Tagged: Science Novel

Ya Gotta Start Somewhere

r-avatarNovels #4 and #5 presented us with an unaccustomed obstacle: getting to know a new cast. Over the course of writing and revising the trilogy, we became intimately familiar with the minds and personalities of those characters. We were used to having the characters’ voices be second nature, so the need to readjust took us entirely by surprise.

This is a particular issue for Rune Skelley novels, because we use a very tight third-person viewpoint. Nothing is presented that the POV character doesn’t know, and that character’s worldview informs choices of adjectives and phrasing. The narration adopts the dialect of the viewpoint character.

Beginning the new books was like impersonating a total stranger, at first. It was a dilemma, because to write the scenes we needed to know the characters, and to get to know them we had to spend time with them, i.e., write the scenes. Which brings us to the title of this post. Ya gotta start somewhere.

With Novel #5, the science novel, we started at the beginning, and it wasn’t too long before the new characters became as real to us as the previous cast. Of course, the parts written earliest had the least character voice, but that’s what revision is for. The opening scenes got some retooling to let the POV character, the protagonist, shine through.

Mostly.

There are still a few pockets of “author voice” in the narration. (Kent’s supposed to deal with them tonight, so maybe by the time you read this they’ll be gone.) These mini info-dumps escaped our scrutiny until Jen hit the line edits. They have natural camouflage, because they sound comfortably familiar to us. They sound like Kent.

One of the hardest things for a writer to do is step back far enough to see the work honestly. Beta readers or critiquers are invaluable, but having someone else direct you to the troublesome paragraph is only useful if you can then see the problem, see through its camouflage. Working with a partner helps tremendously, because there’s an extra set of eyes.

The Expanding Skelleyverse, er, Universe

r-avatarMost of our time in writing cave lately has been focused on revisions of novels 4 & 5. But when we take Lady Marzipan out for a stroll we have other things to talk about. And lately, those conversations have often revolved around what we might do for novels 6 & 7.

Our ideas are shaping up as sequels to the books we’re currently polishing. It feels great to brainstorm and be able to just make stuff up, after being so intent for the past year or so on the minutiae of the Music Novel and the Science Novel. However, because we’re dealing with sequels, there are definite constraints. As Jen put it, we need to find ways of expanding the story world without changing its fundamental nature.

We come up with lots of cool ideas that would wreck the integrity of the story world. (Kent comes up with them. He can’t seem to help it sometimes.) It’s not really an issue of continuity, it’s more a matter of tone. The sequel should be of the same subgenre as the preceding book, and the stakes should be on a similar scale.

Our story worlds have certain rules, not all of which are demonstrated explicitly in any one book. We like to keep things broad and flexible until events force a firm decision. As we make up a new story and new characters, we periodically paint ourselves into a corner — if we allow X to happen here, then Y would never have been necessary and the main characters wouldn’t have met. Unless we also say Z… This is the process that leads us to the new wrinkles of our story-world physics. We can also just decree new facets, of course, but we like following the characters into trouble and then debugging the scenario. It ensures that all the world building we do is relevant, and it keeps us focused on showing the characters’ stories instead of telling the overall plot. It keeps things grounded and relatable.

This approach also helps keep us stocked up on new concepts, in the form of the ideas that don’t fit into the carefully constructed, shared delusion that is any particular Rune Skelley novel.

 

Reinventing The Wheel

r-avatarOur process is now firmly established and fairly predictable. But every book is different. And when you forget, they remind you. Just when you think you know what to expect, it’s back to the drawing board.

The later stages of revision, for us, include deweaseling and line editing. Both are fine-grained views of the text, and we’ve discussed the possibility of combining them so we can save ourselves one whole pass through the manuscript. So far, at least, we feel it’s worth the additional time to do it in two passes because they’re really not all that similar, mentally. It’s beneficial to look at every sentence several times, in different lighting.

When we went through this process with the Music Novel we trimmed out a significant percentage of the words. Now, we’re going through it with the Science Novel and finding that those results are inapplicable. There are fewer weasel words in it to begin with, apparently. The line editing is also much more challenging, and it’s leading to more… negotiations than last time.

All authors see changes in their style over time. More practice should mean cleaner, crisper writing at each stage. When two people write together, their combined experience is reflected in the manuscript. What Kent and Jen have found is that they can each now “do the voice” whereas in the early days they had to go over each other’s work to bring it into line. Interesting that this maturation seems to be leading to new difficulties during revision.

Overall, though, it’s a huge win. We might be finding issues in our workflow that weren’t there before, but we’re also getting from concept to completed draft to polished manuscript with much less effort and in far fewer iterations. Working well as a team has a lot to do with that.

Partners in Crime

r-avatarWriting collaboratively with your spouse can be a very rewarding experience. We’ve talked numerous times about how we do it. I won’t bother with links, because it’s the topic of, like, nearly every Friday post.

There are times, though, when being married to your coauthor isn’t great for the project. One of the best things about having a writing partner, being able to cover for each other, becomes infeasible — if not impossible — when dealing with certain interruptions.

For instance, we recently celebrated our anniversary. Yay us! But that meant that we both took time away from working on our fiction at the same time. We also recently took our son on a college visit. Again, yay family time! Yay smart kid! And again, the manuscript sat idle.

Birthdays, vacations, anniversaries, family outings, weddings, medical emergencies. When you’re married to your writing partner, life hits you both at the same time. You need to accept that there will be times in the life cycle of a manuscript when neither of you is able to advance the work. In our partnership it’s Jen who feels stress when the project sits idle for too long (“too long” being a very relative term). Luckily for her she has Kent to talk her down and dive in with her when it’s time to get back to work.

Better Than Talking To Yourself

r-avatarFor once the timing worked out really well. Our critique group gave us their final feedback on Novel #5 (the Science Novel) just a few weeks ago, shortly before we finished nailing down the edits for the Music Novel. That means that we’re going back through their comments while everything is still fresh. It’s relatively easy to recall the conversations we had during our meetings as they lavished praise (and, admittedly, the occasional not-so-glowing remark) and we took notes. When we encountered a point we had a question about, the work was still clear enough in our group’s minds that they were able to clarify their original idea.

Before we looked at our critiquers’ comments, we read through the manuscript for ourselves, looking at it with fresh eyes. We were quite happy with what we saw. We talked along the way, and made some notes about plot points we want to strengthen and characterizations we want to clarify. Once our own thoughts were down on paper (or, in pixels), we spent a week reading through all of the notes we took during our critique group meetings, and reading all of the comments they wrote in the margins of their comment copies. We chose to disregard the diagram one member drew of the intersection where she had a showdown with a street sweeper, and likewise the lessons on how to write our characters’ names in Korean. Interesting as those were, they are irrelevant to the Science Novel.

The process of looking at a novel’s worth of critique all at once can be quite overwhelming, and it’s an excellent example of why having a writing partner can be a good thing. During group meetings, we all try very hard not to argue or answer back to the critiquer. Unless you’re planning the world’s most complicated and tedious book tour, the work needs to stand on its own. With a coauthor, you have someone to talk through each point with outside of that setting.

Some of it is fun, like when a reader asks a question that you know is answered in the next chapter, or when all of the readers get the “Hell yeah!” moment just like you intended. And some of it is not so fun, like when a reader stumbles over something you were sure you made quite clear. With a collaborator, you’re not stuck just talking to yourself. Your partner is there to help you make sense of the comments and decide which items are in legitimate need of extra work, and which ones can be chalked up to the readers only looking at one chapter a week.

 

Feeling Bad for Neil

r-avatarWe give our characters a rough time. They’d probably all feel like taking a swing at us, were we to somehow meet. Some of them inspire no sympathy, while for others we do spare a regretful thought now and then for what we’ve put them through.

At the moment, we’re feeling a little sorry for Neil. He’s a secondary character (and it feels unkind just pointing that out — “thanks, now you’re marginalizing me, too?”) in the music novel. Not quite 10% of it is from his point of view. He’s probably the nicest person in the cast, at least top three. He’s a sweetheart. And we’re cruel to him.

The latest ignominy to be visited on Neil is that we cut one of his scenes. Not just any scene: this was his Emmy Moment, a cathartic, self-revelatory monologue. It’s tranquil, but not boring. Peaceful. Stuff that we kept includes some truly brutal events, things Neil might have voted to cut instead.

Sorry, Neil.

In a previous draft of the book there was substantially less Neil POV, as in one scene. Rune Skelley doesn’t have a lot of rules (not strict ones, anyway) but we really do try to avoid giving anybody exactly one POV scene. In this case, it was a really good scene that performed important functions in the story, and it worked because of Neil’s POV specifically. Our solution was to find at least one other beat that could be shown from Neil. We knew we were already bending our “rule,” so we took special care not to create a pointless scene just as an excuse for the POV. That’s how he got his chance to grow as a human being right before your eyes.

swish pan!

Now we’ve made huge revisions (resulting in a borderline-huge manuscript!) and, in this draft, Neil gets point of view several times. That cathartic moment of discovery we set up for him is still a lovely scene, but, well, there’s pacing to consider… A good writing partner offers suggestions for what to cut as well as what to add. Suggesting cuts is easy when the material in question is shoddy, but that wasn’t the case here. Sometimes it has to come out even though there’s nothing wrong with it. Those are the difficult choices.

It’s not that we suddenly decided Neil was slowing things down, rather the story beats had shifted due to all the restructuring. We no longer wanted the stillness of Neil’s big scene in that particular spot. So, Neil loses out in pursuit of the greater good for the book overall. The events still take place, just not on the page. (See, Neil? It’s not so terrible.)

We also cut a short scene from one of the other secondary POVs, but we have no sympathy for Darren.

Madness In Our Method, But Not Like Back Then

r-avatarWe recently devoted an entire meeting of our critique group to the Rune Skelley Method. Jen and Kent brought the rainbow, and a hard-copy of the outline, and a few sample stubs. Our fellow authors were keen to hear details of how we use all these components in our process. How we do things, of course, is not necessarily what will work best for you. (But details are available at the links above, if you’re interested.)

The key is that we have a process.

You know you’re supposed to have an outline. You know that the more you road-test your plot before you start writing prose, the less likely you’ll get stuck. You know you’re supposed to get enough sleep, and eat your veggies, and not run with scissors. We certainly hope you’re heeding at least some of that advice, but knowing what you should do and doing it consistently are not the same thing.

That’s another hidden strength of writing in a partnership: you can’t get away with winging it, which forces discipline upon you. It makes you actually do the things you know you’re supposed to.

The conversation at our critique meeting spanned the entire Rune Skelley career. We didn’t always have a defined process — we didn’t know we wouldn’t get away with winging it, and wing it we did. We ran, with and without scissors. We wrote much of our first novel from inspiration, letting the characters find their ways into more and more trouble with little supervision. It built up effortlessly into a top-heavy mess. There was no outline, just a vague sort of mission statement for how it was all supposed to end. For a while, it ended in tears and an abandoned manuscript. We had to put it aside for a year. A year. We just stopped writing it. When we did go back, we largely started over. It took a long time and a gigantic amount of work to figure that book out.

What we know now is that all those impulsive maneuvers our characters came up with, which we spent months transcribing into elaborate prose, should have been explored in brainstorming sessions where they could be be debugged quickly, and where potentially better alternatives could more easily be considered. By doing all the exploration in long-form text (written longhand, BTW) we gave ourselves a huge disincentive to think about changing it. So when it became clear that we didn’t have a way forward from where we were, that something had to change, we needed that year off before we could face the task.

In contrast, Novel #5 worked the first time. There’s still work to be done, but it came out the proper overall shape in one go. We devoted a considerable amount of time up front to documenting what was supposed to happen, and fleshing out the setting, and analyzing the characters’ psyches. Considerable time, but way less than a year. And we didn’t have cry about it.

Music To My Ears

r-avatarWe’ve been deep in our music novel for the past few months, and just last week we reached the conclusion of Novel #5 in our critique group. This led to a lively discussion about endings in general, and the parallels between fiction and music composition.

There are many different approaches to endings, and different kinds of readers prefer different ending styles. What they all have in common is that readers seek a feeling of completion, that a “good” ending must be “satisfying” — whatever that means to each individual.

In music, this feeling of completeness is dependent on resolution. If the song changed key somewhere along the way, it will feel unresolved until it returns to its home key. The repeat structure, the lyrics, all kinds of elements of the music can contribute to this sense of resolution, of things coming together. This isn’t to imply that the only valid endings are those with complete resolution. Far from it. Some songs end on the up-beat and leave the listener ringing with unresolved energy. There are false endings, and slow fade-outs, and many other conventions.

Just like a good story ending, these various ways of handling resolution play with our instinctive, intuitive drive to have things tied up neatly. Sometimes the power of the ending comes from the elegance with which this denouement is achieved, while in other cases the conclusion’s ambiguity is what makes it stick with us, like the song that bounds up for its final beat, and never comes back down.

Tricky endings are definitely a place where it’s necessary to know the rules before you try to break them. Done poorly, they just feel flat. Like the author just stopped typing and called it “the end” without addressing questions raised along the journey. An ambiguous ending with no cathartic climax (aka, the European ending) isn’t right for every story, but then again not every tale calls for a big showdown. Just like not every song wants a gradual diminuendo, and not every song wants to end with a cymbal crash.

Look at the threads that make up your story, at the choices that haven’t yet borne fruit, and construct an ending based on satisfying your readers. Or, leave just the right questions ringing in their minds.

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

Nomenclature By Any Other Name

r-avatarAs we’re fond of mentioning, one of our characters is an author. Samples of “her” work are included as epigraphs throughout the novel. This presented an interesting challenge for us. We needed to make sure that her voice is distinct from ours. In addition to changing up the style, we also wanted to have an entirely separate nomenclature for her story world.

Our fictional author writes heavier science fiction than we do. This necessitated the development of technical terms for machines and processes in her story world. Jen and Kent worked together to create a new vocabulary to express our character’s characters’ scientific achievements.

But we didn’t stop there. The fictional fiction world’s inhabitants needed both a unique personal naming scheme, and method of address. To enhance the otherness we wanted to avoid using terms like Mr or Dr, or even Comrade. After a lengthy brainstorming session and several walks around the neighborhood, we made a decision.

Then Jen had fun with naming the individuals. She developed a pattern for the names to follow, a theme for them to fit. For a “real” novel it would probably be too much, too stilted, along the lines of every character being named for a color. But that matchy-matchy quality works very well for our meta-story because it ties the characters together at the same time that it sets the names apart from those in the real story.

One final way we set the story-within-a-story apart has less to do with nomenclature. We always use the characters’ full names, including their title. Doctor Rune Skelley found this a very effective way to add to our author character’s unique voice.