Tagged: As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1

At the End of the Rainbow…

… awaits a pot of more work. Yay!

Now that our rainbowing is completed for all four ghost books, it’s time to start writing. Writing an outline, that is. Also some character sheets, and probably a map. (Sounds a little like we’re playing D&D, which is another form of collaborative storytelling. Hmm.) Actual prose needs to wait just a little longer.

To celebrate the milestone, we took Friday night off and watched a movie. Er, we usually give ourselves Friday nights off. And this movie was, technically, research. But we did get take-out, including dessert.

A writing partner is someone to snuggle up with on the couch to watch a movie that played long, long ago, at the theater where you both worked at the time.

It Tastes Like Victory

The plot rainbow for Ghost Book 4 is complete. And freakin’ massive. Our whiteboard is 4′ x 8′, and the rainbow covers the entire front and more than half the back. It’s really something.

So — the entire Ghost Series is plotted. It feels great! It’s also intimidating because these novels are what we’re going to work on for the next few years. No pressure.

Amazingly, we’re still really psyched by the story we’ve specced out, even after spending 3/4 of a year immersed in it. Before we can actually start the prose composition there are still a few steps we need to complete:

  • photograph, number, document, and file the Book 4 rainbow
  • watch a couple of movies for research
  • review the Book 1 rainbow, and expand as necessary
  • turn the rainbow into an outline
  • finalize character and setting sketches
  • write the first batch of stubs

Then we’ll be ready to really start. With all our pre-work, the writing itself should go pretty smoothly. It’s a good thing we didn’t just jinx ourselves!

A writing partner is someone who knows the proper counter-jinx techniques and rituals, and will perform them with you.

We Can Almost Taste It

We’ve been plotting the Ghost Series for some time now — much longer than we realized, as it turns out. A quick tour through our Friday posts shows that we first mentioned the plot rainbow in mid-February (!). That’s a full 8 months ago, and we’d already been hammering away at it before we told you about it.

Today we’re pleased to say we’re allllmost done. A few weeks ago we targeted November 1 for packing up Book 4’s rainbow and moving on to the next stage in the process. We’re pretty confident we could have reached that deadline with ease if family trips and Primus concerts and family trips to Primus concerts hadn’t intruded. So we’ll just blame our children (and Les Claypool) and wrap it up as soon as we can. You can’t rush these things. Like a pregnancy, it takes as long as it takes, and — also like a pregnancy — that seems to be about 9 months. We’ll have the Writing Cave to ourselves again this weekend. With a roaring fire and enough Halloween chocolate we might actually reach our goal.

A writing partner is someone who helps the time fly by.

Two Sides to Every Story

Book 4 of the Ghost Series keeps expanding. Regular readers of the blog know that there are so many characters we had to modify our plot rainbow to accommodate them all. And since these characters insist on interacting with one another, having so many of them causes an exponential increase in the number of plot events. In practically no time we outgrew the acreage on the front of our new whiteboard. Lucky for us, the back is also magnetic.

Act 3 of the novel now lives on the back of the board, where it has plenty of space to stretch its legs. We thought this was the perfect solution, and it is pretty great. The problem is, no matter which side of the board we’re looking at we want to reference something on the other side. This entails a lot of flipping the board back and forth. And back and forth. And back and forth. Jen keeps joking about buying a second enormous whiteboard, and Kent keeps hoping that she really is joking. “But just imagine,” she says, “how complicated a plot we could devise if we had twice as much space to work!”

A writing partner is someone who will go along with some — but not all — of your mad schemes.

Too Villainous? Is That a Thing?

All the characters in the story have to be true to themselves. Their actions in response to a given situation have to be what they’d actually do, not what’s convenient for the plot. That applies to the bad guys just as much as the heroes. Well, of course it does. Right?

Yes, but. This is one of those rules not to be followed off a cliff.

In our case, the discussion was over a matter of degree: how horribly will he treat this particular person? It wasn’t a matter of would he do the nasty thing, but would he do it more than once.

When you have questions like that, the real questions you should be asking are, what kind of story am I writing, and what can the plot survive.

What kind of story: just how cruel is your villain, and when you do justice to depicting his depraved actions does it skew the tone or the direction of your story in undesireable ways? Showing what he’s capable of is important, but once that’s established it might start to seem gratuitous to let him keep living his best life.

What can the plot survive: there’s a difference between choosing what’s convenient and avoiding what’s lethal. If the heroes are neutralized, or the object of the quest is destroyed, then the story no longer works.

Back to our situation: we’re leaning toward the once being enough. (Our bad guy will still have plenty of chances to be naughty.) We don’t want the victimized character out of play for too long, and we don’t want to make victimization thematic.

So, yes. There is such a thing as too much villainy. Don’t let your villains kill your story.

Pardon Our Dust

The Writing Cave is undergoing renovations. This means all the stuff from that one, single room has been displaced, and now more or less completely fills three rooms and the hallway. Painting has commenced, but there’s a lot to be done after that.

We’re still working on the Ghost Series, but things are a bit chaotic and we utterly spaced on getting our prompts done this week. Sorry!

Normal schedule should resume next week, although the reno will be ongoing.

The One Time When Failure to Plan ≠ Planning to Fail

Waaaay back when we were working on Book 1 of the Ghost Series, we decreed that an event occurred. Which is what this whole plotting and outlining thing is about, so why pat ourselves on the back now, months later? In this particular case (and probably many others, if we’re honest) we decided what was going to happen, when it was going to happen, and who it was going to happen to. We knew the Who, What, When, and even the Why. Notice anything missing? The Where. At the time it didn’t seem important to specify, and if we’d gone ahead and written Book 1 before thoroughly outlining the rest of the series, we would certainly have set the scene someplace. Perhaps even someplace interesting in its own right. What we probably wouldn’t have done was set it where we’ve now decided is the only place that really makes sense. All we have to do is make a note of this in the Book 1 outline and — BLAMMO — Synergy!

Planning the entire series before we start writing has led to several opportunities like this, and we love it. Any chance to make the pieces mesh more intricately results in a richer final product.

At some point we will actually have to start writing the books, but for now we’re a couple of watchmakers fiddling with all the cogs and springs and itty bitty gears. It may sound like a lot of work, but it will save us a ton of time on rewrites later.

A writing partner is someone who makes sure you don’t end up with any loose parts leftover once you’ve constructed your masterpiece.

Outlining: It Gives You Superpowers

The Ghost Series contains many wonders, some of which have made our planning more complicated. One wondrous element in particular is a pain in the butt: some of the characters are precognitive.

Precognition is what many RPG rule systems refer to as an unbalanced power. If mismanaged, it takes all the fun out of the game. You end up with a player who wants to roll dice every time their character takes a step. The same basic problem can arise with fiction. It’s crucial to place heavy constraints on any precogs you let loose in your world, so they can’t just spoil everything. Yet, the ability to see into the future has to be of some value. They have to be right sometimes or else they’re not precogs, they’re just delusional. In fact, allowing them more power brings more potential for excitement and intrigue.

What you want is a way to level the playing field, so you can match wits against precognitive beings and win. If only you, too, could gain the power to foretell the future.

With an outline, you can! (You knew that was coming — hey, are you psychic?)

There are those who complain about writing from an outline precisely for this reason: you already know how the story will go. We see that as a strength. You can focus on telling the story well, because you don’t have to spend energy inventing it as you go. You can do foreshadowing and recurring themes in a very intentional way.

Here in the Writing Cave, there’s another way that we hold our own when our characters are supernaturally gifted. We gang up on them. A writing partner doubles the number of brain cells available when you need to come up with a way to surprise the precogs.

Four Times the Fun

The thing about quadrilogies (or tetralogies if you prefer) is that they’re longer than trilogies. Like, an entire book longer. And in our case, that extra book is shaping up to be the longest of the series. That’s nothing unusual. You’ve probably noticed in other series you read that the books tend to get longer as their roman numeral suffixes get higher. We were expecting Book 4 to be a bit of a beast. Were, in fact, braced and ready to flip our new whiteboard over and continue our plot rainbow on the back. The damn thing could be 16 feet long if it needed to be! We were prepared. Or so we thought.

When you’re writing a ghost story, you can’t count on death to prune your cast the way you can with other genres. Characters have a way of piling up as we discovered when we tried to set up the rainbow for Book 4. We had nearly twice as many characters as places to put them. The snazzy grid on the whiteboard has room for 11 rows. We needed 18. Not all of these people will have Point of View, but we need to keep track of their comings and goings and dastardly deeds.

We tried looking for ways to lump characters together into a shared row, but there weren’t enough we could do that with to solve the problem. We tried arranging them in columns instead, but that gave us too few rows for the plot. We scratched our collective head and joked about buying a second board.

In the end we dusted off our paper cutter and chopped all our beautiful squares in half, allowing two people to share a row while maintaining their individuality. We have embraced the rectangle lifestyle. The main difference is that Jen has to write smaller to fit all the important info in half the space, but she’s up for the challenge. We just hope we have enough magnets. We bought 400 of the little suckers, and for most plots that would be more than sufficient. Depending on how dense this rainbow ends up being, we might need more, which is truly kind of terrifying.

A good writing partner is someone who isn’t afraid of all the neodymium.

Our Heads Are Haunted Now

The fancy new whiteboard now houses our Ghosts, Book 4 rainbow. Barely — it flows across both sides already and we have a lot left to add. (hooboy!)

Not only are we fleshing out the fourth and final volume, but we’re also creating a text synopsis of Book 2 simultaneously. Which puts some of Book 3 in the mix as well, because we have to keep in mind how events span that interval.

We’ve crammed at least three novels’ worth of ghosts into our brains, is what we’re saying. It’s really all four, although Book 1 hasn’t come up too much recently.

But, this is exactly why we wanted to handle all the outlining and storyboarding and other pre-writing for the entire series up front. It’s hard work, but it’ll spare us from getting halfway through the fourth book and wishing we’d done a bunch of things differently in the earlier ones. In other words, it will save us from needing to rewrite the whole tetralogy. Our revisions will be focused on how to sharpen up the telling, not trying to get the shape of the tale itself.

A writing partner is someone who’s willing to let their skull become a haunted house so you don’t have to face an army of spooks all by yourself.