Tagged: Son of Music Novel

Keeping With Tradition(al Marketing)

r-avatarThe frustrations of sending query letters do sometimes have their compensations, such as when an agent asks for a full. That happened to us this week, which (a) makes us both extremely happy, and (b) feels a little spooky considering that just last week we vented about marketing.

Now we need to generate a properly formatted manuscript of the Science Novel and get it sent!

In related news, we’ve also registered to go to a conference next month. It’s been a while since we attended one, and we’re excited to do a little networking with industry types and our fellow wordsmiths.

Meanwhile, the first draft of Son-of-Music-Novel continues to move along. We’re at 80,000 words and into our fourth batch of stubs, which takes us more than halfway through the outline.

New Frontiers in Marketing

r-avatarAh, what is there to say about marketing? We don’t know any writers who like doing it, even those who are good at it. It’s an essential element of a writing career, though, and a mere glance at the paltry tally of posts in that category here at the Skelleyverse gives you an idea of how we feel about it.

We’ve focused our efforts (“focus” and “effort” being two things our marketing activities do not have much of) on traditional publishing. We send queries out to agents whose profiles and portfolios indicate we might be a good fit. As everyone who’s ever done that knows, it’s a slog. There’s really nothing to say here by way of encouragement, it just sucks.

  • It relies on a different type of writing than the product you’re trying to sell.
  • There’s practically zero feedback to tell you if you’re on track. Miss by an inch or miss by a mile, it usually looks the same from your desk.
  • It’s time consuming, especially if you’re conscientious about researching the agents and sending your query selectively.

Authors today of course have many new options for self-publishing. This is something we’ve been reluctant to embrace, partially due to a sense that traditional routes offer greater validation of the work but mostly because the landscape was in such perpetual flux that it was difficult to know how much faith to put in any of it. Things have matured substantially in recent years, although we do still live in exciting times. The interesting twist is that the new age of technology is actually pushing publishing models back in time. The future will probably look a lot like two centuries ago, before there were such things as publishing houses.

No matter how you go about it, getting published seems to entail taking on a shit-ton of work that’s not the writing you want to do, not the stories inside that are trying to get out. It’s business. It’s different.

But it’s also how a writer connects to readers, so it’s a gotta-do-it, however much it sucks.

Leaping From the Turnbuckle

r-avatarThe Skelley Method for Excellent Fiction Writing™ advocates the use of stubs, our proprietary step between outline and fully composed prose.

During writing sessions we manage our workflow by divvying up the stubs. The choice of who writes what usually comes down to which characters are prominent or what kind of subject matter is involved, and we’re both pretty versatile. The thing that almost never happens is handing the scene over to our partner partway through.

Almost never. But that’s exactly what we did just recently, and it was quite successful. It’s an example of the benefit of flexibility in your process. In this case, Jen did the first half and then Kent stepped in to finish it. He likes to bat clean-up, so it was a smooth experience.

Last night we had a variation on the theme, where Jen went back to a scene Kent wrote a few weeks ago and filled in a spot where he’d inserted a placeholder. It was a case where we knew conceptually what should go there, but the implementation was turning into a speed bump. Now that Jen’s revised the scene it’s in great shape. (Side note: a lot of advice books would say not to fiddle with any of your completed scenes until you have a completed draft, and that’s often wise counsel. With a partner, things can work a bit differently. Also, this revision counts as forward progress even though we had to go back to do it — plus now we can see how the concept actually works, so our new scenes don’t have that question hanging over them.)

This tag-team approach to our recent scenes has allowed us to rack up 72,000 words in the first draft of Son of Music Novel. 72,000 words so far. We’re nowhere near done.

Like Music To Your Ears

r-avatarFunny thing about writing a story that contains a lot of music: sometimes that means you can’t have any music playing while you’re writing it. The right background music can be very helpful, might even be inspiring, but there’s also a potential for the music in the writing cave to clash with the music in the writing. Another danger is that whatever you happen to have on while working on a scene will influence the flavor or even the outcome of that passage.

In the music novel, and now in son-of-same, the goal is to put awesome music in readers’ heads. The conceit is that the band in the story is awesome, that they’re every reader’s favorite band, which, if you’ve ever talked about music with anyone, you can see would be impossible. So comparing the story’s music to any specific real-world bands is off the table. It would backfire at least as often as it worked, no matter which paragons of rock and roll we used as comps.

So, how then to put the magic music in anybody’s head? We use two techniques in combination (in harmony, one might say).

The first and most important thing is to lavish description on the feeling that the music creates, rather than just on the music itself. The proper device for this is the specific feels of a specific character. Showing the sadness Jackie feels when she hears the song is infinitely stronger than saying that it’s a sad song.

The second thing is, when describing the music itself, use metaphor and poetic license. Get across the energy of the sound. Try to describe it without naming any instruments, without using any musical jargon. Pretend you have no knowledge of how that torrent of sonic mayhem was created, you just know it’s a fire-breathing lizard dancing through a forest of giant mushrooms.

Advance readers of the music novel have universally said they want the albums, want to go to the concerts, despite the fact that their personal tastes are wildly different. Sounds like success to us!

The Story of the Film So Far

r-avatarAs we told you last time, Novel #6 is shaping up nicely. We decided it was time for a read-through of the work so far, so that’s how we spent a good chunk of the holiday weekend. One of the main reasons we wanted to do it was to get a sense of how the parallel threads are meshing and how the beats line up.

Overall we were quite pleased, but we do have a few places marked for adjustments. Naturally we aren’t stopping here to try to fix anything, because we need to keep up our momentum. But looking at what you’ve accomplished can be very motivating.

The writing will soon bring us up to the end of the first act. The second act is quite different and it feels good to have the tone of things so far firmly in mind as we near that transition. Although we had only a few notes, the read-through gave us a lot to talk about and energized us to keep going.

Son-of-Music-Novel Progress Report

r-avatarCounting the stuff from Wednesday night, we’re almost up to 43,000 words on the new book. We’ve done twenty scenes (one’s not quite finished, but it’s thisclose) which nearly depletes our stub stockpile.

While we don’t like to work on a scene without a stub, that doesn’t mean that we generate all the stubs before we do any of the writing. What we’ve found works far better is a sort of inchworm approach — stub it out up to some milestone, then write all that prose, then generate the next batch of stubs, and so on.

There are definite advantages to doing this. For one thing, even with a thorough outline such as ours, your plans will inevitably be overtaken by events. The outline has to be end-to-end despite the likelihood of needing to redo a lot of it. If we also ran ahead and created all the stubs, then that’d just be more rework. There’s also a purely logistical reason: we find it works best to have one person do all the stubs (that person is Jen), so if she had to generate the whole set before anyone could move on to the next stage, someone would be sitting around for a while (that person would be Kent).

How do you choose the cutoff point for each round of stubs? In this case we based it on a watershed moment in the story — it’s the boundary between acts I & II. You could also divvy things up based on character chronology: Jane as a child, Jane as a teenager, Jane in college, etc. Or just guesstimate word count and chop it into quarters or tenths or whatever you’re comfortable with.

Whatever size “inch” you make your inchworm, remember to take stock each time you start another iteration. Make the stubs your story needs, which might not be the ones prescribed in the outline. Stay flexible and keep moving forward.

Beyond The Edge of the Page

r-avatarReaders want to feel immersed, and they want to place their trust in the author to know where the story is going. These concepts shake hands through the magic of world-building: in order to help people forget that everything on the page is made up, you must make up a ton of additional stuff to give it context.

Despite the oft-touted genre influence on how much world-building is called for, the simple fact is that all narrative — nonfiction included — needs to create a compelling environment, a vivid arena where the action will unfold. And it needs to be expansive enough to feel unbounded, like the story could go in any direction and never hit a trompe-l’oeil backdrop. In a realistic story this might not, technically, count as world-building, but let’s not get hung up on technicalities. Whether it’s a beach in the Caribbean or a plateau on Mars, you want your reader to feel the sand.

This is sometimes described as the sense that the story extends past the edges of the page. Striving for that effect raises an important question: how far?

World-building is a type of research. You’re just creating information rather than finding it in other sources. As with all forms of research, there’s a risk of falling down a rabbit-hole. Erring on the side of thoroughness is probably wise, but stay wary of the point of diminishing returns. Questions that come up in the middle of writing a scene can derail your productivity if you fixate on them.

In Son of Music Novel, one of the secondary characters is on television, in a show we made up. We know what it’s called, but up until a recent work session we hadn’t filled in anything else about it. And, the show’s title suggested two possible kinds of show it might be. We know that the show needn’t be depicted on the page, so theoretically we don’t need to settle the question of what it’s about.

But we do, actually. Tossing off a title that’s not attached to anything calls attention to the gap. It makes a reader wonder. Wondering what’s behind that title turns into wondering if the author’s ever going to address it, reminds the reader that someone made all this up.

What we (probably) won’t do is make lists of episode titles. The band’s discography is documented in tremendous detail, but there’s a reason we call this book’s parent the Music Novel. It’s not the Television Novel. You need to prioritize, because the world you’re building truly is boundless. This is where it can be helpful to have someone (a writing partner, for instance) who can act as a sounding board and help you know when it’s time to climb out of the rabbit-hole.

We Meant to do That

r-avatarTheme is not something we talk about a whole lot, either in the writing cave or here on the blog. We just don’t get the urge to write a novel “about” Man’s Inhumanity to Man, or whatever. I’m sure that for some writers starting with Theme feels natural and is a tremendous inspiration, but to us it feels at best backwards, at worst pretentious. We’d rather come up with a plot and characters that excite us and write about those.

English majors and high school students shouldn’t worry though. We aren’t trying to put them out of business. Theme does tend to arise naturally while we’re writing. We’ll notice certain symbols that arise and tie various plot threads together, which will prompt us to look for more events that can be tied in, until the whole plot hangs together on a thematic spiderweb. Those moments of discovery are delicious and addictive, and they convince us that our subconscious minds are freakin’ brilliant.

“Oh, you like how all those little details support our theme? Of course you do! We meant to do that!”

Almost a year ago Jen had a dream about some of the characters from our trilogy. The scenario was quite amusing (to us anyway) but didn’t fit with those novels, so we put it aside. As we were fleshing out the characters for Novel #6, Jen suggested it as a quirky attribute for one of the females. Kent agreed, and now it’s taken on a life of its own and has, against all odds, become the theme for Novel #6.

We did not set out to write a novel about “when the thing you rely on becomes the thing that harms you,” but that’s what we’ve ended up with. The heroes and villains each find themselves dealing with just such a scenario. Because we’re great and we meant to do that!

It keeps spreading, too. Last night we discovered another little detail in the background/supporting documentation that has been in place for a few months, and now, when looked at through the Theme Filter™, takes on new meaning.

Working with a writing partner increases the opportunity for such delicious discoveries. You have two brains approaching the topic, each from its own unique perspective. You’re each going to include different ideas that echo your theme, and you’re each going to spot different details that can be punched up to reinforce it even more.

Working Without a Net

r-avatarIt started off as research notes. We need to nail down the methodology of one of our characters, incorporating a bit of near-future seasoning.

Then Kent said, “I should write an apocryphal scene depicting all this stuff, to get a feel for it.” The next bright idea was, “Why not consult the outline and find a beat that belongs in the novel, so the prose doesn’t just get discarded?”

That’s fine in theory. Economizing effort. Thing is, the stubbing process hasn’t progressed that far into the outline yet. So, it became an object lesson in our dependency on stubs. When Jen heard the first draft, she said, “It’s well done…”

Uh oh.

Some of what Kent invented on the fly wasn’t right for that moment, or for that character. We both liked the imagery and the conceptual basis, though, which gave us a minor dilemma. The whole idea had been to avoid discarding the practice-prose, but now we had something that wasn’t working.

Fortunately, we have each other to talk to. In short order we determined that what Kent had come up with makes more sense if it’s attached to another character. And it does — it’s more in line with her personality, and it dovetails more smoothly with some later plot developments. One wonders how things would have taken shape had we played by our own rules. We’ll never know, but we know we’re pleased with how it’s working out.

It’s a Process

r-avatarA few weeks ago we were struggling with getting the old fiction engine fired up. After a little bit of tinkering with various wrenches (both monkey and goose), and the jumpstart of realizing we already had 11,000 words, we’re happy to announce that Son of Music Novel is spluttering to life. Our hands will stay greasy for the next little while as we make fine adjustments, but soon enough the chapters will come chugging out.

Mechanic Jen finally remembered how this whole stub-manufacturing process works, and has begun cranking them out. A stub, as faithful readers know, is a sort of detailed scene synopsis, the step we use between the outline and the first draft. While Kent has been letting his imagination run free, composing prose like a boss, Jen has been wrestling with the outline. As we mentioned, it’s 26 pages long, and quite detailed. She needs to feed that, point by point, into the maw of the fiction machine, let it whir and grind for a few minutes, and catch the proto-first draft nuggets that emerge from the other end.fiction-machine

As with every step in the process, the output becomes more refined. While toiling away, Jen has discovered that some of the points in the outline don’t really require an entire scene (which is a good thing since we don’t want this novel to be a billion words long). She’s found ways to merge what were originally envisioned as multiple scenes into one über scene, and ways to distill the single pertinent fact or event from an otherwise superfluous scene for inclusion elsewhere. It’s really an extremely early form of editing, and it will save us hours of labor.

Now that the fiction machine is running more smoothly and the fumes are being cleared from the writing cave, we expect Son of Music Novel to progress quickly. We’ll keep you posted!