Tagged: Sibling of Music Novel

High Altitude Viewing

There are two kinds of series in the book world (okay, there are probably more, but play along for now) — the episodic kind, where each novel is its own complete adventure, and the serial kind, where each novel tells part of a larger story. We write the second kind. Our novels, while each having a satisfyingly complete story, are parts of a larger whole.

We’ve been on the road a lot lately, and as we talked about last week, that’s pulled us away from composition of our current work in progress. As we find our way back into the writing, we took the opportunity to pull back from the minutia of scene-by-scene storytelling and take a look at not just the novel, but at its place in the trilogy.

Due to our weird, inside out process on this trilogy, we’re writing the middle book last. It was really interesting to look at the bigger picture and make sure that the edges are still lining up with the existing books. The last thing we want is for the railroad we’ve been building from both ends to fail to meet in the middle.

We were really pleased with what our aerial view showed us. There is a nice escalation of stakes from one book to the next. (Or a really unpleasant one, if you’re one of our characters.) The phenomenon that makes our story world unique gets explored from a new angle each time, by different sorts of characters. It felt really good to see our kingdom laid out beneath us just the way we’d pictured it.

A writing partner is someone who you can enjoy having your head in the clouds with, but will also help you land the plane.

and without even meaning to, we included planes, trains, and automobiles in this post!

Roadtrip Season

It’s roadtrip season, and faithful readers know what that means: brainstorming! Hours spent traveling hither and yon cut into our writing time, but we don’t let that kill our productivity. We find that extended car trips make a great time to have in-depth discussions about our works-in-progress.

Our current WIP (Sibling of Music Novel) is puttering along smoothly, and while we do need the occasional chat about the details of a scene, there’s nothing knotty enough to fill a couple of hours of straight discussion. That’s a great place to be as a writer. Or as a pair of writers.

So when we need a topic that can fill a few hours, we switch gears to a project that’s in an earlier state of development. And right now, that means the Ghost Story. It’s still fairly embryonic, with many of the kinds of Big Decisions left to be made that are ideally suited to lengthy conversations.

We recently dug out Ghost Story’s dedicated Steno o’ Notes and read through it, and we reviewed the folders of inspiration images we’ve been collecting. With our pumps primed, discussion came easily. Our conversations have already been quite fruitful, and roadtrip season isn’t over yet. We expect to make some real progress on this whole new story world so that it will be waiting for us to dive in once the Music Series is complete.

A writing partner is someone to help you tell ghost stories around the steering wheel.

Floor Plans! They’re Everywhere!

A couple of scenes that Kent recently finished writing take place in the same location. Halfway through the second of them, he started adding notes about furniture that should have been mentioned in the first. Soon it wasn’t just furniture, but major architectural elements. By the time both scenes were written, he’d become unsure that the locale’s form was consistent, or even coherent.

So, he drew a map of it. Two maps, actually, because the characters do some remodeling. Result: yes, the shape of the room works for the action as prescribed, without needing to factor in any extra dimensions where dwell the Old Ones.

It might have been better to have the drawing available before he started writing, but it will certainly come in handy for the second draft. It’s quite possible that he was actually better off not having a map to look at while writing. Referring to a map can trigger his dormant dungeon-master training, which can bleed through into the prose if no one is keeping an eye one him. Then the narrative starts to sound like, “The room is a rectangle, twenty feet by thirty. Seventeen feet from where you’re standing there’s a fireplace. Roll for perception.”

Speaking of incoherent locales, we’ve been browsing a lot of house plans online. For now it’s mostly for entertainment, but we will want to create our forever house within the nigh-foreseeable future. It needs a dedicated office writing cave, and we’d really like to have some kind of demarcation for that so we can “come home from work.” The house has got to be in a modern style, and it needs to have certain other specific features. The problem, of course, is not that this combination of traits is hard to find. The problem is that there are so many possibilities, but we only need one house. (Right?) (Yes.) A good percentage of the designs make us scratch our heads, but that still leaves way too many to make it an easy decision. We don’t really expect pity on this count.

A writing partner is someone who shares your ideas about the perfect writing cave.

Summer Update

For what seems like an age, Jen has been writing new stubs while Kent continued with prose composition. (That’s one huge advantage to having a writing partner, the two-pronged attack.) In reality it’s only been a couple of weeks, and she got about 24 of them done. They normally go faster, but this part of the outline was a bit scattered and she had to find ways to consolidate, so that we didn’t end up with twice that many scenes. Now we’re set up nicely for our next big push.

With both of us working (and with Stranger Things 3, Veronica Mars, and Archer all used up, leaving only Legion, What We Do in the Shadows, and Harvey Birdman in our current rotation) we ought to be able to advance well into enemy territory this month.

Kent’s solo efforts recently pushed the manuscript total over 80,000 words, and if we’re dedicated we ought to be able to top 100,00 by September. Stop laughing, it could happen.

Having a writing partner means having someone to share the load, someone to binge quality TV with, and, in our case, someone to help when it’s time to move your kid for grad school.

Awkward Pauses

Our WIP is part of a trilogy with a sizable cast, including multiple POV characters. In this book, there are several new viewpoints. Some of them are new characters altogether, while two others in particular have been on the page before. But, we’ve never ridden around in their heads until now.

The brand-new characters’ viewpoints have turned out to be easier to write than the returning ones, which surprised us. But with one set it feels like being a stenographer scrambling to keep up as the dialog flows, and with the others it’s as if they keep glancing over to be prompted for their lines.

The reluctant duo are beginning to loosen up, though. The more scene-time they get together, the more their personalities solidify. It’s a matter of us as authors getting to know the characters better, but it feels more like the other way around. It feels very much as if the characters are becoming more relaxed around us.

One possible explanation has occurred to us for why it was the returning cast members we ran into this with, rather than the entirely new ones. Part of our process involves role-playing as our characters, typically when we go out for dinner. And this is something we made heavy use of with the newbies, but did far less of with those we had worked with before. It seems we slightly underestimated the magnitude of making someone a POV character. (Sorry, guys.)

A writing partner is someone with whom you can pretend to be fictional characters, in public.

A Stitch in Time

We have a sickness. As we write, we always try to estimate how many words long the finished manuscript will be. Why? Who knows. It doesn’t really matter, unless we’re coming up really short or going suuuuuper long. But still we obsess. We try to look at the outline and guess how many pages it represents, when we know in our bones that it’s a pointless endeavor. Some sections of the outline are incredibly detailed, others are done in broad strokes. It’s an inexact science.

Currently we are halfway through the outline for Sibling of Music Novel. 36 scenes have been written, and six more are stubbed and ready to go. Does that mean that we are halfway through the novel? Our guts say “not quite.” And since the manuscript is sitting at a hair over 71,000 words right now, that suggests that we’re looking at a finished product of something like 150,000 words. Which is quite a lot, in case you were wondering.

— insert all the typical caveats about editing and its impact on word count here —

Since we’re fairly confident that this one will be long enough, we’ve begun scrutinizing the outline for ways to consolidate scenes. Jen took it one step further and was reviewing the stubs still awaiting our tender ministrations. Turns out that there’s a stub for a scene that now feels unnecessary. By not writing it we’ll save ourselves the time that would have taken, plus time in editing when we would have agonized over removing it. The events in the ghost scene still happened to the characters, but we’re confident that they’re minor enough to be mentioned in passing. And if it turns out we’re wrong and all the characters want to do is talk about the events that happened off-screen, well then we’ll go back and write it later.

A writing partner is someone who can help you see around these kinds of corners.

Bottleneck! Dead Ahead!

The writing is mostly back on track now that we’re home from our epic arctic adventure (puffins!), with our word count standing at a fiendishly satisfactory 66,600. We still have a bunch of stubs laid out and waiting, so we can keep steaming along for a while. Jen just completed a scene in a particular POV, so while that voice is warmed up she’ll jump ahead a few scenes to that character’s next appearance. Kent is in exactly the same situation with another character. One of the (many) great things about writing with a partner is the parallel processing.

But, let’s not be hasty.

All this skipping around with the chronology is fine, as long as we’re paying attention. We have another plot thread, which involves a different subset of the cast and therefore will take a bit of a mental shift to pick up right now. That’s why we were thinking of skipping past it. But, the events in that thread’s next few scenes are tightly coupled, which means it doesn’t make sense to divvy them up. So, if we follow the plan where we each stick with the POV that’s warmed up, we’ll create a bottleneck when the third plot thread becomes the only option to work on.

And that’s why we’re not going to proceed that way. Jen will stick to the plan, but Kent will essay the mental shift and pivot to the other thread. Once its first scene is in the can, it won’t be able to create a bottleneck. At that point, Kent can stick with that thread or swing back to the other one (which has more sex in it).

This idea of bottlenecks doesn’t really pertain if you work solo. At most, it can dictate what order you write the scenes in, but you’re going to be the one writing all of them regardless. With a partner comes the need to coordinate. If Jen can’t write scene B until Kent finishes scene A, then we lose the parallel processing advantage.

A writing partner is someone who helps you figure out the most efficient way to tackle working with a writing partner.

The Areas of Our Expertise

One of the fun things about being a writer is all the research. Wait! Come back! We’re serious. The classic advice is to write what you know, but even if you knew some really cool and exciting things, you’d have to reuse them over and over and they would cease to seem so cool and exciting.

Kent and Jen want their characters to be well-rounded people with varied interests, and they want them to be distinct from one another. While we do draw some from our own lives, neither of us is a villain, and we’ve found that our novels work better when there’s some conflict. We’re also not scientists, or rock stars, or psychically gifted. When our characters are, it requires some reading on our parts to make it all feel real.

We also don’t want to set all of our novels in our boring little home town. Even when we invent a new setting, it still draws heavily on the real world. We like to visit sites we’re writing about, but that’s not always possible. So again, we hit the books. And the internet.

To give you a taste of Sibling of Music Novel, here are a few of the things we’ve been researching lately:

  • the ingredients list of Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts
  • the immersive sensory details of eating said Pop-Tarts
  • the Burmese alphabet
  • old Agfa cameras
  • sesame allergy symptoms
  • how quickly a pot seed can reach maturity
  • postmodernist painters
  • home computers of the 1980s
  • the lunar cycle in 2008
  • the original floor numbering of the Empire State Building
  • old dentist chairs
  • the salinity of the Hudson river
  • audition monologs

Now that we’ve spilled so many details, you have to promise that you’re not going to write the novel faster than we do!

Progress! To! Report!

We’ve cracked the 40 kiloword barrier on the current work in progress. That works out to about 150 pages.

It’s taken some late nights, but we’re continuing to make headway despite weeks like this one when there seems to be some time-consuming obligation to tend to every evening. Evenings and weekends are our writing time, so when they get yanked out from under us it can have a big impact. Jen would like us to be farther along, of course, but even she is pleased with both the quantity and the quality of our recent output.

The part of the book we’re currently writing doesn’t lend itself to being prosed in parallel, so we’re tag-teaming it. Kent writes a scene, then hands things off to Jen for the next one, and then back to Kent. Whoever’s turn it isn’t, meanwhile, doesn’t get to slack off. Nay, time in the Writing Cave is too precious, so that partner revisits the already completed scenes and takes care of comments that we left for ourselves. Or, does research, or writes a blog post. Or keeps the stub stockpile built up.

There’s so much going on! Even the Bandit Lord is tired.

Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

Events in the Writing Cave are progressing with blinding speed. At a smidge over 31,000 words we are running out of stubs, which in this case is a good problem to have. It means the first draft is zipping right along.

Jen wrapped up the scene she was in the middle of, then turned her attention to crafting more stubs. We timed it well. There are still 4 stubs from the previous batch waiting to be written, so that’s what Kent will do while Jen bakes the new ones. Stubs are much quicker to write than the fleshed-out scenes, so she ought to be able to crank out the next couple dozen before Kent runs off the end of the runway.

Things are getting really juicy, and we’re having a blast with this story. We can’t wait for you to read it!