smoothly with some later plot developments. One wonders how things would have taken shape had we played by our own rules. We’ll never know, but we know we’re pleased with how it’s working out.

It’s a Process

r-avatarA few weeks ago we were struggling with getting the old fiction engine fired up. After a little bit of tinkering with various wrenches (both monkey and goose), and the jumpstart of realizing we already had 11,000 words, we’re happy to announce that Son of Music Novel is spluttering to life. Our hands will stay greasy for the next little while as we make fine adjustments, but soon enough the chapters will come chugging out.

Mechanic Jen finally remembered how this whole stub-manufacturing process works, and has begun cranking them out. A stub, as faithful readers know, is a sort of detailed scene synopsis, the step we use between the outline and the first draft. While Kent has been letting his imagination run free, composing prose like a boss, Jen has been wrestling with the outline. As we mentioned, it’s 26 pages long, and quite detailed. She needs to feed that, point by point, into the maw of the fiction machine, let it whir and grind for a few minutes, and catch the proto-first draft nuggets that emerge from the other end.fiction-machine

As with every step in the process, the output becomes more refined. While toiling away, Jen has discovered that some of the points in the outline don’t really require an entire scene (which is a good thing since we don’t want this novel to be a billion words long). She’s found ways to merge what were originally envisioned as multiple scenes into one über scene, and ways to distill the single pertinent fact or event from an otherwise superfluous scene for inclusion elsewhere. It’s really an extremely early form of editing, and it will save us hours of labor.

Now that the fiction machine is running more smoothly and the fumes are being cleared from the writing cave, we expect Son of Music Novel to progress quickly. We’ll keep you posted!

Son-of-Music-Novel Project Status Update

r-avatarWe have officially turned the corner.

Jen has created three genuine stubs, and Kent had a research deliverable that bears many of the hallmarks of a stub. Now that we’re pedaling again, the bicycle doesn’t seem so scary.

Another thing we’ve done is watch movies. (For research, honest!) It’s been a mini-marathon of films that deal with combinations of elements similar to what we’re concocting for the new novel. Our aim is to learn the landscape, so we can avoid this scenario:

Rune Skelley: “So that’s our pitch!”
Agent: “A remake of _____? Not interested.”

So far we haven’t seen anything that significantly resembles our story. Our ideas tend to be weird (although it’s more flattering to call them original), so there’s probably not a serious risk of overlapping too much with something that’s already out there. But saying we need to make sure lets us thin out our Netflix queue and deny that it’s procrastination.

If next Friday’s collaboration post consists of us screaming and pulling our hair out, you can blame Lars von Trier.

Turning The Corner (If We Can Find It)

r-avatarIn the eternal war between Plotters and Pantsers, Rune Skelley is a stalwart Plotter and ever shall be.

With that out of the way, it’s time to acknowledge one of the advantages enjoyed by our ancient adversaries: Pantsers don’t have to figure out how to switch from the planning mode into actual writing.

That’s where we are now, and it feels like looking for an address in a strange neighborhood. We know our turn is around here somewhere. We’re going slow so we can read house numbers. We’re puttering along in a strained metaphor when we should (probably?) be writing.

On the other hand, Kent observed recently that the current state of Son of Music Novel is analogous to a first draft even though there’s no manuscript per se in existence. It’s not like we’ve been spending all this time just sharpening pencils in the Writing Cave. We’ve accomplished a lot. But, without a manuscript we do not, technically, have a first draft.

The truth is, there’s no such thing as 100% preparedness. Plotters reach a point of diminishing returns when their plans hit a certain level of detail, and that’s the signal to start writing and save further optimization for the revisions stage. Recognizing that signal from the inside is not always so easy to do, and therein lies our dilemma.

This is an area where Kent’s and Jen’s personalities are perhaps too similar. We both like the planning mode, and share some of the same trepidation about leaping in on the writing too soon. If one of us was a Pantser at heart, we’d have a more balanced perspective and might vacilate less about turning this corner. Contemplating just about any other stage in the process, such an odd-couple partnership seems doomed to a lot of frustration. But maybe it can work.

Whichever banner you rally to, Pantsing or Plotting, do you think you could collaborate with a member of the other camp? Could you learn from each other? Leverage your disparate strengths? Or would it lead to a meltdown?

Lavishly Illustrated Plans for World Domination

r-avatarAs co-writers who work together in the textual medium, Jen and Kent are somewhat unusual. However, there are other storytelling forms wherein laboring in solitude would be the exception. In the case of film, it’s nearly unheard of for one person to create the whole thing.

We’re fascinated by other storytellers’ processes, and recently we had the chance to bask in the genius of Alejandro Jodorowsky (not in person, sadly, but still). By now you certainly have heard about Jodorowsky’s Dune, the documentary of the almost-making of the greatest movie that doesn’t exist. (No? Search it now, then come back. You’ll thank us.)

In particular, we were captivated by the book. (And here we don’t mean the novel he was adapting.)

Jodorowsky compiled his team’s fabulous concept art and shot-by-shot storyboards into a mammoth book for presentation to Hollywood studios. He knew that a vision so audacious would seem unattainable, thus the meticulous (and gorgeous) documentation of how he planned to bring it about.

iu-1 iu-2

The photos don’t convey the book’s immenseness. It’s the size of a shoebox.

For Rune Skelley, Jodorowsky’s presentation book for Dune is inspirational. We have a fairly detailed (and occasionally colorful) process of our own, which is not going to seem very impressive next to what’s mentioned above. But we do put in a lot of effort up front because, when you’re working as a team, whether on a novel or a film, it’s crucial to know that you’re sharing the same vision.

In addition to the used-up steno pad, and the rainbow, and the prose outline, and the nearly-but-not-quite traditional outline, and the stubs, we also pull together piles of other notes and images that connect us to the story world.

Early in the process, we “cast” every role in the book by tracking down pictures of people who could play them. Often these are photos of famous actors, but we don’t limit ourselves when searching. These photos become incorporated into the character sheets that list out other basic data about each person in the story.

Another thing we do is “scout locations,” choosing real-world buildings to serve as templates, or sometimes to play themselves. In son-of-music novel, a family purchases a certain well known landmark mansion. Jen has been doing a little nip and tuck on the floor plan to bring it into line with the new occupants’ needs, while respecting the historical character of the structure of course.

Kent’s done a fair bit of research, most of which is classified. The most enjoyable part was putting together a gallery of fractal images and coming up with a categorization system for them. (He realizes fractals have already been categorized, but not in a way that meets Rune Skelley’s requirements.)

As with everything else about writing our books, we’re mad planners where world-building is concerned. And even when our settings resemble consensus reality — superficially — we devote the energy to make sure we can feel them under our nails.