Category: Plotting & Outlines

Essential blueprinting for your fiction enterprise.

Predicting the Future – 2017 Edition

It’s time for everyone’s favorite activity: Strategic Planning!

What do we plan to accomplish in 2017? And how hard will this post make us laugh when we dust it off and look at it at the end of the year?

Kent, Jen, and Lady Marzipan took a nice long walk yesterday, and in between long, lingering sniffs of all the mailboxes in the neighborhood, we talked about how we hope to spend our time in the writing cave this year.

First and foremost, we’re planning to publish two books this year, sequels to Miss Brandymoon’s Device. Tenpenny Zen will be out in March, with the third novel to follow in late summer or early fall. There will be a lot of busywork involved with prepping those, which will keep us distracted from actual writing. But it’s kind of necessary if we want to release a quality product. Which we do.

Our second highest priority is knocking out the first drafts for Son and Grandson of Science Novel. We’re currently something like halfway through Son, and we’re planning to just steam ahead and write them both back-to-back (interrupted only by the fiddly stuff needed to release Tenpenny). We’re notoriously bad at predicting how long it will take us to write a novel. Jen seems to think that if we really knuckle down it should only take one long weekend, whereas Kent is more realistic and assumes it will take forever. Hopefully we’ll land somewhere in the middle and finish up by summer. Maybe.

After that, well… After that it gets a bit scary. With the Divided Man series published and the Science series resting comfortably as a first draft, that leaves only the Music series. We like the elegance of trilogies, even if we try not to officially label things that way – who knows when we might feel inspired to tell more stories set in our various fiction worlds? Currently the Music series has two completed novels, which means it needs at least one more. We have a few notes about what that third story might look like, and yesterday while we were out getting lunch and taking care of a friend’s cats we talked through those ideas and expanded a few of them. We don’t know yet what form the third Music novel will take, but we have no doubts that we’ll figure it out.

But then what? After we wrap up the Music series, we run out of map. We’ve been living with these three story worlds for a long time, and it’s unsettling to think that we might be done with all of them as soon as this year.

That might be catastrophizing a bit because it’s highly unlikely we’ll finish three novels in one year, and even if we do, there’s still all the editing.

But. But! We’re still sailing off the end of world.

So, if we’re smart we’ll devote a couple of lengthy conversations to exploring what comes next. Road trips are a fruitful time for that, which means we’ll need to plan a few of those. Where will the new year take us?

Happy New Year, everyone!

So Now It’s Fall Already

r-avatarProgress report time: we’re making progress!

Jen has completed the first nine stubs for Son of Science Novel. Each stub represents a scene, which for us tends to run in the range of three to six pages, although many times they end up longer. It’s not exactly rare for a scene to get cut after we’ve written it, but our process does help us minimize such wasted effort. If it gets stubbed, it’s a pretty sure bet it’ll be in the book.

Kent has completed the first draft of the new short story. He hadn’t done one in quite a while, and it felt damn good. In this case it was also fun to reconnect with characters we haven’t written lately. So now that draft needs to rest for a bit and then we’ll do revisions.

And, we have been devoting a lot of time over the past few weeks to the business side. This is a trend we expect to continue for the foreseeable future. It’s exciting and intimidating at the same time. One thing that’s become clear to us is that the biggest appeal of traditional publishing is the idea of having other people do all this stuff. (Which isn’t necessarily an accurate idea, but it sure is appealing!)

Now, back into it. More worlds to conquer! And winter is, is… due to arrive… just around the corner, er, bound to show up at some point.

Gentlemen, Start Your Engines

r-avatarWe mentioned recently that there hasn’t been much writing going on in the writing cave of late, and we’re happy to announce that that’s about to change.

Yes, we’re still wading around in the marketing bayou, wielding our machetes, collecting the far-flung pieces of the treasure map that will assure us publishing success, while doing our best to avoid quagmires, gators, and other distractions. But we are still attempting to plug away at the fiction at the same time.

A few days ago Jen finished up the detailed outlines and timelines for the next two novels we’re going to tackle. They’re both sequels to the Science Novel, so it makes sense to work them in tandem. This was the first time we’ve worked on such a grand scale, and it took a lot longer than expected to get them both fleshed out. We needed to upgrade our crystal ball to get better resolution for such far-future details.

Then last night Jen composed the first stub for Novel #7, aka Son of Science Novel. (In our writing cave, Stubs are what we call detailed scene descriptions, the step between outline and actual prose.) We like to have at least half a dozen stubs lined up before we start writing so that we’re both clear on how our individual parts will fit into the finished work. We’re not quite ready to start yet. But we’re so close! The excitement is building, and we’re hopeful that we’ll actually remember how to do it. To limber up, Kent is working on a short story.

Where It All Came From

r-avatarBackstory is a fraught topic for writers. Without getting into the debate about how much, if any, belongs in your finished product, we can say definitively that it serves a crucial purpose in our writing process.

The outline for Son of Science Novel is complete. This sequel introduces many new cast members, whose lives have been complicated since well before they intersected with our story. There’s a lot to know about them, so we are formally outlining the backstory, giving it the same kind of development attention as the “proper” narrative. Not only is it beneficial in getting to know these new people, but it also serves a debugging function, keeping us from basing story events on flawed reasoning. It’s alarmingly easy to overlook gaps and contradictions when you view things from 30,000 feet. A lower-altitude pass is essential.

Another place where backstory has been tremendously important is in the music novel. The protagonist’s outlook on life, and the experiences that shaped it, can’t be sketched in. A sketch would rely on the reader’s preconceptions to fill it in, and that would make it misleading. None of our readers has said, “I don’t need to know this.” Which raises the philosophical question of whether it really constitutes backstory. But to us, there’s no question at all. It’s pertinent, interesting, and unexpected, which places it within the scope of the narrative regardless of its chronology.

Working with a partner gives you a great resource for gut-checking things like how much backstory is needed. And, someone to listen when you do your thinking out loud, to catch the inconsistencies before they undermine your plot structure.

Time Flies Like An Arrow

r-avatarWoof.

Everything. Takes. Forever.

Maybe we have unrealistic expectations. Okay, that’s probably it. After all, we’ve done this several times, so of course it’ll just go faster and smoother each time from now on, right?

Jen continues to hammer away at the outlining for Son of Science Novel. It’s taking (spoiler alert!) longer than she budgeted. But it really is coming together, and now she’s nearly done incorporating all the mysterious scratches left by mysterious chickens in our various steno pads, from back when we were brainstorming the story. The process might be going faster, except she finds herself distracted by the art project happening on Kent’s side of the writing cave.

Kent continues to refine the illustration for the cover of our trilogy’s first book. It’s getting very close too, in fact, but there’s always one more tweak, one more font to try, one more configuration of the title and other text in relation to the artwork… Kent claims that he’d be making better time if not for the constant distraction of the outline being crafted on the other side of the writing cave. (Jen rolls her eyes.)

It’s worth giving your projects the time they need in order to create work that you’re proud of. With a partner sharing the load, you’ll get through the slow patches in half the time and have energy left for the fun stuff.

Places, Everyone!

r-avatarOur first three novels are set in the same made-up town, which is strongly inspired by a real place. The music novel and (son-of) are set in New York City, which despite what you may have heard is an actual, real place. For the science novel and its successors we have once again invented cities, and the locations that inhabit them.

The science novel’s locale is practically part of the cast. We never considered setting the story in a known city. When it came time to plan its sequels, though, we worked very hard at tracking down a real place that could work. Neither of us can quite say why. Given the logistical constraints of the plot, as well as some crucial geographic and climate considerations, it was proving all but impossible to choose an existing location. Plus, we wanted it to have a cool name.

The desire to name the place was probably the signal that snapped us out of it. So, today we concocted a deliciously Russian appellation for the place where we’ll be making more characters’ lives miserable, and decided where to put its map pin. In this case, “we” means Jen of course, because names are her superpower. Now that we’ve chosen this route, it’s dawned on us how strange it would have been to have books in a series follow different theories of setting and world-building.

As an added bonus, creating a location from scratch allows Kent to stretch his D&D muscles to draw up maps.

Cave of Rainbows

r-avatarAs much as we tout the benefits of our rainbow-based approach to story development, we must also admit that the system has its drawbacks. Laying the whole thing out takes up a hallway, or most of a room. Laying out multiple rainbows concurrently (backstory + sequel + another sequel) takes up our entire auxiliary writing cave.

Studying the whole thing is a bit laborious, too. It can involve some stooping, and playing a sort of anti-Twister to keep from ruining the layout with one’s feet. (The other night, Kent had to sneeze while standing astride the whole construct. That could have been disastrous!)

Maybe we kid ourselves, but we feel like the inconveniences are all offset by the system’s merits. In fact, the strengths and weaknesses are all due to the same thing — the physical nature of the cards, which allows them to be shifted around and makes their representation of the story more tangible and spatial. There are software tools that do similar things, some of which we also make use of. Scrivener’s cork board is nice, and Jen is an expert with Aeon Timeline.

But sometimes you need to crawl around in your dusty auxiliary writing cave, and sneeze a few times, to really internalize a project.

Spinning Plates

r-avatarRune Skelley likes to focus on just one novel at a time. Having to keep track of multiple story worlds simultaneously makes it harder to do any of them justice. Harder, but hopefully not impossible, because we’re bending our own rule right now.

Novel #1 (Miss Brandymoon’s Device) is getting a final round of line edits, while we’re also doing a read-through on the Science Novel in preparation for outlining the sequels. We’ve already rainbowed them, and now we need to really get that world under our nails to expand those rainbows into full-fledged outlines. The line editing is happening mostly by day, with evenings available for the read-through. It seems to be working pretty well, so far.

In addition to all of that, we’re getting feedback from our beta readers on Son of Music Novel. That means we have to keep all three of our story worlds in our heads, to some extent.

Oh, and we’re doing cover mockups for our first trilogy. Shifting from verbal creative mode to pictorial creative mode is refreshing now and then, although there’s a lot of creative verbiage flying around the writing cave while we converge on a common vision for these covers.

Sometimes, practical demands force you to spread yourself a little thin. Having a writing partner means you can keep more plates spinning.

Another Major Milestone Passed

r-avatarOur double-complete rainbow is double-completed!

A few nights ago, we laid out the rainbows for both of the sequels to the Science Novel, with one flowing directly into the other. At that point, the second one was only about two-thirds done, but we were hot on the trail of a plot wrinkle that would give shape to the remainder of the story. So by the end of that session, our colorful array of paper squares reached its final form.

Our next step was to sleep on it. Not physically on the rainbow, of course. But this did mean that Lady Marzipan had to be banished from the Auxiliary Writing Cave for another night so we could leave things laid out. The next evening, Jen read off the first rainbow a row at a time while Kent typed up a synopsis of sorts, something we refer to as our prose outline. If Kent didn’t need to sleep, we might have powered through and done both of them, but Lady Marzipan had to stay out for yet another night. But finally, next time, we got there!

Typing up the prose outlines moves the story development process into a new phase. It’s not just transcription; it’s a chance to catch gaps and inconsistencies — looking at things through a different lens — and start getting a feel for the rhythms of the stories.

So what’s next? We lay them aside and work on something else. Specifically, we’re assessing critique notes on the Music Novel. We like to give stuff some time to rest as part of our process, and we don’t like to try to work on more than one book at a time.

Letting Your Villain Spread Those Villainous Wings

r-avatarStill outlining the second sequel to the Science Novel, but we think we’re past the midpoint in devising a plot. It should get easier from here on out, although we’ll inevitably hit a few more snags.

One of the key moments this week was when we gave our primary baddie a little more latitude by having some of the other evil characters target a different victim. The way we’d initially blocked things, Main Bad Guy was lured into a trap but then turned the tables. The new setup makes him proactive rather than reactive, which is good (even though in this case it’s evil). Another benefit of the change is that it brings back someone who would have otherwise retired from the story with hardly a scratch. The outlook is a bit more complicated now, which is usually a sign that you’re doing it right.

This proactive-vs-reactive concern applies to characters in every part of the moral spectrum. You might have been advised to make sure your protagonist isn’t just the person stuff happens to happen to, and what we’re saying is it applies equally to the antagonist. Look for plot nodes where any of the major characters become the object rather than the subject and take them apart to find a better move.

This is a great illustration of why we like to do such detailed up-front work. Had we been flying by the seat of our collective pants, this minor change would be a nightmare to implement. This way we will be able to concentrate on the characters’ voices, and vividness of description, and sentence rhythm… the parts of novel writing that are actually fun.