Tagged: Music Novel

Genre Unconventional

r-avatarWhen writers look back at their old output, they can experience a variety of feelings. If it’s really old stuff, then they’ve probably forgotten all about it and can see it almost like a “real reader.” Touring through all the posts on the Skelleyverse recently, we got to ride the ups and downs of seeing so much of our writing as if for the first time. We also discovered some things about ourselves as writers.

While our novels stick to a certain sub-set of science fiction, our prompted posts inhabit many genres. We added tags for the most frequently used, including romance and horror. And we added the gonzo tag, exclusively (so far) for Kent’s use. Either he routinely gets stuck with the more difficult stichomancy prompts, or Jen is just a little bit better at beating hers into coherency.

Exactly what kind of science fiction is found in a Rune Skelley novel?

Our stories aren’t set on alien planets or at distant points in time. Monsters and wizards don’t stroll the streets; the laws of physics apply, as far as the general populace can tell. But there’s a secret ingredient, something sliding under the veneer of normalcy. The protagonist is (un)lucky enough to be aware of this hidden reality, which is of course unique to each Rune Skelley universe. These things aren’t hidden as in being buried or masked. They’re intertwined with the familiar environment. In some cases, there’s no way for the protagonists to share the secret even if they want to. Other times, protecting that secret is the protagonists’ main goal in life.

This setup saves us a bit of labor on traditional world-building, because we don’t need to tell you what color the sky is. But the trade-off for that lies in needing more demonstrations of the deeper nature’s implications.

We’ve alluded a few times to our recent project being further toward the hard end of the scifi scale. The main reason it ended up that way has to do with what type of secret ingredient its world needed. In the trilogy and in the music novel, the special nature of the story worlds is a paradigm shift, an everything-you-know-is-wrong proposition. But in the latest book, it’s a what-if question on a less cosmic scale, but with staggering consequences. The tale’s plausibility relies more on technical points of known science than the others.

None of which is meant to suggest we have any kind of problem with other sub-genres, or other genres for that matter. But if you peruse the prompts for examples of how we cope with those other forms, you might see why we like to stick to what we know best.

Papercuts

r-avatarWe definitely have our work cut out for us on this revision pass. Many scenes will be moved around, and although that doesn’t really impact their substance it does raise concerns about their tone. If something that used to fall in the third act is now going to be very near the start of the novel, we might want to make adjustments for the fact that readers don’t already know all the background. And, vice versa; moving early scenes to a later stage means we’ll need to be careful that we don’t introduce a lot of review and repetition, as those scenes no longer need to introduce all the ideas.

Probably the most significant change is due to reassigning POV. We realized that one of our characters needs to be fleshed out a lot more, because of the role he must play in the ending, and developed a bunch of great ideas for him. Too much stuff to get across without going inside his thoughts. At the same time, we identified a weakness with another character’s thread. He had point-of-view in several scenes, but nothing essential would be lost if we showed those events from someone else.

Meanwhile, we have our whole manuscript’s Scrivener file marked up with critique comments (our own and our group’s), on matters large and small. Project management consultants would be saying to leave the little stuff and concentrate on the big tasks first. After all, that missing comma will be irrelevant if the whole sentence — or the whole scene — gets cut. But Rune Skelley likes to do things Rune Skelley’s way, and here that means checking off as many of the dinky little things as possible first. The main benefit of that is decluttering the comments column when the text is on the screen, which is invaluable for both Jen’s and Kent’s ability to focus. We don’t like bleeding from a million papercuts, and even if the block of text where we fixed that comma does eventually get chopped, well, fixing the comma only took a few seconds. Totally worth it to us for the peace of mind.

Fortunately, we were able to agree on this order of business. There are many different ways to divvy up the work, and the optimal strategy might be different in every situation. But, in a collaboration, if the partners disagree on how to proceed they’ll likely trip over each other’s changes and generate friction. Get on the same page about your revision workflow before either of you starts editing.

Retro-Rainbow Rocketeers

r-avatarWe’re tackling the revisions on our music novel, which we completed last year. Coming back to it has been a bit eye-opening, leading us to wonder aloud how we got ourselves into certain messes.

Our process evolves with each book we work on, and at the time of this first draft we hadn’t yet implemented our rainbow plot diagramming technique. The read-through showed us that we have some significant structural concerns, and the plot’s complexity was making it hard to verbally analyze all the possible changes. So, we decided to do the rainbow trick after-the-fact.

It’s been eye-opening as well, helping us get all right-brainstormy about our plot structure. In the course of an hour or so the other evening, we re-envisioned the whole book as a set of parallel threads, seeing ways to sync up the revelations of backstory info to help inform the main story thread. The current draft is exposition-heavy, and a lot of that is in flashbacks (messes and wonderment, as previously mentioned), but we never felt that there was actually too much background info. The story world is complex, as are the characters, and we want to portray it all with richness and texture.

The upshot is, by writing the characters’ arcs on color-coded notepaper and spreading the whole thing out on the floor, we were able to see the “jobs” that the backstory exposition is supposed to do, and figure out a way to reposition the pieces so they can get their jobs done. If it sounds like we’re just rationalizing not cutting out the flashbacks, well, we hope that’s not true. Having a picture in our heads of how it’s supposed to interlock should give us the clarity to know which pieces are in fact pulling their weight.

Kill Your Partner’s Darlings

r-avatarEvery writer has heard the advice Kill Your Darlings. The theory is that the good of the story is paramount, and takes priority over all. No matter how deeply you love and adore a scene, a character, a turn of phrase, if it doesn’t better the story it gets the axe. It’s good advice, but often difficult to follow.

A writing partner can make the process easier, and also more difficult.

Killing your own darlings is a heartbreaking process; killing someone else’s is less so. When you have a scene that you know needs trimming, but you can’t bear to do the work yourself, your coauthor should step in with more objectivity and kill the darlings that need to be killed.

The problems arise when your collaborator is particularly bloodthirsty. When the red ink flows like blood it can be traumatic. Not only do you mourn your dead darlings, you can sometimes feel personally attacked. If someone in your critique group, or a professional editor, suggests striking something you particularly love, you can console yourself with the knowledge that they are idiots and obviously don’t understand your vision. When it’s your partner…

Right after Thanksgiving we finished the read through of the music novel. It had been resting for a long time, so we found we could see it with relatively clear eyes. We saw  a novel with love handles. It really is too long, just like our critiquers said. Right now there are certain love handles that we like and aren’t ready to lop off. We’re exploring ways to restructure the novel so that they’re less noticeable. We’re also making plans to whittle them down. If they do some crunches and wear Spanx, nobody will notice, right?

While we wrestle with the fate of those darlings, there is one section that we both agree needs serious work. Kent wrote most of it, and he has very bravely handed it to Jen, even though she’s holding a butcher knife and has a mad glint in her eye.

Let’s hope she uses the knife more like a scalpel than a cleaver, and that when it’s her turn to hand her darlings over to the slaughterhouse she’s able to trust Kent to do the same.

 

Revisions, Revisited

r-avatarNow that we’re done with our latest first draft, and mostly recovered from the bacchanal honoring that milestone, we’re getting set to make revisions on our previous novel. It’s also at the first-draft stage.

We have a methodical approach to this, as we do for nearly everything. The first step is a read-through. We are making some notes and discussing the story along the way, but the primary goal right now is just to get to know the material again. It’s been “resting” for quite some time while we worked on other projects, which is a good thing. The time enables us to get some critical distance.

The next step will be to paw through all the comment copies. Critique group feedback is invaluable, and we have a sizable heap of it. We’ll look for patterns, things that are raised by multiple readers. We’ll also indulge in a frightful amount of second-guessing and interpretation. Using what we learn from all this feedback, combined with our own to-do list generated during the read-through, we’ll move into planning the actual edits.

In this case, we expect to need some substantial structure-level changes. Therefore, it’s even more important to be systematic in dealing with things. If our process has its steps in the wrong sequence, we’ll end up wasting effort on things that will only get cut later anyway, or worse yet, tangle ourselves up in inconsistencies.

It’ll probably be a while before we reach a point where we can split things up. There’s a time for divide-and-conquer, and there’s a time for double-teaming the work. This is an example of the latter. Much like the very early stages of story development, we’ll be doing a lot of analysis and making decisions together about what is needed. It’s one of the most intense and rewarding aspects of writing with a partner.

Creative Drought

r-avatarWe’ve reached the point in the lifecycle of every Rune Skelley project where we have to put the manuscript aside and do other things. Through our years writing together we’ve identified this as our main weak spot, and we’ve developed a system for dealing with it without losing all forward momentum.

I imagine that every writer encounters problems of the same ilk, where you’ve written all you can and there is no more creative spark. A coauthor can often help cover for minor bouts of writer’s block, as we talked about before. But sometimes you both deplete your compositional resources at the same time. When we first started writing, this led to us walking away from the project for months at a time while our batteries recharged. These days we have several novels that are in various stages of being finished, and we try to shuffle between them as needed. If we can’t write anything new on Project 4, well Project 3 needs to reread and edited.

This time is a little different though. We hadn’t quite hit the wall when we decided to put the novel aside. The excuses were creeping in, and the output on any particular evening was waning, but we were both still chugging along, noses to the grindstone. Life intervened, tossing us a huge project that requires a lot of time and focus. Apart from attending our weekly critique group and updating this blog, we haven’t done anything writing related for nearly a month. It’s a very unusual position to find ourselves in.

The outside project is starting to wind down. We’re not ready to set quill to paper again just yet, but hope to get back to it in another week or two. And we hope that having a partner will ease the transition back to the writing life.

Brave New World

The time has finally come for us to start the actual writing process. We’re finding it slow going, even with all the preliminary work we did. The first three novels we wrote were a trilogy. By the time we got to the third one, we knew the characters better than we knew ourselves. It was dead easy to find their voices and dive in.

After the trilogy, though, we wrote a standalone novel, and had this same problem at the beginning. We just don’t know the characters well enough yet to feel totally at ease writing in their voices.

This is one place where writing with a partner can make things more difficult. If either of us were doing this solo, we could just wing it and see what happens. With two of us involved, and wanting everything to feel seamless, we both feel a little inhibited.

Because Jen is cruel, she makes Kent take on the first scene. It’s up to him to introduce the narrative voice, and the main character’s voice, too. Jen sits there and watches him type, because until she sees what he’s done she can’t write anything. The fear is that we will both write something great, but that the pieces won’t mesh. Instead of chocolate and peanut butter coming together to make a delicious peanut butter cup, we dread ending up with salmon bonbons. Either the fish or the ganache would be delectable on their own, but together they’re something the loser made on Iron Chef.

And so we tiptoe around each other, each of us hesitantly writing scenes and vignettes. When we share them, it is always with a healthy dose of Remember This Is A First Draft and I Don’t Know If This Works.

Fortunately, this weirdness is confined to the character voice. We know for sure that the actions and details contained in a scene will be right, and next week we’ll tell you how.

What’s in a name?

We’re trying to come up with a name for the city where our story takes place.

The novel before this one is set in Manhattan, so there was very little naming of places required. The neighborhoods and streets all have names already, and there are myriad restaurants, boutiques, businesses, and landmarks to call on for flavor. That’s not to say that we didn’t have to make anything up. We invented a few locations to suit our purposes and then we had to name them.

This time, though, we’re back to founding our own city, which gives us the fun honor (or dreaded chore, you decide) of naming absolutely everything.

Naming is a special art, whether it’s characters or places or the story itself. Not everyone has the gift for it. In our case, Jen definitely has the touch. So in our workaday partnership activities, naming stuff is one of her primary duties. (Kent has other talents. Honest.)

But for whatever reason, in this case we’re teaming up on the toponym issue. Jen named the whole cast already, so maybe she was just tuckered out. It’s neat to kick ideas back and forth and watch how your partner reacts. It’s a good way to tell if you’re on the same page in regards to the flavor. If one of you wants to call the place Kitten Basket* while the other favors Death River*, there’s a disconnect somewhere and it’s better to get that sorted out early on. One of the beneficial side-effects to our collaboration and brainstorming has been that the place’s history is starting to take shape, because some of the name concepts are so evocative. But we still haven’t chosen a name!

*Not actually under consideration. Feel free to use it yourself.