Leaping From the Turnbuckle

The Skelley Method for Excellent Fiction Writing™ advocates the use of stubs, our proprietary step between outline and fully composed prose.

During writing sessions we manage our workflow by divvying up the stubs. The choice of who writes what usually comes down to which characters are prominent or what kind of subject matter is involved, and we’re both pretty versatile. The thing that almost never happens is handing the scene over to our partner partway through.

Almost never. But that’s exactly what we did just recently, and it was quite successful. It’s an example of the benefit of flexibility in your process. In this case, Jen did the first half and then Kent stepped in to finish it. He likes to bat clean-up, so it was a smooth experience.

Last night we had a variation on the theme, where Jen went back to a scene Kent wrote a few weeks ago and filled in a spot where he’d inserted a placeholder. It was a case where we knew conceptually what should go there, but the implementation was turning into a speed bump. Now that Jen’s revised the scene it’s in great shape. (Side note: a lot of advice books would say not to fiddle with any of your completed scenes until you have a completed draft, and that’s often wise counsel. With a partner, things can work a bit differently. Also, this revision counts as forward progress even though we had to go back to do it — plus now we can see how the concept actually works, so our new scenes don’t have that question hanging over them.)

This tag-team approach to our recent scenes has allowed us to rack up 72,000 words in the first draft of Son of Music Novel. 72,000 words so far. We’re nowhere near done.