Category: Voice

Point of view, dialogue, tone, character internals, and so on.

See, It’s Not Just Us

As a member of a writing duo, it’s interesting to read books written by other duos. Kent’s reading The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. right now, by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland. (Halfway through, and it’s excellent so far.)

It’s almost impossible not to project our familiar process onto this other writing team. That’s just how collaboration works, right? But really, every writing partnership is unique. Having read quite a bit of Stephenson, but nothing else by Galland, makes it tricky to speculate about what each of them contributed to D.O.D.O. It’s full of Stephenson’s tropes, especially regarding technology and history, but it’s not like he holds patents on them or anything. To this Stephenson fan, it mostly feels like a Stephenson book. To Galland’s fans, does it mostly feel like one of hers? More research is needed.

Being a member of a collaborative authorial entity does provide some useful perspective. Galland and Stephenson’s exact process might be a black box, but from the characteristics of the output we know a little bit about how they did it. The voice coheres. In other words, it doesn’t sound like two writers taking turns telling the story in their own styles. It sounds like a single, consistent storytelling voice. This is something Jen and Kent pay a lot of attention to as Rune Skelley, and something that over time has become second nature. In the early going, we were systematic about revising one another’s drafts so that our individual quirks didn’t get too dense.

There very much are distinct character voices in D.O.D.O., so it’s reasonable to suppose that each of the writers took responsibility for certain viewpoints. That’s the way it usually goes for Rune Skelley, so we might just be projecting again, but we do it that way for some good reasons that would probably generalize to others’ workflows.

Another thing we know is that they converged on this subject matter. Collaboration on something as deep and wide as a novel can’t work unless both authors are invested in telling that story. You both have to be passionate about those characters. After all, if the author doesn’t care, why should readers?

What are some of your favorite novels that were written by duos? Let us know in the comments.

When Writing Feels More Like Acting

We mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Kent is writing epigraphs for the third Science novel. As with book one of that series, the epigraphs are excerpts from the in-world science fiction novels written by one of the characters.

We need these snippets to have a voice that’s distinct from the Rune Skelley voice. They need to feel like they’re from a different era. So, to create them entails getting inside the mind of their fictitious author.

All fiction entails getting inside the minds of your characters, but this is something verging on stunt fiction. Get inside this character’s head, while she’s getting inside her characters’ heads. Write like she would write, and then rewrite like she would rewrite. Thank goodness these things are brief!

For the middle book, we gave this fictitious author a break and excerpted a story told by someone else. The process bore much similarity, even though the resulting epigraphs that time were quite a bit shorter and more interconnected.

Now we’re back to how we started, except that our in-world author has been through new experiences, some of which shook her. How does that color her writing? How does she cope with other constraints (which would be gigantic spoilers if we told you about them)? We don’t want to just serve up another batch of the exact same stuff, but we do want to do more of what’s good. It’s a tricky balance. Kent had some initial ideas that Jen had to nix. Those mystery constraints clamped down hard. Fortunately, Kent believes that constraints fuel creativity, even if they also prompt the occasional tantrum.

Having a writing partner means you have someone to run lines with you and help you get into character.

 

Is This Thing On?

One of the most informative sessions we attended at the Independent Authors Conference was the one on audiobooks. Among the things we learned:

  1. they’re expensive
  2. producing them costs a lot of money
  3. they ain’t cheap

Audio is the fastest-growing publishing segment [citation needed], and it’s not just a “millennial thing.” More than one of Kent’s coworkers where he dayjobs has asked when the works of Rune Skelley will become available in audio format, because they utilize their lengthy commute times to consume books. (These are people whose kids are millennials. But yeah, the younger crowd likes to consume content that way, too.)

The duration guestimate is around 9500 words an hour, so if your book is 95,000 words then it will be roughly ten hours. While there are different ways the billing can be structured, professional audiobook production basically runs several hundred dollars per finished hour. Given the scale of our novels, we experienced major sticker shock. The question that logically occurred to us was, “What about doing it ourselves?” We do everything ourselves. How hard can it be? Kent reads all the manuscripts aloud multiple times anyway in the course of our standard process, and we often say we ought to be recording.

Well. Short answer: yes, you can DIY your audiobooks. But it’s a lot of work, and requires adequate setup and preparation.

  • Needless to say, the manuscript needs to be final. So, our scheme to capture the audio on-the-fly during our writing process isn’t really sound. (Drat!)
  • If you flub anything, you need to do it again. Even if you said all the correct words in the correct order, you might not be pleased with your cadence or inflection. You’ll end up needing to record much of the text twice, or more, to get a top-notch end product.
  • All those takes need to be edited together. This is time-consuming, probably double or triple the finished hours of the audiobook. (And that’s assuming you already know how to drive the editing software.)
  • The narrator’s delivery must be even and distinct. This requires considerable concentration and holding a consisten posture, which can become exhausting over periods of hours. And, across multiple sessions. If you catch a cold, you might not be able to record until your congestion clears up.
  • Good narration is a form of acting. The book’s tone needs to come through, and each character’s voice should be distinguishable. Can you do the accents? Male and female roles? Remember, the listener is counting on you to bring the story to life.
  • The recording environment has be free of background noise, reverb, and interruptions. You need a space where you can’t hear traffic or opening and closing of doors, and so on. If there are other people or pets in the house, and you don’t have a soundproofed room, they’ll have to be unreasonably still or they’ll spoil your takes.
  • It’s critical to have someone do QA (quality assurance) on your output. This is a big job, and doing it well requires a good ear and the ability to deliver honest criticism. It might be hard to find someone willing to donate the hours whose relationship to you doesn’t interfere with their objectivity.

We’re still flirting with the idea of trying it, despite all these obstacles. It’s not impossible, but there’s a reason that the pros charge serious money to do it. Perhaps we’ll have an update in the future, whether it’s a sample recording or, “Yikes, that didn’t go well.”

 

You Are Now Free to Move About the Cabin

We’re doing a read-through of the whole Science trilogy, as a step in the process of releasing the first book of that series. Our intention is to have all three of them fresh in our minds while doing final edits on book one. That way, we will be able to cinch them into a tighter whole as a series.

While writing them, it was hard not to end up with our noses down in the weeds. As we zoom over the tale in this marathon read-aloud, we’re seeing it from a much greater altitude. Kent losing his voice is a small sacrifice in exchange for such a boon, or so Jen assures him.

The three novels are at quite different stages of development. The first one, as we say, is going into final edits. Meanwhile the other two are basically raw* first drafts, and aren’t even arranged into chapters yet. Their scenes are (mostly) in the proper order, but we have been noting places where stuff will need to shift. In some cases it’s that info must be revealed out of chronological order, and in others we’re tweaking the rhythm of the POV transitions.

Having a writing partner means there’s someone to read your stuff out loud to you, at least until his voice gives out.

*Given our extensive pre-work regimen, all of our first drafts are technically medium-rare.

Once More, With Feeling

After several weeks (and several road trips) of brainstorming and discussion related to Sibling of Music Novel, we came to a natural lull. It was the perfect time to read through the two other books set in the same story universe to both refresh our memories about the characters and plot details, and to look for inspiration.

The two existing books, Music Novel and Son of Music Novel, are both quite hefty, so this read through is taking a while. It would go quicker if we each read silently by ourselves, but Jen reads faster than Kent and she’d finish up first and then sit around being bored. Can’t have that. Plus we like to stay synched up so that we can discuss things more easily. This all means that Kent’s voice has been getting a workout. He’s already finished reading the first book out loud, and he’s halfway through the second. It’s sort of like an audio book and a director’s commentary rolled into one, and we’re quite enjoying it. Maybe Jen a little more than Kent (who is a very good sport about all of this).

We might finish up story time this weekend. Or we might not, because Son of Music Novel is freakin’ huge. Whenever we do finish, we’ll jump back into brainstorming, fully immersed in our story world.

Write Like Your Parents Will Never Read It

… But, um, they probably will.

It all depends on your subject matter, and on your parents. In our case, with books featuring so much vivid sex, profanity, violence, drug use, and trashing of religion, we felt pretty confident encouraging our moms not to read our stuff. (That didn’t work. It probably never does.)

Despite all our subtle warnings, our moms still wanted to read the books. So, we had to hand them over. Jen told her mom, “Kent wrote all the yucky parts,” and Kent told his mom to blame those sections on Jen.

The weirdest thing happened. Our moms liked the books.

Sure, they sort of have to. It’s in the mom job description. Of course they’re proud of us as writers. But we knew — or thought we knew — that our content wouldn’t be to their tastes. First of all, they don’t read much science fiction. And as mentioned above, it’s all stuff we’d never bring up in front of them. And we surely wouldn’t use such caustic language with them. They’re our moms!

We just don’t quite know how to process all this, and we probably never will. Happy to have happy readers? Absolutely. Glad not to have upset our moms? You bet! Wondering how well we really know these women? Little bit.

Having a writing partner means being able to disavow the parts your mom doesn’t like.

Don’t Turn Your Novel Into a Turducken

The other night we had a conversation in the writing cave about ways to flesh out a story. We know there are things we neglected to spell out, or perhaps omitted altogether, because of being a little too close to them. However, not everything that you could add is something that you should.

Obviously, you don’t include the stuff that’s irrelevant or uninteresting. But sometimes you need to hold off on making additions even if they’d be fantastic. Because not every nugget of gold belongs in the tale you’re telling right now.

Consider a scenario where your main character makes a decision after tons of soul searching, a decision that’s going to determine the direction of the narrative. You can feel the turmoil of your character throughout his sleepless night. It’s tempting to try to bring the reader into that space of conflict, share the doubt and trepidation of the protagonist. To show (not tell!) all the alternatives that were contemplated, all the attempts to bargain away the painful but inevitable outcome. And in many cases, it’d be the right call. But not always. All that’s essential for the reader to know is what the decision is, and that reaching it was difficult.

Forcing the issue will hurt the whole book. If this moment falls during escalating kinetic tension, then inserting a digression into someone’s interior world is likely to kill the mood. Dwelling on this particular moment for this character might detract from the image you intend to create. And in such cases, no level of prose quality will change the basic fact: it doesn’t fit.

Including a scene that’s a tonal or thematic mismatch is like stuffing a different story inside the one you’re trying to tell, like jamming a bird inside of another bird. Maybe turducken is delicious, in which case the metaphor falls down. Just be sure that all your ingredients really do work together.

Yin And Yang

Good prose is often described as “efficient.” Eliminating extra words helps the reader by letting the author get out of the way.

Conversely, “designed by engineers” is, at best, a backhanded compliment.

Your text has many jobs to do, but it can all be summed up in terms of form and function. Functionally, text must convey a semantic payload. That is, meaning with a little m. On the flipside, the form of the message is your style. It’s the flavor that makes your work uniquely yours. Both are important: have something worth saying, and then say it well.

Where to draw the line between spare and terse is subjective. It’s also genre-dependent, and at the mercy of fashion There is no one right answer. Writing clean isn’t about brinksmanship, skimming the event horizon of a flat voice. It’s about not burying the message under ten feet of fluff. (Or substituting prolix phraseology for actual content.)

Blurry lines become a bigger concern when you write with a partner. What if one of you suggests taking out “some extra words,” referring to a passage that’s essential to the other’s identity as a human being? Not that it’s been that extreme, but this issue is relevant in the writing cave lately. Jen is nearly three-quarters of the way through an editing pass on Book Three of the Divided Man series, and it’s a manuscript that hasn’t been workshopped as much as the other two. Translation: there’s a lot of cutting to do. Kent is, for the most part, on board with those cuts. Really, 99+% of them are things he agrees with, even when the overabundant descriptors being excised are things he lovingly placed there to begin with. When it comes to that sub-one-percent, though, he takes a stand.

Your writing partner can help you rein in your verbosity, or provide the missing sizzle for the steak. You can do the same for her.

Becoming More Human-like

Writing is many things, but maybe more than anything else it comes down to recording — and transmitting — the experience of seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. That’s the essence of “show don’t tell.” And it’s the essence of voice in your fiction.

Kent reflected on this, and on our process and all the different sets of eyes he’s looked out through, and formed the opinion that the act of writing has increased his capacity for empathy. For context, his workplace nicknames have included Spock, Data, and more recently, Sheldon. (His high-school nicknames were less flattering.)

He’s convinced that empathy has become easier for him, sometimes involuntary, and he blames it on the writing. It’s also possible that it’s just a symptom of getting older, or a side effect of spending so much time with someone as compassionate as Jen.

Writing is many things, but most of all it’s projecting yourself into another being. The reader has a keen nose for puppet strings, so the writer must cut them without the character falling limp. You can get away with a little pretending, a little imitating, but it won’t carry you far. To win the reader’s trust, your writing must contain the characters’ honest fears and hungers.

It ends up giving a writer lots of practice standing in others’ shoes. And if you’ve never had a nickname based on an inhuman creature devoid of emotion, you probably have a good head start!

Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a Pair of Scissors Can’t Fix!

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One of the things you need to do when you write with a partner is divvy up the work, and here in the writing cave we often end up each adopting part of the cast. Kent does the POV scenes for his adoptees, and Jen likewise for the other characters. It’s nothing formalized, but we do like it because it helps each characters’ scenes feel more consistent as a set.

So. On our read-through of Son of Music Novel, we agreed that the scenes from one particular POV felt longwinded and over-explainy. And this character happened to be someone Kent had adopted. It was a good fit, because this character’s personality and intellect are similar in some respects to Kent’s, so he felt comfortable with the voice. Maybe a little too comfortable.

There’s no rule against having boorish characters, even boorish POV characters. The trick is to convey them while avoiding boorish writing. We now have to address some issues because this character brought out some of the worst in Kent.* Rather, because when that happened he let it contaminate the prose.

Will we send Kent back to fix the mess he made? Will we bench him and put Jen in for a fresh take on it? We don’t know. But having two of us means we have options.

*note that we are not actually accusing Kent of being longwinded and over-explainy