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.

Mutual Back-Slap Society

r-avatarOne of the great things about having a writing partner is that you can pat each other on the back, so neither of you has to risk a sprained elbow doing it for themselves.

Not everything you write is going to be pure gold, and the same goes for any human writing partner you might have. It really is important to show support and encouragement, but it’s equally important to call bullshit when necessary. Even when the offending idea is something your partner is deeply in love with. Especially then.

There are two ways to go wrong with this kind of feedback.

You might be too soft about it. You don’t want to be mean, and you don’t want to come off like you think your own work is flawless. Who are you to criticize? You’re the co-author, that’s who. If you don’t speak up, then either the defect will remain in the writing, or else later when you do finally raise the issue it’ll be that much harder to deal with. (Maybe your partner will realize on her own by then? Don’t count on it.)

The other pitfall is fixating on the things you don’t like to the exclusion of what’s good. Even if you’re not rude about it, the cumulative effect will wear your partner down. You might train him not to overuse passive voice, but you’ll be smothering his creativity while doing it. “Dull, but free of errors,” isn’t what anybody wants for a log line.

Positive reinforcement is more effective than negative. To help each other improve, and to improve as a team, you need to praise the good stuff. Offer that pat on the back, and hope to earn one for yourself.

Squirrel!

r-avatarThings have been very slow in the writing cave recently. Ever since our triumphant return from our European tour we’ve struggled to get back into our routine.

It’s easy to come up with excuses. There were birthdays in the extended family. Our son plays in approximately a dozen different bands and orchestras, and they all have concerts this time of year. Spring finally arrived, and yard work along with it. Our puppy Lady Marzipan is an unholy terror if she doesn’t get two long walks a day. The TiVo’s getting full so we had to watch a movie (or two). Kent’s car gave up, so we’ve been shopping for a replacement. The teenager had tickets to a concert in Philly, so of course we both had to go along. I mean, there’s an IKEA!

What it comes down to is we’ve reached the stage with the music novel where we’re looking for any excuse to look away (have you seen this thing on youtube?). It’s a terrible feeling because we are so close (so close!) to being done. We’re each in the midst of a pass through the manuscript, looking for places to beef up certain aspects. If we can chain ourselves to our desks long enough to finish that, then I think we’ll turn a corner. The next step will be a read through, which (if we’ve done our jobs correctly) will be enjoyable. It will prove that all of this work was worth it.

Having a writing partner can make dealing with these slow times easier. We sympathize with each other when it’s frustrating. When one of us has a productive day it can inspire the other. And, with Lady Marzipan enforcing our walking conferences, we have someone to talk to about how little we’ve been getting done.

Goal: By next week’s collaboration post, we will have finished this round of edits.

Odds of success: It’s a longshot.

He Looked at Her Comma

r-avatarThe revisions on the music novel keep moving, not very fast, but moving. Our focus has been on heightening descriptions. Jen is concentrating on the characters, and Kent is working on the setting.

At least that’s the theory. Funny thing when you scrutinize your text, you keep finding things that could be better. Little sentence structure improvements, little punctuation tweaks, wordiness, these are all things you should be on the lookout for. Of course, they are a perennial distraction from the task at hand.

We sync up our edits verbally at the end of the night, which is a technique we find very helpful for keeping both writing partners hooked into the text as it’s evolving. Lately our work sessions have culminated in conversations like this.

Kent: “Add a comma after ‘her’ in the fourth paragraph.”
Jen: “Wow, that really makes the city come to life.”

Hard to pin down which of the five senses is invoked by a comma.

Marketing… We got nuthin

r-avatarAt our last critique group meeting, one of our colleagues told us about his experiences so far working with a professional editor (overwhelmingly positive). He now has an editor as well as an agent, and the conversation at our meeting delved into all the business-of-writing stuff that we just basically suck at.

There’s a rant that wants to get started, but we’ll try to keep our cool.

It prompted us to face that we need to get back into some kind of habit of trying to sell our work. We’ve sent out queries in the past, and we’ve gone to conferences and pitched agents at the slam, but for several years now we’ve done very little marketing of any kind.

Why is it so hard for us? (Not just for us, we know.)

  1. it takes time, time that’s already in short supply, so it cuts into our “real” writing
  2. querying is a different kind of writing, so those mental muscles need a separate warm-up
  3. the fact that it’s different from writing fiction makes it feel a bit perverse that it’s the package by which we are trying to attract representation for said fiction
  4. it’s frustrating; we do get tired of hearing “thanks anyway”

That wasn’t too ranty, right?

Why don’t we self-publish then, if we’re so bothered by the traditional process? We’ve been asking ourselves that very question with increasing frequency. Of course, we already are self-publishing some stuff — you’re reading it right now. But we know that the amount of work involved with publishing a novel ourselves is enormous. Sending a batch of queries feels like a major effort, so it’s probably wishful thinking that we could solve that problem by taking on the entire workflow.

What we know for sure is that our current approach — waiting for psychic vibrations between us and an influential publishing magnate to generate a contract out of thin air — isn’t going to work. We need to carve out the time and follow some kind of strategy.

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.

Synergistic Tag-Team

r-avatarWe’ve been beavering away on the revisions for the music novel, and we’re getting close to done with this pass. The ending has gotten a major overhaul and now kicks total ass.

The original ending is something we were happy with when we wrote it. Our critiquers mostly thought it was okay, but not awesome. They made some good points, which we were able to acknowledge once we had a bit of critical distance. So, as we turned the rest of the novel inside out we pondered the ending. Certain outcomes were nonnegotiable. The details of how they came about had quite a lot of flex.

Jen had the idea to work in one of the heroine’s character traits which had been underused in the old draft. It’s a pretty significant detail and we had just completely ignored certain implications of it. When Jen suggested we utilize it in the finale, we both had a “how long has that been there?” reaction. We’re obviously not going to spoil the ending, but imagine something along the lines of a character having a knife in her pocket and just not thinking to use it to cut herself free. Only it was us who forgot she even had the knife. We won’t put any of this on her, because she’s actually quite smart.

Something else that influenced — and complicated — the flow of concluding events was the inclusion of a different POV character. As we mentioned before, the rewrite gave point of view to a character who had not previously had it. Kent adopted this guy as his pet character, writing pretty much all of his new scenes. When it came to the ending, he had some great insights into what this guy would say and do, and the new stuff crackles with tension.

Kent wrote some great action and then Jen went through and beefed up the emotional content (yes, we’re back to our stereotypical gender roles). There’s been a lot of nitty-gritty back and forth on this pass, which is the whole reason to have a writing partner. They see things you don’t, and vice versa.

Felicity and Smedley 4evah!

r-avatarAs we mentioned previously, we recently spent a few days sprucing up the blog. While reading through all of the Monday and Wednesday posts where we share our bizarro microfiction writing prompts, we learned something uncomfortable about ourselves. Namely, that we favor a certain breed of names. They tend to be old-fashioned and a bit snooty, at least to our ears. Felicity is used most often, by both Jen and Kent. Is it the same Felicity each time? That seems unlikely, and it’s probably safer to say no. If it was always the same Felicity, that would probably nudge Jen back toward the quagmire of trying to concoct one epic plot that could encompass everything. That way madness lies.

No, it’s better to not impose order, even if it means living in a world populated with many a Felicity, Winifred, and Gertrude, and their boyfriends, Smedley, Archibald, and Reginald.

We also have a penchant for saddling couples with matching names: Emilio and Emily, Phil and Felicia, Felix and Felicity.

Regular readers of the Skelleyverse will know that Jen is almost entirely in charge of naming the characters in our novels. In light of that, it was interesting to see proof that, when winging it, she makes choices just as questionable as Kent’s.

We’re Internet Famous!

r-avatarOur good friend and occasional collaboration partner Reggie Lutz has a blog where she chronicles her writing life, her journey to self-publishing, and her baking adventures. She also interviews the most brilliant and creative people she knows, and recently added us to that illustrious list. Check it out to learn our deepest thoughts on collaboration, motivation, escalators, and breakfast foods.

Reggie is our hero. She is a social media boss, has several publication credits, and even won a writing award. And she still takes our calls!

Look for a guest post from her here soon, and in the meantime go buy this book to get a taste of her beautiful madness.

Our New Stichomancy Generator is Live!

r-avatarWe’ve had our Four Elements prompt generator up for a while now, but we didn’t feel complete, as the composite dihumanoid entity that we are, until we established symmetry by adding a generator for our other favorite type of writing prompt.

Jen compiled an impressively large list of impressively odd text fragments from an impressive variety of sources. Kent coded an impressively random randomizer to pull things from that list. In honor of the fact that our stichomancy archive’s denizens come in all shapes and sizes, the generator is configured to serve up small, medium, and large prompts. We also supplied a little guidance on proper use of the materials.

You can reach both generators by using the buttons at the top of every page, but here’s a direct link to the shiny new Stichomancy Writing Prompt Generator.

Pro Tip: look for chances to “pivot” the prompt around a word or phrase that can mean different things. The original phrase probably has an obvious connotation, and by looking for other ways to parse it you’ll surprise and delight your readers (or at least make them roll their eyes at a pun, which is also entertaining!).

Enjoy!

A Fresh Start to 2014

r-avatarHere in the Skelleyverse we focus on two things: collaboration and prompts. Thus, when we set up the blog we only created two categories. During the past week, while Kent’s been taking some time off from his day job, he and Jen revisited this simplistic setup and decided it was time to get more organized.

We decided to break things down into multiple topics, as you can see by the menu in the right column. There’s no longer a “Collaboration” category because all of our craft-related posts approach things from that direction. Like any other author, Rune Skelley must address the fundamentals. The new taxonomy reflects this. The writing prompts, too, got recategorized. There are different ways to do prompts, so we grouped ours according to how they were generated.

The other thing that we lavished some attention on is the tag cloud. It’s been expanded, but more importantly we winnowed out more than half of the tags that had accumulated since we started blogging here, consolidating some things, e.g., husband and wife replaced by spouse, and eliminating a few others by changing them into categories. The impact on the tag cloud’s personality is quite noticeable, and we hope you’ll enjoy using it to explore our strangeness.

In the course of this project, we reviewed every bit of content we have here. It was a lot of work, but it was fun, especially because we did it together (naturally) and cracked each other up for hours at a time in the process. Turns out Jen’s husband is really weird, as is Kent’s wife. We spotted some trends in the content of the prompts, which we shall analyze and report on in a future post.