Tagged: As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1

Ghostly Progress Update

We are back to actual writing again on Untitled Ghost Novel Number One. The new batch of stubs will take us up through some significant turns in the plot, with new characters arriving and a few new avenues of conflict opening up. Plus, of course, hauntings.

The first thing we did when they were ready is make Kent read them aloud. We discussed them to make sure there were no glaring holes that should be filled before moving on to the next step. (There weren’t.) Then we divvied up the first few of them. Sometimes we both have our eye on a particular scene, and sometimes we’re both hoping the other will pick up certain ones. This time, though, it was easy. We agreed right down the line and got a fairly even division of labor. As we check these off, we’ll have quick chats about who should do which ones next and keep rolling down the list.

One big advantage of our stub-based workflow is how it facilitates writing scenes out of order. Stubs contain enough info about each scene to protect continuity as we jump back and forth. Especially in a co-authoring situation, it’s essential to have that flexibility. With both of us writing, something’s always being done out of chronological order. Right now, for example, Kent’s in the middle of the scene that comes after the one Jen’s writing.

A writing partner is someone who helps keep your system running smoothly.

Outline Like The Pros

Kent has run out of stubs to work from for Untitled Ghost Novel Number One. Jen is closing in on the next batch, but until they’re available Kent had to find something else to do with his writing time. So he’s writing the prose outline for Untitled Ghost Novel Number Two.

A prose outline is like a very detailed synopsis. But while a synopsis skips over subplots and secondary characters, the prose outline is comprehensive. The goal is to capture everything from our brainstorming notes and the plot rainbow, putting it all in order with a rudimentary narrative flow.  Ours typically come in at around twenty pages.

We’ve never met anyone who likes to write synopses. They hurt. If it’s a one-pager that’s intended for use in marketing, it’ll usually be written after the manuscript is completed, and it’s painful to squash everything down so much. But the prose outline comes beforehand, and it’s painful because you have to describe a story that you haven’t really written yet. It’s sort of like a first draft. Of course, we say that about the rainbow sometimes too. And each stub is a first draft of a particular scene. Maybe a term like prototype, or proof-of-concept, would be more apt for these pre-writing artifacts.

A writing partner is someone who writes the prose outline, when he’s done procrastinating by writing about writing the prose outline.

My, This Slope is Slippery

Back in the day, Rune Skelley could be found hard at work in the prose mines nearly every single evening. We toiled behind our keyboards night after night, weekdays and weekends, only taking time off for real emergencies. We got a lot done, but we also burned out. We didn’t want it to be as catastrophic as the time we remodeled our master bathroom and got so burned out we abandoned the project for six months and just used the bathroom in the hall, so we modified our schedule.

It started with taking Friday evenings off. We allowed ourselves some time to relax. Most of the Go! Go! Go! attitude came from Jen, so to ease her into the “weekends aren’t the enemy” mindset, we started by watching movies that could count as research. When she saw that we were able to take an evening off once a week and not lose our momentum, that rule relaxed and we now watch whatever the hell we want.

Things started to slip a little bit during the early days of the pandemic. We had dinner with Jen’s mom once a week, but at the same time we stopped having weekly writer’s group meetings so we told ourselves it all balanced out. Even though in the good old days, the only reason we didn’t have to work on Writer’s Group night is that Group counted as work. Visiting Jen’s mom, not so much.

And then we spent a solid year outlining the Ghost Series. One of the best things about brainstorming is that you can do it anywhere. Another of the best things about it is that it doesn’t take long to get into the right gear to do it. Work sessions can be short and still be quite productive.

All this slipperiness on the slopes started to turn into an avalanche when we were hit with a double whammy: we started having regular (though virtual) group meetings again, and we started actually writing Untitled Ghost Novel #1. Suddenly we couldn’t work in the car on the way to and from our family dinners, and we had another evening commitment on our schedule, and the short work sessions we’d learned to sneak in between episodes of Supernatural and Ted Lasso weren’t cutting it. Sad to say, instead of knuckling down we are now more likely to come up with excuses to skip writing sessions. “Would you look at that? It’s so late. There’s no point in trying to get the fiction engines spooled up now! Better just go watch Severance.” “We’ll get in a good long work session on Saturday (as long as the weather prevents Kent from doing yard work).” “It’s my birthday, and I want to just chill and eat cheesecake.” “It’s the dog’s birthday and I just want to chill and eat cheesecake while the dog wears a funny hat.” etc.

Untitled Ghost Novel #1 is coming along, but not as quickly as it ought to. We had a Very Serious Talk about it today and vowed to do better. But we did not pinkie-swear. When we pinkie-swear you’ll know we really mean it.

A writing partner is someone who values your pinkies as much as their own.

 

Balancing Act

Have you heard the good news about stubs? The scene-by-scene synopses that form a handy-dandy bridge between the outline and the finished prose are invaluable to our process. Think of them as the beta version of your first draft.

In addition to obvious things, like blocking scenes and deciding where they will be set, stubs are a great way to debug the plot before it’s written. Take our current Work-In-Progress, the Ghost Novel. The section of the outline that we’ve reached could appear on the page in any number of ways. As Jen wrangles its ungainly shape into stubs, she’s working hard to streamline it. Most scenes will end up doing double, triple, (quadruple?) duty, providing a much richer reading experience. The process also allows us to make sure point of view is distributed fairly evenly among our characters. Sometimes there’s a legitimate reason to stick with a certain character’s take on events for a good long stretch, but quite often it’s more interesting to switch it up and see through someone else’s eyes. Working in stub format, it’s a lot quicker to play around with structure until we hit upon the most exciting option.

A writing partner is someone who encourages you to experiment until you get the right answer.

The Season of the Stubs

We’ve got about 20 scenes in the bag so far on the Ghost Novel. With the two of us both creating prose, we’ve made decent progress despite the ceaseless distractions of the world today and the summertime schedule disruptions of road trips and family get-togethers.

In the past week, however, this double-fisted writing approach has not been available to us. The first batch of stubs had 21 of them in it, so we’re very nearly out. Therefore, while Kent plugs away at those last couple of scenes we have stubs for, Jen has shifted her focus and is generating the next batch of stubs.

We always have the entire outline written first, so in theory Jen could do the stubs for the whole book all at once. In practice, though, we’ve learned that it’s good not to get too far ahead of ourselves with that. Our understanding — of the characters and of the story world’s physics — deepens as we write. Which means, the assumptions baked into a stub get farther and farther off-base the farther downstream we go, until eventually we would have to just throw the rest of them out and redo them.

It’s paradoxical that the outline stays fairly solid while the stubs go astray. Yet that’s what happens.

So, Jen does them in batches. How many in a batch? There’s no set number, but it’s generally in the 15-20 range. That’s enough to keep us busy for a while, but not so many that we have the sort of problem mentioned above. We like it when a batch gets us up to a landmark event of some kind in the plot. The quicker the stubs are locked down, the sooner she can get back to writing prose alongside Kent.

A writing partner is someone who can shift gears based on where you are in the project.

A Tale of Two Roadtrips

Back in April we took a little roadtrip. And as we usually do, we spent the time on the road brainstorming. We came up with a doozy of a character moment for someone’s backstory. It’s really quite a shocking thing. So shocking that at first we weren’t sure we wanted to commit to it. Once it was shakily noted down, we set it aside. (The writing was shaky because we were in a moving car, not because the idea itself was that outré.) We walked around the city a bit, attended a phenomenal concert, and the next morning we found a place with fantastic crepes. In short, we pretended we weren’t writers.

We picked the idea up again on the drive home and found that, yep, that terrible thing is indeed what happened in this person’s past. By not talking about it for a while we were each able to get used to it on our own, and all on its own it became the obvious answer.

More recently we took a day trip, and we barely talked about our work at all. Part of that was because the weather was wretched and Kent needed to really concentrate on not driving us into a ditch. But mostly it was just time for us to have some adventures unrelated to the current project. Sometimes a writer needs to soak up new experiences to give the ol’ creativity engine something to work with. (And maybe there was a touch of still being a bit stunned from the last big idea.)

A good writing partner is someone who is ready for novel adventures when you are. And also someone who shares a taste in funky lamps for the auxiliary writing cave.

Search, Then Search Again

A novel set in the vague “present” allows the author to, for the most part, write what they know. You might need to dig into the details of a profession your character has, or a location they’re going to live in or visit, but you don’t need to research everyday life. Pretty much everyone knows what modern cars and airplanes are like. You can drop in a reference to Netflix or Uber or Joe Biden without needing to explain streaming entertainment, ride sharing, or the state of politics.

Still Untitled Ghost Novel #1 is set in the past, which has required us to do more research than usual. We want to be as accurate as possible, but we’re trying not to get too hung up on minutiae. No one wants to read a book that sounds like it was written by the most anal people on IMDB who take it personally when the train seats in a movie are the wrong shade of brown. Plus, it’s a ghost story. We’re allowed to take liberties.

Some of the research we’ve done for the Ghost Series will come as no surprise: mausoleums, funerary flowers, tarot. Some of it will give you a hint to the time period we’re working in for the first book: telegrams, livery stables, the British Raj. And some of it will hopefully have you scratching your head: world record for underwater breath holding, the history of welding masks, Gloria Vanderbilt.

Put all of that in a pot and stir. Sprinkle in some teen heartthrob magazines, circuit breakers, and the tunnel through the redwood tree, and voila! You’ve got yourself one heck of an untitled ghost novel!

A writing partner is someone who doesn’t let you fall too far down the research rabbit hole.

Getting to Know You

Sometimes characters’ personalities change once you start writing them. Your villain turns out to have a sense of humor. The hero’s loyal ally proves to be secretly sort of a dick.

Outlining is based on plot kinetics, concrete events. To the extent that anyone’s interior state is represented at all, it’s very broad. Probably based on the role or archetype of the character more than details about their motivations. “Bob opposes Alice, so when she enters the bake-off he… switches her sugar and her baking powder.”

Writing the prose is when you start to see out through these people’s eyes. The antipathy between Bob and Alice becomes something you can feel, not just a specification for the project. And, that ingredient switcheroo is easier said than done. Bob looks up at you and asks, “How do I not get caught?” and you sternly order him to figure it out. He does, or when he gets caught he talks his way out of it, or he invents a completely new way to sabotage Alice, and in the process you figure out how his mind works.

There’s also the grit of everyday life, sensorial stuff like clothing choices or a favorite snack, little challenges like too much traffic or too little coffee, and so on. Small-scale things that reveal so much more about this person than we get from the macro plot structure.

Here at SkellyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises, each of us tends to “adopt” a subset of the cast. This spreads out the load, so each of us only has to learn to wear half as many heads. The initial adoptions have a tendency to stick, but we rarely make formal assignments — Kent might take the lead with a given character, but Jen can step in to write later scenes in that POV, which helps round out its voice.

A writing partner is someone who gets to know you a little more on every page, as you get to know them better, too.

We Read A Thorough Read-Through

The Story of the Ghosts So Far has been read through. It was interesting to see where we would catch up to it, because the read-through was happening a little at a time (Kent used it as the material for his reading aloud while Jen cooked) and meanwhile we were still adding to it in the evenings.

In other words, we treated it the same way we treat most other books. (Except for the part about adding on to them in the evenings — we don’t do that with anybody else’s books.) Getting a chance to experience it at a full gallop, as it were, did feel quite different. We both expressed surprise at how much happens in this early section. There is one particular event we have a lot invested in that hasn’t happened yet, and we’d started to feel like we were taking too long in reaching it. And there will undoubtedly be some pacing adjustments. But our idea that it was “taking too long” was just because we had been overemphasizing that one thing.

The notes that we made were mostly quite minor. The really picky stuff we went ahead and cleaned up, which took maybe ten minutes. But for anything more complicated than typos we are saving the actual fixes until later. Need to keep moving forward.

A writing partner is someone who also likes being a reading partner.