Tagged: Music Novel

Making Ourselves Believe the Make-Believe

A hallmark of well-crafted fiction is when readers effortlessly suspend their disbelief. Creating good fiction calls for writers to suspend their disbelief as well.

For instance, to write our ghost story we need to convincingly portray a world in which ghosts exist, so we have to embrace that alternate reality. In our Divided Man series, it was extra-terrestrials, nanotech, and psychic powers. In the Music series, it was something else (which you will not be able to guess, ever, we guarantee that), and in the Science series it was immortality. Each story we tell gives consensus reality its own unique twist, which on a certain level becomes “true” for us also. That immersion is crucial for us to bring richness to the setting, and to keep its physical laws consistent.

And that’s the easy part. Writing a novel calls for the author to see the world through potentially disturbing eyes. Could be a cult leader, a mad scientist, a serial killer, or a televangelist. If you’re a nice person — which we’re sure you are — the behavior of such characters seems unthinkable to you. Then again, you’d probably make a rather dull bad guy. Every villain is the hero of their story. They believe in what they’re doing. So the writer must be able to believe in it too, at least while they’re writing. This is still true even if the villain isn’t a POV character! Like an evil marionette, it’s relying on you to pull its strings.

A writing partner is someone who encourages delusional ideation, but only when you’re on the clock.

Writing Cave Progress Report

Update on the Music Series: After completing the read-through for the whole trilogy, we made a few tiny little adjustments to Book One. We then collated all the input from our critique group and beta readers for Book Three, and all the stuff we wanted to take action on has been transferred into the live Scrivener project. It was a few dozen items, mostly pretty small. We say it was a few dozen because Jen has been knocking things off the list at a truly impressive pace. Meanwhile, Kent dug in on a couple of the not-so-small issues and has made great progress on them. Fewer items getting checked off the list, but a comparable degree of progress.

We did discuss working on Book Two after we got Book One tidied up. Because, you know, they go in order that way. Here’s the thing. Book Two is the one we wrote third. Thus, it hasn’t had as much time to rest, and we haven’t had a chance to circulate it for feedback. Therefore, we’re still doing this series inside-out.

“I’m Not a Monster”

The conventional definitions of the words show us what distinguishes a monster from a villain. A monster is a frightening and destructive creature, while a villain is a person who commits evil deeds.

They both have their place in fiction. Just don’t mix them up. If your hero really needs a villain to oppose, but you provide a monster and call it a villain, there will be imbalance. Remember, the villain is the hero of their own story. Another way to think of it is that a villain is an actual character, with a complex interior state. Good villains have a powerful drive, and are capable of emotions besides inchoate rage and savage glee. But, let’s give the monsters their due. A powerful and relentless foe, something that doesn’t need a reason to want the hero dead, can create a lot of tension if properly cast.

Enough with the theoretical stuff. Why bring any of this up right now? So happy you asked!

Our read-through of the Music Series is getting close to done. We just passed the middle of book three, and there are exactly three books in the series, so. Getting close!

As we might have mentioned, we’re really pleased with the state of all of these books. One of the points of pride is that the adversaries take a variety of forms. There are villains, and there are monsters. There’s even a villain who repeatedly denies being a monster. (While demonstrating so eloquently that sometimes people can be both.)

What type of adversary does your protagonist need? What kind of tension will keep your readers turning pages?

Reminders For The Reader

We have a lot on our mind (the single, shared Skelley hive-mind) as we do our read-through. Among the many things we’re keeping an eye on is whether we succeed in keeping the setting and the characters vivid and lively for the reader the whole time.

How much description is too much, and how many reminders should there be about certain details, is a challenge every author has to deal with. Description is a fundamental element of prose, but it can slow down the story. What you’re really seeking is balance. That search is a place where beta readers and critique groups can provide really useful feedback, but ultimately it’s the writer’s call to make.

There are no straightforward rules for this. The right answer depends on the type of story, what part of that story you’re looking at, and what your readers really want out of the book. Sure, if you figure out the right search terms, you’d surely land on someone’s list of rules for exactly this, but they’d be of dubious value. (Whereas if you keep reading our blog, you’ll get pure gold, of course. Anyway.) Rune Skelley keeps these two guidelines in mind:

  1. the less ordinary the details, the more reminders are warranted
  2. prevalence in the text should line up with what’s significant for the characters
  3. (bonus guideline) remember that you’re never going to please everybody

Point number one relates to world building. It’s not just important to say, somewhere, “oh by the way the sky has polka dots.” You have to keep the place and its denizens feeling real for the reader.

Point number two is one we pay careful attention to here in the Writing Cave. Just because something is a fact doesn’t mean it needs to be brought up. Focusing on which details the characters care about helps the reader really get inside their skin. This is also a way to bring a sense of wonder into a familiar or ordinary setting, by helping the reader see it through someone else’s eyes.

Point three simply acknowledges that this is all subjective. You collect your feedback, and Reader A tells you the recurrent descriptions are like a pleasant leitmotif running through the prose, while Reader B says he started skimming whenever it felt like things were sliding toward reminder-town. Meanwhile Reader C asks why you waited until page 200 to mention the sky having polka-dots, when actually by then it’s been described seven times. However, if multiple sources agree that something’s either too heavy or too sparse, then you should probably make adjustments.

All through the writing of the first drafts of these books, we fretted about this ongoing description issue. Kent was pretty convinced that we were going to need to add tons of reminders. But at this stage, almost three-quarters of the way through our reading of the trilogy? We’re both quite happy with the overall state. Editing will most likely involve sprinkling in a few more mentions of certain things, but it’s in a good place already.

A writing partner is someone who helps you get a feel for how to help readers inhabit the story’s world.

The Art of Reading Through

In our big Music Series read-through, we’ve crossed the midpoint of book two, which pretty much means we’re halfway through the trilogy.

Something we chatted about recently is that there’s a balance we need to strike between getting done reading the damn thing and not missing important points that need discussion. This one hasn’t been edited at all yet, or even shown to any beta readers, so there are things that need work. But we’re not in revisions mode yet. We need to complete the read-through of all three books first.

The whole point of the exercise is to get the entirety of the trilogy into our minds in order to plan our edits holistically. Increasing the interconnection across the books, and strengthening the payoffs in book 3 by laying the right groundwork in books 1 & 2. As we look for ways to tighten up the narrative, we need to keep an eye on scenes in all three books so we don’t orphan anything. The big structural adjustments have to be made first, then we can work on polishing the prose.

A writing partner is someone who helps you stay on track when you’ve got roughly half a million words to wrangle.

Pace Yourself

As we were finishing up the read through of Music Novel (Verdict: Awesome!), we suddenly realized that the second book in the series, Sibling of Music Novel, hadn’t been broken up into chapter-sized bites yet. It wouldn’t be strictly necessary, since it’s just the two of us reading it, but we wanted to take a crack at it to make it a little more like reading a real book.

It’s still a first draft, so it’s bloatier than it needs to be. It won’t read just like a real book, even with the chapter breaks, but it helps us assess the pacing.

Other writers that we talk to say they write their novels in chapter-long chunks. The concept seems foreign to us. We plan our novels scene by scene, and then later combine the scenes into chapters. Each scene could technically be its own chapter, but that would give us a crazy high number of chapters, and their lengths would vary wildly. We (especially Jen) don’t like that.

Jen took a stab at breaking this bad boy down into reasonable chunks. At this early stage she worked mainly by word count, with an eye toward ending each chapter with a hook. It mostly worked pretty smoothly. There were a few places where a two scenes in a row ended with particularly juicy, propulsive events, and she had a hard time choosing where the breaks would go.

That’s the point of the read through, though. We’ll see how the pacing feels. Where things are awkward, we’ll make a note of it. Perhaps on the second draft, certain scenes will need to be presented in a different order. Some might get cut altogether. Right now it seems impossible to think we’ll need to add anything, but never say never.

Writing with a partner, working in scenes rather than chapters makes more sense (at least to us). How do you approach things?

Braiding Them Ever More Intricately Together

We’re still working on our epic read-through of the entire Music Series, which will help prepare us to do edits on books two and three. But, even though Book One has already had a lot of editorial attention, we are also on the lookout for a certain breed of change that we might entertain there as well.

Now that all three of the books are written, we have the ability to enrich the foreshadowing for key events and strengthen the themes running through the whole series. So-and-so ended up being a more important character in the later books? We can tweak how the early appearances are handled. These crackpots hanging out in the margins are just a random rabble, except, hey, maybe… Wait, is that a granite countertop, or stainless steel? (Oops.)

We have no intention of doing anything drastic. We have enough work ahead of us as it is, thanks. But small changes can sometimes go a long way to unifying the members of a series. The big attraction for us is that it makes us look smarter, but there really is a payoff for the reader as well. The story world feels that much more real, that much easier to fall into. And on a reread, clues will jump out that you didn’t know were clues at all the first time through.

A writing partner is someone who helps you do sneaky, crafty things for your readers’ benefit.

The Rereadening Commenceth

Now that the draft of Sibling of Music Novel is complete, we have begun our read-through of the entire Music Series, starting of course with Book One. We wrote and revised that one first, then Book Three, and then did a bunch of stuff for the Science Series, and then wrote Book Two (aka Sibling). We didn’t really do it all in that order on purpose, but the upshot is that it’s been a good long while since we really delved into that first book.

And you know what? It’s good!

Okay, we are a bit biased about that. But seriously, it feels so good to be reading that one again. As mentioned above, this book has already been through some pretty heavy editing, so it’s in a nice polished state. And the story is just a lot of fun! (Although, the point where last night’s reading session left off was decidedly tense. Our characters would not say there was anything fun going on at that particular moment. We tell them “Just doing our job,” but they still hate us.)

We’re really looking forward to the day when all of you can read this book, too. That day gets closer all the time!

2020 Vision

As we sit here in the Writing Cave, planning out our next writing moves, it’s becoming clear that 2020 might be a year that very little actual writing gets done.

We set January 31 as the deadline for Sibling of Music Novel, a target which seems easily reachable. There are two scenes in progress, and five more after that waiting to be written. Easy peasy. After a small champagne toast, the rest of the month will be spent going back through the manuscript and filling in the placeholders, fixing things we changed our minds about halfway through, and addressing all the other little fiddly things that we know need attention. It will still technically be a first draft, but it will be a pretty clean one. That’s how we like ’em.

To celebrate the completion of the Music Trilogy we’ll pop open the BIG bottle of champagne.

As of February 1 (assuming all goes according to plan) we will have four completed novels that are in need of major edits. For the past few years we’ve concentrated heavily on the writing side of the equation, and now it’s time to turn that around and get some things polished up and gorgeous.

We have two Music Novels and two Science Novels to edit, and we have yet to decide what order we’re going to do them in. On the one hand, we’re pretty immersed in the Music story world at the moment, so it makes sense to stick with that. On the other hand, Sibling needs some time to rest before we can effectively edit it, so it makes sense to switch our attention to the Science story world. Plus that’s the one that our critique group is looking at right now. But the Music Novel is the one our agent is shopping around, so maybe we should stay focused on that?

Around and around we go.

Wherever we decide to start, each novel will go through several stages of editing, and will rest in between.

And in the background we’ll still be tinkering with ideas for the Ghost Series. Jen is a little concerned about what our workflow will look like if we finish up everything else before we start on the ghosts. At various stages of our process we find it helpful to switch our attention to a different project to let our batteries recharge. What will happen if we don’t have anything else to turn our attention to? Kent is a little concerned about having an ever-increasing pile of first drafts that never get readied for publication, and he points out that there will inevitably be projects after the Ghost Series, so when we need a break we can figure out what the next one will be and work on that.

These best laid plans might all fly out the window when our agent sells Music Novel, because then we’ll have plenty of distractions, what with selling the movie rights, and going on all the talk shows, and hobnobbing with celebrities, and buying yachts and all that.

Happy 2020 to all of you!

Sometimes It’s Better Not To Do Too Much Research

There was a recent interview with Thom Yorke in the New York Times, in which he talked a lot about fame and how he’s adapted to it. Much of what he said would really resonate with the main character of our Music Novel. It felt neat to read something that validated so many aspects of our depiction of rock stardom. And, considering that we wrote that book well before Yorke’s interview even happened, it was especially nice not to have something come along and tip over our whole applecart.

Sometimes, it’s better that you didn’t do a huge amount of research. It forces you to use your imagination. And even if you get it “wrong” it’s still yours. If you say that’s how it works in your world, then so be it.

Had this interview been something we read back when our Music Novel story was still coalescing, it might have been hard not to end up cribbing from it. Here is an articulate and intelligent person describing all the same things we need to describe. It might even have influenced the whole makeup of our main character, skewing him to be more similar to Thom Yorke. It might have made him a bit less original.

We did some research, of course. Our experience leads us to encourage that you do sufficient research as well. But maintain that power to dream. Rely on your imagination, and avoid becoming hung up on someone else’s reality.