Show Your Work

As January runs out of days, we’re running out of items on Sibling of Music Novel’s To Do list. We’ve already checked off all of weird little oddball things we’d left dangling, and filled in the placeholders with actual prose. And we decided that there’s a certain level of punching up that will wait for the second draft, and we agree on where the cutoff is for that. Which leaves just one more bit of business we need to accomplish before this novel officially goes into hibernation.

Some of our characters are professional musicians. We’ve talked in the past about writing some of their lyrics. Now we’re working on other supplemental material that fleshes out the world: record reviews, fan chatter, things like that. Things written in the story world about or by our characters. It’s something we’ve done in every novel so far, and it’s a part of our process that we really enjoy. It’s really fun to try on other voices and to write in different styles.

The novel itself needs to have a consistent tone and voice. Even though there are two of us writing, we don’t want that to be obvious. But with this ancillary stuff we’re allowed — nay, encouraged! — to take sharp stylistic turns and explore idiosyncratic voices. We want these pieces to be distinct, both from the novel itself and from each other.

A writing partner is someone you can harmonize with, but who also lets you play a solo every now and then.