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.

Fine-Grained Collaboration

r-avatarUsually when Rune Skelley is writing a novel, the workload is divided up by scene. Kent and Jen work in parallel, each at his or her own desk, on his or her own computer, writing his or her own scene. We have both gotten pretty good at writing in the Rune Skelley voice, and our personal idiosyncrasies are smoothed out during editing. The Kent scenes become more Jen, the Jen scenes become more Kent.

Our current project has introduced a new wrinkle to our writing partnership. In a move that seems to be related to creating stubs, Jen has recently started writing little micro-scenes and then handing them over to Kent to finish. These differ from stubs in that they are, more or less, fully formed prose. Really brief sections of fully formed prose.

The first one was a seduction. Jen knew exactly how a pivotal point in the characters’ interaction would play out. Rather than risk losing its spark by summarizing it, or losing it altogether by backburnering it until it was time to write the whole scene, she typed up the part she knew, capturing the eroticism of the moment beautifully.

Kent had the challenge of working up to that exact moment, and then back out of it again, without disturbing it. He did a brilliant job, which emboldened Jen to write up several more micro-scenes that were rattling around in her head.

It’s a tricky way to work when you’re collaborating. A solo author can do exactly as he or she wants at any given point in the composition process. When you’re working with a writing partner, you need to be mindful about too many constrictions.

We believe that boundaries spark creativity, but too many boundaries can cause paralysis. A partner is a boundary of sorts, placing constraints on what you write, but in a good partnership that limitation paradoxically becomes a source of greater inspiration.

Onward and Upward

r-avatarIt seems like every time we write a novel, we hit a point  in the plot where things get thorny. On our first one, which we began without an outline, we got completely derailed for about six months.

Kent is working on a theory (because that’s what he does) that what we’re running into is somehow a fundamental aspect of big, complex projects. He mutters about how it’s like spinning plates, but he wants to come up with something more original. Whether it’s a universal thing or specific to the Rune Skelley experience, it’s certainly a consistent fact of writing life for us.

It’s been less of a problem on our recent novels, though, for two reasons. One: now we’ve got a good process based on tools like outlines and stubs. Two: we’ve learned how to work more effectively as a team.

We’re at that point again, in case you were wondering. It’s the timeline that’s turned into a thorny thicket this time. Lots of throughlines intersect, and it’s a real puzzle to get them not to conflict. Jen is the Goddess of Puzzles and has this one nearly solved, but it’s a huge task. Progress on the manuscript has barely been affected though, because while Jen weaves our characters’ trajectories on her cosmic loom, Kent can keep working on prosifying the existing stubs.

Teamwork! It keeps us moving onward and upward.

An Equal And Opposite Reaction

r-avatarEvery writer has to deal with occasional bouts of writer’s block, or lack of motivation, or distractibility.

Squirrel!

This week has been just such a week for Jen. She wants to keep the project moving, but can’t seem to find her way into any of the scenes that are already in stub form. Usually that would mean that it’s time to write more stubs, but we are currently well-stocked. More of the scenes need to be fully written so that we can make sure we’re still heading where the outline says we are.

Luckily for Jen, she has a writing partner. Kent is not suffering from the same malaise as Jen, and has been writing some great stuff, if he does say so himself. Jen happens to agree. But that’s part of the problem, actually. Lately Jen feels like Kent has been using all the good sentences and she’s just randomly smashing the keyboard.

This compare and contrast mindset can be one of the downsides to collaboration. When the stars align, the co-authors drive each other to brilliance. Other times, someone feels like they’ve been left in the dust. Right now it’s Jen’s turn, but Kent had a similar episode as we were finishing up the rewrites on the previous project.

The two of us trust each other enough to talk about these feelings and reassure one another that everything’s golden. As you embark on a collaboration with a new partner it’s something you should keep an eye out for. Collaboration is not competition. You and your co-writer should cover for each other when necessary, and celebrate when everything goes smoothly.

Plotline Evolution

r-avatarDwight Eisenhower said that plans are useless but planning is essential. So it is with outlining a novel and then actually writing it.

The outline says certain events will happen in a certain order, but then while writing the scenes it doesn’t feel right, so small adjustments have to be made. Those little changes add up along the way, and sometimes the plot moves off in a totally unexpected direction. If you have a solid outline, you’ll probably be able to swerve around obstacles and get things back on course. Or, perhaps you’ll opt to pursue the new path you’ve found along the way.

There’s another level where things can evolve under your fingertips. The general shape of the events might not change, but you still end up with a radically different story than the one you thought you’d set out to tell.

Does the propulsion come from wondering who the villain will kill next, or from trying to figure out who the killer is? The same basic tale can be flipped between these states by a single critical detail: whether or not you tell the reader who the bad guy is. That decision could move your story to a different genre entirely, without even altering who kills whom.

What looks like a suitable source of action and tension in the outline might turn out not to fulfill its promise in prose. In a collaboration, this is something to talk through with your partner as it develops, especially if you’re divvying up the work and each writing a subset of the scenes. If you rely on the outline as the firm bedrock of your project, but your partner has made adaptations on the fly without telling you, then the whole first draft could fall apart halfway through.

But as always, there’s an upside to having a partner to help cope with the challenge. As long as you communicate you’ll avoid the catastrophe described above, and you’ll be able to brainstorm a solution that makes you both happy. Kent and Jen like to go for walks together, and use the time to discuss these kinds of shifts in the plot. How do you debug your outlines? What do you do when you feel the story pulling you down a different road?

Our Method For World Domination

Last week we promised to share our secret method for making sure every scene contains everything it needs to. That secret is…

Drumroll please…

Stubs. What an ugly little word for something so useful. A stub is, in the Rune Skelleyverse, an intermediate step between outline and prose. It’s a summary or synopsis of a scene. We talked at length about the importance of a thorough outline when working as a team. Now to transform your lavishly illustrated plans for world domination into a reality.

In Chez Skelley it’s Jen who creates the stubs for both of us to work from. She examines the outline and dissects it, breaking it down into scenes. For each scene she decides which character’s point of view is most appropriate or interesting, and then writes a brief overview of the action. She includes details like what characters are wearing, continuity items, and hidden motivations. There’s a lot of information in a stub that doesn’t appear in the finished scene, but instead goes toward making sure the author remembers why certain details are important. The stub also serves as a nice place to collect snippets of dialog or description that come up in email conversations or planning meetings, so that they aren’t forgotten.

Once a chunk of the novel has been stubbed, it becomes easy for either of us to choose which scene we’d like to work on next. The stubs all show precise starting and ending points so the writer knows exactly how their jigsaw piece will fit into the finished puzzle.

Jen likes this method because she’s something of a control freak, and this allows her to smear her grubby thumbprints all over the scenes she doesn’t write, even before the editing process.

Kent likes it because it makes his assignment crystal clear, and he knows that Jen won’t come along after he’s done, whining that he left something important out. At least not very often.

Stubs work well for a writing partnership, but they are probably of limited use for a solo author. They could be seen as a really early draft, useful for detecting plot holes and unnecessary scenes.

Do you use stubs? And if so, do you have a better name for them?

Weasel Stomping Boots

We all have our particular words that we tend to overuse. When writing in tandem with a partner, the weasel-word list can be twice as large.

In our partnership we have a system for keeping this issue under control. We have an actual list to work from and we use the software’s find function to track them down. Here’s the clever bit: we color-code them throughout the text so they jump out. That way we can skim through the manuscript watching for clumps. This is something we do together in real-time, so we can discuss whether to keep or stomp each weasel as we go. It would probably work out all right to divvy up the work, but we like the double-team approach for this particular aspect of the revision process.

Most of our weasels are qualifiers — almost, just, seem, appear, etc. — but we also use our color-coding technique to help us spot passive voice and repetitive sentence structures. It’s a great way of prompting yourself to really see how you’re using words, encouraging an analytical reading mode rather than getting drawn into your own story or glazing over because it’s all so familiar.

In our writing, and in work we review for our critique group, we have noticed a tendency to adopt pet words. These pets are generally not weasels (because who would want a pet weasel?), just regular words that get stuck in the writer’s head for whatever reason, and wind up on the page an inordinate number of times in a passage. BTW – “inordinate” was a pet word we encountered at one time.

With a writing partner, you have two sets of fingers creating the pet words, but you also have two sets of eyes and ears looking out for them. For us, that’s a beneficial trade-off.

What herd of weasels do you have to wrangle? How do you go after them?

By Any Other Name

Recently we talked about naming the setting for our new novel, but we haven’t talked much about naming characters. Up until we mentioned it, you probably didn’t even realize that characters should have names, right?

Obviously you know that your characters need good names, and that the names need to fit the genre you’re writing in. Instead of harping on that, or trying to explain what makes a good character name, we’re going to talk about how we come to an agreement on names for our characters.

In a nutshell, Jen does it. Kent has, shall we say, questionable taste in names. He’s usually happy to just pull a name out of the air and saddle some poor character with it forever. Jen, as we’ve mentioned before, loves backstory in every form, and will happily sit for hours poring over baby name books and websites in search of a name with the right feel for the new character. She gets to name the characters because she cares more.

That’s not to say that Jen has absolute authority over character names. Kent has veto power (usually), and even makes the occasional suggestion. Once she’s done making faces and explaining why his suggestion is wrong, Jen pats Kent on the head, rolls up her sleeves, and gets to work.

There are times when a character is presented to Kent with a complete name attached. More often, Jen will create a list of potential name combinations and together we will discuss pros and cons. For this new work, Sam was on the table as a possibility, but it turns out that pretty much whatever surname you put with that, Kent thinks it sounds like a noir detective. Since none of our characters are noir detectives, that ruled Sam out.

This process is another way to make sure you and your writing partner have the same image of a character. If one of you wants to name the heroine Felicity Fairchild and the other thinks she ought to be called Jinx, there’s a fundamental disconnect that needs to be rectified before you jump into composition. Iron out these bugs before you start and you’ll save yourselves a lot of headaches come editing time.

If neither you nor your partner have the naming bug, you could say that whoever creates the character, or writes their debut scene, gets the honor (or chore) of naming them. What method do you and your writing partner use?

Tolstoy

The opening line of Anna Karenina famously declares that all happy families are alike, while each unhappy one is unhappy in its own way. Writing partnerships are the opposite: the failed ones are all the same in the end, but each successful one is unique.

We haven’t rambled about what makes a good writing partner lately. It’s overdue.

Some teams gel because of the similarities between the partners, which makes sense because they have common ground. Not everyone gets along with other people who are too much like themselves, though, so some partnerships thrive because the members are different. Also, differences broaden a partnership by letting you each draw from the other’s expertise. More than that, some occasional friction can be invigorating. It is a signal that your partner cares about the project enough to get worked up over it.

All relationships take a certain amount of work, and a writing collaboration is no exception. The thing to watch out for is how much of your energies are going into not strangling each other, because that’s energy that could be better spent on something else. The same reasoning applies when there’s too little passion. If you’re exhausting yourself trying to build up your partner’s enthusiasm, that’s not good either.

Every writing team needs to find its own groove, and sometimes it takes a different groove from one project to the next. Work at it, and find a shared voice you love, and your partnership will be happy in its own unique way.

Happy Winter Solstice!

Early Stages of Story Development

We’re currently hard at work on our new novel, have been for several weeks, although technically we haven’t written the first word. We haven’t even started to create the outline. All that exists in tangible form so far is a few pages of notes.

What have we been doing all this time?

Talking, mostly. The cast is pretty well defined at this point, and we’ve become comfortable enough with the premise to have a shorthand of sorts for referring to it. We’ll choose a character or a plot element to brainstorm about, and set out to walk a lap around the neighborhood. When we get home, there are usually several new additions or amendments to be made to those notes. Some of the new ideas are incompatible with what we already had, but we hang onto it all because we’re not sure yet which version will turn out to be truth.

Yesterday, Kent took a stab at capturing a single, cohesive rendition of the plot we have so far, skipping over all the false starts and mirages. It’s not yet ready to be used as a real outline, but it has already served a useful purpose. Jen went through it and had only a few minor notes, which gave us both confirmation that we really do have the same mental image of the story.

The verbal interaction is fluid and dynamic. In fact, this is probably the stage of the process where a collaboration is most alive, because the process itself consists entirely of talking to the other person. But getting it down on paper creates something concrete that you can analyze with greater precision.

We have about half a plot, so far. The beginning is nailed down pretty well, but not all of the alternatives have been pruned all the way through the middle. As for the ending, well we’re in basic agreement about which characters need a comeuppance and who should get a happy(ish) outcome, and several images have been proposed that could be part of the climax. So, about half a plot. With any luck, it’ll go faster from here on out.

 

Why We Don’t Do NaNoWriMo

As I’m sure you know, November is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). There’s a whole website about it, so I won’t go into the details here. The idea is to focus on writing for one month, essentially providing an excuse to be selfish with your time.

We find though, that as a married writing team, we don’t need permission to focus on our craft. When we write we don’t have to tune out our significant other. Writing is what we do together most evenings anyway. There’s not really a way, short of taking extended vacations, for us to focus on writing more than we already do.

One aspect of NaNoWriMo that many people seem to like is the way it lets you track your progress. It’s set up to appeal to one’s vanity and competitive nature, and for many people it provides a lot of motivation. Thing is, once again, it’s something we really don’t feel the need for because our writing partnership has it built in. We’re totally vain and competitive! Plus, we have to keep each other synced up, and we each want to feel a sense of ownership in the product (and feel like we’re holding up our end) so we’re pre-motivated to keep the work flowing and share it with one another.

In a way, every month in the Skelley house is NaNoWriMo.

Do you participate in NaNoWriMo? Let us know in the comments.