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.

Wordcount is Happening

r-avatarThings tend to repeat themselves, here in the writing cave. It’s natural for a cycle to emerge, given that we consciously follow a process that we’ve honed over several projects. But what’s interesting is how the unplanned things also seem cyclical. Falling down the research hole when we’re supposed to be writing? Check! Both Jen and Kent have resumed everyone’s favorite form of procrastination. (Okay, playing mindless games and messing around on Twitter are also popular choices here in the writing cave. But research has such a sheen of respectability. Ooooh, shiny!)

What are we researching? Well, that’s need-to-know. For now we’ll only classify our studies as diverse and rewarding. Hence, their effectiveness at slowing down the actual writing.

Despite such impediments, we are making progress. It’s not as fast as we planned, which come to think of it, it never is. And even though it’s absolutely, positively, not a competition, Jen does have a bit of an edge if you score things by words, although Kent is ahead by one if you count scenes. We might require adjudication to settle that one. Probably smarter to just keep writing.

Another source of distraction is the launch of Miss Brandymoon’s Device. (We might have mentioned, but in case it slipped our minds — it’s available free from our site as well as at Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.) We got the first hard-copy proof yesterday and we can’t stop fondling it. My, oh my, that’s a sexy book.

Spooling Up the Fiction Engines

r-avatarWe may have mentioned our novel launch once or twice in the past few weeks, but in case you missed it: Miss Brandymoon’s Device is available! For FREE! Right NOW! Go download it, we’ll wait.

You’re back? Great. Before you go immerse yourself in our book and forget about the outside world, we’ll give you a quick update on our activities in the writing cave.

Son of Science Novel is next on our agenda. We thought we were ready to write it. It’s been discussed to death, outlined thoroughly, and broken down into scenes (at least the first act has been). We know the characters and settings pretty well, have reference photos for inspiration. From the outside we look overprepared.

But from the inside we’re still finding gaps in our knowledge. The layout of the not-so-abandoned-after-all cold war doom factory will be important not just in this early scene, but in blocking later scenes as well. We need a floor plan now so we don’t write in errors that we’ll need to fix during revisions. Kent fires up Illustrator and puts his brain in Dungeon Master mode!

Do we really need to write a whole scene wherein Boss tells Underling to recruit Heroine, when we can simply show the recruitment? Will readers question Underling’s motivations? Is that necessarily a bad thing? Jen puts on her Problem-Solving hat!

Some of this might look like procrastination, what with the multiple visits to Pinterest and the innocent google searches that turn into bottomless research clickholes, but it’s all valuable. It’s all immersing us in the story world, one we haven’t visited for a while. The better prepared we are, the less we’ll need to change later.

And as everyone knows, it’s dangerous to go alone. For us, having a writing partner makes the journey less perilous.

mbd-cover-cropRead a description of Miss Brandymoon’s Device

Read a sample

Get it free from Amazon

Get it free on iTunes

Get it free at Barnes & Noble

Get it free at Kobo

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.

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.

The Harshest Critic, The Biggest Fan

r-avatarSome pretty smart people, including Harlan Ellison and JK Rowling, recommend that authors write to please themselves. We embrace this advice and encourage you to do likewise. Trying to predict the market is a recipe for frustration, as is trying to imitate the style that you imagine other people want from you.

In practice, this is a bit more complicated when there are two of you. We pointed out way back in the Skellyverse’s earliest posts that a writing partner has to be someone whose tastes and interest align with yours, because the first thing you’ll have to agree on is what to write.

If you can do that, next comes agreeing on how to write it. Even if you both love science fiction with strong female characters, you’re still working in a huge space. That’s a good thing, because you have lots of room to work. But it does present the possibility that you and your partner might get separated.

If you can collaborate within a framework, so you know you’re both writing the same book, then you can fly in loose formation. If you don’t have a good feel for the voice, and you have to check in with each other over every sentence, then you’re not getting the value out of your collaboration.

Working with a partner, you have to write to please each other.

Reading Aloud is Always Allowed

r-avatarWe just drank our champagne in celebration of completing the revisions on Music Novel, a process that culminated in a few nights of marathon read-aloud sessions so we could make sure our careful cuts hadn’t gone amiss anywhere.

Now, we’re doing our preliminaries for revision of Son of Music Novel, which consists of (say it with me) reading it aloud. We like to read things out loud, and we think you should do it, too.

There is a little more to it than just getting prepped for editing. We have beta readers awaiting this book with varying degrees of impatience, but it’s a first draft. We know it has some issues, and we don’t want to make it our beta readers’ job to report them to us, at least not the big ones.

We could just each read the manuscript and then compare notes. But hearing it (and in Kent’s case speaking it) is a great way to pick up on the rhythms and textures, and we find it’s a good info-dump detector, too. Working with a partner gives you a built-in listener, but even if you’re going solo it’s a valuable tool.

We also have at least one prospective beta “reader” who’s requested it as an audiobook, so perhaps one of these times we’ll make a recording.

The Name Game

r-avatarOn any team, different players have different strengths. In the case of Rune Skelley, one of Jen’s main strengths is naming — things, people, places, you name it (but not if she sees it first). This is good because Kent tends to be less than awesome at coming up with names.

This doesn’t prevent him from having opinions, though. So, once in a while, Jen will deliver a name that just doesn’t work for Kent. And it does matter if both writing partners aren’t on the same page about a name. After all, characters’ names are perhaps the most important things about them. No other aspect gets such heavy use, or is called on to signify everything else the reader knows in such a compact, almost invisible way.

These name-disagreement situations are uncommon, but we’re in the midst of one right now. They’re terribly awkward. There’s a sense of “Jen is the one who’s good at this, so she wins,” which we both know isn’t a solution. Kent is at a disadvantage to produce viable alternatives, so he feels stuck. We really don’t have a formal process for coping with them, other than trying to keep communications open and give each other time to adjust. So far it’s never led to arson.

Partnership is about trust and compromise. Working with the right partner, compromise can be a creative exercise.

Close But No Cigar

r-avatarWe talked last time about our workflow for this revision pass, and the benefits of all the extra conversation. This time we’re going to come clean about a downside to this approach.

Stuff doesn’t always match up the way we want it to.

At least half the time our wordcounts or character counts don’t agree after we finish getting “synced up,” which leads to a rather laborious process of tracking down the discrepancy, which isn’t the most effective use of our time. And time is a very important commodity for us, so things that waste it are a major concern.

The silver lining, if there is one, is that this way we’re catching little errors that much sooner. If Kent handed over a file with “He went the store” in it, importing that would infect Jen’s copy of the manuscript with the mistake. Sure, it would get spotted on  a future read-through, but we sleep better knowing we’re on top of that stuff.

Having two people working on a project makes certain things more complex, and sometimes that makes them less efficient. We look at it as a cost of doing business, and we think the negatives are tiny compared to the positives.

What’s the biggest challenge you face in working with a co-author? If you’ve never done it, what’s the thing you’re most worried about?

The Best Part of Collaboration

Our mission to slenderize the Music Novel is going great. We’re about a third of the way through the manuscript and well over halfway to our goal for cuts. We haven’t set a revised target number of words to remove, just agreed that we won’t stop editing upon reaching the original objective.

It’s going well, but it isn’t going fast. It sometimes takes several looks at a page before the extra words start flashing in red. It’s not always just “yoink!” — sometimes sentences need to be restructured or synonyms need to be found.

The biggest time-sink, though, is syncing up all our changes. It never feels like it should take all that long, because few of the edits are controversial in any way. But it can take as long to convey the edits between us as it took to do them in the first place.

We could certainly speed that up. Using the export features in Scrivener allows us to swap edited nodes in seconds.

But that big source of delay is also the best thing about writing together as a team — talking to each other about the text. Walking each other through the process we used to streamline a paragraph or the rationale for cutting one altogether. Even though few of those conversations involve any disagreement, it’s good to be able to talk shop with a fellow writer.

So, we won’t be utilizing all available technologies to bolster our productivity metrics. We’d give up too much in the process.

Archeology

r-avatarThe spring cleaning bug bit Jen this year. We’ve both known for a long time that the writing cave was way overdue (yes, it was way overdue a long time ago; we were verging on eligibility for a depressing reality show appearance). The excavation is well underway and has led to some very interesting finds.

In addition to the kids’ old school papers and mementos, manuals for appliances we junked years ago, and other miscellany, Jen uncovered some primitive forms of writing from many eons ago when Rune Skelley first formed. Deciphering these ancient inscriptions taught us much about the way of life as it was practiced back then.

We used to do our first drafts longhand, on lined paper. We’d use the process of typing them up as a chance to do minor edits.

We used to print out each draft and do all our revisions on paper. Any lengthy new or altered passages, we wrote out longhand, just like with a first draft.

We used to dive in and make up the story as we went. There would be a premise, and some notion of the inciting incident, and a shadowy impression of where it should all lead. Then we’d just go for it, and when it wasn’t quite right we redid it. Then we redid it again. (And again.)

As we moved away from so much handwritten output, we had a stage where we would write scenes, dozens of scenes, and then print them out and fan them on the floor to decide what order to put them in to form a story. Then we’d write whatever new material was needed to spackle over the seams.

We found a binder that Jen created for the Music Novel, containing notes about the whole cast and the band’s discography. Several characters’ names are out of date, as is the whole plot, but the inspiration is still there, still resonating.

We’ve come a long way, from such primordial techniques to our current state of rainbows and wrenches. It’s good to be reminded of how things once were, if only to be glad you don’t operate under such conditions anymore.