Tagged: As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1

Mic Drop

Late last night, Kent finished the final scene of As Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1, bringing an end to our first draft. Sort of.

While we have technically reached the end of the prose portion of the program (after something like 15 months), there are some decorative flourishes we still need to add. Jen made a good start on the epigraphs we like to put at the beginning of each chapter, but we probably don’t have enough of those yet. We won’t know exactly how many we need until we actually smoosh the scenes together into chapters. So that’s something else we have to do. And as we wrote, we marked a few places that we know need attention, so now we also need to go back and attend to those. But that’s more of a second draft thing.

Let’s not lose sight of the important part: the first draft is complete! Celebratory beverages all around!

A writing partner is someone with whom to bask in your accomplishments (and savor your victory meal).

Dropping Like Flies

Kent has been on a roll, knocking out at least one scene each work session. We knew this section would go fairly quickly (it’s an exciting high-stakes action sequence), but we’re a little stunned by the blinding speed we’re achieving. A lot of the credit goes to Kent, but Jen’s been pulling her weight, too. She jumped ahead and picked up a weighty scene after all the whiz-bang pyrotechnics were played out, and now she’s taking another hop forward.

This approach, with Kent chasing behind Jen and filling in the gaps, is much more efficient than playing leapfrog would have been. If we’d tried to alternate our way through, we would have spent as much time talking about exactly how the pieces lined up as we would doing the writing. This way any continuity errors can be blamed on Kent alone, saving us tons of time ;)

All that to say, we have fewer than a dozen scenes to go. (Eight. We have eight scenes left. At least until Kent’s fingers hit the keyboard for an hour.) Those remaining scenes will mostly be longer, and our pace will slow, but the end is nigh! We’re excited to see the light at the end of this tunnel, and all those clichés. It had been a long time since we wrote a novel, and it’s very gratifying to know we’re still capable of doing it. With any luck, the next one will go a little quicker.

A writing partner is someone who plunges your smoking fingers into a bowl of ice when you’ve been typing too fast.

You Know What They Say About Small Packages

As we work on the climax of As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1, we’re finding that the scene lengths are suddenly shorter. This is entirely expected, because setting up the dominoes takes a lot longer than knocking them down. It’s good for morale, because we feel like we’re writing faster.

We say we aren’t surprised that these scenes are shorter, but a more honest take is that we were only surprised briefly. There was a moment of confusion about it, because the fact that this is what everything’s been leading up to kind — it’s the biggest big deal in the book — implies that these scenes should take up a disproportionate page count. Also, there’s a lot going on! These are mostly action scenes. Again, that means it’s a good thing that they’re concise, but they feel so weighty that their brevity is counterintuitive. That mental disconnect, that an event’s magnitude within the story isn’t related to how many words it takes to describe it, is a lesson that we seem to relearn on each project.

A writing partner is someone to get excited with during the exciting part.

Novel in a Bottle

As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1 mostly occurs in one locale. About 80% of the scenes take place in that spot. We briefly considered making that the only setting we would use, but chose not to impose that restriction on ourselves.

It would be very hard to make it work. Not that “it’s hard” is always a good reason not to do things, but this would be a giant amount of work. Even if all we needed to do was eliminate 20% of the scenes (or figure out how to move them to the right setting) that would take a lot of effort. But it would be worse than that, because we would have to change things around in other scenes too in order to keep everything lined up. This book was not planned with “only one setting” in mind, and doesn’t really lend itself to the treatment.

There are certain types of story that lend themselves to certain types of constraints. For instance, mysteries often work very well in first-person narration. The satisfaction comes from feeling the solution come together — all the clues must be assembled into one picture, and it’s the picture seen by the narrator. But there’s not much epic fantasy that’s told in the first person. Having just one viewpoint available greatly limits the bandwidth for world building.

When only one locale is available, you get a bottle episode. Some stories don’t have to stray beyond one place. Strangers thrown together at a remote motel is a standard trope. But many stories do want some room to run. There’s a reason why “strangers coming and going yell exposition at each other across the lobby” isn’t such a well-known setup.

A writing partner is someone you don’t mind sharing one location with.

We Have Big Plans… And They’ll Have to Get Bigger

If a little planning is good, then a lot of planning should be great, right? And you know what would be best of all? All. The. Planning.

Except, no. There is such a thing as too much planning. It’s not a catastrophe if it happens, but it can create some headaches. As we recently discovered. (Spoiler: we’d say the problems you get with overplanning are better ones to have than what you get with underplanning.)

As regular blog readers know, we outlined all four Ghost Books at once. We wanted to know where the plot is going, and be able to do nifty thematic stuff and foreshadowing. Great. In the process, we did end up creating a problem for ourselves, which we’ve discovered now that we’re closing in on the end of book one.

There’s a very fancy prop — think priceless magical heirloom — that gets used prominently in the first book and then is never mentioned at all in the outlines of the later volumes. We think we’ve figured out how it happened. During the outlining, we thought of this item as more of an aesthetic element, something that added spice to a few early scenes but wouldn’t really be missed later on. During the creation of the actual prose, it became nifty-keen in ways we hadn’t anticipated, becoming something that we couldn’t just stop mentioning. Anyway, we caught it and we can easily (we hope) tweak the future outlines to factor it in.

Given that what we’re saying is we missed some stuff, it might not be obvious how this  represents overplanning. But it was. We just planned out a few too many books all at once. We didn’t apply to the outlining process the lessons we’ve learned about stubs. There’s a reason we do our stubs in batches, which is so that we can course-correct as we go. So, now we’ll have to course-correct anyway. No big deal. Much easier to fix outlines than completed manuscripts!

The take-away is this: there’s an optimal amount of planning, and it’s probably better to do a little too much than not enough.

Sometimes A Writer’s Best Tool Is A Shoehorn

Even with a process that’s as overengineered as ours, sometimes things get missed. Despite all the meticulous planning, despite the extra set of eyes, we sometimes end up needing to retrofit something into the prose that we considered finished.

Now, a lot of sources of writing advice would say “never look back,” and that in such cases you should just make a note about it and keep going. There is the danger of working endlessly without ever actually reaching the end, that polishing Act I can become one’s way of procrastinating about finishing the story. Here at SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises, LLC, we don’t let that worry us too much. We have plenty of other ways to procrastinate!

Without giving anything away, there is a late event in the outline that we’ve known about all along, but what we overlooked was a bit of specific groundwork to support it. Once we decided on what those missing details should look like, Jen made a stub for it. Only this stub wasn’t numbered, because we didn’t know exactly where we’d be putting it. Figuring out where that would be, and then wedging open a spot so it could fit, turned out to be the trickiest part. Kent looked at the completed scenes that were from the proper POV and involved the right locales and so on. Our game plan was to just inject a paragraph or three into one of those. That didn’t turn out to be feasible, so it became its own scene. Which meant we needed to frame it, give the POV character a motivation other than “make this exposition sound casual.” Which led to a smoother arc for that character.

We certainly could have left it for the second draft. But, that late event is kind of a big deal so it’s good for our peace of mind to know that it really does work. If we’d been like a shark and just kept swimming forward, we would have been writing tons of stuff on the basis of an untested assumption that it would end up working out. So if it hadn’t, if we had somehow goofed up our timeline and there was no way things could work like we wanted… Well, best not to contemplate such a universe.

A writing partner is someone who helps you keep moving ahead, but will also go back with you if that’s what it takes.

“Most of the Time, You’re Right” He Admitted

Outlines are good. Stubs are good. Something we probably don’t mention enough on here is that the invisible in-between step is also good. A lot of realizations happen while converting the outline into stubs. We realize that certain scenes aren’t really needed, and we realize that there are gaps we need to fill. During outlining it might have seemed crucial to include the fact that Muriel goes for a manicure, but that doesn’t mean we’re obligated to create a scene just so we can show that.

Now, because building stubs is Jen’s job, she’s the one who usually comes to such realizations. And because she’s an awesome writing partner, she runs her intended changes past Kent first. Which is great. But Kent does find himself trying to strike a delicate balance during those chats.

It’s always a safe bet that Jen’s idea is a good one and will improve the novel. Therefore, Kent nearly always ends up agreeing with what she’s suggesting. The trouble is, when someone seems to automatically agree with whatever you say it feels like they’re not really listening. Kent likes to demonstrate that he’s listening and show some investment in the outcome. He likes to have an opinion. But overdoing things in that direction causes problems as well. It’s not that there’s really such a fine line between pushover and pompous ass, but at times it can feel that way.

It’s always good to be able to articulate why you like something, not just, “It was good.” (This is good to keep in mind for critique as well.) “You’re right, we don’t need the trip to the salon — showing Muriel admiring her nails later conveys it with one line instead of a whole scene.”

A writing partner is someone who listens to their writing partner.

Eerily Close To The Conclusion…

…of the first draft of As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel Number One.

Jen is working on the final batch of stubs, which will take us through the climax and then out the other side to the denouement. Kent meanwhile has been writing the scenes that lead right up to the climax. We’re probably around 75% of the way through, which maybe doesn’t qualify as “eerily close” but it does feel like we’ve hit the home stretch.

The manuscript’s word count is just shy of 112,000. Our list of things that we need to punch up and/or mention more often stands at about two dozen, so it’ll be interesting to see how big the second draft ends up being. We expected these books to be smaller than our usual, in fact we worried about them coming out too small on account of the series being broken up into four rather than three novels. It’s looking like we had nothing to worry about!

A writing partner is someone to make the journey with, however long it turns out to be.

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Travelog…

We know you’re all desperate to see more of our vacation snaps, but you’ll have to wait one more week because we have an exciting announcement: As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1 has passed the 100,000 word milestone! (101,313 to be exact.) We plan to pop the champagne tonight since we don’t generally work on Fridays. The advice is to write drunk and edit sober, but why waste the fun on a work session?

It Was… Soap Poisoning

Turning our outlines into manuscripts requires an intermediate step (which we’ve talked about a lot in the past) – stubs. Stubs can be seen as super rough first drafts or as scene synopses. They take the story’s skeleton and fatten it up a bit, to give an idea of how the dots will look when they’re all connected. (Who doesn’t love a mixed metaphor?) When Jen was working on the latest batch of stubs for As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1, she made an uncomfortable discovery. We’d reached a part of the plot where a lot of interpersonal shenanigans happen, and if she wasn’t careful, things would take quite a turn into the soap-operatic.

All of the relationship stuff needs to happen so that folks will be in their correct positions later on to keep the plot rolling as planned. We just didn’t want anyone — readers or characters — to forget that this is a ghost story. Spooky stuff needs to happen from time to time to maintain the eerie tone.

It wasn’t obvious from the outline just how long this stretch of non-spectral stuff would be. It looked like only a bullet point or two, until Jen started to unpack it all. “Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord get married” doesn’t seem like it will necessarily need multiple scenes until you remember that they first have to book a venue and hire a DJ, and that those activities are very challenging for them because they are dogs.

By the time it was all sketched out, it came to something like 10 scenes where the ghosts just had no jobs, and that’s too many scenes in a row. Jen sat with the problem for several work sessions, moving the pieces around on the board and folding ingredients in from adjacent sections until the batter was smooth and had a pleasingly marbled appearance. (We use a standmixer to process our metaphors. Saves time.) The weird and eerie elements of the story wouldn’t get lost while the humans dealt with their assorted interpersonal crises.

A writing partner is someone who’s a strategizing chef in the Writing Cave and an osteopathic artist in, well, also the Writing Cave.