Tagged: Divided Man Series

Unlocking the Door Versus Finding the Key

r-avatarOur plots are complex. We strive to get our readers following the flow and being invested in the characters, but we don’t agonize over whether they can recite back all the beats. It’s nice to see people getting most of them, though. We’re not monsters.

In the reader feedback for the third book in our trilogy, we saw a clear trend that certain specific events got away from people. Characters end up making choices based on things that were opaque to most of our audience, which is the same thing as characters just doing crazy stuff without any apparent motivation. Not good. Jen and Kent agreed about where the trouble was, and agreed that it was something that really needed fixing.

The comments came up fairly late in the manuscript, but clearly the place to deal with the problem was earlier. The topic should also be revisited a few times, letting different characters’ impressions shape what the readers learn, so later on it’s just something they know and it doesn’t need bulky explanations. Again, Kent and Jen were in total agreement on all of this.

So we started talking specifics and suddenly were talking past each other. There was a major disconnect in how we were viewing the problem, of which we had hitherto been unaware. It was frustrating as hell and it took a while to diagnose why communicating about this issue had suddenly become so difficult. We threw metaphors at each other until we finally got it sorted out.

There were actually two issues.

Basically, the characters need to unlock a special (and very complicated) door. The readers were asking “what’s this supposed to do?” Whereas Kent perceived their confusion as relating to how the key works, Jen saw them being puzzled over the purpose of getting the door open. When we launched into our discussion of “the” issue, we each jumped directly to how we wanted to address it, assuming we were in agreement about what “it” was, so naturally our suggestions made no sense to each other.

In the end, it was a case of two heads being better than one. Together, we were seeing twice as much opportunity to enrich the experience of the story. Along the way, it was a case of the left hand not knowing what the right was talking about. Working in a partnership can offer fantastic advantages, but it adds complexity by requiring communication. A good partner will stick with the discussion.

One Is The Loneliest Number

r-avatarHow do solo writers do it?

Our evenings lately have been spent sprawled on the big leather sofa with the laptop and a small mountain of meaningfully marked-up copies of our manuscript. One of us (usually Jen) wades through all of the critiques while the other (usually Kent) mans the laptop, adding comments and making edits to our master copy. Jen interprets all the line-edits and deciphers everyone’s handwritten comments, directing Kent to the proper parts of the manuscript so that together we can discuss the proposed changes.

It’s slow going, and we generally only manage one or two chapters per night. Each of those chapters is gone over with a fine tooth comb (hey baby, that is one fine tooth-comb you’ve got there!) four or five times as we consider the feedback from all of our beta-readers. Working with a partner makes something like this bearable, oftentimes even enjoyable. It’s hard for us to imagine this part of the process as a solo author. Who do you talk to about whether a suggestion or complaint is valid? Who do you high-five when a passage works exactly as you planned? Whose shoulder do you cry on when a passage doesn’t work at all? And most important: who do you send for snacks and refills of fortifying beverages?

The writer’s life can be a very solitary one, but with a writing partner it doesn’t have to be.

Critically Distant

r-avatarNovels #4 and #5 are both in resting phases, which gives us a chance to circle back to the final volume of the trilogy. It’s been sitting patiently for quite a while, and this seems like a good opportunity to consolidate the feedback from our most recent critiquers. Of course, we want to know our own minds about the text before we try to make sense of what other people said about it, so we’re doing a read-through.

This wasn’t supposed to be a difficult thing. It wasn’t supposed to stir up disagreements.

A perennial challenge for authors is getting an “honest read” of their own stuff. Knowing what’s going to happen, and knowing what’s supposed to be symbolic, gets in the way of appreciating it the way a “real” reader would. That’s one reason it’s important to let work rest. What seems to have happened to Kent, in this instance, is that he failed to put aside his anticipation of certain later events in this book, but exceeded recommended dosages of forgetfulness about how the previous books led up to it. As a result, he raised awkward questions that baffled Jen, and the conversation wasn’t productive. But we pushed through, which is good because otherwise we might not have reached the point where Jen saw what was happening and steered Kent back on course.

Now everything seems to be going much better. There is a bit of a hangover though: Kent feels spooked. It’s a get-back-on-the-horse situation, and that’s what he’s doing, but his confidence isn’t yet fully restored.

Working solo, a writer might wreck a good manuscript trying to fix illusory problems. The chances that two of you will be having the same kind of off day are pretty slim (hopefully!) so you can be confident that anything you agree on is a valid concern.

Ya Gotta Start Somewhere

r-avatarNovels #4 and #5 presented us with an unaccustomed obstacle: getting to know a new cast. Over the course of writing and revising the trilogy, we became intimately familiar with the minds and personalities of those characters. We were used to having the characters’ voices be second nature, so the need to readjust took us entirely by surprise.

This is a particular issue for Rune Skelley novels, because we use a very tight third-person viewpoint. Nothing is presented that the POV character doesn’t know, and that character’s worldview informs choices of adjectives and phrasing. The narration adopts the dialect of the viewpoint character.

Beginning the new books was like impersonating a total stranger, at first. It was a dilemma, because to write the scenes we needed to know the characters, and to get to know them we had to spend time with them, i.e., write the scenes. Which brings us to the title of this post. Ya gotta start somewhere.

With Novel #5, the science novel, we started at the beginning, and it wasn’t too long before the new characters became as real to us as the previous cast. Of course, the parts written earliest had the least character voice, but that’s what revision is for. The opening scenes got some retooling to let the POV character, the protagonist, shine through.

Mostly.

There are still a few pockets of “author voice” in the narration. (Kent’s supposed to deal with them tonight, so maybe by the time you read this they’ll be gone.) These mini info-dumps escaped our scrutiny until Jen hit the line edits. They have natural camouflage, because they sound comfortably familiar to us. They sound like Kent.

One of the hardest things for a writer to do is step back far enough to see the work honestly. Beta readers or critiquers are invaluable, but having someone else direct you to the troublesome paragraph is only useful if you can then see the problem, see through its camouflage. Working with a partner helps tremendously, because there’s an extra set of eyes.

Madness In Our Method, But Not Like Back Then

r-avatarWe recently devoted an entire meeting of our critique group to the Rune Skelley Method. Jen and Kent brought the rainbow, and a hard-copy of the outline, and a few sample stubs. Our fellow authors were keen to hear details of how we use all these components in our process. How we do things, of course, is not necessarily what will work best for you. (But details are available at the links above, if you’re interested.)

The key is that we have a process.

You know you’re supposed to have an outline. You know that the more you road-test your plot before you start writing prose, the less likely you’ll get stuck. You know you’re supposed to get enough sleep, and eat your veggies, and not run with scissors. We certainly hope you’re heeding at least some of that advice, but knowing what you should do and doing it consistently are not the same thing.

That’s another hidden strength of writing in a partnership: you can’t get away with winging it, which forces discipline upon you. It makes you actually do the things you know you’re supposed to.

The conversation at our critique meeting spanned the entire Rune Skelley career. We didn’t always have a defined process — we didn’t know we wouldn’t get away with winging it, and wing it we did. We ran, with and without scissors. We wrote much of our first novel from inspiration, letting the characters find their ways into more and more trouble with little supervision. It built up effortlessly into a top-heavy mess. There was no outline, just a vague sort of mission statement for how it was all supposed to end. For a while, it ended in tears and an abandoned manuscript. We had to put it aside for a year. A year. We just stopped writing it. When we did go back, we largely started over. It took a long time and a gigantic amount of work to figure that book out.

What we know now is that all those impulsive maneuvers our characters came up with, which we spent months transcribing into elaborate prose, should have been explored in brainstorming sessions where they could be be debugged quickly, and where potentially better alternatives could more easily be considered. By doing all the exploration in long-form text (written longhand, BTW) we gave ourselves a huge disincentive to think about changing it. So when it became clear that we didn’t have a way forward from where we were, that something had to change, we needed that year off before we could face the task.

In contrast, Novel #5 worked the first time. There’s still work to be done, but it came out the proper overall shape in one go. We devoted a considerable amount of time up front to documenting what was supposed to happen, and fleshing out the setting, and analyzing the characters’ psyches. Considerable time, but way less than a year. And we didn’t have cry about it.

Genre Unconventional

r-avatarWhen writers look back at their old output, they can experience a variety of feelings. If it’s really old stuff, then they’ve probably forgotten all about it and can see it almost like a “real reader.” Touring through all the posts on the Skelleyverse recently, we got to ride the ups and downs of seeing so much of our writing as if for the first time. We also discovered some things about ourselves as writers.

While our novels stick to a certain sub-set of science fiction, our prompted posts inhabit many genres. We added tags for the most frequently used, including romance and horror. And we added the gonzo tag, exclusively (so far) for Kent’s use. Either he routinely gets stuck with the more difficult stichomancy prompts, or Jen is just a little bit better at beating hers into coherency.

Exactly what kind of science fiction is found in a Rune Skelley novel?

Our stories aren’t set on alien planets or at distant points in time. Monsters and wizards don’t stroll the streets; the laws of physics apply, as far as the general populace can tell. But there’s a secret ingredient, something sliding under the veneer of normalcy. The protagonist is (un)lucky enough to be aware of this hidden reality, which is of course unique to each Rune Skelley universe. These things aren’t hidden as in being buried or masked. They’re intertwined with the familiar environment. In some cases, there’s no way for the protagonists to share the secret even if they want to. Other times, protecting that secret is the protagonists’ main goal in life.

This setup saves us a bit of labor on traditional world-building, because we don’t need to tell you what color the sky is. But the trade-off for that lies in needing more demonstrations of the deeper nature’s implications.

We’ve alluded a few times to our recent project being further toward the hard end of the scifi scale. The main reason it ended up that way has to do with what type of secret ingredient its world needed. In the trilogy and in the music novel, the special nature of the story worlds is a paradigm shift, an everything-you-know-is-wrong proposition. But in the latest book, it’s a what-if question on a less cosmic scale, but with staggering consequences. The tale’s plausibility relies more on technical points of known science than the others.

None of which is meant to suggest we have any kind of problem with other sub-genres, or other genres for that matter. But if you peruse the prompts for examples of how we cope with those other forms, you might see why we like to stick to what we know best.

Creative Drought

r-avatarWe’ve reached the point in the lifecycle of every Rune Skelley project where we have to put the manuscript aside and do other things. Through our years writing together we’ve identified this as our main weak spot, and we’ve developed a system for dealing with it without losing all forward momentum.

I imagine that every writer encounters problems of the same ilk, where you’ve written all you can and there is no more creative spark. A coauthor can often help cover for minor bouts of writer’s block, as we talked about before. But sometimes you both deplete your compositional resources at the same time. When we first started writing, this led to us walking away from the project for months at a time while our batteries recharged. These days we have several novels that are in various stages of being finished, and we try to shuffle between them as needed. If we can’t write anything new on Project 4, well Project 3 needs to reread and edited.

This time is a little different though. We hadn’t quite hit the wall when we decided to put the novel aside. The excuses were creeping in, and the output on any particular evening was waning, but we were both still chugging along, noses to the grindstone. Life intervened, tossing us a huge project that requires a lot of time and focus. Apart from attending our weekly critique group and updating this blog, we haven’t done anything writing related for nearly a month. It’s a very unusual position to find ourselves in.

The outside project is starting to wind down. We’re not ready to set quill to paper again just yet, but hope to get back to it in another week or two. And we hope that having a partner will ease the transition back to the writing life.

Onward and Upward

r-avatarIt seems like every time we write a novel, we hit a point  in the plot where things get thorny. On our first one, which we began without an outline, we got completely derailed for about six months.

Kent is working on a theory (because that’s what he does) that what we’re running into is somehow a fundamental aspect of big, complex projects. He mutters about how it’s like spinning plates, but he wants to come up with something more original. Whether it’s a universal thing or specific to the Rune Skelley experience, it’s certainly a consistent fact of writing life for us.

It’s been less of a problem on our recent novels, though, for two reasons. One: now we’ve got a good process based on tools like outlines and stubs. Two: we’ve learned how to work more effectively as a team.

We’re at that point again, in case you were wondering. It’s the timeline that’s turned into a thorny thicket this time. Lots of throughlines intersect, and it’s a real puzzle to get them not to conflict. Jen is the Goddess of Puzzles and has this one nearly solved, but it’s a huge task. Progress on the manuscript has barely been affected though, because while Jen weaves our characters’ trajectories on her cosmic loom, Kent can keep working on prosifying the existing stubs.

Teamwork! It keeps us moving onward and upward.

Brave New World

The time has finally come for us to start the actual writing process. We’re finding it slow going, even with all the preliminary work we did. The first three novels we wrote were a trilogy. By the time we got to the third one, we knew the characters better than we knew ourselves. It was dead easy to find their voices and dive in.

After the trilogy, though, we wrote a standalone novel, and had this same problem at the beginning. We just don’t know the characters well enough yet to feel totally at ease writing in their voices.

This is one place where writing with a partner can make things more difficult. If either of us were doing this solo, we could just wing it and see what happens. With two of us involved, and wanting everything to feel seamless, we both feel a little inhibited.

Because Jen is cruel, she makes Kent take on the first scene. It’s up to him to introduce the narrative voice, and the main character’s voice, too. Jen sits there and watches him type, because until she sees what he’s done she can’t write anything. The fear is that we will both write something great, but that the pieces won’t mesh. Instead of chocolate and peanut butter coming together to make a delicious peanut butter cup, we dread ending up with salmon bonbons. Either the fish or the ganache would be delectable on their own, but together they’re something the loser made on Iron Chef.

And so we tiptoe around each other, each of us hesitantly writing scenes and vignettes. When we share them, it is always with a healthy dose of Remember This Is A First Draft and I Don’t Know If This Works.

Fortunately, this weirdness is confined to the character voice. We know for sure that the actions and details contained in a scene will be right, and next week we’ll tell you how.

Minutiae

We’re getting down to the bitter end with our edits on the third book in the trilogy. We’ve done all the big things like deleting scenes and resequencing chapters. Characters that only had one or two point-of-view scenes now find themselves with none, relegated to the background like a mere extra in a movie. Descriptions have been expanded, motivations clarified, plot points strengthened, dialog perfected. The ending has tripled in size (Now with moar happenings!).

What is left?! I hear you cry.

Weasel words, that’s what’s left.

What are weasel words? You cry yet again.

Weasel words are meaningless little words that clutter up your prose. Every author has certain crutch words that pop up, seemingly while you’re not looking, like dandelions. In our case these crutches are mainly qualifying words. Given free rein, our sentences would all look like this:

Apparently he actually perhaps might have just wanted to.

And so we use the Find function of our word processor to search out these evil little weasels and banish them.* We talk about every single one. Yes, it’s tedious, but when we’re done the prose is much snappier. It sparkles like morning dew.

What does any of this have to do with collaboration?! I hear you cry one final time.

Well, until you have a half-hour-long argument over whether or not a particular sentence needs “had” to truly connote when in time and space the action occurred in relation to the currently happening story actions, you can’t truly call yourself a co-author.

* This technique also works well for ferreting out passive voice. Color all instances of “was” red, and, when you’re done crying, your novel will thank you.