Tagged: Son of Music Novel

Life Imitates Art

r-avatarAs we mentioned a few weeks ago,  it’s field trip season around the Skelley fiction compound. These recent excursions were great fun, and they gave us a lot of discussion time as we sped down the highway. We did a lot of brainstorming about our next novel, and came up with some excellent ideas. More about that in a future post.

When we go on a trip, Kent is the driver and Jen is the navigator. It occurred to us that this is also how it is when we write. After collaborating on the broad strokes of plot, characters, and outline (choosing a destination), Jen gets down to the nitty gritty of mapping out how to get there. She loves to develop backstory, and she’s always the one in charge of the stubs (our step between outline and first draft), just as she is always in charge of the map. But a map doesn’t do much good without a driver, and an outline doesn’t do much good without a writing workhorse.

During the composition process, Kent keeps his feet on the pedals and his hands on the wheel, and awaits further instructions. He propels the story forward, but knows that he can’t just go in any random direction. There needs to be a plan.

We could drive this metaphor into the ground (see what I did there?). We could talk about how when you’re driving you encounter detours, much as in fiction writing when you explore an intriguing side plot. We could compare traffic jams to writer’s block. We could change lanes entirely and write a big flowery paragraph about the journey being as important as the destination, but we think you get the point.

Much as having a navigator can improve a road trip, a coauthor can make writing easier. They share the burden, and they’re much more fun than arguing with the GPS.

Two-Fisted Writers

r-avatarLots of people read more than one book at a time, and now we seem to be flirting with the idea of writing more than one simultaneously.

While we’ve been getting back into the swing of things with our nightly writing routine, which has felt like learning to ride a bike all over again, we’ve also been brainstorming plot ideas based around a really nifty bizarro premise that Jen came up with.

There are certain traits we’ve identified as essential to the Rune Skelley brand, and Jen’s concept embodies some of them right out of the gate. It’s dark, for one thing. Character driven for another. But there’s a particular type of story world that we like to build, something that’s made all the more strange by its seeming familiarity. That’s where the brainstorming is focused right now, figuring out the setting and what’s freaky about it.

We’re thinking about handling it as a sequel to something we wrote last year. The themes resonate, and that story world’s mechanicals suggest a direction for a plot. So it’s promising, but we don’t want to get too locked into one view of how we might do things.

Besides, we still have about half of the outline to get through in our current project, and there are a couple of other novel drafts awaiting our tender revisionist ministrations.