Synergistic Tag-Team

We’ve been beavering away on the revisions for the music novel, and we’re getting close to done with this pass. The ending has gotten a major overhaul and now kicks total ass.

The original ending is something we were happy with when we wrote it. Our critiquers mostly thought it was okay, but not awesome. They made some good points, which we were able to acknowledge once we had a bit of critical distance. So, as we turned the rest of the novel inside out we pondered the ending. Certain outcomes were nonnegotiable. The details of how they came about had quite a lot of flex.

Jen had the idea to work in one of the heroine’s character traits which had been underused in the old draft. It’s a pretty significant detail and we had just completely ignored certain implications of it. When Jen suggested we utilize it in the finale, we both had a “how long has that been there?” reaction. We’re obviously not going to spoil the ending, but imagine something along the lines of a character having a knife in her pocket and just not thinking to use it to cut herself free. Only it was us who forgot she even had the knife. We won’t put any of this on her, because she’s actually quite smart.

Something else that influenced — and complicated — the flow of concluding events was the inclusion of a different POV character. As we mentioned before, the rewrite gave point of view to a character who had not previously had it. Kent adopted this guy as his pet character, writing pretty much all of his new scenes. When it came to the ending, he had some great insights into what this guy would say and do, and the new stuff crackles with tension.

Kent wrote some great action and then Jen went through and beefed up the emotional content (yes, we’re back to our stereotypical gender roles). There’s been a lot of nitty-gritty back and forth on this pass, which is the whole reason to have a writing partner. They see things you don’t, and vice versa.