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.

Gizmos And The Writers Who Design Them

Something we’ve known would be part of our story ever since the pre-outlining stage with our color-coded paper squares is a high-tech device (we like those) built by one of our main characters. Suddenly, now that the word count is over 120k, we discover that we never discussed what this gadget looks like.

So, the other night we did just that.

Such conversations are among the greatest joys of writing together. We can spend hours brainstorming, and frequently do, especially on long drives. But most of the time it’s about the broader shape of the plot. This was a lot of fun particularly because we were more or less engineering this trans-dimensional machine on the fly. Focusing on the details rather than the high-altitude view.

Kent can now proceed with the scenes featuring this apparatus, because we know what it looks like (more or less). There’s still somewhat of a range of options, but we have a shared image of what those possibilities encompass, now that we’ve agreed on how the thing goes about bending reality.

Sometimes “writing partner” is just a synonym for “fellow mad scientist.”

The City That Doesn’t Sleep

As previously mentioned, it’s been roadtrip season for Rune Skelley. Our most recent jaunt took us to the Big Apple for a little research, reconnoitering and relaxation. While there, we went to our favorite Turkish restaurant, did our part to revitalize the retail sector, and took in three shows, but none of those things were the highlight of the trip.

The coolest part was when we got to meet our agent, Trodayne Northern! Our visit lined up with his schedule and we got together for an early lunch. When we reached the restaurant we had picked, it needed another half an hour to open, but we rolled with that and popped into the vintage poster gallery across the street to chill and peruse artworks until the eatery was ready to provide us with sustenance. It was really breakfast for Jen and Kent (so of course Kent ordered a cheeseburger).

We hung around for a couple of hours, never running out of stuff to talk about. Trodayne, if we made you late for your meeting we are sincerely sorry.

Being In Tune

When we reached the end of a recent writing session and Kent read aloud what he had written, Jen said, “I like when you approach things from angles I never would have thought of.” The feeling is mutual, and that’s kind of the whole magic of writing with a partner: the synergy that comes from aiming two imaginations at a challenge.

Of course, in another recent Writing Cave conversation someone made a comment along the lines of, “Good to touch base before running too far ahead, in case your vision and mine turned out to be totally different.” There’s a famous song lyric about words having two meanings sometimes… the point is, just because you’ve talked it through and think you’ve agreed on how things should go doesn’t mean you’re really in sync.

There’s no magic pro tip for ensuring a perfect mind-meld between partners. You just have to practice. There will be misunderstandings and disagreements from time to time. Ironically, the better you are at processing disagreements, the fewer of them you’ll end up having.

Here are some non-magical tips that might help, though.

  • talk to each other about the story and the characters, a lot — what would take hours of rewriting to fix is often fluid and instantaneous in conversation
  • err on the side of more structure in your process, rather than less — spell things out thoroughly in the prewriting phase
  • maintain a win-win mindset — unexpected ideas from your partner are a good thing!

A writing partner is a source of frequent pleasant surprises.

Bottleneck! Dead Ahead!

The writing is mostly back on track now that we’re home from our epic arctic adventure (puffins!), with our word count standing at a fiendishly satisfactory 66,600. We still have a bunch of stubs laid out and waiting, so we can keep steaming along for a while. Jen just completed a scene in a particular POV, so while that voice is warmed up she’ll jump ahead a few scenes to that character’s next appearance. Kent is in exactly the same situation with another character. One of the (many) great things about writing with a partner is the parallel processing.

But, let’s not be hasty.

All this skipping around with the chronology is fine, as long as we’re paying attention. We have another plot thread, which involves a different subset of the cast and therefore will take a bit of a mental shift to pick up right now. That’s why we were thinking of skipping past it. But, the events in that thread’s next few scenes are tightly coupled, which means it doesn’t make sense to divvy them up. So, if we follow the plan where we each stick with the POV that’s warmed up, we’ll create a bottleneck when the third plot thread becomes the only option to work on.

And that’s why we’re not going to proceed that way. Jen will stick to the plan, but Kent will essay the mental shift and pivot to the other thread. Once its first scene is in the can, it won’t be able to create a bottleneck. At that point, Kent can stick with that thread or swing back to the other one (which has more sex in it).

This idea of bottlenecks doesn’t really pertain if you work solo. At most, it can dictate what order you write the scenes in, but you’re going to be the one writing all of them regardless. With a partner comes the need to coordinate. If Jen can’t write scene B until Kent finishes scene A, then we lose the parallel processing advantage.

A writing partner is someone who helps you figure out the most efficient way to tackle working with a writing partner.

Be Seeing You

Anybody a fan of The Prisoner? As part of our recent vacation, we visited The Village, home to the cold war’s retired spies. In reality The Village is a gorgeous little seaside resort in Wales called Portmeirion. Everywhere you turn there’s a fantastic view or a quirky little surprise.

Just, be on your toes.

 

The town square, with its fountain and its colonnades. And its palm trees.

 

That’s right, the infamous Welsh palm trees everyone raves about.

 

In the lower right you can catch a glimpse of the Stone Boat.

 

Here is No 6’s cottage (the cute round one). The interior is now the Prisoner Shop, not 6’s funky bachelor pad.

You’ll just have to imagine the marching band.

The Bandit Lord is a Welsh Corgi, so we were on the lookout for his ancestors. We did not see a single dog in all of Wales!

Now that we’re home and over our jet lag, and Jen is just about recovered from the evil lung-rot that the terrible woman on the plane infected her with, we’ve started cranking out the prose again. As you can see, we have plenty to fuel our imaginations.

A Damn Good Excuse

Progress on Sibling of Music Novel has been non-existent lately, but damn do we have a great excuse. That excuse is “Iceland.” Holy crap you guys, it’s gorgeous! It’s also not the warmest place this time of year. Who could have predicted?

We visited Gullfoss, a 105-foot waterfall.

 

At Thingvellar National Park, we stood between continental plates. Seriously.

 

In Reykjavik, the Punk Rock Museum is in a disused public bathroom. The toilets are still in place.

 

Kent enjoyed some Icelandic beer, while Jen stuck with the lamb stew.

 

Mmmmm… sheep dung smoked.

 

In Akureyri, on the northern coast, the stoplights are heart-shaped.

 

From Akureyri, we boarded this teensy little plane and flew north. Why? Because that’s where Grimsey Island is.

 

And Grimsey Island is home to the Arctic Circle.

 

And puffins!

So you can blame our stalled word count on the puffins.

The Iceland and Grimsey legs of this trip count as research for a couple of novels in the Science series, and the Wales leg counts for the Music Novel. Sure, those books are all already written, but now we can zhuzh up the descriptions during editing. Learn about our Welsh adventure next week!

Speaking in Code

Having worked together for so long (and having been married for even longer), Jen and Kent know each other really, really well. We share a sense of humor and a lot of in-jokes. Sometimes it seems like we share a single brain. This makes it much easier to write together, and it has led to a sort of verbal shorthand that we understand just fine, but that outsiders find incomprehensible. It’s almost like we’re talking in code!

What a natural transition that was into today’s topic!

In our chain story, there are a ridiculous number of ridiculous codes employed by our protagonist and his cohorts. Many of his allies and enemies attended the same spy school he did, The Hopscotch Academy, so it makes sense that they would have learned the same espionage techniques. What doesn’t make sense is the variety and absurdity of many of them. In addition to the standard spoken signal phrases, signs, and countersigns, there are:

  • codes hidden in tattoos
  • various forms of choreographed arm movements
  • using nearby people’s bodies to form the shapes of ancient runes
  • various licking codes, employed during kissing, but also to hands
  • bubble codes for underwater use
  • spoken Morse code
  • various unspoken forms of Morse code involving thrusting and squeezing, for use in sexual situations
  • flavored lipstick, to tell you which dialect of a code to use
  • thumb rubbing
  • the Stevedore’s Code, involving luggage
  • the Washerwoman’s Code uses various colors of clothing to pass messages
  • the Haberdasher’s Code utilizes pocket squares and handkerchiefs
  • the Confectioner’s Code involves candy bars and their wrappers
  • the Mexican Painter’s Code uses eyebrow movements
  • the Acrobat’s Code involves finger wiggling waves, for some reason
  • the Luchador’s Code utilizes wrestling masks
  • the Pianist’s Code involves musical notes
  • toe snuffling, and the order in which the toes are snuffled
  • toespelling, in which one contorts one’s toes and presses them into another’s soles
  • the Soothsayer’s code involves nontraditional usage of tarot cards
  • the Bog-Roll cypher involves messages written on toilet paper, passed between dance partners
  • the Glassblower’s code utilizes glassblowing terms
  • the Shadow Puppeteer’s Cypher makes heavy use of middle fingers
  • the Fossil cypher involves, for some reason, aerial photography
  • the Make Everything Sound Dirty Code does just what it says on the tin. That’s what she said. Name of your sex tape.
  • the Limbo Code was outlawed by the academy, but is known by our protagonist and John
  • Contra-Buffoon is when your actions are so clumsy they go around the horn and become subtle again

Jen and Kent don’t know how the vast majority of these codes work, but they make regular use of a few of them. Can you guess which?

See, It’s Not Just Us

As a member of a writing duo, it’s interesting to read books written by other duos. Kent’s reading The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. right now, by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland. (Halfway through, and it’s excellent so far.)

It’s almost impossible not to project our familiar process onto this other writing team. That’s just how collaboration works, right? But really, every writing partnership is unique. Having read quite a bit of Stephenson, but nothing else by Galland, makes it tricky to speculate about what each of them contributed to D.O.D.O. It’s full of Stephenson’s tropes, especially regarding technology and history, but it’s not like he holds patents on them or anything. To this Stephenson fan, it mostly feels like a Stephenson book. To Galland’s fans, does it mostly feel like one of hers? More research is needed.

Being a member of a collaborative authorial entity does provide some useful perspective. Galland and Stephenson’s exact process might be a black box, but from the characteristics of the output we know a little bit about how they did it. The voice coheres. In other words, it doesn’t sound like two writers taking turns telling the story in their own styles. It sounds like a single, consistent storytelling voice. This is something Jen and Kent pay a lot of attention to as Rune Skelley, and something that over time has become second nature. In the early going, we were systematic about revising one another’s drafts so that our individual quirks didn’t get too dense.

There very much are distinct character voices in D.O.D.O., so it’s reasonable to suppose that each of the writers took responsibility for certain viewpoints. That’s the way it usually goes for Rune Skelley, so we might just be projecting again, but we do it that way for some good reasons that would probably generalize to others’ workflows.

Another thing we know is that they converged on this subject matter. Collaboration on something as deep and wide as a novel can’t work unless both authors are invested in telling that story. You both have to be passionate about those characters. After all, if the author doesn’t care, why should readers?

What are some of your favorite novels that were written by duos? Let us know in the comments.

Progress! To! Report!

We’ve cracked the 40 kiloword barrier on the current work in progress. That works out to about 150 pages.

It’s taken some late nights, but we’re continuing to make headway despite weeks like this one when there seems to be some time-consuming obligation to tend to every evening. Evenings and weekends are our writing time, so when they get yanked out from under us it can have a big impact. Jen would like us to be farther along, of course, but even she is pleased with both the quantity and the quality of our recent output.

The part of the book we’re currently writing doesn’t lend itself to being prosed in parallel, so we’re tag-teaming it. Kent writes a scene, then hands things off to Jen for the next one, and then back to Kent. Whoever’s turn it isn’t, meanwhile, doesn’t get to slack off. Nay, time in the Writing Cave is too precious, so that partner revisits the already completed scenes and takes care of comments that we left for ourselves. Or, does research, or writes a blog post. Or keeps the stub stockpile built up.

There’s so much going on! Even the Bandit Lord is tired.

A Lot of Balls in the Air

It’s hard to remember, but there was a time when we were only working on one book. Back in the prehistory of the Skelleyverse, Miss Brandymoon’s Device was our only project and we devoted all of our time to it. And it took forever to write. We were still learning how to organize our process, how to mesh our styles, how to create a coherent story with two headstrong people both trying to steer.

Through the years we got much more efficient. We also broadened our fictional ambitions. We added a second story universe. And then a third. Three seems to be a comfortable number for us. Our books come in trilogies, and once we put the Divided Man Series to bed, we started really fleshing out the ghost series that will come next.

Currently we are writing in the Music series, getting feedback on the Science series, and working on preproduction for the Ghost series. Our stories tend to be big and complex, and they benefit from being able to simmer for a long time. Every time we circle back and have a brainstorming discussion, new details emerge. It makes the story world and characters rich and full-bodied. It gives us time to get to know these people we’ll be spending a lot of time with, and it helps us spot plot holes.

A writing partner is someone who will help you with your juggling act.