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.

Like a Well-Oiled Machine

We had hoped to have Sibling of Music Novel up to 20,000 words by the time we made this update, but between dog birthday parties, driving our son to the airport. and a power outage, we only managed to hit 17,000. Not that we’re complaining. We’re actually quite pleased with our progress.

It had been a while since we were in composition mode, and it sometimes takes us a little fishing around to find the right gear when we switch things up. Apparently this time we were away for the Goldilocks amount, because all we had to do was adjust the mirrors a little bit and we were ready to go. This is even though we’ve only used one recurring character as a POV character so far, the rest being brand new to this outing. We found the new voices quite quickly, and are really enjoying the stuff we’re coming up with. We’re patting ourselves on the back over here.

A lot of writers say that you should never be happy with your works in progress, but that’s not a belief we subscribe to. We generally enjoy the writing process, and genuinely love sharing our work with each other at the end of every session. The immediate feedback is great! No worries: we’re not so in love with the work that we think the first draft is perfect. It will all need to be polished and finessed. But for a first draft, it’s pretty fucking great if we do say so ourselves.

Having a writing partner means hearing the laughter right away when a joke lands, hearing the suppressed sobs when the knife twists just so in a beloved character’s emotions, and just generally knowing if your prose is on the right track.

David Byrne on Collaboration

Kent is reading How Music Works by David Byrne, as everyone he knows is already aware because he keeps recommending it. (It’s really good.)

One of the themes expressed throughout the book is collaboration. Now, Byrne is talking about music and lyrics rather than fiction, but it’s remarkable how little that seems to matter. Working creatively as part of a team is subject to some universal rules, it seems.

Of course, a lot of this collaboration theme comes out when he’s telling about how Talking Heads’ music came into existence. Working with bandmates is the fundamental form of musical collaboration. But it comes up again and again in other, less expected ways too.

An especially interesting passage connected to this theme describes the process of creating the songs for the theatrical production Here Lies Love. There were multiple layers of collaborative activity. First of all, the lyrics were inpired by, and when possible directly quoted from, things that Imelda Marcos actually said, making her a contibutor to the process years after the fact. The subject matter and story line were established before any music was even contemplated, providing a set of constraints the he had to operate within. Launching a show takes a long time, and well after the music was “complete” Byrne got notes from the producers of the play, not wanting to change words or tunes around, but a desire for specific character motivations and plot points to be added to the songs. They told him what their story needed, and trusted him to figure out how to make it happen.

This really resonated with Kent, because it felt a lot like how he and Jen find their way through a manuscript. The pre-writing tells us what we need, and then composing the actual scenes is when we make it happen. In our case we both wear both the writer hat and the editor/producer hat, but the analogy is still very strong.

Whatever kind of art you create, teaming up with a partner can make the process more productive and rewarding.

The Next Chapter

This week we tackled the last of the items on our To Do list relating to the Science Novels. We’re ready to plunge into writing Sibling of Music Novel, and didn’t want a bunch of tiny tasks swarming around us like gnats.

Kent whipped up a nice batch of epigraphs for the third novel, while Jen divided said novel into chapters so that he’d know how many he needed. (Answer: 28) Additionally she gave the chapters names.

We’ve mentioned before that Jen is our resident namer, and it’s a job she really enjoys. There was no chance that Kent was going to get his grubby paws on this task. Don’t get all riled up in his defense, though. Jen does ask for his opinion, and he has veto power.

During composition, we tend to give the scenes that we write goofy or overly spoiler-filled titles. They’re full of inside jokes and terrible puns. In short they would make egregious chapter titles. Would you read a book with chapters called “long day at the business factory”, or “emotionpalooza” or “merrily merrily merrily merrily” or “poopin’ in a bag” ? Of course not.

For the Science Novels, the actual chapter titles all relate to places in the stories. It was easy to come up with a couple dozen of those for the first book. As we moved through the series it got more difficult, largely because we don’t want to just repeat all the same place names from book to book. The thinking cap got a good workout, and in the end we came up with a nice, evocative batch of about 70 names, to cover all three books in the series. Now the whole series has proper chapters, with names and epigraphs and everything.

Having a writing partner means always having someone to share an inside joke with, even if it won’t make a good chapter title.

When Writing Feels More Like Acting

We mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Kent is writing epigraphs for the third Science novel. As with book one of that series, the epigraphs are excerpts from the in-world science fiction novels written by one of the characters.

We need these snippets to have a voice that’s distinct from the Rune Skelley voice. They need to feel like they’re from a different era. So, to create them entails getting inside the mind of their fictitious author.

All fiction entails getting inside the minds of your characters, but this is something verging on stunt fiction. Get inside this character’s head, while she’s getting inside her characters’ heads. Write like she would write, and then rewrite like she would rewrite. Thank goodness these things are brief!

For the middle book, we gave this fictitious author a break and excerpted a story told by someone else. The process bore much similarity, even though the resulting epigraphs that time were quite a bit shorter and more interconnected.

Now we’re back to how we started, except that our in-world author has been through new experiences, some of which shook her. How does that color her writing? How does she cope with other constraints (which would be gigantic spoilers if we told you about them)? We don’t want to just serve up another batch of the exact same stuff, but we do want to do more of what’s good. It’s a tricky balance. Kent had some initial ideas that Jen had to nix. Those mystery constraints clamped down hard. Fortunately, Kent believes that constraints fuel creativity, even if they also prompt the occasional tantrum.

Having a writing partner means you have someone to run lines with you and help you get into character.

 

That Time Jen and Kent Were Writing Two Different Books Together

It’s not all that strange for us to be juggling multiple projects.  The twist this time is that we’re each focusing on one book, just not the same one. Jen is compiling the outline for Sibling of Music Novel while Kent writes the epigraphs for Grandson of Science Novel. A more typical scenario would involve switching between projects every day or two, with the two of us staying mostly synced up on whichever project we switch to.

Another fairly common situation would be where one of us is writing while the other one does research, or designs a cover, things like that. When we’re doing different types of tasks, it’s less noticeable if they’re related to different books.

This feels sorta weird this time, because we are both writing. We tend to ask each other questions out of the blue a lot, and that’s when it’s really noticeable that we’re thinking about different worlds.

For a long time, we would not have even considered this type of multitasking. We very deliberately kept our combined attention on one project at a time. It allowed us to stay immersed in that story world, and our concern was that we’d burn a lot of mental energy spooling it back up again if we got distracted by something else. But as the manuscripts accumulated, life in the Writing Cave got complicated. And it turns out that we’re pretty damn good at keeping multiple worlds spinning in our heads. After a while you even used to it.

Having a writing partner gives you twice the bandwidth for generating warped realities.

That Time Jen Made All New Project Boards

The cave paintings in the Writing Cave are mostly project boards. One entire wall is devoted to them.

These are things Jen sets up, large sheets of card stock to hold sticky notes that get pulled down as their tasks are completed. Each board has its novel’s title inked across the top in three-inch letters, and any cover concept or mock-up that we have gets clipped to the edge. We work in trilogies, and the metal strip for our nifty neodymium magnets is just long enough for us to hang three boards.

Well. A couple of weeks ago, Kent came home and his little mind was blown! The project wall had been completely redone. There were still three boards, but instead of being book-oriented they were now trilogy-oriented. Suddenly nine novels’ worth of project tracking occupied a space where heretofore had only ever been three. Kent boggled, a flatlander perceiving the Z-axis for the first time.

Jen excels at this type of organizational wizardry, and thrives on having such artifacts in the environment. Her desk and Kent’s are pretty much equally cluttered, which disguises her greater affinity for order. There is of course a system in the clutter, but we both admit that it’s inefficient. (Our annual workspace archeological expeditions tend to turn up many un/pleasant surprises.) The key to the project boards is that they’re placed on a vertical surface, which makes it much harder to pile crap up on them.

What else adorns the walls of the cave? There is a signed, framed XKCD print, framed copies of the covers from the Divided Man series, and lots of bookshelves. Atop a bookcase live a globe and a set of matryoshka dolls (one of which seems to be haunted).

A writing partner is someone who wants to spend a lot of time in the cave with you.

2019 Preview

Last week we recapped our 2018. Now it’s time to look ahead and see what the coming twelvemonth will hold in store.

Our top priority will be writing Sibling of Music Novel. The first round of outlining is essentially complete, which does not mean we are yet in possession of anything that resembles an outline. But it does mean we’ll be ready to begin the actual writing pretty soon. Hard to say how long that will take. Our past few projects have been all over the map. Hopefully we can be speedy this time!

After that, we have a couple of good candidates for our attention, depending on which story world we want to focus on. We can stay with the Music series and do an editing pass on Son of Music Novel, or we can pivot back to the Science series where there are two manuscripts that need such treatment.

Deciding which of those worthy endeavors gets our attention first will depend on how our near-future publishing strategy shapes up. 2018 was the year we got an agent, and 2019 will be the year that we adjust our routines accordingly.

And, that means as of now we don’t have an answer for “What book(s) will you release in the coming year?” Everything’s topsy-turvy! But we can say for sure that we’ll be sweating in the writing cave. (Not really, though, because it’s air conditioned.) We will let you know what’s coming just as soon as we find out ourselves. Watch this space for updates.

To sum up, we expect to be busy!

A toast: May this, the year two thousand nineteen, be generous and gentle to you and everyone you love.

2018 – The Year That Was

To the shock of both of us, last year’s forecast for 2018 was spot-on. We wanted to finish up the Science Novels, outline the middle Music Novel, and begin talking about the Ghost Novels, and that’s pretty much what we did. The one place we missed the mark was in predicting (or hoping) that the first Science Novel would be released in 2018. It wasn’t. But we have the best excuse! 2018 was the year we got an agent! And that put our self-publishing plans on hold while we talk to him and figure out what makes sense in this new landscape.

Here’s how we spent 2018 on the blog:

January and February were devoted to writing Grandson of Science Novel, whining about missing self-imposed deadlines and target word counts, a brief break to clean our desks, and an update to our chain story’s cast of characters.

In March we mused about whether a protagonist should learn of ALL of the villains evil doings (“No.”) And we had the joy of setting up new computers.

April brought several rounds of critique group advice, and we finally reached the end of the first draft of Grandson of Science Novel. Break out the champagne!

But don’t drink too much, because we still had some work to do before the Science Novels could all be considered Done Enough. We spent May plugging holes and strengthening descriptions. Oh, and we got a puppy.

On June 1 we declared ourselves done for realsies, and hit the ground running on that Music Novel outline.

July and August were devoted to brainstorming, outlining, and research for Sibling of Music Novel.

In September we pulled back from Music Novels and dove straight into the Science Novels again, reading through all three of them in preparation for edits and cover design.

The Science Novels remained our focus in October as we worked to get them ready for our beta readers. Plus we passed a major milestone: 1000 blog posts!

When the Science and Music Novels are done, our next project is going to involve ghosts. We spent November taking various road trips and using the time on the road to lay the groundwork for this whole new story universe. Plus we tossed some old audio equipment outside during a blizzard and took pictures of it. As you do.

Which brings us up to the present. December. We GOT AN AGENT! And since he’s going to be selling the first Music Novel for us, we really need to turn our attention back to that series and get the middle book done. We were a bit rusty when we sat down to our brainstorming, but with a little bit of WD-40 and a couple of jumper cables we’re now purring along like a vintage muscle car.

We hope your 2018 went well, and your 2019 goes even better. Happy New Year!

Exciting News! We Have an Agent!

* For Immediate Release *

Rune Skelley is thrilled to announce having inked a deal with Prentis Literary. Woo hoo! (Can you say “woo hoo” in a press release?)

Our writing journey is now officially leading toward hybrid publishing, after independently publishing three novels. We’re looking forward to learning many new things. We’re very fortunate for the opportunity to work with Trodayne Northern, who has been patient and helpful with us at each turn as we figure out how to be a client. As a bonus, he really gets our stuff.

What this means for our release schedule is not clear yet. Trodayne has taken on the Music Novels, and meanwhile we are thisclose to releasing the first of the Science Novels. Or, are we? The landscape has shifted, and we’ll need to figure out what path now makes the most sense. It’s a good problem to have!

Being coauthors has (hopefully) prepared us well for the collaborative relationship between author and agent.

Mystery Science Road Trip 3000

A little while ago Kent had a birthday, and Jen gave him the best present ever: VIP tickets to a Mystery Science Theater 3000 Live show. The date of the show finally rolled around, so we jumped in the Skelleymobile and headed off on a road trip.

Faithful blog readers will know that we like to use car trips as brainstorming time. Our open projects are dwindling in number as we complete novels and launch them into the world. In fact, out of our first three trilogies, we currently have only one book that’s unwritten, and it’s most of the way outlined already. The part of it that’s not nailed down yet involves a lot of moving parts that all need to mesh together just so, and “in a moving car while Kent pays attention to traffic” didn’t seem like the best environment for tackling it. Enter: the Ghost Novels!

Before this trip we had a few wisps of ideas for the way we want the supernatural to work in our newest story world. Now, after a couple of hours of discussion, we have a much clearer picture of the way our ghosts will work, and even the ghost of a plot (see what we did there?). At this point it’s more like two or three plotlings, some of which might work together and some of which contradict each other. A lot more conversation will be needed before we’re ready to start writing. But it felt good to explore a whole new universe, especially this one at Halloween time. We’re surrounded by spooky stories and it’s exciting to start to work on our own.

You know what else is exciting? Getting to have a conversation with Joel Hodgson (who is very nice! — he told Kent he asked a great question!), having our pictures taken on the Satellite of Love with Joel, Jonah, the Bots, and Pearl Forrester’s clone Synthia, and then watching a live riffing of a truly terrible movie.

Most exciting of all? Having a writing partner who shares your sense of humor.