Tagged: As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1

Fjords

One of the neat things about how we use the rainbow is how it encourages us to really examine everybody’s through-line. We just study the whole thing color-by-color and it helps us make sure everyone’s accounted for.

Of course, we focus on the principle players first. That means by the time we delve into the second half of the cast, stuff’s pretty well defined. We don’t want to add padding, or make excuses to mention these characters. But we don’t want to just dismiss their arcs either. It’s tricky to find things that are worthy of inclusion and also won’t require us to revise our major characters’ actions too much.

Once all the big plot landmasses are established, the goal is to fit stuff into the crinkly bits around the edges.

As you’ve surely guessed, we are currently examining the parts of the rainbow concerned with not-so-major characters. One in particular, whose activities are severely constrained. The way he’s limited is interesting in its own right, but there are only so many times a reader wants to be reminded, “Yup, dude’s still stuck.” For various reasons, we knew it’d be a wrong choice to just skip his parts. It was a bit frustrating. But, we did eventually hit on a setup that ticks all the boxes. It dramatizes the central desires of this person, and intersects with the primary characters’ paths in a non-interfering way. Huzzah!

A writing partner is someone who loves doing all the crinkly bits as much as you do (and helps you remember where your towel is).

Threading The Projector

The rainbowing for Ghosts Book 3 is coming along nicely. Hard to know just how close to done with it we really are, but we’re dealing with events near the climax now so it sure feels like we’re almost done. Thing is, there are colors of this rainbow that have so far received scant attention. It’s going to take a few more trips through the whole thing to get it sufficiently pinned down.

This saga has a lot of moving parts. As Jen put it, we need to figure out how to thread the world’s most complicated projector, but then we’ll get a really cool movie.

It’s a lot of work. We like to advocate doing that work up front, but the work’s still there all the same. We’d be lying if we said that a front-loaded process magically eliminates all the chores. What it does is protect us from writing ourselves into a corner. Sad experience is a great teacher: we don’t want to do that again. Being stuck for six months wasn’t fun. All this pre-writing might take just as long, but it is fun! We’re not stuck. We’re just enjoying the freedom to change our minds about who lives and who dies. (It’s a ghost story, so those words start to lose their meanings, but you get the idea.)

A writing partner is someone who’ll help you solve the puzzle of how to make your story the best it can be.

In Search of a Different Kind of Inspiration

Ideas are not something we struggle with, usually. That’s one of the advantages to being a writing team. Between the two of us we’re almost always able to come up with fun complications for our plots, and, after letting our characters struggle with them for a bit, fun solutions to those complications. It’s pretty awesome.

We’ve encountered a snag, though, in something tangentially related to the writing: redecorating the Writing Cave. Jen says it’s time. The Writing Cave is the first room we did anything to after buying our house. Back then we just called it the office. Writing wasn’t something we were as dedicated to, and we just needed a good place to set up our computer desks where the kids couldn’t casually smear peanut butter all over the keyboards. They do that less often now, what with one of them being in grad school and the other the proud owner of a shiny new PhD.

When we bought the place, the office was carpeted in plush, vibrant blue — a wall-to-wall Cookie Monster pelt. The rest of the house had hardwood, and we knew there was hardwood under all that Muppet fur, but we worried about what shape it might be in. It must be pretty bad for the previous owners to have kept it covered, right?

Wrong. When we pulled it up we discovered that the underpadding was pieced together from a million little scraps, all stapled into place. But other than that the floor was fine.

We stripped off the mattress-ticking wallpaper and put up a nice rich blue, speckled with whimsical stars and moons. It looks a lot less Lucky Charms than that sounds, but it is perhaps a little too whimsical and there are a few spots where we tore it a little moving furniture. When we had new windows installed, the paint we got to do touch-up doesn’t quite match the original.

The ceiling fixture doesn’t give as much light as we need, and is constructed in such a way that it’s hard to find bulbs that fit inside it with the cover on.

So — we’re all agreed, then. It’s time to redo this room. (Well, we’re not *all* agreed. Kent is indifferent. But he’s willing to follow Jen’s lead.) We know we want to make a change, we just don’t know what we want to change it to. It’s a strange place for us to be. We’ve done a lot of home improvement, and we usually have no shortage of ideas there either. But this time we (read: Jen) are kind of floundering. We’re most likely going to get new desks that can convert to standing desks with the touch of a button. Other than that we’re happy with the furniture. That’s good for our budget, but doesn’t leave a lot of room for creativity.

All we know for sure is that we don’t want the walls to be white. And we want a new light fixture and window covering. What those will look like, we have no idea. Oh – and we’re going to clear out the closet and install some sort of organization system, once we sort through all the junk and see what we actually want to keep.

If we get it figured out while we’re still outlining the Ghost Books, we can talk through plot points while we paint. Otherwise we’ll have to divide our time between writing and acting out our HGTV dreams.

The best writing partner is the one who supports you, even when it means applying liberal helpings of elbow grease.

No One Here Gets Out Alive

It might not be as dire as as the title suggests, but very few of our characters float through our novels unscathed. And now that number is even smaller. A nice enough guy who made it through Book 2 experiencing nothing worse than some hinky interpersonal shenanigans has just found himself drafted into service as a major player in Book 3, where his future looks a lot stickier. Right now we don’t know his ultimate fate, but from what we do know, he’s going to be put through the wringer before he reaches it. Good for our story and those reading it, not so good for him.

Sorry dude, but you knew the hazards when you signed up. You say nobody told you? Hey, not our fault you didn’t ask around. Anyone from any of the other series could have put you wise. Well, half of them are untrustworthy. That’s a fair point.

(All this sass from someone who initially showed up in our notes as “boy-toy.” He should appreciate what a promotion this is.)

Sometimes characters will try to just drift off the page and leave their subplots without a payoff. You’ll want some kind of perimeter alarm system: a laser grid maybe, if it’s a sci-fi setting, or just a little string and some empty cans for lower-tech environments. Now, you don’t necessarily have to catch every last one of them. Not on our account, at least. But you do want them nervous. Right now Boy-Toy is giving us epic stink-eye, but who knows? He might end up doing something really heroic!

A writing partner is someone who will patrol the perimeter with you.

Two Down, Two To Go

The plot rainbow for Ghost Novels, Book 2 is done. On to Book 3!

This is the second pass on each of these rainbows. When we first generated them, we were looking at things from a pretty high altitude, and this time through we’re zooming in on things. Rainbow number two doubled in size this time around. By the time we were ready to number the cards and pick it up to make room for number three, it barely fit in the Auxiliary Writing Cave’s designated Rainbow Assembly Zone.

Now we have number three spread out in the same spot, and it looks so dinky! But we know there’s a ton of info we haven’t incorporated into it yet. The next step is to review all our notes about this book, then we can start adding cards to enrich this rainbow with details. In all likelihood, this one will also end up straining the capacity of the Assembly Zone.

A writing partner is someone who builds rainbows with you, and then helps you make them bigger and brighter.

Twist the Knife

Our characters hate us. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. It’s a hazard of this job we’ve chosen, and it’s one we usually accept without complaint. But this time some of our characters are ghosts, and, well… we don’t want to be haunted, you know? Nevertheless we persist — for you, dear reader. It’s all for you!

We know that, intelligent and discerning bibliophile that you are, you don’t want to read a novel about pleasant people who experience nothing but joy. Apart from being unrealistic, it wouldn’t be very interesting.

So when we’re hammering away at the plot rainbow, and we reach a decision point like, “Should Istvan Von Rupert crash his custom zeppelin, or get food poisoning from eating raw snails?” the answer is usually “Yes.”

The above example introduces physical peril for poor Istvan, but in our books he’s actually more likely to face emotional or psychological turmoil. So, “Will his wife leave him, or will he lose his job?” might be a better illustration. And again, the answer is probably “Both.” No matter how much we might like Istvan (which really isn’t very much, but that’s beside the point), we need to complicate his life for our own amusement, and yours. The scuzzier the decision feels, the better it generally is. And anyway, aren’t ghosts supposed to have tumultuous backstories?

A writing partner is someone who will help with the exorcism that will inevitably result from pissing off the ghosts as much as we’re planning to.

 

A Ghostly Outline

The rainbow for Book 2 is proving to be a lot of work, but we’re certainly glad to be identifying all these gaps now rather than later. With as many times as we’ve done the rainbow process, the challenges of this series have been something of a surprise.

We think a big part of it is the fact that all four books are in play during this pre-writing stage. It means that when we lay out the rainbow for any one of the books, we’re also aware of the other segments that make up the whole, giant thing. It’s like the ghosts of the rest of the books haunt the discussion.

Too bad we don’t have a room in our house that’s big enough to lay out the entire tetralogy-spanning Bifrost. The Auxilliary Writing Cave is sufficient for only one at a time. On previous projects we’ve spread out rainbows on the dining table or down the hallway, but those aren’t wide enough this time around. Oh well.

A writing partner helps you keep track of hundreds of colorful paper squares and the supernatural realms they represent.

How Old Did You Say You Are?

The Ghost series is shaping up to be a generations-spanning saga. That’s a fair description of most of what happens in the Writing Cave, so we’re used to setting up timelines that show when all our characters are born and (often) when they die.

What is a little different this time is that we’re starting off with the full knowledge that what we’re building is a generations-spanning saga, so our pre-writing process is being applied to the whole series. We mentioned already that picking up Book 2 immediately revealed unresolved questions in our “exhaustive” plotting of Book 1. That hasn’t really stopped. Book 2 planning is well along at this point, but today there was yet another example of something that we thought was already settled showing itself to be up in the air.

It’s those birth and death dates this time. Not all of them (whew!) but a few, and one character in particular whose age matters to the plot.

This made us glad that we are planning out the whole series up front, of course. If we had written Book 1, it would be a lot more work to adjust someone’s age. And if we’d published it, then we’d be stuck.

A writing partner is someone who ages like fine wine. (And helps you organize your multigenerational epic, too.)

When “Mysterious” Doesn’t Cut It

Ghost Story progress update: we have preliminary rainbows for all four books, and the Book 1 rainbow has been expanded considerably. We are now working on building out the rainbow for Book 2. It’s going very well, but we have discovered that we struggle to make firm decisions where a particular character is concerned.

This person’s column tends to be a bit sparse when we first lay out each rainbow. It’s someone we originally pictured as an enigmatic background figure, who would just turn up to chuckle darkly now and then. Turn up at significant moments in the story, of course. Well, we need to understand what’s responsible for the timing of those appearances, which means we need to know more about this character.

It hasn’t been any problem at all to invent fun backstory. The problem has been winnowing down the fun ideas to just those that don’t contradict each other, and arranging them into a coherent line through the plot. Those conversations are filled with too much “maybe this” and “maybe that” and not enough “okay, that’s settled.”

But we are getting there. It’s just turning out to be tougher to get to know this person than most of the rest of the cast. Which isn’t surprising, considering that the first thing we pinned down was “enigmatic.” How right we were.

A writing partner is someone who’ll help you dig up all the dirt about your most uncooperative characters, and then sift through it for treasure.

Once More, From the Top

In broad strokes we know how the Ghost Series will end. Broad strokes don’t quite cut it, though, do they? Endings are important, the final ending most important of all.

There are, generally speaking, three different ways to structure a series. The first approach is to take a big story and cut it into bite-size pieces. The second is one in which each book is a self-contained story with a distinct beginning and ending, with little forward movement or continuity from installment to installment. Third is the approach we prefer to write, a sort of hybrid of the first two. There’s an overarching story told through the whole series, but each novel tells a distinct section of that story. It’s not that each book stands on its own, but that each tells a satisfying story on its own. But that means that, by the time a reader gets to the end, it needs to build to something truly spectacular. The ending needs to mean it.

As we talk through the four books we’re planning for our Ghost Series, we keep circling back to the finale, filling in more detail. The most recent time we talked about it, we hit a bit of a wall. The fresh insights weren’t flowing. So, heeding our own advice, we set the ending aside and circled back to the beginning again. And lo! Looking at those two points back-to-back was just what we needed to do. It shone a spotlight on some thematic things that were there all along, just below the surface. As soon as we dragged them out and dusted them off, it sparked all sorts of ideas. Concrete ideas about actual actions our characters will take! Not that they’ll be happy about it, of course.

We’re certainly not done with the ending. It will continue to grow and evolve as we work our way through the four books. By revisiting it from time to time throughout our process, we can refine it, and keeping it fresh in our minds gives us something to aim for as we plot.

Four novels worth of story is a ton to keep track of, but having a writing partner makes it a little easier. And a lot more fun.