Tagged: Son of Science Novel

Another Major Milestone Passed

r-avatarOur double-complete rainbow is double-completed!

A few nights ago, we laid out the rainbows for both of the sequels to the Science Novel, with one flowing directly into the other. At that point, the second one was only about two-thirds done, but we were hot on the trail of a plot wrinkle that would give shape to the remainder of the story. So by the end of that session, our colorful array of paper squares reached its final form.

Our next step was to sleep on it. Not physically on the rainbow, of course. But this did mean that Lady Marzipan had to be banished from the Auxiliary Writing Cave for another night so we could leave things laid out. The next evening, Jen read off the first rainbow a row at a time while Kent typed up a synopsis of sorts, something we refer to as our prose outline. If Kent didn’t need to sleep, we might have powered through and done both of them, but Lady Marzipan had to stay out for yet another night. But finally, next time, we got there!

Typing up the prose outlines moves the story development process into a new phase. It’s not just transcription; it’s a chance to catch gaps and inconsistencies — looking at things through a different lens — and start getting a feel for the rhythms of the stories.

So what’s next? We lay them aside and work on something else. Specifically, we’re assessing critique notes on the Music Novel. We like to give stuff some time to rest as part of our process, and we don’t like to try to work on more than one book at a time.

Did We Say “Geniuses”?

r-avatarWork progresses slowly on the outline for Grandson of Science Novel. It’s probably no more sluggish than the corresponding stage of things for the book that precedes it, but the headwind is kind of killing our morale.

Coming off the wrap-up of Son of Science Novel’s outline, we had a lot of momentum. Also, we were brimming with ideas for the third book because there was stuff — lots of stuff! — that was left deliciously untidy at the end of the second one. Thus we were counting on maintaining our momentum and having half the work already done.

Er, yeah. No.

The ideas are great, but what we’re discovering is they’re not the hard part. The stuff in between them, the connective tissue, that’s the challenge. We got ourselves persuaded that it wouldn’t feel like starting all over, but it does. Dammit.

The advantages of having both books in a state of high plasticity are still valid. We’re still confident that working on them in tandem is the smart move. What we’re learning is that “time savings” probably isn’t among those advantages.

Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun

r-avatarDouble your plotting?

Sure, why not!

The outline for Son of Science Novel came together pretty well about a week ago. We don’t know all the details yet, but we have a complete through-line, beginning to end. The ending that we envision allows for this book to stand on its own while also throwing to the next book, Grandson of Science Novel, which will finish out the trilogy.

In a fit of madness and/or brilliance we decided to go ahead and plot out Grandson (Novel #8) before hammering out all of the details for Son. (The plot hammer is another tool in our writing kit, used in conjunction with the goose wrench and the monkey wrench.)

Our previous trilogy was not written this way. We were still learning what worked for us, and developing our process. Now, though, we are geniuses, and we’re ready to tackle anything.

The advantage of getting into the final book before tightening everything up in the second is that we have the freedom to make adjustments all throughout the story. The downside is that too much freedom can be paralyzing. When you try to keep too many options open it’s impossible to hold the whole thing in your head. The plot threads ramify and peter out in dead ends instead of cascading smoothly through a flow chart to a satisfying conclusion.

In the week that we’ve been talking about Grandson, we’ve made a lot of progress. Almost all of the characters will carry over from the previous two books, so very little work is needed on their backstories. That leaves us free to really tighten the screws and make their lives miserable. Fitting fates have been devised for almost everyone, much to their chagrin.

Had we waited to outline this third book until the second was written (or even just thoroughly outlined) we would have felt constrained by what was on the page. Changes could be made, but would have meant a lot of wasted effort. So far we haven’t devised anything new that necessitates big changes in Son, but we have uncovered some thematic elements that will resonate more if we introduce them earlier, and we discovered the solution to a lingering question. In Son we had gotten as far as “there’s something wrong with this character’s process,” and by talking through Grandson we’ve decided what that “something” is.

Will we write the two stories back-to-back? Doubling up on everything else (right down to the number of writers we are!) has worked in our favor, so it seems quite likely.

Untangling Things

r-avatarSon of Science Novel has been quite a challenge to outline. We know what events kick the plot into motion, and we know how things come to rest at the end. It’s that pesky middle part that’s been giving us trouble. It’s kind of like this:

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For us, plotting a novel is a lot like combing out long, tangled hair. There are many strands, and it takes patience to get them all in order. If we do our work properly, in the end everything will be silky smooth and free of snarls. It helps if you have a technique.

Our technique is the Plot Rainbow, which we’ve talked about before. Working to untangle Son of Science Novel, we’ve been approaching the story from multiple angles, running through it from various characters’ points of view. We make a little bit of progress with each pass, detailing more plot beats and gaining a deeper understanding of our characters and their motivations.

We know that Hortense will arrive at the cat food factory in time to save Godrick from being thrown into the giant pressure cooker so that the two of them can fall, improbably, in love. The trick is making her trip to the industrial zone feel internally motivated. The reader cannot wonder why such a prim, perhaps even prissy woman would darken the door of such a smelly establishment. Her arrival must feel inevitable based on what we already know about her.

Working backwards is often a good way to solve these problems. If you know that, for your plot to work, Hortense MUST visit the cat food factory, and the only reason you can come up with for her to do that is that she just inherited it, then you know that earlier in the story you need to make significant mention of her terminally ill eccentric aunt. (The one with 38 cats.)

Bringing together Hortense and Godrick does involve more than just keeping him from getting cooked. Their romance, however unlikely it seemed at first, must arise from within each of them and feel — after the fact — as natural and inevitable as the cat hair on all their clothes. This is where we really rely on our partnership, by role-playing the coquettish heiress and the plucky workplace safety inspector. The characters’ lives intertwine, braiding together into a unified story.

Having a process, and tools like the plot rainbow, makes it easier to work out the snags. Working through it with a partner also helps, allowing you to hand the comb to someone else who might have a better angle on the trouble spot.

When Real Life Intrudes…

r-avatar…which it did this week, it’s good to have a partner to rely on. We had to make a couple of road trips, and as always we tried to use that time productively. It worked pretty well.

We’re also playing with index cards to debug the new plot. These aren’t the color-coded, character-specific rainbow cards, but no-shit index cards. By now we have a fairly long list of events that we want to include in the book. So we made a card for each one that we could recall off the tops of our heads and started laying them out in different configurations. It’s a quick way to look at what-ifs, and it’s a great exercise to do together. It just doesn’t work too well in the car.

It’s been a little bit of a challenge to unknot the middle portion of this plot, and it’s taking longer than we’d like. But it’d be much worse to discover these knots by writing our way up to them in prose. And with a partner, at least there’s someone to talk to out on the road.

Reintroducing, For The First Time…

r-avatarAs Son of Science Novel’s plotting continues, one of the things we like to do is pick one character and look at the story through his or her eyes. Especially for the new characters, this is a great way to get acquainted with them and figure out their reasons for choosing certain paths and forming certain allegiances.

For returning characters, we don’t expect the process to show us so much about them. We still do it, for other reasons. This week it turned out that one of our returning characters was sorta-kinda new, too.

This person has a minor part in the Science Novel. It’s not that we didn’t know him, but in this book he’ll be promoted to the POV cast. For that, we need to get to know him better. Looking at the story from his vantage helped us spot many small but important unanswered questions, which now mostly have answers. The issue also applied to the backstory, and for that we used our time-honored technique of going out to dinner as members of our cast. (Kent cheated a little bit this time by not doing the accent.) Mostly when we do that, the characters at the table are romantically involved. For this outing, they were parent and adult child. It was highly illuminating.

Having a writing partner means there’s someone to help out with every phase of the complex process of writing a novel. And, sometimes it means you have someone to take out for dinner.

Tools of the Trade

r-avatarAs we get deeper into the plotting of Son of Science Novel, we’ve been experimenting with some new (to us) software: Aeon Timeline. It’s a very flexible tool for, well, making timelines.

Last week we talked about how we think we have all our new characters’ backstory figured out. In order to test ourselves and make sure there were no holes, inconsistencies, or open questions, we laid out the backstory in our favorite Rainbow formation. Each character gets a column in their own color, and each row represents a story point. It took two work sessions in the auxiliary writing cave to get the whole thing in shape, and to answer the questions we uncovered along the way. And to drink the mulled wine and the raspberry lambic.

When we were happy with the Backstory Rainbow, Jen set about entering all of the data into Aeon Timeline. The result is easy to browse, and doesn’t require immense amounts of floorspace.

Our writing software of choice is Scrivener, which Aeon is supposed to sync with. We say “supposed to” because we haven’t tried it yet. It will be interesting to see just what the two programs do when they talk to each other, and testing it now at the beginning of a project makes a lot more sense than pulling the trigger on a work in progress.

What writing tools do you prefer? Tell us in the comments.

Getting More Excited Every Night

r-avatarWe have turned a corner in plotting Son of Science Novel, and it feels so good. We no longer have to say, “Let’s try to focus on plot-level events instead of backstory,” because (as we knew would happen) our knowledge of the new characters’ histories is now sufficient that the story proper has started to come alive.

One key to reaching this turning point is that we’ve started to give our new characters some stressors and time constraints. The protagonist from Science Novel was, of course, our seed for the new story threads, but it took a while for other characters to really activate. Now they have pressing issues of their own, not just a static collection of wants that our returning protagonist will bump into. They’re not just waiting for their turn as a foil anymore, but are part of a story that would be happening even if this person from a previous book didn’t stroll through. (But of course, she does, and that makes things ever so much more interesting!)

Kent has noted of a couple of particulars, “That’ll be fun to write!” Those tend to be the ultra-geeky ideas. Jen is building up our repository of reference photos for the new cast members, a process that sometimes causes us to re-envision these people. It definitely helps us feel a connection to them.

The best part is, our momentum is building as our investment and excitement build. We still have a long way to go, but we’ve crested a steep hill and right now we’re picking up speed as we coast down the other side. The wind in our hair feels great!

Our Plot-to-Backstory Ratio is Now Favorable!

r-avatarNow that our note-taking has reached the point where we had to order refills for our favorite pen, Jen decided it was time to get everything from the steno pad typed up and organized. Which led to the happy surprise discovery that the preponderance of our notes have to do with the actual story, rather than the backstory.

During our conversations from which these notes are generated, we tend to spend a lot of time on the stuff that’s led up to the point where we will join the story, the “how did they get that way” of our various new cast members. While it’s vital for us to have a sense of history with these characters, we’re acutely aware that hardly any of the details will make it into the manuscript, and so we became concerned that these rabbit holes were distracting us from plotting the story.

Getting a rough plot laid out really didn’t take all that long. But as soon as we started drilling down on a story beat, we had to answer questions that hinged on backstory, and that meant coming up with said backstory. Then we’d climb back up and look at another story beat, which necessitated another round of backstory development. A few such sessions quickly resulted in continuity problems within the emerging backstory, and resolving those sent tremors up into the plot. It’s taken a few iterations, but the first half(?) of the plot is now stabilized pretty well.

The metaphors above might suggest pickaxes and helmets with lamps on them, but our tools of choice during this work are in fact two kinds of wrenches.

Try Looking At It From My Side

r-avatarAs we steam along on story development for Son of Science Novel, occasionally our brainstorming sputters a bit. One reliable way to get the juices flowing again is to pick one of the secondary characters or villains and take a brief stroll in those shoes. It always shows us gaps that would otherwise be hidden, giving us fodder for discussion and interesting problems to solve.

Remember to make everyone in your story world a full citizen. The allies and enemies are not merely there as foils for the protagonist. They don’t vanish the moment the action moves away from their vicinity.

Try telling the tale in the villain’s voice. It will help make sure the bad guys’ actions are coherent and give your heroes worthier adversaries.