Tagged: As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #2

It Was the Middle One

What do you do when you realize that your work in progress contains a continuity glitch? Well, that depends on the situation. If you’re Rune Skelley, and the glitch is that a locale gets described differently in different scenes, then it goes something like this, or at least this is how it went in this specific case.

We saw two paths before us. On one hand, we could decide how the place looks and make the fixes before moving on, because that way we’d have a clear, shared image to call up the next time that locale gets used. On the other hand, we could just leave it marked and worry about it later, because future scenes might raise plot points that dictate new or different details of the locale anyway.

In the end, we chose yet another path. (A writing partner is someone who brings two more “other hands” to these situations.) This path goes right up the middle. What we’ll actually do is decide — provisionally — what the correct description is, and make careful notes about it. Perhaps even draw a map, which is something we probably should have done before. But we will leave the existing scenes alone for now and save the corrections for later. Going forward, we will each have a clear image as a touchstone, and we shouldn’t stray from it without a good reason. But if we find a good reason, we can stray away without feeling like we wasted time on edits that are now out-of-date.

A writing partner is someone who helps you figure out how to split the difference.

WIP Read-Thru Results

The read-thru on Ghosts Book 2 went about like we expected. We really like what we’ve got so far, and we didn’t uncover anything drastic. There were a couple of minor things that we flagged, which mainly have to do with continuity.

In particular, there’s a location that gets described a bit differently in different scenes. This is not just the color of an armchair or which way the window faces. It’s an elaborate locale, which it must be in order to play host to weird and supernatural events that will come up later. We went out of our way to get this place on the page ahead of time, and to give the characters a chance to explore it. This also gave us a chance to invent the fiddly details that will come into play eventually, which we unfortunately seem to have reinvented when we described the spot the second time. This is most likely a case where Kent did one of the affected scenes and Jen did the other, and each of us approached it as if we were introducing the location.

But that’s okay! It just gives us a surfeit of good stuff to draw from when we deal with continuity bobbles during revision.

A writing partner can see things from another angle.

Reading is Writing, Sometimes

Our WIP has hit that point, roughly 100 pages in, where it’s time to go back and read over what we’ve done so far. Take it for a test drive and see how it handles at cruising speed.

During the writing process, we have of course been continually reading and rereading as we added to it, but with a very narrow focus. Looking at the current scene, the current paragraph, the current word. Now, by taking it all in as a whole we are reminded of where the characters came from, how the current scenes came to be.

It also recharges us by reminding us how far we’ve come. Reviewing your progress is a healthy thing, and can be fantastic for morale. We find it renews our desire to see how it turns out. (Even though we already know — there are always still surprises!)

What this read-thru is not: a revision pass. Sure, we’ll clean up whatever easy stuff we happen to spot, and make some notes for later about any larger considerations. But it’s important to keep in mind that this is a WIP, and we have to keep moving forward.

A writing partner is your first reader, your sharpest critic, and your biggest fan.

Seeing Patterns

While we type away on As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #2 the feedback has stared coming in on As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1, and we have detected a potential pattern. Well, a couple of patterns. For one, our readers are saying a lot of the same nice things about the writing. For two, and more important, they appear to be in agreement about some opportunities for improvement.

Getting feedback is essential, but it takes a little practice to learn how to apply it. The temptation can be to try to “fix” everything that each critiquer pointed out, but you’ll end up running in circles that way when they all bring up different, often contradictory things. So, don’t let the trees block your view of the forest.

What’s important is patterns. If more than one person mentions the same thing, it’s probably significant. During the critique group meeting, did anyone go, “Oh yeah, same here,” when someone else raised a point? Then that point’s probably important. Sometimes you’ll have to analyze the aggregate notes to find the pattern. And sometimes you’ll have just make your own decisions about which suggestions make sense to you. You’re allowed to disregard anything anyone says. Better to leave your own mistakes in the story than to swap them for someone else’s.

Going over the feedback with a partner is extremely helpful. They bring another set of eyes and ears to catch those patterns, plus they’re a sounding board for figuring out which ideas help the story and which ones don’t. Working with a partner gives you a backup gut-check about which notes to disregard.

A writing partner helps you detect patterns in the data, and helps you understand what they mean.

Specter-Vision

Our WIP is a ghost story (perhaps we’ve mentioned that) and as it happens some of the scenes are ghost-character POV. Our take on being a ghost is that it has a definite effect on one’s outlook, and indeed upon the physical reality of one’s surroundings. Dying changes a person’s entire take on life.

Of course we always remember that when we’re doing their scenes. (Eye-roll)

Okay, there’ve only been a couple of times that we actually had to go back into the text and account for that. It tends to happen when the locale has been previous rendered in ordinary human terms, which would make another detailed description feel redundant (if the current POV character had ordinary human perceptions). It’s just one more aspect of “wearing the right head” to tackle a given character. Likewise if one member of the cast were a dog, meaning they can’t see what’s on the kitchen counters but they can smell and hear lots of stuff that the human characters can’t. So even though it’s the same house everyone’s living in, it can feel like a whole different world for certain characters. (Spoiler: the ghost POV character is not a dog.)

We don’t do real spoilers around here, so we can’t say anything too specific about what it’s like to be a ghost in our story. We asked one of the specters to sum it up for us, and here’s what we got back: “There’s some interesting scenery, but overall it’s kind of a hassle.”

A writing partner is someone whose point of view helps you express your characters’ POV.

The Saga of Gigi and Pierre

It’s amazing that, no matter how conscientious you try to be about looking around all the corners during the outlining phase, stuff always finds places to lurk so it can ambush you during prose.

Naturally, we’ve known all along that Gigi and Pierre will become a couple, and that their bond will be tested. We talked about how things look from each of their perspectives, what’s different about Pierre’s attitude toward the relationship, etc. And we identified the moment when the first test will crop up. What we didn’t do was spec in a scene to show the fallout of that event. Then the prose draft had caught up to that point in the narrative, and this felt like an omission.

We had to discuss what to do about it. The default stance here in the Writing Cave is that we don’t like scenes that exist solely for depicting Relationship Drama. Words like “soapy” get tossed around sometimes. Scenes need to earn their keep, and we love it when they accomplish more than one job. So, we tried to talk ourselves into sticking with the blueprint, i.e., not adding a unitasker relationship scene and thus keeping the Gigi/Pierre breakup implicit.

Thing is, our original concern was that not making the couple fight explicit leaves a gap in the story. And that’s because the real rule about scenes earning their keep is that you include the ones that carry the story. Ask, “what’s this story about?” and, “what is this scene about?” When they line up, you have a winner. (NB, stay alert for too much of a good thing; if you showed it already, you probably don’t have to show it again.)

The story can be “about” multiple things. In our case, it’s about ghosts and it’s also about this Gigi/Pierre thing. Their romance and its ups and downs shape the choices they will be making later on. So, while we don’t want to give anybody soap poisoning, we need to give readers a decoder ring for why those two behave the way they do. So, this instance of Relationship Drama merits a scene, even if that’s the only job it does.

A good writing partner is someone you work well with, so that the soap operatics are confined to the page.

A Small Leap In Productivity

It was fortuitous to get an extra day last month in which to do some writing, because it at least partially offset the multiple days when stuff came up and we got no writing done at all.

Let us take this moment to pause and wish a Happy Leap Day to all who celebrate.

Leap Day William

We’re making headway on As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #2 once again. Not as rapidly as we were hoping (it never is) but tangible, empirical progress all the same. Kent just wrapped up a scene and got a nice start on the next one, and Jen shipped another couple of stubs.

To help us keep up this momentum — hopefully even build on it — we’re instituting a revolutionary positive-reinforcement technology: sticker charts! Henceforth, our access to ice cream will be regulated by how many stickers we earn. That’ll definitely keep us motivated (at least until we find a black market for frozen dairy treats). So we look forward to cranking up our output!

One thing that we need to remind ourselves about is how much work we get done that’s not reflected in metrics like word count. We talk things out, which is real work but has no measurable substance. Recently, Jen detected a possible issue with repetition across several stubs, and now because of some productive conversations we no longer have that issue. The affected stubs haven’t all been completed, but what would have been the point of plowing through them only to end up scrapping and redoing half those scenes later? It’s unclear how the new stickers-and-ice-cream economy of the Writing Cave will take such scenarios into account.

A writing partner is someone who sticks by you 366 days of the year.

The Land-Speed Record Is Safe

Our recent output has been nil.

We got off a roaring start on Ghost Book 2, making good headway because we were doing a good job of sticking to our schedule. And then, well, stuff came up. Life intruded, which it does all the time, but for a couple of weeks now it’s been downright pushy. We’re fine, in fact it was mostly good news! It’s just a lot.

Not that we can claim that we were straining in the traces to put in more of those solid multi-hour work sessions that keep a project on track. Nah, we got a little lazy and took advantage of having some legitimate excuses.

This week we’re recommitting to the schedule, the lifestyle, the dream. Well, that first one mainly. That’s the key: having a schedule. We’re also dabbling with some ideas about carrots and sticks, and maybe shifting back to composing on the laptops for a change of scene. We have humongous desktop monitors, which can be a tremendous boon to productivity in a lot of ways but can also backfire. It’s too easy to leave scads of distractions open all the time.

A bit of archeology in the files for the previous manuscript suggests that these ups and downs are pretty normal for us, and that our net progress is basically right on track. Which is… good to know. Bit disappointing, though. Now that Kent’s retired, our pace was supposed to increase substantially. That hasn’t happened so far. But we’ll figure it out.

A writing partner is still your partner even when you’re not doing a lot of writing.

Golden Oldies

To help set the mood for the era we’re writing about, the late 1960s, we’ve been listening to a bunch of music from that time. Or rather, Jen’s been listening to most of it, and Kent has been indulging her when she comes across something particularly cool or particularly weird that she just needs to share.

The music is a mix of incredibly familiar songs and total headscratchers. For every Beatles classic, there’s a Pigmeat Markham or a Peppermint Trolley Co. For every Beach Boys song we know, there are two we were completely unaware of (that, incidentally, sound nothing like the Beach Boys).

Kent has observed that once enough time passes, a decade becomes its own musical genre, and songs that never would have been played on the same station all get lumped together because they’re of a similar vintage. This experiment is like that on steroids. We’ve been listening to Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, Aretha Franklin, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Frank Sinatra, Englebert Humperdinck, Tom Jones, and a bunch of artists we’d never heard of. Did you know that Ray Charles had a cover of Eleanor Rigby? Or that The Tijuana Brass had a version of My Favorite Things? We didn’t! But we do now.

A writing partner will ride shotgun in your musical time machine.

System Is Working As Intended

For the Ghost Series, we made a very deliberate choice to get all four books figured out before writing any prose for the first one. Our approach is to consider the project as one big story. Ideas that arise later on in the process might necessitate laying some groundwork in earlier books, and we aimed to give ourselves the most flexibility to do that without getting stuck in an infinite loop of rewrites.

Without an over-arching plan, without making lots of decisions up front, what would happen is we’d wrap up Book 1 and send it out for feedback, and then meanwhile we’d be working on Book 2 and discover a bunch of shiny new ideas that don’t match what we’ve written already. Meaning when our beta readers send us their comments, half of them have been obviated upon arrival. And once we started in on Book 3, the same situation would replay — only twice as bad, because now we’re trying to retroactively account for stuff in two prior books.

Ask us how we know. (Never mind; we’re about to tell you anyway.)

Our previous series grew organically. We’d write a book, and then discover that there was more story to tell using that world and those characters. So we’d write another book, and then another. So far, that progression has always led to trilogies. In one case, we did actually plan out books 2 & 3 in tandem rather than separately. We were starting to get the message even then. With the Ghost Series being a tetralogy, the benefits of advance planning are multiplied because so are the impacts of doing it inadequately.

So, we did a lot of planning. Lots of writing sessions that produced no writing per se.

At this point, we are working on Book 2. And so far? No major revisions have come up for Book 1. Several minor changes, and we’ll surely have more tinkering to deal with. But it’s likely to all be small-scale stuff like which tarot card gets drawn, rather than anything huge like swapping which characters are living and which are ghosts.

A writing partner is someone who helps with all the pre-writing as much as with generating pages of manuscript.