While Kent goes off dayjobbing during the muggy sunlit hours, Jen’s “day job” lately is transcribing our notes from the steno pad. She has been embellishing things to a certain degree. The result is a sort of mega-synopsis. It has very sparse description and zero dialog, but the narrative pull is compelling.

When Kent got home and saw the latest installment, he proclaimed, “I would read this book.”

Killjoy that she is, Jen replied, “We have to write it, first.”

Of course she’s right. And that’s going to be fun to do. A shit-ton of work, but fun. Because we already know the story’s broad strokes, we’ll be able to concentrate on bringing its details to life without worrying about whether we’re staying on track.

We’re certainly biased, but we’re jazzed as all hell to see just how un-put-downable this sucker becomes once the character are allowed to actually talk to each other.

Jen and Kent have nearly filled that steno pad, and generated enough colored-paper squares to all but obscure the dining table (and that’s with the board in!). In other words, the preliminary outlining for Sibling of Music Novel is almost complete.

We’ve made a lot of fun discoveries on the way to this point, things we might not have learned about our characters otherwise. Maybe they would have told us this stuff in the thick of the prosening, but we’re pretty sure most of it wouldn’t have come up. It’s oblique to the plot. A lot of it will never wind up on the page, but it defines the space for the things that will be on the page.

This is a story that we’ve known — in elevator-pitch form — for quite a while. Feeling it solidify through the outlining process has been wonderful. The thing that we found ourselves stuck on the longest is one particular week in the timeline. It falls late in the story and involves a unique mix of characters. That combination makes for a lot of corners to try and peer around to see what’s happening up there. Kent was tempted to just leave it vague for now and get started writing, to fly through it by the seat of his pants when he gets there. But Jen calmed him down with some orange slices and we stuck to our process.

A major benefit of all this pre-work, for us, is that we can get stuck sooner. On our first few projects, when we used more of a pantsing approach, we’d routinely get stuck for a period of months. Months. Finding out where the sticky spots are while we’re just sketching is a lot more efficient than running into them in the midst of an actual first draft.

We’re not trying to be the Outline Police or anything, but it’s been a tremendous boon to us.

Our work sessions of late have swung back into a lot of research about New York City’s landmarks and culture in prior decades. It’s fun research. That’s part of how we know we’re doing it right, although admittedly it’s also a dire threat to any notion of a schedule. Falling down a bottomless image search is all too easy to do.

Naturally, the reason for all this research is so we can invent deeper torment for our characters to endure. They were already pretty pissed off at us about what we have in store for them, and the stuff we’ve come up with this week makes it so much worse. Which is the other way we can tell we’re doing it right: it makes our characters hate us.

There appears to be a link between our enjoyment and the intensification of enmity from certain members of our cast. The more fun we’re having, the more they want to blind us with a hot screwdriver.

Which is our biggest reason for working as a team: to make it harder for our characters to sneak up on us.

Now that our steno pad is 3/4 full and our plot rainbow is a mile long, we feel like we’re almost ready to write up an outline for Sibling of Music Novel. Before we do that, though, we want to make sure we have as many holes filled in as possible. There will always be corners we haven’t seen around, cans of worms we haven’t opened, right up until it’s time to write any given scene, but we like to get as much of that as possible out of the way in the planning stages. The writing goes a lot more smoothly (especially with two of us doing it) when we minimize the number of unknowns.

While Kent’s off at the day job, bringing home the bacon, Jen has spent her afternoons combing through our notes and typing them up in something resembling chronological order. Our brainstorming process is pretty loose, as it should be, and that results in a notebook that is wildly disorganized. Big plot points intermingle with character quirks and setting details. We don’t want to lose any of that little stuff, even if we can hold the broad strokes of the plot in our heads.

Eventually there will be a master document that incorporates everything coherently, no matter how large or small. For now there’s a prose outline for each of the main storylines, and separate documents for setting details and random notes. Each page of the steno pad requires Jen to flit around among these documents, inserting a line or two where appropriate.

Once she’s gotten through all the notes and gives everything a quick spit shine, these documents will give us a good overview of the project and will help us see where we are light on detail.

Our prewriting routine is quite involved, but it’s key to allowing us to write together as a team with minimal headache. What does your process look like?