In the Darkened Room

  1. k-avatarCharacter – Russian game show host
  2. Setting – behind enemy lines
  3. Object – model trail
  4. Situation – seance

In the darkened room, objects moved though on one was touching them. Some of this was due to the tanks rumbling by, and some due to spirit activity.

The medium and the game show host sat on opposite sides of the small table. Gradually all fell silent.

“Are you here, Mikhail?” the medium asked softly.

There was a rapping sound from the table. “Comrade Bagski, you may talk to Mikhail.”

“Well, Mikhail, answer this one right and you win the model train. Ready?”

The table rose and began to twirl.

“Good! Okay, rap once for true and twice for false: The Romanovs got what they deserved.”

Two distinct rapping sounds were heard.

“Correct!”

The medium was troubled.

“Comrade, isn’t this a very touchy subject for a game?”

Bagski brushed it off.

“It’s the people’s model train anyway, he can’t keep it.”

“For a couple of reasons.”

A sudden bomb-burst shook dust from the ceiling and halted conversation.

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The Crowd Was Getting Ugly

  1. by jenCharacter – politician
  2. Setting – theatre
  3. Object – CD
  4. Situation – police intervention

The crowd was getting ugly. Murmuring became grumbling, then hissing and catcalls. This was bad. I looked in desperation to my Secret Service agents, but they just smiled bemusedly. My damn advisers were wrong. No one was going for my new tax plan. The more I thought about it, the more certain I became. This was a set-up.

A bottle broke at my feet. A plastic cup flew past my head. My Secret Service agents disappeared. Emboldened, the crowd threw more garbage. And shoes. And lunch bags. Even a CD, which smacked me in the forehead.

As my blood began to trickle, they went wild and rushed the podium. My football days weren’t so long ago, and I darted backstage. Trying to blend with the foot traffic outside, I slipped down the block to a movie theatre. I dashed to the box office.

“One for Police Intervention,” I said, and hurried inside.

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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?

Clyde Stalked

  1. Character – photojournalist
  2. Setting – Niagara Falls
  3. Object – lunar rock
  4. Situation – first time shoplifting

Clyde stalked into Ripka’s Take It or Leave It, just too distant to really hear the falls (although you could still feel it) and therefor not prime tourist-trap real estate (though still expensive). He glanced around, failing to note the young lady with the sophisticated camera chatting up the proprietor. His dutiful ritual of theatrical skulking discharged, Clyde sidled over to a row of trinket bins. He pocketed a keychain with a tiny plastic barrel fob, complete with the grinning head protruding from one end. Next he pilfered a handful of random gray stones, vaguely pumicey and, for no rational reason, billed as “lunar.” He smiled wanly as the young woman focused the camera on him. As the shop owner stepped to block his exit, the photographer said, “You’re new at this, aren’t you?”

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Turkish Delight Worried The Bullwhip

  1. by jenCharacter – porn star named Turkish Delight
  2. Setting – Loch Ness
  3. Object – bullwhip
  4. Situation – midlife crisis

Turkish Delight worried the bullwhip in her leather-gloved hands. Where on earth was the director? This was going to be her big break, the movie that showcased her acting skills along with her enormous breasts and insatiable appetite for kinky sex. Desmond had assured her it would be tastefully done, but now no one could find him.

Her costars tried to convince her that the cameraman could be relied on to bring the vision to fruition, but Del just didn’t trust him the way she trusted Desmond.

They had flown all the way to Scotland to film the special scenes with Nessie yesterday. It had been freezing, absolutely freezing, but Del had lived up to her end of the deal. Last night Desmond just kept staring at her. He couldn’t even get it up.

He must be having a midlife crisis, Del decided.

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Brave New World

The time has finally come for us to start the actual writing process. We’re finding it slow going, even with all the preliminary work we did. The first three novels we wrote were a trilogy. By the time we got to the third one, we knew the characters better than we knew ourselves. It was dead easy to find their voices and dive in.

After the trilogy, though, we wrote a standalone novel, and had this same problem at the beginning. We just don’t know the characters well enough yet to feel totally at ease writing in their voices.

This is one place where writing with a partner can make things more difficult. If either of us were doing this solo, we could just wing it and see what happens. With two of us involved, and wanting everything to feel seamless, we both feel a little inhibited.

Because Jen is cruel, she makes Kent take on the first scene. It’s up to him to introduce the narrative voice, and the main character’s voice, too. Jen sits there and watches him type, because until she sees what he’s done she can’t write anything. The fear is that we will both write something great, but that the pieces won’t mesh. Instead of chocolate and peanut butter coming together to make a delicious peanut butter cup, we dread ending up with salmon bonbons. Either the fish or the ganache would be delectable on their own, but together they’re something the loser made on Iron Chef.

And so we tiptoe around each other, each of us hesitantly writing scenes and vignettes. When we share them, it is always with a healthy dose of Remember This Is A First Draft and I Don’t Know If This Works.

Fortunately, this weirdness is confined to the character voice. We know for sure that the actions and details contained in a scene will be right, and next week we’ll tell you how.

Guy Could See Where This Was Going

  1. Character – French circus performer
  2. Setting – dead end
  3. Object – infant
  4. Situation – truth or dare

Guy could see where this was going.

He cut to the left, pedaling frantically and veering around stacks of boxes in the narrow alleyway. At least they might conceal him. As he guided the unicycle past an old metal drum full of some loathsome fluid, he saw that concealment would be his only salvation. Dead end.

He became still as a statue, balancing flawlessly as only a lifetime of this sort of thing can teach one to do, as his pursuers thundered by on the main street.

He heard a squeal of brakes, and a door opening. He hoped the babe in the basket atop his head would stay asleep. The car chasing him had been small, but it held many clowns.

It is not good to have so many secrets, Guy thought. Always, in the future, I will say, “Truth.”

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“Please, Jesus, Let Me Sleep!”

  1. by jenCharacter – 17 year old Jesus freak
  2. Setting – pool hall
  3. Object – chess pieces
  4. Situation – insomnia

“Please, Jesus, let me sleep!” the boy yelled. Hans had seen his type before. The WWJD t-shirt, the close-cropped hair, the earnest expression. A church youth group was in town for a field trip and the poor sod was overwhelmed.

He dropped to his knees on the pool table, scattering the few balls that remained.

“Oh lord, I am tired! Why do you torment me so?” he cried.

The old men in the corner looked surly and Hans knew they were on the verge of throwing their chess pieces at the boy. As amusing as that might be, Hans had a job to do, and that job was keeping the peace at Pappy’s Pool Palace.

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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?

Morton’s Eyesight

  1. Character – pedophile
  2. Setting – hotel under the face on Mars
  3. Object – blood splatter
  4. Situation – swarming insects

Morton’s eyesight was getting dim for some time before he realized there was anything wrong. He felt safe in his suit, foolishly, and just kept trudging along through the locust swarm. But Martian locusts have razor-sharp wing sheaths and one of these had sliced the airhose. One then clipped his arm, cutting suit and skin, and spilling Morton’s blood on the red planet.

These hikes were supposed to be safe. Those kids left the hotel with no more protection than him, their darling little suits making their movements all the more endearing.

But after tailing them for only ten minutes, he’d lost them.

Morton slumped to his knees, and then keeled over onto his back. His face looked remarkably like the satellite images on the hotel stationery.

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