Category: Voice

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

How Would You Describe That?

r-avatarThe heavy lifting is done in our revisions of the Music Novel, aka Novel #4, but we still have miles to go. We’ve set up a list of global revision issues, each of which pretty much necessitates a separate pass through the full manuscript.

For example, one of the major characters is British, and we identified the need to make that more evident through the usage choices in her scenes. Not just within her dialog, but also the narrative if the scene is from her point of view — we want her point of view to really be the camera lens for those scenes. In other, subtler ways, each POV character needs similar attention. Some of them are less optimistic about life (especially later in the tale…) and some of them are just wired differently. We want certain foibles to be evident in which details the character’s notice, and in their choices of inward adjectives and similes.

And on top of all that, we also need to make the locale more vivid. This one’s set in New York City, primarily Manhattan, and we apparently got lazy about describing the place. After all, it’s on TV a thousand times a week, so everybody knows what it’s like, right? Lazy! Our real wake-up about this issue was when we heard reader feedback on Novel #5, and people repeatedly praised the job we did on the setting. In that case, it’s a fictitious city and because we made it up we were eager to tell folks all about it. So to fix things in the Music Novel, we came up with this simple strategy: pretend we invented New York City. It makes the writing more fun, largely because of the frequency with which we realize just how weird a place New York actually is, probably weirder than anything we would have concocted!

To deal with so many global changes, we split up the list between us. Kent is focusing mainly on “inventing NYC” at the moment, and Jen has moved on from the Anglophonic project to physical traits of the characters. It’s humming along pretty well now, but it’s taken the past week or so for Kent to get back into the swing of things now that we’re back from Europe. Jen must be more resistant to jet lag.

Did we mention we were going to Europe? Prague is a devastatingly gorgeous city. We insist you visit. Go. Right now. Eat trdelník and schnitzel. Drink hot wine and Pilsner Urquell. Visit the astronomical clock and the Museum of Sex Machines. We couldn’t invent a better city if we tried.

Prague prague2 prague3

Being Awesome Together

r-avatarMostly we write about the logistical and procedural aspects of writing with a partner: how to divvy up the work, how we can each play to our strengths, and so on. What we mention in passing is that we talk to each other a lot, and now maybe it’s time to make those conversations the focus of a post on the Skelleyverse.

Kent’s current assignment is to make a pass through the music novel watching for places to have the main character “think in music” — we want readers to be able to hear the world through his ears, and we want it to be clear that music is fundamental to him, not just something he does. Well, Kent made use of Scrivener’s nifty tools for filtering and organizing text nodes to find the places where such edits would make sense, and … stared at it for an hour. Eventually he changed one word. It was a good one, mind you. But let’s review: one word.

But then — but then! — while Kent and Jen were spooling down from their gruelling work session, they chatted about Kent’s mission for about five minutes and came up with several excellent ideas for ways to incorporate the desired flavor. If Kent hadn’t been so fixated on the notion that it was “his” job to come up with this stuff, they could have spent some time chatting up front and come out way ahead.

Every writer needs someone to talk to, even if it’s not a partner per se. It’s critical for effective problem-solving. And if you are lucky enough to have someone sitting in the same room with you, who knows the details of your project and understands the creative vision, then don’t squander the opportunity to think out loud with that person! Good things will happen.

Nomenclature By Any Other Name

r-avatarAs we’re fond of mentioning, one of our characters is an author. Samples of “her” work are included as epigraphs throughout the novel. This presented an interesting challenge for us. We needed to make sure that her voice is distinct from ours. In addition to changing up the style, we also wanted to have an entirely separate nomenclature for her story world.

Our fictional author writes heavier science fiction than we do. This necessitated the development of technical terms for machines and processes in her story world. Jen and Kent worked together to create a new vocabulary to express our character’s characters’ scientific achievements.

But we didn’t stop there. The fictional fiction world’s inhabitants needed both a unique personal naming scheme, and method of address. To enhance the otherness we wanted to avoid using terms like Mr or Dr, or even Comrade. After a lengthy brainstorming session and several walks around the neighborhood, we made a decision.

Then Jen had fun with naming the individuals. She developed a pattern for the names to follow, a theme for them to fit. For a “real” novel it would probably be too much, too stilted, along the lines of every character being named for a color. But that matchy-matchy quality works very well for our meta-story because it ties the characters together at the same time that it sets the names apart from those in the real story.

One final way we set the story-within-a-story apart has less to do with nomenclature. We always use the characters’ full names, including their title. Doctor Rune Skelley found this a very effective way to add to our author character’s unique voice.

Method Acting

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A character in Novel #5 is a novelist. Her works take place in a harder-scifi story world, more disconnected from consensus reality than Rune Skelley likes to have things. Excerpts appear as epigraphs with each of our chapters. It gives us a way to sneak in thematic messages and accentuate events going on in the main narrative, as well as helping to flesh out the character who “wrote” them.

The person who actually wrote them is a character, all right, and he got into character to do it.

Our fictional novelist, for reasons too complicated to go into here, prefers not to see her output. To emulate her process, Kent put his wireless keyboard in his lap and turned his chair to face away from his monitor. Not seeing the words made it easier to resist tampering with each sentence too much, and promoted a more deliberate style of composition. It did slow him down, though. The impact on productivity might be too severe to apply this trick for an entire novel, but when focusing on short passages it is a simple way to alter the way you relate to the words.

We wanted the epigraphs to sound like they were written by someone else. Changing the work conditions helped ensure that the output was distinctive. Matching the conditions faced by our character made it easier to think like her.

Who Said That?

r-avatarAchieving a unified and consistent voice is a key issue for co-authors. Some might find ways to let their individual styles show through without becoming a distraction, but Rune Skelley strives for a single voice in the finished novels.

That’s with the novels. In the writing prompts on this blog, that’s not the case. Not the case at all.

Our comprehensive circumnavigation of the Skelleyverse over New Year’s was more of a learning experience than anticipated. We wrote the stuff, howsoever long ago, so we expected to have a pretty good handle on what it contains. Ah, well.

We couldn’t even always tell which were Kent’s handiwork and which were Jen’s, based on the content. (We kept the hand-written originals, and the penmanship or its lack gives us a definitive ruling.) It’s a bit of an odd experience to read forgotten words that came from your own pen. It’s even weirder to read a passage thinking you wrote it, and then be informed that it was in fact the other person in the room with you.

A similar thing happens with the collaboratively written material, sometimes. Specifically, Kent has a tendency to forget who wrote which parts of the novels. He must admire Jen’s prose, because invariably we discover the mixup when he tries to take credit for stuff she actually wrote.

Our standard of quality includes, among other things, making sure our critique group can’t spot the seams between Kent’s and Jen’s sections. The fact that one of the authors loses track of them is a very good sign that we’re achieving a unified voice.

Our Kids Should Probably Not Read This Post

r-avatarRune Skelley novels contain sex, most of it on the unsavory end of the scale. It’s not that our happy, well-adjusted couples don’t have sex. They do. We just don’t talk about it because it’s boring. And also, we don’t often choose to write about happy, well-adjusted couples. When I say that the sex is boring, I only mean that it’s boring for us to write about and would, therefor, probably be boring to read about. The happy, well-adjusted couples having the sex find it pleasurable and satisfying, which is part of what makes them happy, well-adjusted couples.

There are authors that can make that kind of sex exciting to read, but Rune Skelley is not interested in being that kind of author. Rune Skelley is interested in being a big ol’ pervert. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at the prompts here on the Skelleyverse that have the sex tag. But don’t say you weren’t warned. It’s a heap of unsavoriness.

At the end of 2013 when we did our blog-tidying, we were a little surprised to discover how many of the posts got slapped with the sex tag. I mean, we know we’re both perverts. We’ve been married forever. We know each other pretty well. We just didn’t realize how often our dirty minds bubbled to the surface. It was, shall we say, educational.

Another way that our prompted writing differs from the writing we do for our novels, is that in our novels, the happy well-adjusted couples have sex, they just do it off camera. We let them have their privacy so that we can go peep through the blinds at what the more morally challenged characters are doing to each other. In the prompts, there doesn’t seem to be any vanilla sex at all. It’s either kinky and disturbing, or non-existent.

And to think there was a period of time when we read these aloud to our critique group on a weekly basis. Yes, including the ones featuring the Loch Ness Monster, the explosives, and even the whorehouse and the balloon full of live bees.

Fictional Fiction

r-avatarJen and Kent work hard to blend their writing styles into a seamless Rune Skelley voice. Rune Skelley, though, is not content with a single voice.

Each of our books has called for the inclusion of writings by authors in the story’s fictional universe, and we’ve had a marvelous time differentiating those voices. The fictional authors have writing styles that don’t sound like Rune Skelley. Neither do they sound like Jen, or Kent. Or like our other fictional authors.

As we’ve mentioned, our current novel started out as an idea born of Kent’s fevered imaginings, an idea that didn’t really speak to Jen. We found a way to work around that, and now Kent gets his reward for compromising.

In the story world, there is an author whose novels embody Kent’s original idea, and now Kent has free rein to bring that idea to life. He is encouraged to dive as deep into the hard scifi well as he wants. And since we’re only going to be including excerpts from our fictional author, he doesn’t have to worry overmuch about plot.

Lest it sound like Jen never gets to do the fun part, she already came up with the titles for all ten of our latest made-up author’s novels (and one short story). That “idea that didn’t really speak to Jen” seems to have been whispering in her ear over the past couple of days. Having the names of all the books that will provide the excerpts gives Kent inspiration for the story lines and themes they contain. It’s a neat example of the symbiosis in Rune Skelley’s writing process.

That’s What She Said

 

r-avatarOr was it him?

Writing is often a solitary pursuit. When you have a co-author, a lot of the loneliness can be mitigated, but it’s still a good idea to widen your circle.

As we’ve mentioned in earlier posts, we belong to a critique group. Our weekly meetings provide a chance to get out of the writing cave and connect with other writers. We highly recommend finding your own group of authors for in-person meetings. You’ll get help with sticky prose, encouragement and reassurance on your journey to publication, and by helping others with their sticky prose, you’ll hone your mad editing skillz.

When you work as part of a writing team, you get an added benefit to critique group membership: the others will not be able to resist trying to suss out which of you wrote which passage. If you’ve done your job well, they will have a hard time guessing. It’s amusing to watch them, and gratifying, too. If your fellow writers have a hard time determining authorship, it means you’re doing it right.

There will be partnerships that break up the writing tasks along gender lines, with the male author writing the male characters and the female author writing the females. If that’s what works for you, it’s not a problem. It just makes the critique group guessing game easier once they figure out the pattern. In other writing partnerships, one of you will handle the dialog and the other the action, or one may excel at the relationship stuff while the other is a master of intricate plotting.

However you divide the work, you should strive for a unified voice. Make it your goal to stump your readers, even when they are writers that you know personally, that in addition to understanding the rules of fiction writing, know your individual voices and personalities.

Brave New World

The time has finally come for us to start the actual writing process. We’re finding it slow going, even with all the preliminary work we did. The first three novels we wrote were a trilogy. By the time we got to the third one, we knew the characters better than we knew ourselves. It was dead easy to find their voices and dive in.

After the trilogy, though, we wrote a standalone novel, and had this same problem at the beginning. We just don’t know the characters well enough yet to feel totally at ease writing in their voices.

This is one place where writing with a partner can make things more difficult. If either of us were doing this solo, we could just wing it and see what happens. With two of us involved, and wanting everything to feel seamless, we both feel a little inhibited.

Because Jen is cruel, she makes Kent take on the first scene. It’s up to him to introduce the narrative voice, and the main character’s voice, too. Jen sits there and watches him type, because until she sees what he’s done she can’t write anything. The fear is that we will both write something great, but that the pieces won’t mesh. Instead of chocolate and peanut butter coming together to make a delicious peanut butter cup, we dread ending up with salmon bonbons. Either the fish or the ganache would be delectable on their own, but together they’re something the loser made on Iron Chef.

And so we tiptoe around each other, each of us hesitantly writing scenes and vignettes. When we share them, it is always with a healthy dose of Remember This Is A First Draft and I Don’t Know If This Works.

Fortunately, this weirdness is confined to the character voice. We know for sure that the actions and details contained in a scene will be right, and next week we’ll tell you how.

Sharing a Voice

A common remark about our work is that it feels seamless. Our fellow writers express surprise at being unable to pick out which parts Kent wrote and which parts Jen wrote. This is an important element of our partnership, and it’s not something that happens by accident.

Maintaining this common voice requires attention at all stages of the process. It falls out more naturally in the early steps, because we typically work together when developing story concepts and outlining a plot. Once we have the scene list, we break that down so that we each get approximately half, and for the next little while we tend to be working individually more often than not.

Composing separately allows us to generate a draft in half the time, but if we’re not careful it could also allow us to run into big problems. If our interpretations of the target voice aren’t alike, the scenes might not mesh. So we keep each other updated on our progress, and we critique the scenes as they’re written. This keeps us from straying in different stylistic directions, although after working as a team for a few years we can “do the voice” automatically at this point.

Revision is when we do most of the blending. Jen works the scenes that are a little too Kent, and vice-versa, so we don’t leave any loose edges for the reader to trip on. The objective isn’t to take out each partner’s individual flair, but to make sure the combined effect is fluid and harmonious throughout. Sometimes that does require toning certain things down, but only if they were genuinely overdone in the first place.

For example, Kent has a proclivity for ostentatious word usage. Not just trotting out the expensive words like “proclivity,” but also a perverse drive to exploit the most arcane connotations of familiar words. A useful skill for an author, but also a really effective way to limit readership if it’s not managed. And, if it cropped up at seemingly random times it could easily feel like another story invading. Rather than removing all of the fancy verbiage, we make sure it’s evenly represented (at a reasonable level) throughout.

There’s a lot more we could say about this aspect of a writing partnership. After all, being able to work well with each other doesn’t matter if your results feel cobbled-together. So we’ll be revisiting this in future posts.