Re-Reading The Divided Man Trilogy

For somewhat mysterious reasons, we decided that we’d read the first three novels we wrote. By “decided we’d read” what we mean of course is that we decided Kent would read them aloud to Jen. This project recently came to a successful conclusion.

To get the self-promotion out of the way: it was a blast. We really enjoyed it the whole way through. There is always some trepidation about revisiting early work. Has it aged well? (Yes.) Was it really polished enough to be published? (Yes.) Are we biased? (Yes. But we also have standards.)

The Divided Man Series

 

These books are of special interest to scholars of Rune Skelley’s oeuvre because they were written before we knew what we were doing. That is, writing this trilogy is what taught us how important it is for us to have a process. It was hard! There was at least one six-month span when trying to work on it became so stressful that we just stopped.

Did that seat-of-the-pants workflow contribute anything positive to the flavor of the end product? Probably. There’s a sort of punk-rock attitude infusing the whole thing — a crude spark. Going back to the first books now, we’re a little bit jealous of younger Rune Skelley’s “fuck it, watch this” confidence. We went for the double backflip, and we landed it! Eventually! After wrecking ourselves a whole bunch. As already mentioned, it was hard.

Did building this series without a blueprint actually, you know, work? Yes, but we honestly don’t know how. Each of the three Divided Man books has many moving parts, and the trilogy overall creates a structure in which all of the weird shit we set in motion adds up to a consistent, if convoluted, story world. Something we commented about repeatedly as we did the reading is the complexity of the plot and world-building, and how effectively it’s all tied together. Now, we know how this particular sausage was made. We know we played the game on hard mode, so we have a deeper appreciation for how unlikely it was that all these twists would ultimately line up. In other words, we know how likely we are to face-plant if we try to just wing it through something so ambitious again.

As we have said hundreds of times here at the Skelleyverse, writing with a partner is awesome. A good writing partner is your secret weapon. Something to keep in mind is that working with a partner increases your need for a formal system. Can two people take the free-jazz writing approach and get good stuff as a result? Totally! We did. But, in roughly the same amount of time we spent on those three books, we’ve written seven more. And it was way, way less stressful. Because we have a system.

A writing partner is someone who will ride with you down memory lane.