I have just finished critiquing a fellow writer’s novel. It was a pretty good read. I enjoyed it a lot. But, it was a critique and so I after I commented on the good things, I concentrated on what didn’t work. The main problems with the story were easy to pick. Too much information was conveyed through dialogue. The book changed part-way through, as if the author had finally realised where it was going, but he hadn’t gone back and changed the start. There were some excellent emotional scenes but in other parts of the story there was no emotion at all, and it was just a straight telling of this happened, then that happened and then that.

These are all traits I recognise from my own writing.

If it’s so easy to recognise them in someone else’s story, why can’t I recognise them in my own?

Most authors will agree that time gives distance to their work. Putting a manuscript away for six months definitely shows up many flaws. Yet even so you don’t get them all. You make the novel as good as it can be, but when you get your first beta reader they still pick up a whole lot of things that you hadn’t even noticed, even if it has been months between drafts.

I do a lot of writing with a writing partner. We both work the same way. We talk about what we wish to write and what’s going to happen in the story, but only one person sits down and hammers out the first draft. After that the other writer goes through the text and finds the holes and adds all the things the initial writer left out.

It used to be that this worked brilliantly. The writer who reviewed the first draft gave the same sort of feedback that a writer from a (good) critique group did.

But, I have noticed that as we write more and more together we’re actually becoming blind to each other’s writing mistakes. We know the other person’s writing so well now that it’s getting harder and harder to pick up those mistakes first time around, or even second time around.

We’re relying more and more on other beta readers to pick them up.

Well, we did it. NaNoWriMo.

50,000 words (in Calder’s case, 60,000) of two novels that have some promise.

Both of us did it easier than we expected.  It was mostly a case of bums-on-seats and don’t talk to anyone until we had finished our allocated words. Due to other commitments on the first weekend we both got behind.  Calder took a little over a week to catch up, and I took most of the month but, even so, it wasn’t too hard. If we were writing full-time we figure we could both manage 50,000 words a month on a first draft without any stress.

This is the first time we have ever done any real writing together that wasn’t on the same manuscript. Our writing styles turn out to be quite similar in that neither of us do much planning, we let the story take us where we want to go and let our subconscious work on it when we’re not at the keyboard. (Although I have to say my consciousness was not as sub as Calder’s. I did envision scenarios more rather than just let the whole story percolate the way she did.)

Calder turned out to be a much faster writer than me, which surprised both of us.  I don’t know why, but we both expected me to be the one to waltz through the process with ease. It physically takes me longer to write the same amount of words.

I got one story out of it which I like a lot, although it’s nowhere near finished at 50,000 words. Calder got a story which she’s busy revising now, plus she also got an idea for a second story (which I love) which she’s writing in between polishing bits of her NaNo novel.

All up, it’s been fun and tremendously productive.

I have writers’ block with Barrain right now. I’ve gone through the first 35,000 words and done a major tidy up of what’s there (until the next draft). Now I’m onto new work, and I am procrastinating. I can’t seem to get started.

My solution.

Skip the next 10-20,000 words and leave them for Calder. That’s one of the beauties of writing with a partner.

I don’t normally leave such a big chunk of writing for her when I’m writing the first draft (or in this case the third). She’s a macro and micro-type person, fixing overall problems (plot holes, continuity) or otherwise getting right down to paragraphs and words. But I am stuck, and I need to move forward.

Who knows, we may find that we didn’t need those words anyway.

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p.s. Where to put the apostrophe in writers’ block elicited good discussion in this writing household, and we’re still not sure. 

A lot of sites lately have talked about the Penguin and Amazon Breakthrough Novel and Authonomy. While I can’t speak for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel—there’s a good discussion about it on Nathan Bransford’s blog—I can talk about Authonomy, as both Calder and I have been on Authonomy since the start of the year.

This is how we did it, and what we hoped to get out of it.

There are two of us. We generally write together. We weren’t sure how two authors would go, so we decided that Calder would ‘own’ the book. We were in it not so much to get a book published by Harper Collins (although that would be a nice bonus, of course), but to garner feedback from readers. In particular, we wanted to see whether a story like Potion would still work, or whether it was so old hat (elves, a journey) that no-one wanted to read it.

We both registered as Authonomy users. I registered as myself, CabSav, while Calder registered under our pen name, Rowan Dai. It was an easy decision. She had a lot more time over January and February to devote to it. Plus, she’s more outgoing and enjoys the forum chats. (The author name doesn’t have to be the same as the users, but that’s the way we planned it. Even so, if we did it again she would use Calder.)

The book we put up was Potion, only on the forum we called it Not So Simple After All. Potion has always been a working title. We’re trying out Not So Simple, but we’re still not sure it’s the final title.

Calder has spent considerable time on the forums and reading other people’s novels. She probably won’t be able to do it for much longer, but for the moment she has been doing a lot of work.  It has been a really interesting marketing exercise. I recommend that everyone try it, just to see how much difference it makes by having a visible (and non-negative) presence makes.

One thing the commenters on Nathan Bransford’s blog said about the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award was that they met a lot of really nice people. Other writers like themselves. It’s the same with Authonomy.  There are a lot of really nice people out there, and they all have the same interest as you. They’re all writing novels. How good is that?

The feedback we have got to date on Potion (Not So Simple After All) has been fantastic.  We have learned so much about where the problems are in the first few chapters. People have said the same sorts of things—in general—too many characters, certain spots are confusing, and so on. Not only have people said what doesn’t work for them, they have also offered suggestions as to how we might fix the problems.

In fact, it’s been so good we’re going to put Barrain up too. Just to see how we can improve it.

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.