Tagged: stubs

Writing Cave Status Report

r-avatarRune Skelley’s habitat has been a rather hectic place of late. In addition to the recent travel and interviews that we mentioned the past couple of Fridays:

  • We heard back from two more Science Novel beta readers with much positive input
  • Yesterday’s #PitMad kept us nicely distracted on the twitters for a while, pitching the Trilogy and the Music Novel
  • Jen analyzed the outline of Son of Music Novel and terrified Kent with the number of words we should expect to write by the end of the year to meet our deadline
  • We allocated the next handful of stubs — we will be able to work in parallel for the foreseeable future so our productivity should take an uptick (unless this jinxed it)
  • We’re shortly off to a conference, our first in a while

All the schedule disruptions, while they slow down our prose generation, are also positive things in their own right. So we have mixed feelings about them. Maybe if they didn’t travel in packs…

Writer’s Block? Our Ounce of Prevention = Stubs

r-avatarWe haven’t talked about the special sauce in our team-writing process lately. We still rely on stubs, and so should you. Besides curing warts and controlling the weather, stubs have another miraculous ability we’ve neglected to mention. If you use them, you’ll rid yourself of writer’s block forever! Okay, sometimes it might still be hard to get rolling, but we find our stubs help us keep on track and on task, and make the tyranny of the blank page almost a thing of the past.

Here’s how it works.

The stubs themselves are “burner” writing. You know you’re the only one who will ever see them, so you can give yourself permission for the prose to suck. That’s terrifically liberating, and paradoxically can lead to your best work. If the stub starts to get “too good,” that’s fine. You’ll be able to mine it for gold later on.

When it’s time to do the “real” writing, the stubs give you something to use as a jumping-off point. There might be gold in there, after all. Even if there’s not, the stub holds all the minutiae for you, so you don’t have to worry about it. This lets you apply your energies to crafting magical sentences and inhabiting the characters.

The next time you feel blocked, think of stubs as a way to get get unstuck. Optimally, they’re part of a system that begins with a thorough outline, but you can get a lot of bang out of them even without additional infrastructure. Maybe all you need from them is their disposability, so you can get out of your own way and start writing. Or maybe your stub will just be a list of the key details you need to keep track of in the scene. The important thing isn’t to use them right, it’s to use them to write.

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.

It’s Just Like Riding a Unicycle

r-avatarThey say that you never forget how to ride a bicycle, and in our experience that’s true. The problem is that sometimes novel writing feels more like riding a unicycle, and neither of us ever figured out how to do that (Jen does get bonus points for actually owning one when she was a kid).

The manuscript currently checks in at a little over 23,000 words, which means yay! we’re making progress. That’s double what it was the last time we talked about it. But the last time we talked about it was several weeks ago and that’s really not a ton of progress when you consider that there are two of us.

The current speed bumps are thus: Kent keeps falling down research rabbit holes and trying to write scenes to incorporate all of his new learnings, but those scenes are far ahead in the outline and haven’t been stubbed yet, and this causes angst and rewrites. Meanwhile Jen is trying to check the work we’ve completed so far against the stubs to make sure that every important detail has been included before she files the stubs away. That wouldn’t usually be a very time-consuming job, because usually we’re meticulous about following the blueprint presented in the stub. Right now, though, we’re still trying to remember how to balance on one wheel, and some details are falling through the cracks.

Why doesn’t Jen just go ahead and make the necessary changes? That was the plan, until she got into the thick of things and discovered that she’d forgotten how to steer something with no handlebars. It took many reassurances from Kent that, yes, she is allowed to — nay, is expected to — make changes, even to stuff Kent wrote, before she felt comfortable doing just that. It was a strange headspace for her to be in, and she seems to have figured her way out of it, finally.

We might not be ready to ride our unicycles in the circus, but at least we have each other around to help balance.

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!

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.

Time Lapse

r-avatarOne of the joys of collaborating on a writing project is how quickly you can accomplish things. With two sets of hands typing, the combined output can set a blistering pace.

After fumbling our way back into the writing process after being AWOL for a while, we’ve hit our stride. Each of us dove in on some of the scenes that had been patiently waiting, and our word-counter was a blur.

As is inevitable, we reached a part of the story that wasn’t amenable to tandem work. The plot was at a very kinetic point, with one scene cascading into the next like a chain of dominos. Even with our thorough outline and our scene stubs to guide us, the clockwork precision required to make everything seamless ruled out the ambidextrous approach. Sure, we could have winged it and smoothed out the transitions on an editing pass, but we chose a different method.

Since Jen is the resident stub-maker, she leapt in on those while Kent attended to the actual prose composition.

We’ve come out the other side of the tentpole moment with no time wasted, and a roadmap that will lead us to the very end of the story.

There are 14 scenes left to write. If we each tackle one per day, we’ll be done in a week.

Spoiler alert: We will not be done in a week.

Collabo DIY-A-Palooza Part 2: Defining Your Process

r-avatarThis is the second post in our Nuts and Bolts series.

We all have different work styles, and there’s no one right way to write. If your style conflicts with your partner’s, however, trouble is going to be the result. Nothing stalls out a collaboration better than toiling over a passage until you’re thoroughly pleased with it, only to hear from your partner that it’s not what the project requires. The upshot is, however much structure you do or don’t like in your writing life, a successul collaboration probably means you’ll need a bit more.

Because you and your writing partner are not Jen and Kent, your optimal process will not be exactly the Rune Skelley formula. But it’s a good place to start and can be seasoned to taste. So, here’s the very broad strokes of How To Do It:

  • concept development (gotta find something you’re both really into)
  • outline (can be more like a synopsis, as long as it’s organized)
  • stubs (the Rune Skelley secret weapon!)
  • composition (turning stubs into scenes)
  • successive editing and revision passes (start with structure and pacing, then tighten up descriptions and dialog, and finally polish the prose)

All of the pieces are important, and we’ll talk about each of them again at some point, but the heart of the system is stubs.

Stubs are a lot like writing prompts, albeit very formalized ones. We’ve talked before about why we like them so much. Here’s the recipe.

  • limit the scope to one scene
  • specify the setting and characters (do this even if it feels too obvious)
  • add continuity notes about clothing, how many bullets are still in the gun, etc.
  • give bland, bald, simple statements of what everyone is feeling, which secrets they do and don’t know at this point, etc. (the stub must not be subtle, nor open to interpretation)
  • summarize the scene’s job, e.g., “this is how Mary finds out Bob is dead,” or “establishes Zeke’s obsession with parakeets”

Why can’t you just jump right into writing the scenes? You can. The reason we recommend creating stubs first is the extra structure. We find stubs are an ideal way to divvy things up between the two of us, and they help us identify places where we might not have exactly the same vision before they escalate into “creative differences.”

Tag-team typing

r-avatarKent and Jen spent most of the evening revising a query letter, by literally passing the keyboard back and forth. It’s not the normal Rune Skelley process, but with something as brief as a letter it made sense. It was exhausting!

That’s probably the image that a lot people form when they hear that we write together. Maybe some co-authors do work that way all the time, but it seems doubtful. When we’re working on a novel we go through distinct stages, and how we collaborate changes depending which stage we’re in.

The initial conceptualization and outlining are intensely collaborative and real-time. Much of it happens out loud, with one of us charged with taking notes.

After that comes the creation of stubs. Jen does 99% of the stubbing, but as soon as there are a few of them in the bag Kent can get started on the first-draft prose. So in this phase of the project, we’re working in the same room at the same time, on the same novel, but we’re tackling separate aspects of it in parallel. It’s a divide-and-conquer approach.

Once stubbing reaches a certain point, Jen joins in on the prosification. She and Kent choose which scenes to work on based on which characters and subject matter they feel the greatest affinity for, and sometimes there’s a little arm wrestling involved.

Eventually, all these isolated scenes written by different people need to come together into a harmonious whole. Smoothing the seams and debugging the story flow is the bulk of the work involved with our second draft. This marks a return to a more simultaneous work style, discussing the moves as we make them. There will often be rewriting or entire new scenes that we discover a need for, so there’s also some parallel work going on.

Somewhere in here is when we begin taking chapters in for our critique group. Gathering and analyzing the feedback is another intensive aspect of collaboration. We’re both there, and we trade knowing glances as readers speculate about plot twists. We pore over the marked-up copies we get back, and collate the input that we plan to factor into the next revision pass.

While the manuscript is “rough” we tend toward the parallel approach, splitting up the scenes between us and putting more polish on things each time through until it’s time to shift gears again. In the finishing stage, we pull up our chairs to the same desk and go through the whole book together. It looks a lot like how we worked on the letter tonight, but that resemblance is superficial. We have a highly developed system for those late-stage edits on our novels. What made the letter so much more tiring was that we were composing it as much as revising it. Rather than just needing to agree on whether or not we need the word “had” in a sentence, we needed to create cogent sentences out of thin air.

The Extended Forecast

r-avatarWell, we’re about 50,000 words into the new project now, and we’re humming right along. This first draft is going to be enormous!

Our rapid progress is aided by a thorough outline, and by the stubs Jen makes from it. The giant tangled ball of barbed wire that was the timeline has been straightened and smoothed, and we now have a stockpile of about 20 stubs. That will translate into 20 or so scenes.

Now that the roughest part is behind her, Jen is tempted to steam ahead and make stubs for the rest of the novel. It’s a temptation she’s going to resist though, because a novel in progress is a living, breathing thing, prone to wanting to do things its own way. When it has two authors, that tendency is even greater.

In much the same way that a weather forecast isn’t terribly reliable more than a few days in advance, our stubs lose their relevancy if we make them too soon. Small changes accumulate as the stubs are turned into prose, and that accumulation can lead to the necessity to course-correct. Or to decide to go in another direction. A character’s motivations and personality become clearer as they are written, and actions that made sense in the abstract no longer do when the ink hits the paper.

Jen has already been forced to update some of the stubs that led into the giant ball of barbed wire, and she would rather not have to repeat the process. The second half of the book will wait patiently for us to work our way through the current stub inventory, and if we drift too far off course, we’ll talk together about how to get back on track.

We have a long car trip coming up, so that will be a great time to hash it all out.