Tagged: As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1

A Spooky Realization

Wait, what? Ghost stories are supposed to be eerie? Maybe even scary? Why weren’t we told this at the beginning!

We kid. Sorta. We’ve been happily getting to know the characters and exploring the plot and devising the physics engine that will run the whole thing, and not worrying too much about genre conventions. It is coming along great, we gotta say. It’s just that every couple of conversations, one of us will point out that our goal when we set off was to “write a ghost story,” and remind us that there’ll be an expectation of more than just alluding to the occasional spectral visage in the fog.

So we’re putting more focus on the atmosphere for a while. The story will be a Rune Skelley tale first and foremost, and a ghost story also. This is no different from the approach we’ve always taken with science fiction, but we never seemed to need reminders about putting in enough sci-fi.

We’re also upping the amount of horror in our diet. We’ve never really gone in for the slasher stuff or heavy gore, but there’s so much great material out there with a more cerebral take. Thinky can still be scary!

A writing partner is someone to hold your hand during the scary parts.

Life Imitates Art That We Haven’t Even Made Yet

As loyal readers know, we are ably assisted in our fiction by Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord, for it is they who demand nightly treks around the fiefdom, and those excursions give us much opportunity to converse about our various projects.

 

We do these walks rather late, mostly. After dark. We take flashlights with us, but unless a car is coming or there’s some other reason, we don’t turn them on. To really set the mood, people in our neighborhood have begun decorating for Halloween, and this year they’ve really brought their A-game. And, the project that’s occupied our attention on these night-time promenades of late is the Ghost Story, in all its otherworldly splendor.

A few nights ago we had an unexpectedly stimulating ghost-talk walk. About halfway around the neighborhood, as we chatted about ways in which beings from other dimensions could make their presence known, a blinding white light suddenly appeared fifty feet ahead of us. It floated about six feet above the ground, and held us for a few seconds before turning red and then moving laterally, crossing to the opposite side of the street. Still eerily hovering several feet up. There was no sound.

Then came the bark of a small dog. A gentle human voice told the dog everything was alright. It was our neighbor, wearing a headlamp as he engaged in his own canid-equipped nocturnal peregrinations.

A writing partner is someone to share a briefly terrifying but inspiring encounter.

It Has 1,001 Uses Around The Home

We’re still devoting our dog walks to conversation about the Ghost Story, and focusing on the early portion of the tale. Enlarging what we know about the setting and the characters.

Something we established fairly early was the existence of a special substance. We even gave it a name, and tossed out a few ideas about what it might look like. And then we didn’t really mention it again for a couple months, until just this past week.

Well! When we revisited this material and started brainstorming its properties, we hit a gusher! There are so many possible ways we could use it to twist reality, and not only are they just prima-facie really cool and fun, and they reinforce the desired atmosphere, but this stuff seems to give off plot like a form of radioactivity. We’re taking scads of notes!

A writing partner is someone to do mad science with.

Strange Corners

Now that we’ve taken the Ghost Story all the way through to an ending (of sorts) it’s time to circle back to the beginning and take a second look at the people and events that kick the whole thing off. And it’s turning out that these people are much more interesting than we realized.

It’s like this is a place that we’d driven past on the freeway, which allowed us to spot a few landmarks but not really get the feel for it. So, this time we took the exit so we can tool around some of the neighborhoods. It’s allowing us to look around lots of corners, and we’re seeing unexpected sights down many of these side streets. On our next visit, we’ll get out of the car and wander around, really soak up the atmosphere.

Our main point of original inspiration for the Ghost Story was, as it happened, characters who figure in the middle-to-late portion of the saga, so as we sketched in their history it led to sketching in the histories of the preceding generation, and then sketching in their ancestors’ stories. So stuff was getting pretty sketchy.

Thing is, what we knew initially about those earlier characters was just what our later characters knew of them — or, thought they knew. Once we focused on them we discovered  that the most interesting moments from their lives were the ones they were least likely to tell their nieces and nephews about. They tell us, though. If we give them the chance.

The biggest worry at this point is that the timeline will keep growing backwards and we’ll never be able to pick a starting moment for the story. When all the history was sketchy, it didn’t feel like we had to incorporate much of it. But now it’s more vivid, and we want to tell that part of the story. Which means we need to sketch in a deeper layer of backstory, which we’ll want to enrich, and then the temptation will be to tell that part, too. And deeper down the well we could tumble.

A writing partner is someone who’ll go deep with you, but who’ll also guide you back to the surface when it’s time.

Do You Prefer Tetralogy or Quadrilogy?

Both terms refer to a series of four books, and it seems like that might be where our ghost story is headed.

Our writing output so far consists of three trilogies. A trilogy of trilogies, if you will. It’s all very tidy. But now that the prose outline for our spectral saga is nearing completion we’re faced with a story that seems to want to break neatly into four pieces. And we’re not sure how we feel about that.

Our main work sessions are currently devoted to editing the Science Novels. Since we’re only brainstorming this spooky bad boy part-time, we still have a lot of detail to fill in, but the parts that we do know (and are quite attached to) include four momentous events. The sort of events that would make resounding, satisfying finales. It’s certainly possible that one of them could be adjusted and made into a tentpole moment, the sort of mini-climax that shows up in the middle of a novel to keep readers on the edge of their seats, but we’re hesitant to jump right to that.

We’re still exploring the story and interrogating the secondary characters for exciting backstories. This new story world is expansive and the last thing we want to do is hem ourselves in prematurely. For now we’ll keep talking during our nightly dog walks, and keep expanding everything. By the time we’re ready to make this project our main focus, we’ll have oceans of material to work with. At that point we’ll be better situated to tell whether there’s enough material to fill the spaces between those four big events and make our first Tetra/Quadrilogy.

Let’s hope we don’t have to figure out the word for a series of five.

Ghosts Have Become Less Theoretical

By which we mean, our Ghost Story is becoming more concrete. A preliminary prose outline is taking shape. Jen has taken point on this initiative, and is so far going at it bare-brained. Later, we’ll peruse all our notes and use them to fill in where appropriate.

At this point, the outline covers roughly 25% of the saga that we’ve generated and recorded in a mixture of typed and hand-written notes. The thing about the notes is, they reflect the chronology of our brainstorming sessions, not the saga itself. And they’re riddled with continuity bugs, because we’re still brainstorming.

Even at this early stage, though, arranging our facts into this more refined structure is providing us with new insights. (Insights about fuzzy plot logic, sadly.) Brainstorming is fun, but to do it right you have to be sort of willfully negligent about how any of the shiny ideas could be useful or if they even fit together. So, after several weeks of brainstorming, we’d become a bit attached to a vision of the narrative that’s just not feasible. Oops. It’s much harder to persist in magical thinking when all the pieces are lined up in the correct order. That’s what this prose outline has already begun to help us with. And it’s much easier to put something on the docket for the next dog walk once you know it’s there (or, not there, as is more often the case).

A writing partner is someone who helps you mend the holes in your plot.

Goose Wrench Revisited

Our writing armory is fully stocked.

Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to…

Nah. During brainstorming we mainly use the Monkey Wrench and the Goose Wrench. The Monkey Wrench is the tool we reach for when things are going a little to smoothly for our characters. It helps us find ways of causing them trouble. The Goose Wrench is a little more nebulous.

The very nature of brainstorming is for things to be loose. There are no bad ideas (except when there are). Use the Monkey Wrench to your heart’s content and throw everything you can think of into the mix. But eventually you have to start making decisions. Each decision narrows the field of options that can follow, which is what you want. You’re only going to be writing a single narrative (unless you’re doing something experimental), so you need a single plot. At each decision point you make a choice, then you get out your Goose Wrench and tighten it down. But not too far. Until you’re very close to done with your outline, you want to leave a little wiggle room. You want to leave things loosey goosey, which is where the Goose Wrench gets its name. As you continue working, things will start to take their final shape, but until then you want to have some slack so you can take some unexpected turns. And sometimes you’ll discover that you’ve written yourself into a corner (except that since this is all during prewriting, you’ve saved yourself a ton of time and work). You might need to go back and rethink some of your earlier choices, like flipping back in a Choose Your Own Adventure Book, and choosing a different path.

As we talk about the Ghost Novels, we’re making liberal use of the Goose Wrench. How many squid attacks will there be? We originally thought there would be three, but maybe it would be better to change things up and make the middle one an ambush by sharks with frickin’ laser beams. Keep it fresh.

A writing partner is someone who helps you choose your adventure.

Everyone Is the Hero of Their Own Backstory

Backstory can be tricky to manage. How much of it to show, and how to present it, are thorny questions. It’s really a matter of drawing a line between those things that you as an author need to know, and those that the reader needs. What goes into that second category is the difficult answer to come up with. Some say that the reader needs no backstory whatsoever, while others say it all depends.

But we’re going to focus on the other side of the equation today. So, which things must you, the author, know about your characters’ backstories? All of them. All the things.

Our approach is to flesh out everybody’s backstories during our preliminary phase, which mostly happens while walking the dogs. (If they get bored with all the exposition, they never complain.) What we’ve learned is that there’s a lot of value in knowing the detailed history of even a very minor character. Naturally, it helps us create vivid depictions, and it allows all the cast members to show up ready for work. But in addition to these fairly obvious gains, digging into secondary and even tertiary characters’ pasts has produced a few interesting outcomes.

  • Minor characters have morphed into major characters.
  • Minor characters’ peccadilloes have answered questions about major characters.
  • Important world-building notes have emerged.
  • We’ve spotted useful plot connections and subplots.

Just remember: now that you know Marcel got in trouble when he was in third grade for trying to cheat on a test, you’re not obligated to tell anybody else.

That Frisson of Excitement

There are many reasons it’s great to write with a partner. We talk a lot on this blog about the practical benefits, but what’s really best about writing with the right partner? It’s fun!

The Ghost Story is in a very preliminary stage right now, so it’s pretty much all brainstorming. It’s fun to make stuff up even when you do it alone, but having someone to respond to your ideas and raise suggestions that you’d never have thunk up makes it a lot more exciting.

On a recent canine-mandated forced march around the village, we were developing Ghost Story ideas and Jen suggested something really cool involving minerals. Kent put a bit of a spin on it, which prompted a further modification back from Jen, and we went back and forth like that until we finished the lap.

And it felt so freakin’ awesome. Yeah, yeah — stronger ideas, teamwork, synergy — but the point of this installment isn’t that collaboration leads to better work. The point is that it makes work a lot more enjoyable.

The right writing partner is someone who makes you want to write more.

A Ghostly Rainbow

It’s hard to refine and improve on something without a sense of its shape. So, to help us visualize our stories we lay them out on multicolored paper squares. It’s become an important part of our process, and some of them have been 15 or 20 feet long.

Fittingly, the first take on a rainbow for the Ghost Story is as pale as bleached bones. And — so far — it fits on the dining room table. Rather than festive notepaper squares, this one uses index cards (which make Kent uneasy, but in this case that just helps set the mood).

The main reason Jen set it up was so we could look at the timeline. It’s a multigenerational epic with a sizable cast (which seems to grow every time we take the dogs for a walk) so there’s a lot to keep track of, and doing it all in our heads was becoming a challenge. We had to make sure that when we put all the events in order, they actually were, you know, in order. Also, we needed a gut-check on how old everybody was when it was time for them to do Significant Things.

So, yeah, technically this wasn’t a rainbow. We didn’t refract the plot threads into different colors and line them up in parallel with each other. It isn’t time for that just yet. But when it is, we’ll give it as much space as it needs so we can bring our ghost tale to life.