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.

Getting To The Point Is Not Always The Point

Writing advice tends to be preoccupied with efficiency. Grammar and syntax tips are all geared toward minimizing the number of words to express an idea, and as you go up to broader levels you find tips about minimizing the number of ideas that you set out to express. The explicit assertion is that briefer is always better.

Are there other art forms where creators are told, “This is great, I just wish there was less of it”?

Communicating efficiently is not a bad goal, but a writer should aspire to more than that. Pull a favorite off the shelf and choose a random excerpt, relive the moment when you read it for the first time. Whatever it was about this text that moved you, it probably wasn’t its avoidance of waste. The prose might well be a fine example of clean, efficient expression, but if it didn’t make you feel something, or show you something new about the universe, you wouldn’t care.

We want a good tale, well told. Well, we say we do. In practice, many a cherished story amounts to a good tale adequately conveyed. We have no use at all for a poor tale, regardless of whether the telling is any good.

Focus on having a good story to tell. Then worry about getting better at telling it.

Write What You Know (and other suspect advice)

That time-honored edict seems to get followed in at least one way, because something lots of writers sure like to write about is writing. We do it here, quite a bit actually, so we’ll be careful about throwing too many stones in this glass house.

Many authors pen books of guidance for aspiring writers, and a seemingly disproportionate number of protagonists are themselves writers. (We have a major character who is a novelist, and we have a main character who is a journalist, and we’ve used various forms of the book-within-a-book device.)

It’s probably not that there’s something wrong with writers. All professions probably have some form of this, but when painters paint about painting or plumbers plumb about plumbing it doesn’t result in a book. Anyway.

As far as actual advice is concerned, we say writing is best done with a partner, and we try to illuminate how we make that work. We can only speak with any authority about our own experience, and we try to be consistent about acknowledging that it might not be what works best for anyone else. Hell, it could turn out not to be what even works best for us. We try new things and adjust our process all the time. And then we blog about it.

They say, “If you really want learn about something, teach it.” This might account for much of the tendency among writers to write about writing, because the act of writing is very much a way of teaching yourself. So, even if there were no audience of aspirants to serve as a market, writers would probably still do this.

Chuck Wendig shared some insightful points about his own journey in regard to this topic. Check it out over on his blog: https://terribleminds.com/ramble/2022/10/05/why-i-dont-talk-as-much-about-writing-anymore/

 

Writing Cave Wrenovation Update

You might recall (but we’ll certainly understand if you don’t) that we are doing some renovations in our home office, aka the Writing Cave. That linked post is from a year ago, and hey! we are finally putting the final touches on the room.

It features a magnet wall, which we created via special paint, and a plethora of tchochkes that reference assorted imagery from our assorted fictional universes. It’s still not done, but here’s a teaser pic.

Daily Workflow, Part One

It feels good to be back in the actual stringing-words-together phase of writing. We enjoy the planning and scheming parts as well, but the rhythms of our work sessions during prose composition feel special.

We sit down together and we write. This is typically in the evening, after the day-jobbing and dinner-having. Eventually it’s really late and somebody points out that some of us have to get up in the morning, so we do our wrap-up ritual.

What each of us has written that evening gets read aloud. (By Kent. That’s the rule, apparently.) This serves a couple of valuable purposes. First off, it brings us up to speed on each other’s progress. But also, we can bring up any questions or concerns and chat about them. If there are notes, then fixing those things is usually what we tackle first in the next work session.

Reading your own stuff out loud is a really good way to detect more typos and grammatical irregularities than you will otherwise. If you trip over a sentence, it probably needs to be simplified. Hearing your stuff read out loud helps you spot things, too. It engages different filters.

A writing partner is someone who will (make you) read your stuff out loud.

Some Good Writing Advice From Our Dogs

We’ve put in a ton of work on the ghost novels over the past nine months or so. And we got a lot accomplished! All four books are outlined, we documented the cast and the setting, created backstories and histories for all of that, devised the rules of supernature that we intend to play by, etc. It’s our most elaborate and thorough rainbow exercise ever, by far.

What we haven’t done for quite a while is actually write. And now it’s pretty much time to do that, assuming we can remember how.

As we hiked through the snowy woods the other day with our assistants, Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord, our conversation focused on returning to prose-mode. We reminded each other of what that feels like, and we must confess that we fretted a little about how out of practice we are. Both of us were thinking about the size of the job we’re about to take on, writing a tetralogy in an entire new story world and playing with tropes we haven’t used much before. It was feeling a bit intimidating.

Fortunately, the Bandit Lord had some good advice. He told us not to obsess about it, to just stay loose and let it happen. Lady Marzipan then pointed out that we had probably already talked about it as much as we ought to. We had psyched ourselves up, and we didn’t want to psych ourselves out.

They might not be much help with grammatical issues, but those two assistants of ours really do earn their keep when it comes to moral support.

A great writing partner is, sometimes, someone who licks your face.

Dust Off the Ouija Board

The first Friday post in January is traditionally when we talk about our writing plans for the upcoming year. Our current project is a series of ghost stories, so it only makes sense to consult the spirit world for some guidance. The sole Ouija Board we have is an adorable little tin box of mints, but we’ll make the best of it.

Oh Great Spirits, tell us: what does 2022 hold in store for us?

Now imagine the planchette gliding eerily across the board, painstakingly spelling out our message from the Beyond.

SpoooOOooOoooky!

 

The spirits say that we will begin by writing Ghost Book #1, mostly in the Writing Cave. But since it is darkest winter and there is no fireplace in that room, we might defy expectations and propriety and work in the Auxiliary Writing Cave several times a week. Even if it means we might need to endure snuggling with — gasp! — a corgi. Who are we to argue with the spirits?

Sometimes composition goes quickly for us, and sometimes it does not. The spirits cannot say how long it will take to complete the first book. They do say that when it is complete we will either steam right ahead into writing Book 2, or if we need to look away and recharge our batteries, we may switch to editing Sibling of Music Novel. The future is clouded and they cannot say for sure.

The spirits have one more prediction for us: we should be able to squeeze in the European trip we’ve had on hold since 2020. Fingers crossed they’re right!

As Predicted

Way back in January we made a writing plan for 2021. Let’s see how closely we followed it.

In true oxymoronic fashion, we wanted to start by finishing something. Editing the Science Novels was handily done, so — Check!

Next was plotting the Ghost Series, which gets another check.

And here’s where things fall apart a little. We were a smidge optimistic when we made our plan, and thought we’d have enough time left in the year to start the actual writing. Hilariously, we left open the possibility that we’d need to decide what to do after we finished the first Ghost Novel. Ha ha! Building four plot rainbows took longer than anticipated, and the actual composition hasn’t begun yet. But slow progress is still progress, and we’re very excited about what’s in store.

One other item on our To Do list that still needs to be addressed: deciding what will come after the Ghost Books. Extremely preliminary discussions on that topic have begun. A good writing partner is someone you enjoy having discussions with, no matter how preliminary they might be.