Tagged: stubs

The Stubulator Has Been Activated

Progress report: Jen has stubbed out the first six scenes for As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #2. Typically we aim to have about a dozen stubs ready before writing any of the actual scenes, so we should reach that stage very soon!

Each phase of our process (brainstorming, rainbowing, the prose outline, the actual outline, the stubs, and then finally actual prose) requires a different kind of writing. And there’s always a little hill to climb when we revisit any of those phases after being away from it for a while, to relearn how to do that kind of writing.

Still, we trust the process. Each of those phases helps us understand our story from another angle, making things go a lot smoother during the prose phase and leading to an overall superior end result.

Also, we’ve learned the hard way that staying in any one phase for too long can lead to burnout. We ended up writing the prose for two entire novels back-to-back once. But only once. It’s nice being able to shift gears, use different muscles now and then. Keeps us sane.

A writing partner is someone who shares your faith in the process.

It Was… Soap Poisoning

Turning our outlines into manuscripts requires an intermediate step (which we’ve talked about a lot in the past) – stubs. Stubs can be seen as super rough first drafts or as scene synopses. They take the story’s skeleton and fatten it up a bit, to give an idea of how the dots will look when they’re all connected. (Who doesn’t love a mixed metaphor?) When Jen was working on the latest batch of stubs for As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1, she made an uncomfortable discovery. We’d reached a part of the plot where a lot of interpersonal shenanigans happen, and if she wasn’t careful, things would take quite a turn into the soap-operatic.

All of the relationship stuff needs to happen so that folks will be in their correct positions later on to keep the plot rolling as planned. We just didn’t want anyone — readers or characters — to forget that this is a ghost story. Spooky stuff needs to happen from time to time to maintain the eerie tone.

It wasn’t obvious from the outline just how long this stretch of non-spectral stuff would be. It looked like only a bullet point or two, until Jen started to unpack it all. “Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord get married” doesn’t seem like it will necessarily need multiple scenes until you remember that they first have to book a venue and hire a DJ, and that those activities are very challenging for them because they are dogs.

By the time it was all sketched out, it came to something like 10 scenes where the ghosts just had no jobs, and that’s too many scenes in a row. Jen sat with the problem for several work sessions, moving the pieces around on the board and folding ingredients in from adjacent sections until the batter was smooth and had a pleasingly marbled appearance. (We use a standmixer to process our metaphors. Saves time.) The weird and eerie elements of the story wouldn’t get lost while the humans dealt with their assorted interpersonal crises.

A writing partner is someone who’s a strategizing chef in the Writing Cave and an osteopathic artist in, well, also the Writing Cave.

A Stub By Any Other Name

Here on this blog, we like to sing the praises of the components of our writing process. One that’s particularly helpful to us, and thus gets a lot of mention, is stubs. Which means we get to say “stub” a lot. “Stub stub, stubby-stub stubs. Stubbed stubbing stub stub. Stub.” It’s concise and descriptive, but it’s really not a very pretty word.

Maybe we should do a little rebranding. If it had a sexier name, maybe we’d get invited do guest lectures. Let’s see… if prose is the flower, that makes this a bud. Hmm. “Bud bud buddy-bud” isn’t much of an improvement. Perhaps it could be a scene seed? Or a sceneling? Perhaps not, on both counts. Well, a good stub has a lot in common with a good recipe. Should we call it a prose recipe? We probably should not.

Maybe there’s a way to make the existing name seem hip. What if it was a clever acronym? Technically a backronym, but we don’t need to dwell on that.

S.T.U.B. = Story Template Unit Block
S.T.U.B. = Short Tactical Utility Belt
StUB = (St)ory Unfinished Bit
STuB = Synopsized (Tu)lip Bulb
S.T.U.B. = Synthetic Text in an Unlit Basement

What is becoming increasingly clear is why we focus on the writing, and seek help from others for the marketing.

It doesn’t really matter what they’re called — stubs are great. A good stub makes you feel prepared to write the right scene, much the way a cook can rely on a recipe. It tells you what you’re going to need and why. In a partnership scenario it’s especially valuable, the same way the recipe can assure success whoever’s turn it is to make dinner. (All joking aside, stubs really could be rebranded as “prose recipes.” We just aren’t going to be the ones to do that.)

Balancing Act

Have you heard the good news about stubs? The scene-by-scene synopses that form a handy-dandy bridge between the outline and the finished prose are invaluable to our process. Think of them as the beta version of your first draft.

In addition to obvious things, like blocking scenes and deciding where they will be set, stubs are a great way to debug the plot before it’s written. Take our current Work-In-Progress, the Ghost Novel. The section of the outline that we’ve reached could appear on the page in any number of ways. As Jen wrangles its ungainly shape into stubs, she’s working hard to streamline it. Most scenes will end up doing double, triple, (quadruple?) duty, providing a much richer reading experience. The process also allows us to make sure point of view is distributed fairly evenly among our characters. Sometimes there’s a legitimate reason to stick with a certain character’s take on events for a good long stretch, but quite often it’s more interesting to switch it up and see through someone else’s eyes. Working in stub format, it’s a lot quicker to play around with structure until we hit upon the most exciting option.

A writing partner is someone who encourages you to experiment until you get the right answer.

The Season of the Stubs

We’ve got about 20 scenes in the bag so far on the Ghost Novel. With the two of us both creating prose, we’ve made decent progress despite the ceaseless distractions of the world today and the summertime schedule disruptions of road trips and family get-togethers.

In the past week, however, this double-fisted writing approach has not been available to us. The first batch of stubs had 21 of them in it, so we’re very nearly out. Therefore, while Kent plugs away at those last couple of scenes we have stubs for, Jen has shifted her focus and is generating the next batch of stubs.

We always have the entire outline written first, so in theory Jen could do the stubs for the whole book all at once. In practice, though, we’ve learned that it’s good not to get too far ahead of ourselves with that. Our understanding — of the characters and of the story world’s physics — deepens as we write. Which means, the assumptions baked into a stub get farther and farther off-base the farther downstream we go, until eventually we would have to just throw the rest of them out and redo them.

It’s paradoxical that the outline stays fairly solid while the stubs go astray. Yet that’s what happens.

So, Jen does them in batches. How many in a batch? There’s no set number, but it’s generally in the 15-20 range. That’s enough to keep us busy for a while, but not so many that we have the sort of problem mentioned above. We like it when a batch gets us up to a landmark event of some kind in the plot. The quicker the stubs are locked down, the sooner she can get back to writing prose alongside Kent.

A writing partner is someone who can shift gears based on where you are in the project.

No, After *You*

A month ago we were lamenting how intimidating it’s been for us to reenter composition mode. “Oh, woe,” we cried. “It’s been so long since we wrote actual prose!” And “It’s been literal years since we began a new story world, how ever shall we remember how to do it?”

We can be quite melodramatic when it suits us.

In the weeks since that declaration, we came up with myriad excuses for not actually setting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. It was, frankly, getting ridiculous. During one of our daily forest snow strolls with the pooches, we finally diagnosed ourselves. We were each waiting for the other one to go first, each holding the door open, hoping the other half of the writing team would charge through into the unknown.

Whoever goes first makes a bunch of creative decisions that impact the rest of the novel. They set the tone with language use. They set the pace of the prose. They give us the first glimpse inside a new character’s head and heart. It’s a lot of responsibility!

Usually Kent will jump in and write the earliest scenes while Jen wraps up the last few stubs of the first batch. It’s a process that’s worked well for us, but at least the last 4 novels we wrote were all set in existing story worlds. There are a lot fewer unknowns in an existing story world. Kent wasn’t sure Jen wanted him to plunge in this time. Perhaps she wanted to be the style master this time? Please? No. Being the one to write 100% of the stubs (maybe 99.5%), Jen feels like she already has enough influence over how the story is told.

And so, with great fanfare, Kent slipped into his speedo and took the plunge! This very week saw the minting of the inaugural words, sentences, and paragraphs of the Rune Skelley Ghost Quadrilogy! And what words (and sentences and paragraphs) they are!

A good writing partnership is one where both partners are happy to either lead or follow.

Toodles, 2019!

At the dawn of 2019, we predicted that we would write Sibling of Music Novel this year, and we did! Almost all of it! We also predicted that we would probably move on to work on another project after we finished, and that is where our prophetic faculties let us down. Even though we didn’t complete a novel this year, we’re very happy with where things stand. It was a busy year.

In January we were betwixt and between. Kent was putting the finishing touches on Grandson of Science Novel while Jen tackled the outline for Sibling of Music Novel. We didn’t start composing the new novel until almost the end of February.

Our time in March was divided between writing the Music book and discussing our next project, the Ghost Series.

We were steaming right along in April, writing song lyrics for inclusion in the novel, and researching many diverse topics to round out our characters.

The merry month of May on the blog was dedicated to a deep-dive recap of events in our chain story. In the background we were still writing the novel (when we weren’t visiting the Arctic Circle or The Village), and things ran smoothly until June. That’s when we started encountering bottlenecks. And of course the mandatory fretting about word count reared its head.

In July we talked in depth about Stubs, and shared our template. In August we drank Red Bull. For research. The effects have mostly worn off by now.

We crossed the 100,000 word line with Sibling in September, with no end in sight. So of course we fretted a little harder about what the final word count will be. Then we spent a little bit of early October in NYC for some hands-on research and to meet our agent, and we batted around the idea of setting a deadline.

In November we got a good idea of how much work is left, and admitted that we were unlikely to be done by the end of the year.

Now it’s December again. When our house isn’t full of guests we’re making great progress. Despite that, Sibling of Music Novel will not be done by the 31st. It was more important to us to spend time with our kids than to lock ourselves away in the writing cave and stress about a deadline. We don’t want to be totally laissez-faire about things, though, so we’ve set January 31 as our completion date.

Next week we’ll talk about our plans for the new year. And the new decade.

Happy New Year!

The Skelley Fiction Roadmap

We mention stubs a lot, but it’s important to understand that we don’t just pull them out of thin air. The process has steps that go in a certain order, becoming more detailed as they progress.

Our first major step is a rainbow, which is how we collate the random notes from one or more steno pads we fill up during our brainstorming sessions. (So, those steno notes are prolly our real first step. But you know how to write in a notepad, we think.)

The rainbow is a color-coded representation of the major story beats. Each square of paper is approximately equal to a scene.

(Details about how we build and use the rainbow can be found here.)

The rainbow gets turned into an outline, which doesn’t follow the strict formatting you learned in school. If we were to write a hitman novel, it would look something like this:

And that gets turned into a stub. We fill in the template and write a scene synopsis like so:

The meat of the stub is the scene synopsis: a page or so of text that lists all the major events and how they make characters feel. (Our real stubs are generally longer than the above example.) The stub is not the scene; it’s the instructions for building it. The stub is allowed to tell instead of showing, in fact it’s encouraged. Don’t get fancy here.

When the actual scene gets written based on this, phrases like “Thomas is confused” would be replaced along the lines of, “He stared at Mary, whatever she was saying drowned out by a litany of objections to her very presence. She didn’t have a key, for one thing. He’d never told her his address, for another. And she fucking well knew she’d be waking him up.” (Snuck a little “… and cranky” in there too.)

We find the word count goes up by a factor of at least four, sometimes more like ten, when progressing from stub to scene. Any salient info that isn’t actually in the scene should still be noted in the stub. This is what we usually use the “Remember” line for in the template. If Mary hasn’t eaten in two days, mention that. Even if she’s not the POV character.

What to leave out of the stub: description, mainly. Mention only the specific details that are key to the scene’s meaning and mission.

Anatomy of a Stub

Here’s the template we use for our stubs.

Placeholder text

Keeping it simple allows this template to work for just about any story we want to tell. But it’s easy to customize if you want to. Adding the date of the scene might be handy, for example (especially if you’re writing a time-travel epic).

You fill in as much or as little of the table as each scene requires. If you want to pin things down more before you move ahead, the structure is there for you to use. If you don’t feel a need to specify what the weather is like, no one will scold you. The value in using a template is so you don’t have to waste mental energy stressing about what you might be forgetting. You can just fill in what you feel is important.

But, that innocuous line that says “placeholder text” is the most important thing.

Think of the stub like a recipe for the scene. The table is the ingredients list, but you still need the instructions for how to bring the dish together. That’s what the synopsis provides.

We tend to write them in present tense. They’re pretty much just a flat recitation of events, and they include a lot of glib statements about characters’ interior states. We don’t try to get fancy too much here; we save that for the real prose.

When it’s time to follow the recipe and write the scene proper, we often find that the stub’s synopsis started earlier than we really need. There’ll be a paragraph or two of backstory and then a phrase like, “So now he’s running for his life and wishing he’d kept his mouth shut.” That’s typically where we begin the scene.

What do we leave out of stubs, apart from fancy expressive language? Dialog, for the most part. But it’s not rare for lines in the stub to get pulled verbatim and put into our characters’ mouths. We say we save the flashy stuff for the “real” writing, but you know, you listen to the muse when she sings. The other big thing we omit form stubs is description. Here again, though, it does creep in. Plus we have the “sensory details” line in the table.

Bottom line: do what works for you. Let your tools evolve with your process. If you don’t work scene-by-scene, then stubs don’t relate to your workflow at all. But for us, they’re a perfect fit. We find stubs to be an indispensable aid in working with a partner.

All Things in Moderation

Many times we’ve touted the advantages of the scene-by-scene synopses that we call stubs. They’re great, especially when you’re working with a coauthor. We could just use the outline, treat it as a scene list, but in our experience it’s better to flesh things out a bit further than that before divvying up the work. For one thing, a line-item in our type of outline isn’t necessarily a scene. For another, the stub format prompts for mood, setting and sensory details, and characters’ interior states. Taken all together, our stubs could be considered a first draft. A rather slapdash first draft, with a ton of tonal variation, but still.

So if stubs are so great, why don’t we spec out the whole novel in stub-form before we begin writing? In our experience, certain plot and character issues don’t present themselves until the actual writing is happening. If we race ahead and make stubs for the whole novel, there will be a lot of reworking to do when we set fingers to keyboard and discover in the fifth scene that something doesn’t work the way we envisioned.

As a recent example, we were going to use Saks Fifth Ave as a location. “Hey,” we thought, “all those big NYC department stores are pretty much interchangeable, right?” Heh. No. So even though we liked the physical locale of Saks better, we ended up switching things over to Bloomingdale’s, for reasons. That cast ripples through a whole bunch of scenes, but since Jen hadn’t made stubs for more than a handful of them, it saved a lot of work. We pulled up the outline and untangled things there.

You’ll find your own rhythm, of course. What works best for us is to make stubs in batches of about 20. Beyond that the details get a bit too hazy.

Having a writing partner means having someone to hold your European Shoulder Bag™ while you’re trying on clothes at a crowded Manhattan department store.