{"id":6601,"date":"2019-07-12T08:17:22","date_gmt":"2019-07-12T12:17:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/?p=6601"},"modified":"2019-07-13T21:33:51","modified_gmt":"2019-07-14T01:33:51","slug":"all-things-in-moderation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/all-things-in-moderation\/","title":{"rendered":"All Things in Moderation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-41\" src=\"http:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/r-avatar-e1443983880436.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"81\" height=\"81\" \/>Many times we&#8217;ve <a href=\"http:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/our-method-for-world-domination\/\">touted<\/a> the <a href=\"http:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/its-a-process\/\">advantages<\/a> of the scene-by-scene <a href=\"http:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/writers-block-our-ounce-of-prevention-stubs\/\">synopses<\/a> that we call <a href=\"http:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/slow-and-stubby-wins-the-race\/\">stubs<\/a>. They&#8217;re great, especially when you&#8217;re working with a coauthor. We could just use the outline, treat it as a scene list, but in our experience it&#8217;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&#8217;t necessarily a scene. For another, the stub format prompts for mood, setting and sensory details, and characters&#8217; 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.<\/p>\n<p>So if stubs are so great, why don&#8217;t we spec out the whole novel in stub-form before we begin writing? In our experience, certain plot and character issues don&#8217;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&#8217;t work the way we envisioned.<\/p>\n<p>As a recent example, we were going to use Saks Fifth Ave as a location. &#8220;Hey,&#8221; we thought, &#8220;all those big NYC department stores are pretty much interchangeable, right?&#8221; Heh. No. So even though we liked the physical locale of Saks better, we ended up switching things over to Bloomingdale&#8217;s, for reasons. That cast ripples through a whole bunch of scenes, but since Jen hadn&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Having a writing partner means having someone to hold your European Shoulder Bag\u2122 while you&#8217;re trying on clothes at a crowded Manhattan department store.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Many times we&#8217;ve touted the advantages of the scene-by-scene synopses that we call stubs. They&#8217;re great, especially when you&#8217;re working with a coauthor. We could just use the outline, treat it as a scene list, but in our experience it&#8217;s better to flesh things out a bit further than that before divvying up the work. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[527],"tags":[225],"class_list":["post-6601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-composition-progress","tag-stubs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6601"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6671,"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6601\/revisions\/6671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}