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.

Look Back in Wonder

r-avatar2013 was a great year for Rune Skelley. Our major accomplishment (apart from keeping this blog up to date) was completing the entire first draft of a novel. We took a look back through our Friday collaboration posts here on the Skelleyverse to get an idea of how long the process actually took.

The first mention of Novel #5 comes on September 14, 2012, when we bemoan the fact that we’re having trouble deciding on a story concept. Kent has a Big Idea, Jen has a character name. Turns out both will end up in the novel.

Then, less than a month later, we have a solution! All it took was a long bus ride and a Jack White concert. Thanks Jack! Next time, please play for more than 45 minutes, okay?

By late November we’re pleased to have roughed in about half the plot, and by the end of the month, we’re covering the floor of the family room with a color-coded plot diagram.

In early December we’re struggling with the ending. We seem to lick that problem pretty quickly, because the next week we’re talking about naming our fictional city, and the week after that we’re drawing maps.

Early January 2013 finds us scouring the internet for pictures to represent our characters. It’s starting to feel a bit like we’re stalling, doesn’t it? I mean, this idea has been kicking around since September!

Finally – January 25th we’ve begun writing Novel #5. Go team!

Through February we seem to struggle with distractions large and small.

March finds us 50,000 words in, and working to detangle a tricky timeline knot. We’re collaborating well, though.

We didn’t mention this project at all during April or May, and in June we tell you why. An outside project had our attention. And then it was the new season of Arrested Development that took the blame.

By the middle of July we were getting back into the swing of things, starting with a read-through of the work-in-progress.

In August we were hitting our stride again, and almost done with the first draft!

In September we finally finished!

Of course, that was just the really rough first draft. It needed a bit of work before we could feel good about showing it to our critique group.

In October we were working on some retcon based on a field trip, and getting on each others nerves a bit.

And by the end of November, we had written up all the supplementary materials the novel called for, and were already getting feedback from our critique group.

Whew! A marathon! An entire novel written in under a year! The first mention of the idea was in September 2012, and the rough first draft was completed in September 2013. The sharable first draft took a smidgen longer, if you want to get technical.

Soon it will be time to do it all over again. We’re deep into edits on Novel #4, sometimes called the Music Novel. It has an actual title, but we’re feeling protective at the moment so you’ll just have to wait. As we mentioned, this novel was kind of a mess, so we’re afraid the editing process will be lengthy. But as soon as we’re done with that, we plan to start developing Novel #6 in earnest.

It will be fun to track our progress here, so we can look back over it when we’re done and (hopefully) marvel at how quickly it all comes together.

Happy New Year!

It Takes Two to Tango

r-avatarGood news everyone!

We are thisclose to putting our current first draft to bed. The text of the story itself has been done for a couple weeks, and we’ve even started to get feedback on it from our critique group. So far so awesome.

The only thing we have left to write are some supplementary materials, which we talked about a little bit last week. Kent has been reveling in this opportunity to explore the original story spark that morphed so completely to become our finished novel. His excitement is contagious, and Jen has joined in to a limited extent. We anticipate needing less than 1000 more words and the whole thing will be done.

And then we get to celebrate!

Celebrating your milestones is an important part of the writing process. You need to reward yourself for a job well done, and it’s much more fun to do that with a partner. And we don’t even mean that in a salacious way — we mean with your writing partner. Sure, your spouse or your buddy can lift a glass with you to toast the completion of your new story, but they probably don’t have a full understanding of how satisfied you feel, how proud you are, or just how difficult the road there was. When you have a coauthor, that person is with you every step of the way. You’ve had each other’s backs through the whole long slog, now you can let loose together and get freaky!

Just how freaky do Jen and Kent plan to get? Well, there are some movies that have been clogging up the TiVo for a while. Plus this Day of the Doctor thing is happening. And next week is Thanksgiving.

I hope you’re not scandalized.

Next up, after our Authors Gone Wild break: plotting out the new story idea, followed by extensive edits of a previous novel that’s been waiting patiently on the back burner.

Slower Traffic Keep Right

r-avatarEverybody gets blocked once in a while. Maybe it’s due to burnout, maybe a plot tangle has you stumped, or maybe it’s just one of those days when the muse has fallen silent. It never feels good, whatever the cause.

It’d be great to be able to say there’s a sure-fire way to get past a blockage, but different things work for different people. Maybe working on another project for a while, or maybe just taking a stroll for some fresh air. You’ll need to try stuff and see what works.

Lately, Kent has been struggling to find his game face. The words are there, but they won’t do as he commands. (No one who’s met him believes a word of this, yet it’s true.) Meanwhile, Jen is on a roll. By working together, we greatly reduce the chances of the project getting stalled out completely. Oh, that happens. It happens a fair bit, actually. But either of us on our own would get stuck much more often.

With a partner who’s in a good place productivity-wise, you can be less stressed out over an occasional off day. It can also mean that while you’re stewing in frustration over your inability to write anything, you’ll have a partner in the room with you making it all look so easy. But don’t take it personally. Be glad someone’s got your back, and give yourself the time you need to get limbered up again.

Life Imitates Art

r-avatarAs we mentioned a few weeks ago,  it’s field trip season around the Skelley fiction compound. These recent excursions were great fun, and they gave us a lot of discussion time as we sped down the highway. We did a lot of brainstorming about our next novel, and came up with some excellent ideas. More about that in a future post.

When we go on a trip, Kent is the driver and Jen is the navigator. It occurred to us that this is also how it is when we write. After collaborating on the broad strokes of plot, characters, and outline (choosing a destination), Jen gets down to the nitty gritty of mapping out how to get there. She loves to develop backstory, and she’s always the one in charge of the stubs (our step between outline and first draft), just as she is always in charge of the map. But a map doesn’t do much good without a driver, and an outline doesn’t do much good without a writing workhorse.

During the composition process, Kent keeps his feet on the pedals and his hands on the wheel, and awaits further instructions. He propels the story forward, but knows that he can’t just go in any random direction. There needs to be a plan.

We could drive this metaphor into the ground (see what I did there?). We could talk about how when you’re driving you encounter detours, much as in fiction writing when you explore an intriguing side plot. We could compare traffic jams to writer’s block. We could change lanes entirely and write a big flowery paragraph about the journey being as important as the destination, but we think you get the point.

Much as having a navigator can improve a road trip, a coauthor can make writing easier. They share the burden, and they’re much more fun than arguing with the GPS.

Taking Ownership

r-avatarAs we’ve mentioned before, Jen has felt a bit disconnected from the process of writing our current novel, due largely to the higher hard scifi content. Not that it’s actually hard scifi, it’s just harder than our usual soft serve.

Now that we’re into edits, though, Jen is feeling much more connected. We’ve determined that some of our characters need to be fleshed out, and this is where Jen excels. She’s wild-eyed with glee over creating backstory, and Kent is staying out of her way.

We have found that a good way to produce a consistent narrative voice when working with a partner is to have each member edit the other’s work. Each collaborator’s stronger personality quirks gets smoothed out and the whole thing blends together seamlessly. Jen’s current backstorypalooza is the same thing on a somewhat larger scale. If left unattended, Kent would make the whole story a wiring diagram in narrative form. Jen is adding the human element for balance. If you left Jen unattended, the story would become a family tree in narrative form, told backwards, with no end, so it’s a good thing she has Kent to reign her in.

This novel has been an excellent lesson in the upside of working with a writing partner. Neither of us could tell this story on our own. We each have strengths that come into play, even if it’s not in the composition of the first draft. We know each other’s proclivities and strong suits, and how we compliment each other. If one of us seems to be dominating a certain stage of the process, we know that it will all even out in the end.

As one of our characters sagely said, it’s not a competition, it’s a collaboration.

Who’s Counting?

r-avatarOf the myriad ways to measure your productivity as a writer, one of the most straightforward and objective is your word count. It’s also a significant metric for classification and marketing of your work, because different genres and formats each have their own traditional sweet spots. And it just feels great to tell people that your novel is more than 100,000 words, because they react as it that means it’s good. Perhaps the reaction is more properly construed as, “You must take all this very seriously,” or, “Wow, you really don’t have much of a life.” But it feels good all the same.

The danger of obsessing about word count, of course, is if the writing’s no good you’re just generating more of something no one will want. Your focus should always be on quality, not quantity. In fact, using fewer words is often a hallmark of stronger writing. Brevity is the soul of wit, or so it’s said. (Clichés count double!)

We recently celebrated the completion of the first draft of our new novel, which we accomplished faster than any of the previous ones. Practice makes perfect (remember to double that one, too) but a big part of the reason might have been Kent’s drive to “win” the word count. His claims of victory look reasonable on the surface, but he’s neglecting to include the words in the stubs, all of which go in Jen’s total.

People working together toward a common goal aren’t supposed to be competing with one another, yet they often are. If it produces conflict in the partnership, or if you’re taking the batteries out of each other’s keyboards, then it becomes counterproductive. But up to a point, some good-natured rivalry can be highly motivating. That’s how Kent sees things anyway. He knows if he can keep up with Jen he has something to feel proud of. Working by yourself, you have no one to set the pace.

How do you measure your progress? What makes you feel energized about writing?

The Chaos Machine

r-avatarWhat kind of story world are you creating? Never mind genre conventions, this question is deeper than that.

If there’s any one thing universal to all writers, it might be the fear of being caught making stuff up. It’s all we do, ever. Even when our work draws upon our real-life experiences, we’re curating and manipulating those events in the service of our plots.

All fiction is a tissue of contrivances; it’s pure artifice. The art lies in preventing our readers from noticing. So, we try to imitate life’s messy blend of the mundane and the outrageous. We construct our machines and wind them up, and then take notes. We don’t want too much of a predictable, clockwork machine, because that equates to a boring story. It needs some chaos, just not too much. Curated chaos, just the stuff that works to create verisimilitude.

A pinball machine is an interesting metaphor for striking that balance in the writerly creative process. It’s mechanical, yet unpredictable. Different writers favor different models, and different partnerships lend themselves to different approaches to the chaos problem.

Rune Skelley’s story worlds tend toward a lot of regulation. Maybe they’re more Rube Goldberg than pinball, where complexity and indirection give the illusion of chaos. Jen and Kent work together on constructing the outline and finessing all the beats along the way, and they know where it’s going to end up.

Jen’s collaboration with Reggie veered much deeper into chaos mode, perhaps too far for a machine-based metaphor to describe it. They made a game out of trying to trip each other up, but they found a shared voice and vision all the same.

Is your story world a pinball machine? Or is it some other kind of device?

rhymes with orange

Clink the Champagne Glasses

r-avatarPerhaps the best part of collaborative writing is having someone to toast with when the work is done. Around 10:00 last night, Kent wrote the final words of our first draft! Woohoo! We popped the cork on a bottle of champagne and celebrated in style (if “sprawled on the sofa watching a movie” qualifies as “in style”).

Two weeks ago we had 14 scenes left to write, and now they’re all checked off. The manuscript came in at just a hair under 110,000 words, which is in line with most of our work.

Of course we can’t rest on our laurels for too long. There’s still plenty of work left to do to get this novel in shape. We’ve been debating our best course of action, whether to immediately go through and address the things we know are issues, or to let the manuscript rest for a little while before doing a full read-through and then tackling the edits. Both approaches have their merits. In the first case, the work is fresh in our minds and it should be easy (ha!) to fiddle with the things we’re not happy with. In the second case, if we step away and lose our infatuation with it, then when we come back we will be better able to see over-arching issues. In either case, this will only be the first of several editing passes. There’s still a lot of work ahead.

Luckily for us we each have a partner we can rely on when the work is tough, and celebrate with when we reach milestones.

Go Team Skelley!

Tables Turned

r-avatarIn the middle part of the writing of this novel, Jen was feeling a little disconnected from the subject matter. As we’ve mentioned before, this one’s more hard science fiction than the others have been, and the hard scifi is Kent’s bailiwick. That left the majority of the writing for him while Jen cheered from the sidelines (she did find ways to keep herself useful).

We’re over that hump (and past the 100,000 word mark), closing in on the ending, and a lot of the technical stuff has been written. We’re into the emotional fallout section, where our characters are dealing (or failing to deal) with the repercussions of all that crazy science stuff, and suddenly Kent is the one feeling a little lost.

It seems that he got so invested in the research, and the writing of the technical stuff, that he lost touch a bit with the emotional life of the characters.

If he were writing this book alone, that would be a cause for major concern, just as Jen would have been floundering to write the earlier part on her own. But since we work as a team, we cover for each other and it all comes together beautifully.

Collaborating with a writing partner can allow you to explore a genre and tell a story that you would struggle with on your own.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

r-avatarSaturday, we attended a reading and book signing at our local bookstore-cafe of preference, Webster’s. There we had the distinct pleasure and honor to make chit-chat with three successful and highly regarded authors: Carolyn Turgeon, Jeanine Cummins, and Daryl Gregory.

As we introduced ourselves to each of them, in turn, the same questions came up. Do we write? Yes. Both of us? Yes. Together? Yes.

“How does that work?”

For us, any distinction between “writing” and “writing together” faded away years ago. So it’s always a bit of a surprise (still) when other people are surprised at the notion of co-authorship. That the response was unanimous among these three experienced authors reminded us that our process is rather atypical.

They asked us about things our dedicated readers already know, like how we divvy up the workload and whether we have two computers. Also, how it fits into our marriage. By sharing the writing, we prevent it from coming between us. It doesn’t displace couple-time, because it is couple-time.

It was fun to talk shop, and inspiring to be treated as peers by those who have proven themselves. We stand in awe of those who can carry the whole novel-writing burden on their own.