Reading aloud is something Kent does a lot of. At the end of each work session he offers a dramatic reading of the newly composed prose, which faithful readers already know. But he also reads to Jen while she cooks dinner. It’s his version of singing for his supper. Earlier this week we came to the end of the current read-aloud, and decided that instead of choosing something from our Shelf of Unread Books, we’d dive in and read through our work in progress.

Still Untitled Ghost Novel #1 is currently a hair shy of 35,000 words. That’s 65 pages single-spaced!

The first reading of a work in progress is, for us anyway, a real treat. It’s gratifying to see (or hear) how far we’ve come, and how well the pieces fit together. Of course, it’s not always perfect. There are a few times where our characters start talking about an item or event like the reader already knows a lot about it, when the reader will actually know nothing about it because we invented it. So we’ll need to flesh those spots out. And the opposite is true, too, where more than one character provide Intro to Subject X lessons. We’re making notes about those sorts of things, and we’ll fix them up later.

Where we’re noticing actual inconsistencies is in the descriptions of our main location. It’s a complicated, fancy place that we made up, and it’s a bit of a challenge to make the description of what’s in Jen’s head match up with the description of what’s in Kent’s head. We have a real-world inspiration site to draw from, and a Kent-drawn map to refer to, and we’re still not entirely lined up. We’re tripping over the details.

We have a pretty rigid prewriting process, and by the time we get to the actual composition part of writing, we know a lot of how it’s going to go. No matter how much we plan, though, there are always details we don’t know we need until we’re in the thick of things. Sometimes we’ll call a time-out and have a discussion, but we only like to do that when it’s a big deal, something that could impact the plot. If we paused for every minor thing we’d have no writing momentum and we’d probably end up killing each other. So we trust each other to make command decisions on the little things, and most of the medium things, too.  Usually it works out great. When Kent reads that day’s work aloud at the end of the session, we both make note of the new details and work with them going forward. For instance, if one of us has placed a clever bit of statuary, or described the hidden panel that controls the mood lighting in a certain chamber, then they’re canon. Provisional canon, at least. This is still a first draft! We mostly just scroll back through the manuscript to look up what’s been established, but we also keep printouts of that map handy, so we can add stuff, move stuff, and make rambling notations about stuff.

A writing partner is someone who provides another set of eyes. Sometimes that means they help you spot inconsistencies. Sometimes it means they’re seeing a different picture. A good writing partner is someone whose sky is generally the same color as yours.

Kent is more tortoise, Jen is more hare. But don’t get cocky about wagering on this race.

When it comes to our writing sessions, the same dynamic plays out over and over. After our preliminary throat clearing and internet perusing, Kent gets right to work. He types steadily for the remainder of the evening, with occasional beverage breaks and brief research sidetracks. Jen on the other hand cogitates. She does some research. She does some more research. She gets sidetracked onto a mostly unrelated topic. She looks at inspiration photos of characters and locations. She studies maps and floor plans. And then she looks at the clock and feels guilty that Kent has been working diligently all this time while she fucked around, and she finally gets started. The dam bursts and the prose pours out and she ends up putting in as many (or more) words in the end.

It’s not a competition (as we often remind ourselves), it’s collaboration. We each have our own process, and we’re both quite thrilled with the results. Although we would probably finish a novel in about half the time if Jen could figure out how to blow up the dam as soon as she sits down at the keyboard. Maybe Kent should wear roller skates and install a jet engine on his shell.

A good writing partner is someone who lets you go at your own pace, and makes sure you cross the finish line together.

We spent more time on planning and plotting for the Ghost Series ahead of the actual writing than on any previous project. Yet, when Jen wrote the first scene where the ghosts would show up, it turned out we hadn’t entirely agreed on how they should look. Many of their characteristics were decided, but some pretty basic stuff had gone unspecified without either of us thinking to bring it up.

It felt weird in the moment, and we had to figure out those details on the move, but the fact that this happened is a good sign.

First of all, no matter how diligently you outline, the prose should always feel alive while you’re working on it. Outlining isn’t meant to take away words’ ability to surprise you, just to get you moving in the right direction.

Secondly, this was a sign that all those hours of pre-writing had been invested in the proper things. We focused on mapping out the story and understanding the people in it, rather than being drawn to shiny objects.

We knew our ghosts were going to look cool. And they do! We needed to make sure we also knew that the plot wouldn’t become a haunted house of cards.

A writing partner is someone who’ll hold your hand when your ghost story gets scary!

Last week we talked about what we do at the end of a work session, and this week we’re talking about what we do at the beginning of a work session. Those of you who are paying attention might notice that the beginning ought to come before the end, and wonder why we didn’t write these posts in the other order. We have our reasons.

Once we get settled in at our desks in the Writing Cave, or curled up with our laptops and dogs in the Auxiliary Writing Cave, there’s a certain amount of dicking around we have to see to. It’s union regs. Not optional. So we poke at Twitter and check on some web comics, read whatever articles are hanging out in our open tabs, and then we finally crack our knuckles and get down to work. And the first real bit of work that we do is to read through the previous day’s output. We do this separately, each reading our own work. (Kent gets to save his voice for later.) Any notes from last time get addressed first (aha! that’s why we talked about things out of order!). During this review we inevitably do a little fine-tuning of the prose, just little word picks to make the sentences clearer or prettier. Better. We find it’s a great way to warm up. It reminds us of where we are in the scene, and the fiddling around gets our fingers limbered up. And then all that’s left is to write for an hour or two, which then brings us back to Kent reading everything out loud. It’s like the water cycle.

A writing partner is someone who keeps you out of trouble with the union.

Just a quick note to say that our accumulated prose for the first Ghost Novel now fills 30 pages — single spaced.

Also, a follow-up about how unanswered questions and unexamined assumptions can lurk: Jen asked Kent how big the ghosts’ manifestations are. She said, “Dont’ try to figure out what the right answer should be, just, when you see them in your head, how big?” Of course his answer was, literally, ten times as big as what she’d been picturing. It was something neither of us had verbalized until that moment, although we each had a definite mental image.

A writing partner is someone you should talk to, like, a lot.