Tagged: As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1

Proof of Concept

Once again the plot rainbow proves its worth. Last weekend we pushed ourselves to finish filling in the rainbow for Book 1 of our in-progress Ghost Series. It deviates from the rainbows we’ve created for previous novels in that it’s wider and shorter, but it still covers the floor pretty effectively (and flummoxes the dogs). We’re not completely done with it yet, just done enough. The broad strokes are all there, and some of the nuance. We’ve considered most of the beats from multiple angles and filled in the big holes. Now we’ll move on and do the same thing for the other three planned books in the series, getting them all to the same level of ripeness.

At least that was the plan.

We were really pleased with how thorough we were. “Wow,” we thought. “That’s one nicely detailed plot outline!” And then we gave each other high-fives and drank some champagne, etc etc. And then we spent half-an-hour numbering all the cards and stacking the whole thing neatly so that the dogs could walk around the room again. It was all terribly satisfying.

And then, Boom. On literally the first day of work on Book 2 we discovered something lurking in the notes that needs to be introduced in Book 1.

Sigh.

Luckily it’s not something that will require us to rethink half of the plot, or anything dire like that. It’s a detail that needs to be included, and we need to give serious consideration to how certain characters will feel about it.

Discoveries like this are why we’re working the whole series at the same time. We’d really hate to have the first novel entirely written and then discover we’d left something out. It’s also why we are so enamored of our plot rainbow process. It’s much easier to shift a few pieces of colored paper around on the floor (while fending off a corgi) than it is to rewrite a chapter or two.

A good writing partner is someone who will sacrifice herself to keep the dogs happily snuggling on the sofa while you crawl around on the hardwood, narrowly avoiding paper cuts.

A Rainbow Is Multifaceted

Plotting out the Ghost Series continues, which lately has consisted of intense bouts of rainbowing. We found a story beat that we could beef up, and in the process of adding it we had a minor epiphany about what makes the rainbow such a powerful tool.

Each POV character gets a column/color, and each story beat gets a row. That means for one beat we need to make cards for every character who participates. In this case, that was three characters. It might feel like inefficiency to have to jot things down in triplicate, but that’s the thing — it wasn’t just writing out the same info multiple times. The cards were all different, because they represented the event from different points of view: the character who tells the lie, the character who believes it, and the true target of the subterfuge.

Having to account for events from these various angles really helps us envision their impact. It also helps us plan whose POV to use for the actual prose. We wrote up three cards, but we won’t need to write the scene three times. (That would be inefficiency.)

The rainbow is inconvenient sometimes. It takes up a lot of space. The dogs walk on it, and shed on it. (And one of them will eat it, if given the chance.) Inserting a story beat means shifting lots of other cards to make room. But it’s worth it to get an adjustable visualization of the story that you can look at together with your writing partner.

How to be a Bad Writing Partner

Sometimes, despite everyone’s best intentions, a writing partnership doesn’t work. Maybe you can’t agree on what genre you want to write in. Maybe you have vastly different ideas about how gritty your prose will be. Perhaps one of you wants to write in first person while the other wants to use third person omniscient. Or maybe one of you sneaks into the Auxiliary Writing Cave and chews up the timeline. Or the other other one of you walks back and forth across the plot rainbow while wagging your tail, scattering the carefully constructed grid into chaos. What we’re saying is, maybe dogs don’t make the best writing partners.

Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord are great at getting us out of the house for a daily walk-and-talk that would make Aaron Sorkin proud, but beyond that they’re pretty lousy writing partners. They insist upon pats and belly rubs, which keeps us from typing. The Bandit Lord enjoys lap time at our desks, but only if he can monopolize at least one hand, again interfering with typing. They both enjoy snuggling on the sofa while we brainstorm, but get offended if we need to move in order to reach a notebook or laptop.

We even need to use restraint when reading our work aloud. The Bandit Lord is a very sensitive young man, and if Kent puts any emotion into a scene where a character is mad or upset, he gets very concerned. Lady Marzipan once stretched very exuberantly and managed to poke the power button of our battery backup with her toenail, crashing both computers instantly.

On top of all that, they’re lousy editors.

Despite the nightmarish conditions here at SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises, we’re actually ridiculously fond of our furry tyrants and wouldn’t trade them for any other writing partners. We’ll just have to start using the baby gate to keep our papers safe.

 

The Bandit Lord hard at work at his desk.
Lady Marzipan in a staring contest with her laptop.

Crop Rotation

Coming up with a story and all the people in it and a whole world where it can happen is a lot of work. There’s so much stuff that needs to be figured out. Working with a partner, that mostly entails talking about it. With enough talking, we can figure anything out. (Talking to yourself can work, too.)

Naturally, it’s not quite that simple. In any given conversation, we’ll pick a topic and make good headway, but getting a given thing totally solved doesn’t usually happen all in one go, or even in a linear manner. We reach a point where we’re not making progress anymore, and lay that idea aside. At some point we’ll revisit it and move it ahead. Eventually, after lots and lots of talking, we get everything we need.

It’s like crop rotation. You need to switch things up once in a while and let the soil rejunvenate. That might mean staying within the same story but shifting your attention to a different plot thread, or a different character’s arc, or it might mean working on a completely separate story. The point is, don’t strain harder and harder if your yield is dropping. Spending that energy on something else will be much more productive.

A good writing partner doesn’t let you end with an overwrought farming metaphor.

Nothing Is Ever Wasted

As we recently mentioned, our brainstorming for the ghost series has been very fruitful. The process of organizing all those notes into a single, coherent narrative was a sizable task, and not all of the notes found a home.

In the beginning, we were still trying to figure out what this ghost story was going to be about. We came up with lots of ideas. We’re good at generating ideas. Many of these ideas were even good! But, they tended to be a bit random. They were, in fact, parts of different stories.

These leftovers are a valuable byproduct. They’ll help us start the ball rolling the next time we develop a new series.

Why Even Bother With The Rainbow?

All of the semi-serious content on this entire blog could be boiled down to “we believe in the process.” We pretty much never shut up about it. Of course the process has evolved over time. It’s workflow, not dogma. But in our Friday posts we’ve really hammered the point that we think it’s important, and of all the steps it comprises probably the one we’ve nattered about the most is the rainbow.

Recent experience has further solidified our confidence that the rainbow is effective. Because, you see, we almost decided to skip it this time.

The ghost story is something we’ve been brainstorming about for quite a while, long enough that we really feel we’re getting to know the characters. We have tons of notes, which Jen has somehow collated into a synopsis that doesn’t contradict itself. Reading that made us so excited about the story, it was tempting to jump ahead to outlining, or maybe even start generating prose.

We didn’t always have the rainbow. Way, way back when we began writing novels together, we had nothing like our current process. But we did have some guidelines and rituals. For example, we originally did our first drafts longhand, and the act of typing them up created the second draft. We don’t do longhand drafts anymore. Even though it seemed important at one time, we came to see it as unnecessary.

Maybe the rainbow would fall into that same category. Maybe it was time we outgrew it?

Fortunately, we stuck to the process. Converting the information about our story from one form (synopsis) to a different form (a grid of colorful paper squares arranged on the floor) in this case revealed major gaps in the plotting. But, it didn’t turn into a major problem for the project. All it took was a little unscheduled brainstorming and we got the pieces to fit.

Would it have been a disaster if we’d skipped over the rainbow? Probably not. We probably would have seen the issues when we got to that part in the writing, and we still could have devised a solution. Of course, fixing it would have required rewriting a bunch of scenes, and reluctance to make so many changes might have made us less willing to consider taking the best approach. And, when you’re head-down cranking out prose is not the best time to notice large-scale issues. It’s quite possible that we wouldn’t have caught a problem like this until an entire draft was written. Ouch.

We like having a process that keeps us on track. Another thing we clearly remember about our very earliest collaborative experiences is the months-long droughts we would fall into because we’d written ourselves into a corner. Getting stuck might be a sign that your process is letting you down.

A Ghost By Any Other Name

We thought we were all set with names for our ghost series, until we started watching Supernatural. We’re about a decade and a half late to that particular party, but better late than never, right? The problem is that we were going to have a character named Jensen. And he was going to be peripherally involved with our ghosts. And for those of you who, like us, spent the past 15 years living under a rock, one of the stars of Supernatural is named Jensen Ackles.

Nothing against Mr Ackles or the character he plays. They’re both quite handsome, and we’re definitely enjoying the show. The issue is that our Jensen wasn’t going to be much like Dean Winchester. But with an uncommon name and a similar occupation, we were concerned that readers would immediately picture Dean/Jensen. We didn’t want to fight against that. It would be like having an archeologist in your novel and naming him Harrison. Everyone would expect him to wear a fedora and fight nazis.

So our Jensen has a new name now. And we’re mostly used to calling him by it. Jen is tickled by the idea of naming a dude character after herself, so Jensen is filed away, waiting patiently for a different story world. One in which he will be free to be himself without a bunch of preconceptions.

A writing partner is someone to enjoy old TV shows with, and brainstorm new names for your characters as an indirect result.

The (Too) Many-Worlds Hypothesis

Lately, we’re dividing our time between three fictional worlds (four if you count consensus reality). We’re brainstorming about the Ghost Novels, editing one of the Science Novels, and getting critique feedback about one of the Music Novels.

Back when we started this writing partnership, one of our policies was to avoid splitting our focus like this. We would dwell in one fictional universe at a time. Of course, that was a lot easier to stick to when we only had the one. Our concern, theoretical as it might have been, was that we’d waste too much mental energy switching between worlds. But you know what? It’s not been that hard, really.

A couple of years ago, we felt we had to bend our rules in order to accomplish our goals. It made us nervous, and there was a little bit of a learning curve. But like playing an instrument, or speaking a language, or anything else, it’s a trainable skill. We can do, now, exactly what we assumed wouldn’t work: hold three story worlds in our heads at the same time, and keep them straight.

As we flit about our various universes, we stay together. The critique notes about the Music Novel, we look at together and discuss. When it’s time to do Science Novel edits, we both knuckle down for that. Brainstorming about ghosties is a team sport. We find we can do just about anything as long as we’re doing it together. Probably the only time we’ve sent Kent off to one universe while Jen visited another is when there was cover artwork involved. (And, that worked just fine too. But we prefer to stay in sync.)

A writing partner is someone who’ll straddle three icebergs with you and help you not fall in.

Here’s the Plan (2021 Edition)

Ah, the smell of a fresh new year. So crisp, so clean, so innocent!

Over the course of several recent dog-walking excursions, Kent and Jen developed their master plan for 2021. The first item on the agenda is finishing the edits on Grandson of Science Novel. We had originally hoped to wrap it up in 2020, but that didn’t quite happen, so we’ll take a couple of weeks now and knock it out.

As the dust settles from that, we’ll decamp to the Auxiliary Writing Cave and dig in on plotting our new Ghost Series. We have a bazillion notes — some in longhand, some electronic. Once those have been wrangled into order, we’ll start at the beginning and flesh the whole thing out. This will likely take quite some time, since it’s looking like it’s going to be a 4-book series (quadrilogy? tetralogy?). Somehow, this is the first time we’ve planned an entire series at once and we want to make sure we do it right. The Auxiliary Writing Cave has comfy furniture and a fireplace (and a hidden bookcase), and is the perfect place to enjoy a hot beverage, with or without alcohol, so we’re quite excited about it.

After the plotting we have a split in the flowchart. If we’re feeling excited and energized about all things ghostly, we’ll jump in and start writing the first book in the series. On the other hand, if we feel a little wrung out, and like the batteries need some time to recharge, we’ll switch gears and edit Sibling of Music Novel.

If there’s still time left in the year after that, we’ll do whichever task we skipped in the last step.

And in our copious free time, we’ll start to figure out the next big concept to fill the void when the Ghost Series is done.

That plan should keep us quite happily occupied all year, but it could all go out the window. Our agent is shopping two novels for us, and when a publisher bites there will probably be one or two things they’d like us to do. A little upheaval for a good cause? Sign us up!

Looking Back at 2020 aka The Darkest Timeline

We here at SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises are ready for 2020 to be over. So ready, in fact, that we’re starting our year-end review now, a couple of weeks early. Who’s with us?

Remember the Beforetimes? When there were things worth celebrating? We started 2020 on quite a high note. Renovations wrapped up on the Auxiliary Writing Cave, complete with hidden bookshelf. We wrapped up the first draft of Sibling of Music Novel. We were planning a trip to Romania and Hungary. Things were looking so rosy.

We spent February rereading our Music Series, and practicing the mystical art of placing chapter breaks and perfecting pacing.

In March we lamented our missed vacation (spoiler alert: still on hold), explored how many reminders readers need versus how many they appreciate, and debated the difference between villains and monsters. In 2020, Covid is the main monster. There are many, many villains.

By April we’d started actually editing the third Music Novel, the biggest bad boy who ever bad-boyed. First we made it bigger, then we made it smaller. It was a whole thing, and we got quite philosophical about the whole process.

May brought more editing, and a cryptically described disagreement between the two of us. So cryptic that we don’t actually recall what we were at loggerheads over. Which is a good sign for our partnership, both marriage-wise and coauthor-wise.

No summer vacation for us! In June we just took innumerable walks around the neighborhood with the dogs, using the time to dig into our next project. It has the incredibly creative working title “Ghost Series.” You’ll never guess what it’s about.

By July, we were done with both Son of Music Novel, and the minor touchups we wanted to give Sibling of Music Novel. And we watched Hamilton.

The rereading and editing of the Science Novels started in August. Kent’s voice got quite a workout, because when we wasn’t reading the trilogy aloud, we were still talking about the Ghost Series on our daily walks. We wrapped up the month discussing how much of a character’s backstory an author should know.

It seems we didn’t have a lot to say about editing the second Science Novel in September, because all of our posts are about how excited we are about brainstorming the Ghost Series. We did spare a few minutes to talk about the joys and wonders of a good Goose Wrench.

Fittingly, October was also a time to talk about our ghosts. We even had a spooky encounter on one of our nighttime walks. We updated our writing prompt generator, and dealt with a minor case of burnout.

November had Jen finishing her edits on Son of Science Novel and starting in on Grandson. Kent followed not too far behind. We had Quarantine Thanksgiving without our kids, and engaged in a little bit of self-promotion.

Which brings us up to the present day. Kent is getting his geek on, drawing a cutaway view of a major setting in Son of Science Novel (standard floor plans are for chumps!), while he lets Jen get a little further ahead in her edits of Grandson. He’ll soon have to put his shiny toys away and pick up his flensing tools.

Looking back over this past year, we were surprised to see nary an update to our chain story’s Dramatis Personae, so look for that sometime soonish.

2020 was certainly not the year we wanted it to be, but it wasn’t all bad. Even spending all day together every day since mid-February, Kent and Jen still actively enjoy each other’s company. May you be as lucky in your choice of spouse and/or writing partner.