Tagged: Music Novel

How Would You Describe That?

r-avatarThe heavy lifting is done in our revisions of the Music Novel, aka Novel #4, but we still have miles to go. We’ve set up a list of global revision issues, each of which pretty much necessitates a separate pass through the full manuscript.

For example, one of the major characters is British, and we identified the need to make that more evident through the usage choices in her scenes. Not just within her dialog, but also the narrative if the scene is from her point of view — we want her point of view to really be the camera lens for those scenes. In other, subtler ways, each POV character needs similar attention. Some of them are less optimistic about life (especially later in the tale…) and some of them are just wired differently. We want certain foibles to be evident in which details the character’s notice, and in their choices of inward adjectives and similes.

And on top of all that, we also need to make the locale more vivid. This one’s set in New York City, primarily Manhattan, and we apparently got lazy about describing the place. After all, it’s on TV a thousand times a week, so everybody knows what it’s like, right? Lazy! Our real wake-up about this issue was when we heard reader feedback on Novel #5, and people repeatedly praised the job we did on the setting. In that case, it’s a fictitious city and because we made it up we were eager to tell folks all about it. So to fix things in the Music Novel, we came up with this simple strategy: pretend we invented New York City. It makes the writing more fun, largely because of the frequency with which we realize just how weird a place New York actually is, probably weirder than anything we would have concocted!

To deal with so many global changes, we split up the list between us. Kent is focusing mainly on “inventing NYC” at the moment, and Jen has moved on from the Anglophonic project to physical traits of the characters. It’s humming along pretty well now, but it’s taken the past week or so for Kent to get back into the swing of things now that we’re back from Europe. Jen must be more resistant to jet lag.

Did we mention we were going to Europe? Prague is a devastatingly gorgeous city. We insist you visit. Go. Right now. Eat trdelník and schnitzel. Drink hot wine and Pilsner Urquell. Visit the astronomical clock and the Museum of Sex Machines. We couldn’t invent a better city if we tried.

Prague prague2 prague3

Being Awesome Together

r-avatarMostly we write about the logistical and procedural aspects of writing with a partner: how to divvy up the work, how we can each play to our strengths, and so on. What we mention in passing is that we talk to each other a lot, and now maybe it’s time to make those conversations the focus of a post on the Skelleyverse.

Kent’s current assignment is to make a pass through the music novel watching for places to have the main character “think in music” — we want readers to be able to hear the world through his ears, and we want it to be clear that music is fundamental to him, not just something he does. Well, Kent made use of Scrivener’s nifty tools for filtering and organizing text nodes to find the places where such edits would make sense, and … stared at it for an hour. Eventually he changed one word. It was a good one, mind you. But let’s review: one word.

But then — but then! — while Kent and Jen were spooling down from their gruelling work session, they chatted about Kent’s mission for about five minutes and came up with several excellent ideas for ways to incorporate the desired flavor. If Kent hadn’t been so fixated on the notion that it was “his” job to come up with this stuff, they could have spent some time chatting up front and come out way ahead.

Every writer needs someone to talk to, even if it’s not a partner per se. It’s critical for effective problem-solving. And if you are lucky enough to have someone sitting in the same room with you, who knows the details of your project and understands the creative vision, then don’t squander the opportunity to think out loud with that person! Good things will happen.

Synergistic Tag-Team

r-avatarWe’ve been beavering away on the revisions for the music novel, and we’re getting close to done with this pass. The ending has gotten a major overhaul and now kicks total ass.

The original ending is something we were happy with when we wrote it. Our critiquers mostly thought it was okay, but not awesome. They made some good points, which we were able to acknowledge once we had a bit of critical distance. So, as we turned the rest of the novel inside out we pondered the ending. Certain outcomes were nonnegotiable. The details of how they came about had quite a lot of flex.

Jen had the idea to work in one of the heroine’s character traits which had been underused in the old draft. It’s a pretty significant detail and we had just completely ignored certain implications of it. When Jen suggested we utilize it in the finale, we both had a “how long has that been there?” reaction. We’re obviously not going to spoil the ending, but imagine something along the lines of a character having a knife in her pocket and just not thinking to use it to cut herself free. Only it was us who forgot she even had the knife. We won’t put any of this on her, because she’s actually quite smart.

Something else that influenced — and complicated — the flow of concluding events was the inclusion of a different POV character. As we mentioned before, the rewrite gave point of view to a character who had not previously had it. Kent adopted this guy as his pet character, writing pretty much all of his new scenes. When it came to the ending, he had some great insights into what this guy would say and do, and the new stuff crackles with tension.

Kent wrote some great action and then Jen went through and beefed up the emotional content (yes, we’re back to our stereotypical gender roles). There’s been a lot of nitty-gritty back and forth on this pass, which is the whole reason to have a writing partner. They see things you don’t, and vice versa.

Save It For the Sequel

r-avatarAs we’ve been editing the music novel (hacking our way through dense word jungles with a machete, burning whole scenes to the ground, etc) we keep finding ourselves in conversations about ways to complicate the story world.

Believe me when I tell you that this particular story is complicated enough. We have eight point-of-view characters and a couple of subplots. The premise behind the story, the dark twist we’ve given our fictional reality, is one of those deceptively simple ideas. When it’s first explained it makes perfect sense, then you start to think of the implications and ramifications, and you drown in a tsunami of questions. That’s a good thing, because it gives us lots to write about. The characters get to ask those questions and propel the plot.

The Big Idea of this novel is truly expansive, and we could write hundreds of stories set in this universe. The problem is that right now we’re only writing one. That means that we need to keep it focused on one main plot and not clutter things up with every little idea we have.

As we mentioned, we do have plans for a sequel, so some of our Really Coolest Ideas™ will end up being used there. As we keep reminding ourselves.

Before we started these edits we had a debate about which project we should work on. We almost brainstormed and outlined the sequel instead of diving in on the edits, and it’s a really good thing we didn’t. I think we both overestimated how well we remembered the events of this novel, for one thing. For another, the discussions we’re having now are sparking a ton of ideas for the followup that I’m not sure we would have come up with otherwise.

We have a few more weeks of work to do on the music novel before we move on, but we’re both getting excited about the possibilities for Music Novel 2: Electric Boogaloo. It’s great to have a writing partner to share your enthusiasm with.

Rolling with role reversal

r-avatarAlong with “every word of this book is in the wrong place,” and “we must use every word, twice if possible,” one of the discoveries we made about the music novel was that our main characters’ relationship needed more tension. They get thrown into a harrowing situation that exposes myriad hurtful secrets about their past, and we had them moping for about ten minutes and then laughing it all off. (Well, not exactly. But it was too easy.)

Upshot: one of our jobs during revisions is to roughen up the emotional tenor of their conversations, and shed a little more light on the second guesses and loss of trust that accompany such upheaval. Weirdly, it’s falling to Kent to handle most of it.

We’ve talked before about how each member of a writing duo should focus on their strengths. It’s one of the selling points for having a writing partner: it’s someone who’s good at things you might struggle with. Traditionally, the Rune Skelley partnership divvies up the chores along appallingly stereotypical gender lines. Kent brings the jargon and the action sequences, while Jen humanizes things with emotional cues that are as subtle or as devastating as the situation demands.

That’s why this time through is weird. After we lined up the scenes and made some notes about where the tone was too light or just too vague, it was Kent who felt drawn to those particular edits. Jen not so much.

It seems to be going pretty well, despite the oddness. Kent thinks it’s going a little slow, compared to when he’s in his technobabble wheelhouse. It’s probably healthy for him to get a bit of practice with earth-human feelings once in a while.

Size Matters

r-avatarWe’ve been harping on and on lately about how big our current project is, which raises the question of why we don’t make it two books.

Two books is something we thought about early in the editing process, after all, we’d have two 90,000-word novels. That’s damn respectable. Turns out there are a host of reasons we’ve opted to not go that way.

First, it feels lazy. We want a good book, not an easy book. That means we need to work hard to craft something beautiful and meaningful, no matter what the size. If all we did was lop it in half, it would feel like cheating, and we’d have two not-great books.

Second, even though it’s long enough to be two books, the plot is not really structured in a way that makes it easy to bisect. As originally written, the story proper took place over one week. We had a large amount of backstory that was told through flashbacks. There was (in our opinion) a really clever structure to the flashbacks that, at the time, we felt justified the use of so many. Our readers, though, did not agree. We had six, and none of them picked up on the clever part, which begs the question of how clever it really was. Since our original vision was a bust, we decided to just tell the story in order. Radical, right? But the scenes that were flashbacks in the first draft weren’t enough to carry the first half of the novel. They were a few isolated incidents, but they weren’t close enough together to be easily connected with a line. Now we’ve written new material to close up the gaps and make the line clear, which is what makes it so damn long. In theory we could chop it at a big tentpole moment and give it a cliffhanger ending. But we don’t wanna. That’s not the way the story is meant to be told. We also don’t want to pad out the first half with artificial plot complications just to make it seem like it deserves to be its own story. That’s not how we roll.

And third, we have ideas for another book, ideas that work well as a sequel but not as the third in a series. When there’s only one point of reference, the second point can go anywhere. But when you have two references, anything further really ought to follow a predictable pattern.

Jen and Kent are very happy that they each have a writing partner they can talk about this kind of thing with. They pity the poor solo authors who have to figure it all out on their own.

Excuses Excuses

r-avatarHow about this winter, huh? I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but here in Skelleyville we’ve gotten about 3,000 feet of snow this year. Couple that with the polar vortex and its subzero temperatures, and we have not been able to maintain our routine of walking conferences.

Call us wimps if you must, but we’d rather stay inside with the fire and a mug or two of hot buttered rum.

A few weeks ago the temperature rose several degrees and we felt brave enough to suit up and take some walks in the winter wonderland. It felt good to stretch our legs, and to have the time to talk through some of the issues that have come up in the editing of the music novel. Sure we can have those conversations inside, but we find that we often make more progress as we progress around the neighborhood. A change of scenery is always good, and the physical activity puts us in a different headspace. New ideas emerge. It’s pretty cool.

So it’s a good thing we found another way to derail ourselves!

LSM

Meet Lady Marzipan. She’s incredibly cute, and incredibly distracting. When we’re working in the writing cave, sometimes she’ll lay and quietly guard the door against invading uffdeguffs (and teenagers), but more often she loses her tennis ball under the furniture, or chews on her squeaky octopus, or rattles her plastic chew bone on the hardwood floor. (Yes, our cave has a wooden floor. Doesn’t yours?)

And who can resist that face?

Now when we take walks, she joins us, and our conversations go like this:

Jen: How’s that scene you’re working on?

Kent: Going pretty well. I’m getting close to the — hey, Lady Marzipan! That’s not your squirrel!

She’s a fuzzy little test of our multitasking abilities. (They’re not all that impressive, turns out.) But on the plus side, Kent and Jen now have someone to cast the tie-breaking vote on those rare occasions when it’s needed!

Yup. There are a lot of words.

r-avatarLast night we completed our read-through on the music novel. We knew that the latter portion of it would contain a fair amount of misplaced recap, because of the restructuring (the latter portion was originally the early portion, in fact it was originally the whole book, rife with flashbacks). We did find such material, but it doesn’t have as much bulk as we were expecting, so cutting it back isn’t going to have as much of an impact on the Brobdingnagian word count. Furthermore, there’s stuff we still need to add. Hoo boy. It’s looking like this one could flirt with 200k.

But that’s okay. The book will be the right size, based on the story it contains. There are guidelines, but there isn’t a magic number of words that “good” books consist of.

This attitude is a bit of an adjustment for Kent, in particular. He’s tended to be a bit keyed up about not letting things get too big. In this case, it’s just a bigger story, with more world-building required. There’s also a large cast, all of whom have important functions in the narrative. It’s just big, period.

The scale of your book becomes another point on which you need to agree with your partner. If one of you is thinking of it as a novella and the other as a saga, you’ll probably realize early on that more discussion is needed. But once you’ve agreed that what you’re plotting is “a novel,” be careful of miscommunication. That word could describe anything from about sixty thousand words on up. Of course, there’s an upside to a partnership (as always). A writing partner is someone to help get things in perspective. Editing is a lot of work, and cutting clever stuff is especially hard. It’s all too easy to make excuses for keeping too many words, not paring things down (or conversely for not fleshing them out — too few words is not a typical Rune Skelley problem but we can see how it could happen). A good partner will push for doing things right.

Yoink!

During our read-through of Novel #4 we diagnosed several problems, and have been working to fix them ever since. Unfortunately for one of our characters (we’ll call him Mr X), the prescribed remedy calls for him to longer be a Point of View character. He’s still in the story, and (sad to say) suffers through pretty much the same series of unfortunate events, it’s just that now we don’t get to hear his side of it. He’s a bit miffed at us for silencing him.

A potential upside, from Mr X’s perspective, is that his plot line is now slightly less complicated, which will make his time in the story a smidgen less unpleasant. For Rune Skelley characters, that’s really the best they can hope for: a smidgen less unpleasant.

One of the reasons X got the rug yanked out from under him is that he only had a couple of POV scenes to begin with. We determined that the reader needed more insight into another character (to highlight our creativity we’ll call him Mr Z), which meant making him a POV character. X and Z shared most of their scenes, so it made perfect sense to simply shine the spotlight in the other direction.

That doesn’t mean it was easy, though. Before we could make Z a star, we had to get to know him better. Firstly he got a new name. His original name was “borrowed” from an unpleasant person we dealt with long ago. In the years since, our anger at this person faded and it became less important to do horrible things to his effigy. We also thought better of name-checking an actual living person. So, Z got a new name, and then he and Kent spent some quality time together, discovering what it was like inside Z’s head. Kent emerged unscathed, and now the novel is all the richer.

Swapping Messrs X and Z on POV-duty will make the novel better, which is good because it’s making a lot of extra work. It was among the discoveries we made by retroactively laying out a rainbow for this book, because it showed us in living color that we hadn’t made proper use of Mr X and also highlighted how important Mr Z’s state of mind was to the climax. Even so, it took walking a few laps around the neighborhood to really make up our minds that it was the right move. A writing partner helps you through tough decisions, so you know that all the rework entailed by a major change is really taking you in the right direction.

Words Count – And We’re Using All of Them!

Edits on Novel #4 (the music novel) are coming along nicely. It’s a huge undertaking, and right now it’s only getting huger. The first draft that we presented to our critique group was 155,000 words (!), which we know full well is long. We gave ourselves a pass on the expansive word count, though, because 20,000 of those words were in the service of supplementary material. Sure, the fancy extras were meant to appear in the finished product, but they weren’t actually part of the narrative, exactly, so they didn’t really count. Right? That’s what we told ourselves in order to be able to sleep at night.

Well, now that we’re deep into the edits, our baby has bloated up to over 180,000 (!!!). Yes, that still includes the supplemental material, and, yes, we’re planning to keep that aspect. In fact, we’ll probably need even more of it, for reasons too complicated to go into right now.

We’ve added something like 35,000 words of new material, and we’ve already removed somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000. It’s hard to keep track of exactly what’s going on, because some scenes have been snipped in one place and expanded in another.

Word count is not the best way to track your progress, and it’s not at all an indication of quality. We know this, and we’re trying really hard not to worry about it. But come on! It’s 180,000 words! We know that’s ridiculous. We know!

The good news is that we still have half of the manuscript to edit, and (fingers crossed) most of those edits should involve removing material that’s now superfluous because it’s covered in all the new material that comes earlier.

I guess this is one potential downside to having a coauthor. One writer working alone would need twice as long to dig a hole this deep.

We got into this situation together, and we’ll help each other get out of it, too.

A writing partner is invaluable for talking through the problems in a manuscript, and making a plan to fix them. A writing partner is a wonderful resource to rely on when faced with a daunting project, like editing an entire novel. And a writing partner makes the best drinking companion when you look at that insane word count and just need a minute to, you know, lose your mind.