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.

Turning The Corner (If We Can Find It)

r-avatarIn the eternal war between Plotters and Pantsers, Rune Skelley is a stalwart Plotter and ever shall be.

With that out of the way, it’s time to acknowledge one of the advantages enjoyed by our ancient adversaries: Pantsers don’t have to figure out how to switch from the planning mode into actual writing.

That’s where we are now, and it feels like looking for an address in a strange neighborhood. We know our turn is around here somewhere. We’re going slow so we can read house numbers. We’re puttering along in a strained metaphor when we should (probably?) be writing.

On the other hand, Kent observed recently that the current state of Son of Music Novel is analogous to a first draft even though there’s no manuscript per se in existence. It’s not like we’ve been spending all this time just sharpening pencils in the Writing Cave. We’ve accomplished a lot. But, without a manuscript we do not, technically, have a first draft.

The truth is, there’s no such thing as 100% preparedness. Plotters reach a point of diminishing returns when their plans hit a certain level of detail, and that’s the signal to start writing and save further optimization for the revisions stage. Recognizing that signal from the inside is not always so easy to do, and therein lies our dilemma.

This is an area where Kent’s and Jen’s personalities are perhaps too similar. We both like the planning mode, and share some of the same trepidation about leaping in on the writing too soon. If one of us was a Pantser at heart, we’d have a more balanced perspective and might vacilate less about turning this corner. Contemplating just about any other stage in the process, such an odd-couple partnership seems doomed to a lot of frustration. But maybe it can work.

Whichever banner you rally to, Pantsing or Plotting, do you think you could collaborate with a member of the other camp? Could you learn from each other? Leverage your disparate strengths? Or would it lead to a meltdown?

The Shoemaker’s Elves

r-avatarWe’ve stressed repeatedly the importance of having the right partner in a collaboration. Kent can attest to that. In fact, it’s absolutely magical.

Jen takes longer to fall asleep each night, and often when Kent checks his email in the morning there’s a shining literary gem awaiting him there. This is most likely to occur when we’re in the outlining or brainstorming stages, as we are right now. The other common scenario comes up during revisions, if there’s a thorny spot that we hadn’t quite decided how to handle. Come the light of day, a viable solution has materialized!

Kent tends to be the source of the more conceptual stuff, which has been known to appear to him in dreams (rarely). He’s got more of a knack for premise than plot, sometimes. Once the big, overarching idea is on the table, we work together on figuring out an actual story that can use it. Jen’s focus on getting all the details to line up is essential. (Aside: this description of our writing workflow is exactly the reverse of how we do crossword puzzles. A blank puzzle stymies Kent utterly, but those last couple of stubborn spaces are where he comes into his own.)

It might not be necessary to discuss sleeping habits with a prospective co-author, but you never can tell what will prove vital to your collaboration.

Tightening Up The Geese

r-avatarOur outline is coming into shape. We know the overall structure and we have a reasonable idea of the way everything begins and ends. Of course, the vast majority of the details are still loosey-goosey.

That’s a problem, sometimes. So, as mentioned in the previous post, we occasionally delve into fairly granular levels of detail while working on an outline, even though things can’t be carved in stone yet. We need to manage the looseness of the gooses because there’s a compounding effect to the uncertainty in each scene. “Not sure how this one ends,” becomes, “or how the next one starts.” Leaving everything vague in your outline leaves you with only the mirage of an outline. It won’t have enough structure to serve as a useful guide when you start writing, and you’ll be pantsing it despite all the time you spent supposedly outlining.

So, on a shelf in the same closet where you keep your weasel-stomping boots, you should have a goose-wrench. But whereas those boots are made for stompin’ — no weasels when you’re done — the wrench should be applied selectively, and judiciously. Having some loosey-goosey areas is desirable; you just don’t want the entire outline flopping around. Identify the points through which your story must pass, and crank them down just tight enough so they don’t shift (although the rest of the tale can still pivot around them).

Naturally, this is yet another activity made easier by working with the right partner. Active discussion is an excellent way to figure out which story beats need the wrench, and how tightly to pin them down.

Choose Wisely

r-avatarA good coauthor will make your job easier. He or she will help with all stages of the writing process, from initial brainstorming through final edits and marketing.

A great coauthor will inspire you to creative heights you could never reach on your own.

But when it’s -7º F and you’re fighting off a terrible cold, the best coauthor will pick up Thai food and snuggle under a blanket with you. You’ll want to keep that in mind when choosing your collaborator.

Like Riding a Bike (in the snow)

r-avatarLast week was the first time in what felt like forever that we managed to have a meeting of our critique group. It also marked the first meeting since the shifting of the group’s attention to someone else’s work, which led to some embarrassment when Kent started setting up to take notes rather than give feedback.

But it wasn’t difficult at all to get into the proper mode, and it felt damn good to flex some muscles that hadn’t seen a lot of use in the past year or so. Unless you count the fact that Kent and Jen give each other feedback almost daily… but that’s not really the same thing.

On the way to the car, we were chatting with our fellow author whose latest revisions are now the group’s focus. We talked about process a bit, bringing him up to speed on our status (still brainstorming, but we have about one-third of a preliminary outline now!). The conversation inevitably slid into mutual admiration. He shook his head in bewilderment about how we coordinate everything, while we stood in awe that he does it all by himself.

This week, we generated some (probably apocryphal) prose. It was the first new fiction either of us had written in quite some time, and just like with the crit session it felt fantastic to return to something that we hadn’t done in a while.

The outside temp might be eleventy-below, but with all this newness and fresh starts it’s feeling a little like spring in the Writing Cave.

2014 Is In the Rear View Mirror

r-avatarOur look back in wonder at 2014 probably should have been posted last week, but this way it will stand out from all the other “year in review” posts around the internet. It’s not procrastination, it’s a feature!

We started off 2014 with a newly reorganized blog. I’m pleased to say we did such an excellent job with it that it was unnecessary to do it again this year! In other organizational news, we also launched our Stichomancy Writing Prompt Generator.

In February we were busily editing the Music Novel, and were rather obsessed with its high word count. That early in the process we were still adding new material, filling the holes our beta readers demanded we fill, so the count kept rising.

In March we introduced the newest member of Team Skelley, the very distracting Lady Marzipan. As you can see, she’s a bit bigger now, but is still quite a distraction.

ladymarzipan

Lady Marzipan makes sure we take frequent forays from the writing cave to walk around the neighborhood and sniff all the mailboxes. We use the time in between smells to discuss whatever’s going on in our fiction, which in March was a lot of editing of the Music Novel.

April brought posts about the other work we had in play, the Science Novel. Our critique group was working their way through it which meant that we had to switch gears once a week from being deep in the guts of the Music Novel to remembering what the hell we’d even written in the Science Novel. To escape the stress we ran away to Europe for a quick, frigid vacation.

In May we couldn’t stop talking about how much fun we had in Prague, and the various ways we were distracted.

June brought the startling realization that the Music Novel has swelled to a whopping 187,000 words. Yikes! Time to start winnowing it back down again.

So that’s just what we spent July doing.

On August 1 we were thrilled to announce that we were done with edits on the Music Novel! As of today, our critique group is just about done with it, which means that we’ll have another round of edits coming up soon.

September found us deep in contemplation about where our writing would go in the future. We lamented not being in “writing mode” for quite a while.

We spent October editing the last book in our Trilogy, which prompted much thought about writing advice, both good and bad.

November is National Novel Writing Month, of which we still do not approve.

Come December we were finishing up edits on the Trilogy, doing a final reading of the Science Novel, and warming up for (gasp!) marketing.

So, it was a year where not a whole lot of composition happened. We kept our writing muscles limber with writing prompts, but the majority of our time was spent editing. That’s the part of writing a lot of people don’t take into account. It’s not enough to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). Once the words exist, you have to poke them with sticks, gouge them with forks, and occasionally set them on fire.

Next week we’ll talk about our plans for 2015. Happy New Year (a week late) everyone!

An ‘Interstellar’ Collaboration

r-avatarOne of the most interesting things about Interstellar is how it came to be. It’s a collaboration between Christopher Nolan, his brother Jonathan, and renowned theoretical physicist Kip Thorne.

This interview in WIRED shows how each of them played to their strengths while learning from the others, and how that led to spectacular results.

It was originally Jonathan Nolan working with Thorne, and although Jonathan is not present for the interview it’s vividly clear that their working relationship was very different from how things operated between Thorne and Christopher. Not that both partnerships weren’t enthusiastic and positive, but they differed in their process.

The most telling example of that: rules. Jonathan and Kip never codified the rules of their story world, whereas that was among the first things to happen once Christopher came on board. They make a compelling case that having that framework is how they were able to craft a successful story.

Every partnership is unique and the things that propel one author might bog down another. How do you approach “rules of the world” in your fiction?

One Is The Loneliest Number

r-avatarHow do solo writers do it?

Our evenings lately have been spent sprawled on the big leather sofa with the laptop and a small mountain of meaningfully marked-up copies of our manuscript. One of us (usually Jen) wades through all of the critiques while the other (usually Kent) mans the laptop, adding comments and making edits to our master copy. Jen interprets all the line-edits and deciphers everyone’s handwritten comments, directing Kent to the proper parts of the manuscript so that together we can discuss the proposed changes.

It’s slow going, and we generally only manage one or two chapters per night. Each of those chapters is gone over with a fine tooth comb (hey baby, that is one fine tooth-comb you’ve got there!) four or five times as we consider the feedback from all of our beta-readers. Working with a partner makes something like this bearable, oftentimes even enjoyable. It’s hard for us to imagine this part of the process as a solo author. Who do you talk to about whether a suggestion or complaint is valid? Who do you high-five when a passage works exactly as you planned? Whose shoulder do you cry on when a passage doesn’t work at all? And most important: who do you send for snacks and refills of fortifying beverages?

The writer’s life can be a very solitary one, but with a writing partner it doesn’t have to be.

Critically Distant

r-avatarNovels #4 and #5 are both in resting phases, which gives us a chance to circle back to the final volume of the trilogy. It’s been sitting patiently for quite a while, and this seems like a good opportunity to consolidate the feedback from our most recent critiquers. Of course, we want to know our own minds about the text before we try to make sense of what other people said about it, so we’re doing a read-through.

This wasn’t supposed to be a difficult thing. It wasn’t supposed to stir up disagreements.

A perennial challenge for authors is getting an “honest read” of their own stuff. Knowing what’s going to happen, and knowing what’s supposed to be symbolic, gets in the way of appreciating it the way a “real” reader would. That’s one reason it’s important to let work rest. What seems to have happened to Kent, in this instance, is that he failed to put aside his anticipation of certain later events in this book, but exceeded recommended dosages of forgetfulness about how the previous books led up to it. As a result, he raised awkward questions that baffled Jen, and the conversation wasn’t productive. But we pushed through, which is good because otherwise we might not have reached the point where Jen saw what was happening and steered Kent back on course.

Now everything seems to be going much better. There is a bit of a hangover though: Kent feels spooked. It’s a get-back-on-the-horse situation, and that’s what he’s doing, but his confidence isn’t yet fully restored.

Working solo, a writer might wreck a good manuscript trying to fix illusory problems. The chances that two of you will be having the same kind of off day are pretty slim (hopefully!) so you can be confident that anything you agree on is a valid concern.

You Have a “Boss”

r-avatarOn being self-employed: “The hours are great, but my boss is a jerk.”

Writing fiction is a traditionally solitary activity. Being productive at it requires discipline, because it’s always easier to just mess around on Facebook or Netflix, or wherever you like to squander the scant moments we’re granted on this orb, than it is to devise clever scenarios for captivating characters and encode them evocatively through the maddeningly and beautifully deficient medium of language. No one will ever know. (Nor will they ever read your novel, if you don’t write it.)

When you’re writing with a partner, you have someone counting on you. Of course, one of the major draws of the writing life is that it’s not a nine-to-five grind; you don’t have some stuffed-shirt micromanager giving you a hard time. So, does having a partner mean writing becomes a job?

Firstly, no. Not if you have (and are) a good partner.

Secondly, even if you prefer to think of writing as a calling you need to take the work seriously. If you don’t do the work then no one else will take you seriously.

Your partner isn’t there just to make you feel guilty when your daily word count is low. Neither one of you should be “in charge” of the partnership. There will certainly be instances where one or the other of you will be better suited to take the lead, and that’s good. It means you have varied strengths to play to. In the Rune Skelley arrangement, Jen is more organized and so she handles project management. She likes doing it, and Kent is grateful for the structure.

To make a partnership work, you both have to be the boss sometimes. And to make it work well, you both have to try to be a good one.