Category: Writing as a Team

Two people writing as a team can have advantages over soloist authors. But to have a fruitful writing partnership we must adopt a process that utilizes our strengths, and we need a relationship that’s strong enough to support the endeavor. Here’s where we explore the matter from various angles.

Finding It Or Making It

Either way, time is always the issue.

For us, it appears to come down to a choice between writing simultaneously and having evenings off. And, for now at least, we’re going to keep our evenings.

“Writing together” doesn’t have to mean “sitting in the same room at the same time, engaged in the same activity.” In order to regain a modicum of productivity while our grandkid is on-site a lot, we’ve opted to take turns sneaking off to the Writing Cave. It feels weird because we’re so accustomed to being able to kibbitz instantly whenever a question pops up, and now we have to go track down whoever’s on baby-minding duty, or else save up our kibbitzing for lunchtime or some other moment when we’re both available.

What we remind ourselves is that it was weird not doing our writing in the evening, which we’d been very accustomed to back when Kent was still dayjobbing. We adapted then, and we’ll get adapted this time too.

The one part of the ritual that has often ended up becoming an evening event is the reading aloud of the day’s output. It typically doesn’t take very long, and if it ate into our evening to any meaningful degree that would probably be a good problem to have.

A writing partner is someone who lets you be in two places at once.

Over 900!!! aka I Recognized the Colloquillian Ambassador

In honor of this milestone, we pulled our stichomancy ingredients from cat-related sources. Why cats? Because cats have nine lives, and this is number nine-hundred in the chain story. Also, we happen to like kitty cats, despite having puppy dogs as assistants. They like cats too. Lady Marzipan in particular loooves them so much that she gets too excited and the kitties get too scared. So she’s really never actually gotten to meet one. It’s tragic, really.

Anyway, enjoy this team-up installment constructed with snippets from the official site of the Cat Fanciers Association as well as an assortment of Wikipedia entries purr-taining to all things feline.

As usual, Jen goes first and only relinquishes her grip on the keyboard once the first prompt phrase has been incorporated. Then Kent takes his turn, and so on, alternating until the deed is done.

  • the same as 15 years ago, but in a different order
  • baffles everyone
  • pretty heavy for a youngster to pick up and carry around
  • has a malevolent attitude toward Stuart
  • earned the right to bear a name
  • inflicting harm on his roommates for perceived injustices
  • who ran for mayor
  • regularly post photos of him climbing into rental cars
  • napping in unusual places
  • notorious for being an expert night cat burglar

Tune in next time parts 899 & 900      Click Here for Earlier Installments

I recognized the Colloquillian ambassador from a scandal more than a decade ago. To save face, he’d changed his name, but he hadn’t done a very good job of it. All the letters were the same as 15 years ago, but in a different order. The details of the scandal make even less sense, a story that baffles everyone while actually scandalizing very few. I hoped the ambassador didn’t have any children, though, because speaking from experience, any sort of scandal involving one’s parent is pretty heavy for a youngster to pick up and carry around in their mind.

Fleur stepped back to my side and helped me get the chaos inside my clothes under control. While stabilizing the final few persistent bells and whistles, she covertly whispered to me, “Our intelligence reports that the ambassador has a malevolent attitude toward Stuart, so don’t bring him up. Whoever he is.”

According to my Colloquillian former lover (the one who taught me what I know of the language), her countrymen had very, very strong opinions about how a person earned the right to bear a name as grand and revered as Stuart. One of their folk heroes was the main figure in a legend about a lonely plumber inflicting harm on his roommates for perceived injustices, which was how he earned that right. The only other man deemed worthy of the Stuart sobriquet was my lover’s brother, who ran for mayor of the capital and was elected at age 14. His term in office was defined by scandals of his own, as the press would regularly post photos of him climbing into rental cars when the whole populace knew he wasn’t old enough to drive.

Both Stuarts were known for napping in unusual places, but it wasn’t clear to me if that was a requirement of the “job” or a perk. A final detail popped up from deep in my memory, that one of the Stuarts was notorious for being an expert night cat burglar. But which one?

bonus points for using them in order

about stichomancy writing prompts

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Down The Rabbit-Hole Again Some More

We’ve found ourselves doing more research than usual for the Ghost Novel(s). Wouldn’t want to allow any inaccuracies in our depiction of ghosts, which of course explains why we felt the need to take a deep look into:

  • lava tubes
  • sex magic
  • acorns, culinary uses thereof

…And many other topics besides. Like, it’s a long list. Whenever we spend any significant energy on looking something up, we make a note of it. We’re fascinated by the variety of stuff that winds up on the list. We’re fascinated by how hard it would be to predict what is going to show up on the list, especially considering that we really did have a solid idea of the story before we even started prose composition on it.

A writing partner is the only other person who wouldn’t think your research list was evidence of a diseased mind.

Even The Best Advice

It is vital for writers to seek feedback, from beta readers and also from our fellow authors. Finding out what works and what doesn’t is the only way to get better. But, you need to bear in mind that all this input is coming through a filter, and ultimately it’s up to you to decide which notes to apply and which ones to disregard.

When you get input from another writer, it’s usually them saying you should do it the way they would do it. It might not be phrased with quite such blunt honesty, but when anybody gives advice about anything, how else can it work? Your colleagues are trying to share the benefit of their experience. They mean well. But if you’re not careful, you might get steered toward someone else’s voice and vision.

When you collaborate with a partner, you have someone telling you to do it the way you do it, only better. Your partner has an intrinsic sense for how things are intended to come across, and thus won’t offer advice that leads you astray. Jen and Kent are co-authors, but a similar partner dynamic could exist between, say, a writer and an editor. The key is that you’re teammates with a shared vision, so when you advise each other you’re honing in more strongly on the desired end-product, not diluting or distorting it.

Working with a partner is not a substitute for seeking outside feedback, and you really should listen with an open mind to the comments and suggestions other people offer. That same remove from your work that imposes a filter also lends perspective. They’ll see things that you and your partner missed due to being too close to it. Gathering and processing outside feedback together with your partner helps in identifying which notes are important.

A writing partner is like a voice inside your head, but in a good way.

Radiant Is the Blood of a Vibrant Writing Partnership

We’re big fans of the Venture Bros, and recently completed a binge of the entire series plus Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart including the extras. Our favorite extra was John Hodgman’s interview with series creators Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick.

Other writing partnerships fascinate us, so hearing Doc and Jackson describe theirs was a treat. (Pretending we’re on a first-name basis with those two is also quite a kick!) In their case, each episode was written entirely by one or the other of the duo. That means that both partners could do the show’s voice. No matter which one did the honors for a particular episode, from the audience perspective it always felt like the same show. That stuck a chord with us, because Jen and Kent have both learned how to do Rune Skelley’s voice. Back in our very early days, our process included a step where we’d edit each other’s stuff. That step was there explicitly so that the voice wouldn’t be “too Kent” or “too Jen” in the finished product. We no longer need to do that.

Another thing that felt familiar was the zany complexity of the plotlines and of the characters’ myriad backstories. In our novels, we always wind up with intricate situations involving complicated people. Tonally, those novels are nothing like Venture Bros. But, Tune In Next Time, our gonzo flash-fiction chain story, comes a lot closer. And listening to Doc and Jackson tell stories about producing Venture Bros reminded us of what it’s like to do Tune In Next Time. Lots of weird shit gets thrown into the mix, and it’s hard to predict which stuff will turn out to matter later on. It takes a lot of agility to sustain something like that. For us, it’s just a whimsical way to keep adding content to our blog. But for Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer, the stakes were considerably higher. Our hats are off to them for delivering a show that stayed true to its insane internal logic.

A writing partner is someone who knows when the two of you should and shouldn’t be working without a net.

System Is Working As Intended

For the Ghost Series, we made a very deliberate choice to get all four books figured out before writing any prose for the first one. Our approach is to consider the project as one big story. Ideas that arise later on in the process might necessitate laying some groundwork in earlier books, and we aimed to give ourselves the most flexibility to do that without getting stuck in an infinite loop of rewrites.

Without an over-arching plan, without making lots of decisions up front, what would happen is we’d wrap up Book 1 and send it out for feedback, and then meanwhile we’d be working on Book 2 and discover a bunch of shiny new ideas that don’t match what we’ve written already. Meaning when our beta readers send us their comments, half of them have been obviated upon arrival. And once we started in on Book 3, the same situation would replay — only twice as bad, because now we’re trying to retroactively account for stuff in two prior books.

Ask us how we know. (Never mind; we’re about to tell you anyway.)

Our previous series grew organically. We’d write a book, and then discover that there was more story to tell using that world and those characters. So we’d write another book, and then another. So far, that progression has always led to trilogies. In one case, we did actually plan out books 2 & 3 in tandem rather than separately. We were starting to get the message even then. With the Ghost Series being a tetralogy, the benefits of advance planning are multiplied because so are the impacts of doing it inadequately.

So, we did a lot of planning. Lots of writing sessions that produced no writing per se.

At this point, we are working on Book 2. And so far? No major revisions have come up for Book 1. Several minor changes, and we’ll surely have more tinkering to deal with. But it’s likely to all be small-scale stuff like which tarot card gets drawn, rather than anything huge like swapping which characters are living and which are ghosts.

A writing partner is someone who helps with all the pre-writing as much as with generating pages of manuscript.

Re-Reading The Divided Man Trilogy

For somewhat mysterious reasons, we decided that we’d read the first three novels we wrote. By “decided we’d read” what we mean of course is that we decided Kent would read them aloud to Jen. This project recently came to a successful conclusion.

To get the self-promotion out of the way: it was a blast. We really enjoyed it the whole way through. There is always some trepidation about revisiting early work. Has it aged well? (Yes.) Was it really polished enough to be published? (Yes.) Are we biased? (Yes. But we also have standards.)

The Divided Man Series
Miss Brandymoon's Device Tenpenny Zen Elsewhere's Twin

 

These books are of special interest to scholars of Rune Skelley’s oeuvre because they were written before we knew what we were doing. That is, writing this trilogy is what taught us how important it is for us to have a process. It was hard! There was at least one six-month span when trying to work on it became so stressful that we just stopped.

Did that seat-of-the-pants workflow contribute anything positive to the flavor of the end product? Probably. There’s a sort of punk-rock attitude infusing the whole thing — a crude spark. Going back to the first books now, we’re a little bit jealous of younger Rune Skelley’s “fuck it, watch this” confidence. We went for the double backflip, and we landed it! Eventually! After wrecking ourselves a whole bunch. As already mentioned, it was hard.

Did building this series without a blueprint actually, you know, work? Yes, but we honestly don’t know how. Each of the three Divided Man books has many moving parts, and the trilogy overall creates a structure in which all of the weird shit we set in motion adds up to a consistent, if convoluted, story world. Something we commented about repeatedly as we did the reading is the complexity of the plot and world-building, and how effectively it’s all tied together. Now, we know how this particular sausage was made. We know we played the game on hard mode, so we have a deeper appreciation for how unlikely it was that all these twists would ultimately line up. In other words, we know how likely we are to face-plant if we try to just wing it through something so ambitious again.

As we have said hundreds of times here at the Skelleyverse, writing with a partner is awesome. A good writing partner is your secret weapon. Something to keep in mind is that working with a partner increases your need for a formal system. Can two people take the free-jazz writing approach and get good stuff as a result? Totally! We did. But, in roughly the same amount of time we spent on those three books, we’ve written seven more. And it was way, way less stressful. Because we have a system.

A writing partner is someone who will ride with you down memory lane.

Gazing Into Our Crystal Ball

Our plan for our writing life in 2024 is simple: complete the first draft of As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #2, and if there’s time, get started on #3. We got a quick start on #2 at the tail end of 2023, and we have a work schedule that’s working. It should be very doable.

Except.

We have a couple of major challenges coming up this year. First of all, we’re building a house. Not us personally. We’ve hired some fine professionals to do all the hard stuff because we want the place to be amazing. Even though we won’t be swinging the hammers ourselves, we expect the project to be an enormous distraction. Almost as big a distraction as our other challenge for 2024: our first grandchild.

Jen’s degree is in Human Development, and she’s worked with young kids a ton, so we’ll be providing a lot of care for the little one while he’s fresh. We’re stupendously excited! But we’re also realists who acknowledge that infant care is going to disrupt our writing schedule quite significantly. We’ve started talking about how to stay on schedule. Maybe we’ll reinstate our evening work sessions. Maybe we’ll alternate days of childcare and writing time. Maybe the kiddo will be a good napper and we’ll work while he’s snoozing. A lot depends on him, and we haven’t met him yet. We shall see!

So, in between changing diapers and choosing cabinets and tiles and appliances (and everything else), we will: write Novel #2. When that’s done we’ll review it alongside #1 to make sure it all flows smoothly, preview #3 and #4 to update anything necessary, do a deep dive into the prep for #3, and then start writing #3. And if we need to look away from the ghosts, we still have a Music Novel in need of an editing pass.

A writing partner is someone who stands beside you when life comes at you fast.

Look Back in Awe

As we’re sure you’ve noticed, 2023 is nearing the finish line. That means it’s time for us here at SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises, LLC to review what we accomplished throughout the year.

Our main goal for the year was to complete the first draft of As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #1, and that gets a big ol’ checkmark. The first draft was in the can by late summer, and we managed to squeeze in a couple of read-throughs and a sort of mini-edit to address the issues we uncovered. It might not meet the technical definition of a second draft, but whatever you call it, we’re happy with where it stands right now.

Our second goal was for Kent to retire, and again we accomplished it! (Well, Kent did. Jen cheered from the sidelines.)

Our third goal was to travel, and holy shit did we do that. We got to within 800 miles of the North Pole!

We forecast that we might edit one of the Music Novels if we wanted a substantial break from writing about ghosts between As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novels #1 and #2. That was not necessary. The timing worked out nicely to put #1 to bed shortly before heading out on our Epic Arctic Exploration, and that adventure provided more than enough of a break.

It took longer than we liked for us to get our brains out of vacation-mode, and acclimate to all Kent’s new free time. We’d optimistically anticipated working 4-5 hours a day and having the productivity of the gods. It didn’t quite work out like that, but toward the end of the year we did settle into a pretty good daily schedule that we hope to expand on in the coming year. There will be some challenges to that, which we’ll talk about next week in our preview of the coming year.

Happy new year!

 

ETA: we finished the year with 7287 words in Book 2