Tagged: Science Novel

Tables Turned

r-avatarIn the middle part of the writing of this novel, Jen was feeling a little disconnected from the subject matter. As we’ve mentioned before, this one’s more hard science fiction than the others have been, and the hard scifi is Kent’s bailiwick. That left the majority of the writing for him while Jen cheered from the sidelines (she did find ways to keep herself useful).

We’re over that hump (and past the 100,000 word mark), closing in on the ending, and a lot of the technical stuff has been written. We’re into the emotional fallout section, where our characters are dealing (or failing to deal) with the repercussions of all that crazy science stuff, and suddenly Kent is the one feeling a little lost.

It seems that he got so invested in the research, and the writing of the technical stuff, that he lost touch a bit with the emotional life of the characters.

If he were writing this book alone, that would be a cause for major concern, just as Jen would have been floundering to write the earlier part on her own. But since we work as a team, we cover for each other and it all comes together beautifully.

Collaborating with a writing partner can allow you to explore a genre and tell a story that you would struggle with on your own.

Time Lapse

r-avatarOne of the joys of collaborating on a writing project is how quickly you can accomplish things. With two sets of hands typing, the combined output can set a blistering pace.

After fumbling our way back into the writing process after being AWOL for a while, we’ve hit our stride. Each of us dove in on some of the scenes that had been patiently waiting, and our word-counter was a blur.

As is inevitable, we reached a part of the story that wasn’t amenable to tandem work. The plot was at a very kinetic point, with one scene cascading into the next like a chain of dominos. Even with our thorough outline and our scene stubs to guide us, the clockwork precision required to make everything seamless ruled out the ambidextrous approach. Sure, we could have winged it and smoothed out the transitions on an editing pass, but we chose a different method.

Since Jen is the resident stub-maker, she leapt in on those while Kent attended to the actual prose composition.

We’ve come out the other side of the tentpole moment with no time wasted, and a roadmap that will lead us to the very end of the story.

There are 14 scenes left to write. If we each tackle one per day, we’ll be done in a week.

Spoiler alert: We will not be done in a week.

Multitasking Made Easy

r-avatarIt was a bit like herding cats, but we are finally back into the fiction writing we allegedly love. We were away from it long enough to convince ourselves we had forgotten how it works. Following the read-through of the existing 75,000 words, we procrastinated with discussions about modifying the ending (some of which were fruitful), and then we procrastinated some more with movies to “reward” ourselves for completing unrelated projects.

Several times we sat down to work and were stymied. Months ago when we stepped away from the project, we didn’t leave ourselves set up very well to step back in. Kent had a few cryptic sentences at the start of his scene. Jen simply had a document called “Deja Vu.” It was blank. The fear of the blank page got so bad that we even put off writing anything new in favor of backfilling a retaining wall with 4 tons of gravel.

In the end, we had to lock ourselves in the writing cave and stare at the flashing cursors on our monitors until we remembered how to make our fingers push all those tiny little buttons with the letters on them.

It felt good to produce something again, and we’re falling back into our old rhythms, which reminds us why it’s so nice to write with a partner. Jen is composing prose like a demon while Kent is busy learning all the important aspects of mouse breeding. If there were only one of us, progress would be slower. The writing would have to stop while the research into how temperature affects the genders of mouse fetuses was accomplished. With two of us, no such work stoppage is necessary. Kent can gather all the information he needs for future scenes while Jen works with the characters who are not elbow-deep in rodents. It’s a win-win.

In case you were wondering, colder = more female mice.

back in the saddle, almost

r-avatarThis week we finally took some serious steps back toward writing. Because of the lengthy interruption in our routine, we couldn’t just dive straight back in. We needed to do a read-through of the existing material first.

Our current novel is about half done, standing at 75,000 words. That doesn’t mean it will definitely be 150,000 when it’s finished, just that we’ve dealt with roughly half of the events defined in the outline. World-building can be dialed back now, but on the other hand there’s a lot of complicated action coming up. And it’s a first draft, so who knows what might happen in revisions. What we do know is it was a very wise move to get reacquainted with the text, because with that much of it there were a lot of details we had forgotten.

The experience of reading the whole thing rapidly was very enjoyable; dare we say we were pleasantly surprised. It got us talking about the curious tension between author and manuscript. You have to be in love with it, because some powerful force needs to motivate you to take on so much work. But you also need to be your own work’s harshest critic if you really love it, because excising the merely good to make room for something great is also a ton of work. When you’re wrapped up in the crafting of prose, sometimes the big-picture aspects of the project become hazy. You need to get some distance once in a while. In that respect, our longer-than-planned hiatus had a silver lining.

We were each going to read it separately, but instead Kent wound up reading the whole (half) novel aloud. Jen was very appreciative. We made notes as we went, often discussing the book during our evening strolls. We did spot some gaps we’ll have to fill, and we agreed that some of what’s there will need significant changes. Some writers might opt to tackle those revisions by way of resuming the writing workflow, but we’re not going to do that. Now that the whole thing is again fresh in our collective mind, and we have good notes about the things we were concerned about in the first half, we’re going to move forward. That’s what nearly all the writing advice books say, and it’s one case where we firmly agree with them.

Getting back up to speed after a layoff is always tricky. Jen and Kent find that having a writing partner helps tremendously with overcoming the inertia that inevitably sets in. Even if you write solo, it’s a really good idea to connect with other writers somehow, such as through involvement with a critique group. You’ll feel a bit of peer pressure, which in this case is a good thing. With a collaborator, that incentive to be productive is always there.

Tentative Steps

r-avatarAs we mentioned a few weeks ago, we’ve been distracted from our fiction by an unrelated project. That project is finally in its death throes — finally! — and we will soon turn our eyes and brains back to writing.

As the title of this post suggests, we’ve taken a few hesitant steps back into our imaginary world already. On our walks, we’ve started to talk about the characters again. It feels like we’ve been away from them forever, and I suspect that it’s going to be a little tricky to get back into the flow. We plan to finish kicking the side-project’s ass, then take a little break to watch the new season of Arrested Development (our carrot through this whole process). Kent has a week off, so the timing is excellent.

Once the Bluth family is done with us, we’ll recommit to the fiction. We’ll start by rereading the unfinished novel, to get our sea legs back, and then we’ll push through and write the rest of it.

A writing partner can make it easier to get back on track with a project, because you are responsible to someone besides yourself.

The right partner can also take on the majority of the work when you have other obligations, thereby minimizing downtime. Just be sure to return the favor when your partner’s life gets hectic.

In the Rune Skelley case, being married means that this intrusion impacted us both equally, and derailed the entire novel. Maybe we need to hire an intern to take up the slack.

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.

Finishing each other’s sentences

r-avatarWith our workflow, the basic building blocks of a first draft are scenes. The outline gives us a very rough scene list, and then we move on to making stubs, which for the most part correlate one-to-one with scenes.

We divvy up the stubs, and normally each scene is written wholly by one or the other co-author. Things sometimes call for a bit of improvisation, though, like the other night. We each pecked away until we got almost to the ends of our respective scenes, and then both of us felt stuck. So we swapped scenes. What stymied Kent turned out to be easy for Jen, and vice-versa.

Either one of us writing solo would have just stared at the screen. Separately, we’d have been blocked. Together, we barely broke stride.

Our “official” process would place this type of cross-fertilization in the second-draft phase. We know that the rough scenes come off the conveyor belt with a bit too much of the particular flavor of the collaborator who took care of it. Or, perhaps a bit too little of the other’s seasoning, as the case may be. Either way, we fix it by revising each other’s scenes. We do that on successive drafts, until sometimes we don’t even really remember who originated a certain scene.

In this case, we got a jump on that part. Now that we’re working on our fifth novel together, we’ve internalized the Rune Skelley voice to such an extent that we no longer need to explicitly merge our individual styles. But we do still rely on each other to augment strengths and cover for weaknesses.

 

Fine-Grained Collaboration

r-avatarUsually when Rune Skelley is writing a novel, the workload is divided up by scene. Kent and Jen work in parallel, each at his or her own desk, on his or her own computer, writing his or her own scene. We have both gotten pretty good at writing in the Rune Skelley voice, and our personal idiosyncrasies are smoothed out during editing. The Kent scenes become more Jen, the Jen scenes become more Kent.

Our current project has introduced a new wrinkle to our writing partnership. In a move that seems to be related to creating stubs, Jen has recently started writing little micro-scenes and then handing them over to Kent to finish. These differ from stubs in that they are, more or less, fully formed prose. Really brief sections of fully formed prose.

The first one was a seduction. Jen knew exactly how a pivotal point in the characters’ interaction would play out. Rather than risk losing its spark by summarizing it, or losing it altogether by backburnering it until it was time to write the whole scene, she typed up the part she knew, capturing the eroticism of the moment beautifully.

Kent had the challenge of working up to that exact moment, and then back out of it again, without disturbing it. He did a brilliant job, which emboldened Jen to write up several more micro-scenes that were rattling around in her head.

It’s a tricky way to work when you’re collaborating. A solo author can do exactly as he or she wants at any given point in the composition process. When you’re working with a writing partner, you need to be mindful about too many constrictions.

We believe that boundaries spark creativity, but too many boundaries can cause paralysis. A partner is a boundary of sorts, placing constraints on what you write, but in a good partnership that limitation paradoxically becomes a source of greater inspiration.

The Extended Forecast

r-avatarWell, we’re about 50,000 words into the new project now, and we’re humming right along. This first draft is going to be enormous!

Our rapid progress is aided by a thorough outline, and by the stubs Jen makes from it. The giant tangled ball of barbed wire that was the timeline has been straightened and smoothed, and we now have a stockpile of about 20 stubs. That will translate into 20 or so scenes.

Now that the roughest part is behind her, Jen is tempted to steam ahead and make stubs for the rest of the novel. It’s a temptation she’s going to resist though, because a novel in progress is a living, breathing thing, prone to wanting to do things its own way. When it has two authors, that tendency is even greater.

In much the same way that a weather forecast isn’t terribly reliable more than a few days in advance, our stubs lose their relevancy if we make them too soon. Small changes accumulate as the stubs are turned into prose, and that accumulation can lead to the necessity to course-correct. Or to decide to go in another direction. A character’s motivations and personality become clearer as they are written, and actions that made sense in the abstract no longer do when the ink hits the paper.

Jen has already been forced to update some of the stubs that led into the giant ball of barbed wire, and she would rather not have to repeat the process. The second half of the book will wait patiently for us to work our way through the current stub inventory, and if we drift too far off course, we’ll talk together about how to get back on track.

We have a long car trip coming up, so that will be a great time to hash it all out.

Onward and Upward

r-avatarIt seems like every time we write a novel, we hit a point  in the plot where things get thorny. On our first one, which we began without an outline, we got completely derailed for about six months.

Kent is working on a theory (because that’s what he does) that what we’re running into is somehow a fundamental aspect of big, complex projects. He mutters about how it’s like spinning plates, but he wants to come up with something more original. Whether it’s a universal thing or specific to the Rune Skelley experience, it’s certainly a consistent fact of writing life for us.

It’s been less of a problem on our recent novels, though, for two reasons. One: now we’ve got a good process based on tools like outlines and stubs. Two: we’ve learned how to work more effectively as a team.

We’re at that point again, in case you were wondering. It’s the timeline that’s turned into a thorny thicket this time. Lots of throughlines intersect, and it’s a real puzzle to get them not to conflict. Jen is the Goddess of Puzzles and has this one nearly solved, but it’s a huge task. Progress on the manuscript has barely been affected though, because while Jen weaves our characters’ trajectories on her cosmic loom, Kent can keep working on prosifying the existing stubs.

Teamwork! It keeps us moving onward and upward.