Calder asked me, the other day, how I ’saw’ what I was writing as I wrote it. 

She is very visual. She sees the story almost like a movie as it unfolds in her head, and the hardest part for her is getting that picture down exactly as she sees it, and not losing what she has seen as she translates it to paper.

I had to think about how I do it, and I still couldn’t say for certain. All I can say with certainty is that I seldom see movies.

Most of the time I am inside the character’s head, seeing what he or she is seeing, thinking what he or she is thinking, feeling what he or she is feeling, sometimes even smelling what he or she is smelling. It’s very focused. I couldn’t necessarily even tell you what the view is outside that narrow focus, who else is around in the story. It’s often a nebulous grey area (dark grey) and I have no idea what is happening there.  It’s a bit like a spotlight on the stage. All attention is focused on the spotlight, and everything around it is dark.

Sometimes I can’t even tell you what the main character looks like outside of some general characteristics. Scott, from Barrain, is tall, blonde and obviously nice-looking.  He’s athletic, because he snowboards and skis. Not so long ago he’d be classified as a yuppie—I don’t know what that translates into in this generation. But one person’s nice looking and fit is not the same as someone else’s.  I can’t give you an exact idea of what Scott looks like because I don’t really know.

Ask Calder though, and she could probably give you a police identikit photo of him. And that photo, incidentally, is unlikely to look anything like my version of Scott.

My writing partner, Calder, and I both have different writing styles.

I would characterise her style as humorous, light and somewhat distant. She’s an easy read, and puts more description and more emotion into her stories. I am a little heavier—but still by no means heavy—with lots of dialogue but not much extraneous description. What description I do include is mostly about what the point-of-view character sees and feels. There is definitely less emotion.

Obviously, combining these styles gives us the best of both.

Added to this, neither of us is heavy on internal monologues. We both use the same type of language, simpler rather than dense. When we write we simply let the words flow and what comes out at the end needs editing to make it work.

Although we have written together for so long, we both have different things that need fixing in our first drafts. If I had to pick one thing for each of us I would say the for Calder it’s cliches. Her writing is full of them. For me it’s unlikeable characters.

Calder starts with good characters but her first drafts include a lot of unnecessary phrases. To use a really bad, made-up example, she would write something like, “And then they were gone, like puffs of dust on the wind,” when all she needs to say is, “And then they were gone.” Editing these is easy.

My problems are not so easy to fix. Often, when I do the first drafts, my characters are miserable, self-centred and downright unlikeable. Definitely not someone you would want to spend an entire book with.

Maybe it’s a reflection of my own personality. I hope not. The characters are generally wimps, and spend the whole book feeling sorry for themselves.

The thing is, I can’t see how bad they are until someone else points it out. Even then, it takes a lot of convincing and two or three more drafts before we have something we both like.

The end result depends on whether it’s something we are writing together or something that we are writing on our own. If it’s our own, we restrict our edits and comments to necessary changes (or what we think is necessary, at least). If we are writing a piece together, ideas come into the mix too, and we inject our own ideas into the other person’s writing. Once we do that we end up with a style that is neither one nor the other, but is generally something we are both happy with.

For most us, starting our novel is the easy part. 

An idea comes, or old ideas suddenly click together, and you start writing.  The first chapter or two is good.

I myself have dozens of novel beginnings that I have started and stopped.  Some of them are just waiting for time to complete them. Others are simply dead—sitting in the equivalent of my bottom drawer (the Ideas folder on my PC).  At what stage does one realise that these ideas have died?

Even though we write mostly as a team, Calder and I determine the novel rigor mortis factor a little differently.

Calder will write the first few pages and then hand them to me. It’s raw, unedited and very first draft. If I don’t like it she dices the idea then and there.  If I do, she keeps writing to see if it’s going to work. We know by around chapter three whether it’s working or not.

My criteria for liking or disliking the story are the characters, first and foremost, and whether or not the idea intrigues me.

As for me, I tend to write the first three chapters. By then I know if the story is or isn’t working for me. If it’s not working, it goes into the bottom drawer, Calder unseen. 

If it is working, I go back and do a rough first edit before I hand it over. If Calder likes it, we keep going.

Neither method is perfect—Calder had no say in Shared Memories, for example. I just couldn’t stop, and I would have written it anyway. Luckily she likes it. And some of Calder’s ideas that would make really good stories die an unnecessary early death, but that’s what the bottom drawer is for. We can alway revisit an idea.

I was reading some of Calder’s writing today. Her style is a lot different to mine.

As I read I tried to work out what made her style so different. After all, we have written together for so long you would think our writing would almost be interchangeable.

In the end, the only description I could come up with was that her writing is more ‘removed’ than mine. I think she would write great literary fiction, the detached observer type.

Now I know that you can’t confuse style of writing with story telling, but given that her writing is so much more removed from the reader, what makes her so much better at characterisation than me?

Why aren’t her characters distant too?

I envy those people whose voice comes across so strongly in non-fiction writing.

I recently re-read Holly Lisle’s “Mugging the Muse—Writing Fiction for Love and Money“. This is a woman who packs valuable advice about writing into a package that also puts across, among other things, her angst at a failed marriage and her determination to succeed.

Read Lisle’s writing diary. It, too, is strong, powerful writing.

Kathy Sierra, one of the writers over at “Creating Passionate Users“, is another one who writes non-fiction with passion and personality.

Calder has a stronger personal writing voice than I do.  The funny thing is, when I edit her work I tone down the voice. I don’t know if this is poor editing on my behalf, or just so many years of technical writing training me to take out unnecessary extras.

Not that technical writing has to be boring, mind you, as the Passionate Users people show, but a strong voice in writing is often very personal, and few businesses like personal in their content.  They may also have multiple writers, and it’s hard for one person to write in the personal style of another.

In a way, I suppose, ‘corporate impersonal’ is just another voice, and I have trained myself to write in this voice for the last 15 years.

Does the voice you write with in non-fiction carry across to your fiction?  Can someone who has read your non-fiction pick up a novel and recognise that you wrote it?

For Holly Lisle I would say, definitely yes. Read Sympathy For The Devil. I think the same voice that came out so strongly in Mugging the Muse comes out here as well.

Even though I can’t see it, Calder says a recognisable voice comes out in our writing too.

Last day of NaNoWriMo. Had I been participating I would have failed spectacularly. Congratulations to all of you who participated.

Calder’s opinion of Barrain so far…

This draft is definitely better, but Mathers simply would not do what he was doing. Mathers is not a ‘bad’ policeman. He would not overlook the obvious.

He might start out believing the dead body was Caid, but if all the evidence—and that’s every single piece—points to that being impossible, why does he continue to insist he must be right?

This is where the value of the co-writer comes in.

Left to myself I would have Mathers insist on the body being Caid’s all through the book, but I can’t do that now, my co-writer won’t let me.

I can already see some flow-on consequences.

Mathers’ relationship with his partner will definitely change. They’ll be more buddies than antagonists, working together on a case that doesn’t make sense, rather than at loggerheads all the time.

His relationship with Scott will change too. Scott changes from being a suspected murderer to a victim.

This changes every police scene from here on.

It’s becoming a markedly different story.

Finished a major draft of Shared Memories last night. I’m sitting here now with pen in hand while Calder reads it through, waiting to write down her comments as she reads.

• She doesn’t like the start.
  That’s normal. She never likes the start of our books. This one has already been re-written about five times. We replaced it with a different start for a while, but just recently reinstated the old one.
• Then she starts on the holes.  “Kym wouldn’t not have gone through his bag that first night, particularly if she thought there might have been drugs there.”
  Hmm. This one is a problem, as Kym’s going through the bag two days later is important. If she finds the map any earlier it loses impact. Unfortunately, Kym is a professional. She would check the bag that first night.

More holes, all the way through the novel. They get worse (because the first part of the book has been re-written so many more times than the second half), and Calder’s comments get more and more honest, especially if we’re doing this over a glass of wine, which we often do.

By the time she’s got to the end it’s:

• “… and the poor Wyverns, they just come charging into the room and make straight for Roland and try to kill him.  They’ve had plenty of time to do it before, but they don’t. But no, they go out of the room and then come back in and immediately go racing over to kill him … and they don’t even succeed. They can’t even slash his throat with their claws. I mean, they should have been able to. Then Roland’s father comes in behind them and what does he do? Absolutely nothing.”

It’s quite funny, and very honest. We have a great time.

Some people think it’s too honest. We had a friend staying one night (they were staying a lot longer than that, otherwise we wouldn’t have been working on our novel that particular night). She was horrified that Calder would be so brutally honest.

“CabSav has gone to a lot of trouble to write this,” she said. “The least you can do is give her positive feedback about what she has written.”

She didn’t understand that we didn’t need praise, we needed an honest assessment of what was wrong.

When you’re critiquing for a writers group—such as the excellent Critters, for example—you need to say positive things about the story as well as telling them what doesn’t work. Firstly, it’s polite. You don’t know the writer, and a writer puts a lot of him/her self on show when they put a story up for critting. It’s up to you to respect that they have done so. (Not to forget that Aburt will boot you out of Critters if you are not polite.) These writers need to know what works, as well as what doesn’t work.

But Calder and I, we have been writing together a long time now. I know the story must be working on some level or she wouldn’t stick with it through all those rewrites. Not only that, when she says something works, she really means it works. When she says, as she did for this review, “The bit where Marco and Hamill talk about his son is much better. You have really improved that,” she means we have really, really improved it.

It wasn’t until the fourth draft of Potion that Calder and I realised we didn’t see the characters the same way.

Tegan, one of the point-of-view characters in Potion has “long dark curls that frame her face”. We mention her eye colour—blue—when comparing her to someone else but that’s pretty much all the description you get of Tegan’s physical features.

We were talking one day and realised that Calder’s Tegan had rich, chocolate brown hair with chestnut highlights that fell half-way between her shoulder blades and her waist, and the curls were quite, well, curly. My Tegan, however had hair that fell past her waist. It was darker, and the curls were more waves than actual curls.

In another story, Shared Memories, the point-of-view character comes from a world called Nuan. Calder pronounces it “Noo-one”, I pronounce it “Nah-wonn”.

Does it matter?

Not in the least?

The vision we share for a book depends less on the physical than on how the characters act and react. Yes, there are some phyisical things we know about each character—Tegan’s long dark curls, for example—but it’s more, “Tegan wouldn’t muck around like this. She would unleash a magical firebolt instead, and it would all be over in minutes,” than “That’s not how Tegan looks.”

We do, however, need to share a common vision for the story, and where it’s going. I mentioned in an earlier blog about writing as a team that before we start writing we talk about the story, finessing it until we have a story we can both visualise and are prepared to work on. Satisfaction is the most extreme example of this to date, where my original idea was changed totally. Changed for me, that is. The final concept of Satisfaction, the one we’re going to write, is the picture Calder saw in her mind in the first five minutes as I described it to her that first day.

That was unusual. Normally we meet somewhere in the middle.

Writing a book with a writing partner is a lot like reading a book you both love. What each of you gets out of a book when you read it is totally your own. But it doesn’t spoil the enjoyment of the story for either of you.

We write as a team.

Different teams write in different ways. Some share the work more or less equally, others divide it differently. We’re one of those other teams who divide it differently, although we can see that changing over time, particularly if we venture into children’s stories, where Calder will probably do the bulk of the writing and I do the bulk of editing.

At present though, the work is divided roughly along the lines of the following.

The idea

One of us has an idea. It could come from either person, it just has to grab both our imaginations and make us think it has somewhere to go.

We discuss the idea until it clicks with both of us. This can take hours, days or weeks, and some ideas go nowhere because they intrigue one of us but the other can’t get interested at all.

By the time we have something we can both work with the idea has changed completely from the original. The initial idea for Satisfaction, for example, was an adult novel. The story we will end up writing is a children’s cartoon. Even so, the germ of the idea is still there, it’s just not the same story.

First draft

I start writing the first draft.

At the end of each day I hand what I have done over to Calder to read. She reads it off the screen, highlighting any major problems such as bad characters or bad plot lines.

Next day we discuss where the story goes now, and that night I type in the next day’s wordage.

At the end of the first draft we print out the whole story. Calder goes through it looking for major plotholes and problem characterisation. I sit nearby with the computer and note any feedback she gives verbally. (The worse the story/characters, the more verbal the feedback.)

After she has finished we discuss what has come out of it and how we might change any problems.

Second draft

I do the typing, making changes based on our notes and discussions.

There are some major changes between drafts one and two. The story gets moved around, characters are chopped, new characters added. We make a lot of changes to cover plot-holes, and that often takes us in different directions, too.

By the end of draft two we generally have a story. Rough, but pretty much in place.

These are major drafts, I might add. There are plenty of minor drafts in between, and lots of revisions ongoing.

Draft 3

By the third draft we’re looking at characterisation. Fleshing out the characters to make them more rounded, changing their behaviour to make them behave more in character. Would Scott behave this way? How would Blade react to that? and so on. By this time we have a pretty good idea of what makes these people tick, and we can use that to give depth to the story.

I’m very light on some of the emotions, so Calder often comes in here and starts adding ‘emotive’ passages.

Along the way we fill in minor plot holes.

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