The Officially Official, “How do you guys write, anyway?” Post
This is without a doubt the question we get asked most often, and the most complicated one to answer. Every writing partnership works differently. They could trade off chapters or scenes or paragraphs or points of view or any number of permutations I’m probably not thinking of.
For Donna & I, it’s about the characters. Sometime in the earliest stages of an idea, we have to figure out who is going to write the hero and who is writing the heroine. Sometimes this can be a practical decision–if the heroine is a doctor, Donna has the medical knowledge to make that convincing. If the heroine’s a techie, I can work my geeky mojo.
Sometimes it’s because the hero or heroine started life as a secondary character and one or the other of us already spent some of our time thinking about important backstory and characterization details for them. And sometimes it’s about balance–if I’m already writing one alpha bastard dude, I don’t want to write another assertive hero because I don’t want to take the chance that I’ll start mixing up their motivations.
(Sidebar: And that is a danger, because the most important thing to us is not how we write, but how much we write. We simply can not be productive when we’re only working on one project. We trade scenes back and forth every few minutes, so while one of us is writing, the other one is twiddling their thumbs. Or checking twitter. Or watching TV. Or doing a lot of things other than remembering to be prepared to write when they get the scene back. So we keep two or three projects going so each of us always has something to be writing.)
So, back to how we write. Once we have the hero & heroine divided up, and a rough idea of the plot in mind, we each develop our own character in our own ways. It’s not a scientific process, and I’m sure Donna does it differently than I do. For me, it involves getting the basic idea of the character’s history, the pivotal events in their lives, their current problems and their motivations.
I like to know odd things that never make it into the story, too. I know that Mackenzie from Crux worked the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota, one summer. I know that Derek, from Crossroads, has a mancrush on Jack Bauer and would rearrange work meetings to avoid missing 24. Quirky details are the most fun for me, so I always have lots of those. 
Once our characters are in place, we block out the first few scenes and start writing. Whoever has the POV character usually does a bit more of the work, since it’s their job to decide how their character would filter the world. A scene narrated in Alec’s POV has a lot more swearing and a lot less understanding of basic electronics than the same scene written from Jackson’s POV.
We each write the dialogue and actions for the characters we’re keeping track of. Sometimes we write in and around each other’s sentences, or go back and change something in the latest addition. Sometimes we leave big notes to each other like, ADD HER REACTION HERE. It’s a wild jig-saw puzzle with us madly snapping in the pieces, and a week later I could not tell you which of us wrote what because chances are we both had our hands on most of the sentences.
Every time we finish a few of the scenes we’ve blocked out, we stop, reassess our overall plot, tweak if necessary, and then block out the next few scenes and keep going. We need to know what each scene is supposed to accomplish, and try to decide up front. If Donna thinks we’re establishing that the heroine has daddy issues and I think we’re establishing that she likes to drink milkshakes, we will write utter gibberish.
And sometimes we do, but usually one of us will go, “This isn’t working” before we get TOO far into the gibberish. (In the early days, not so much…now we have learned it’s better to say “Dude, this sucks” than to wait 15k before we point out that it, uhh, sucks.)
So, that is basically what we do, only we do it with multiple projects. We know from experience that 15k/month on one project is about our happy, steady rate, but that 45k/month is our overall writing sweet zone. It takes us 6 months to write a 90k book, but we can write 3 of them in those 6 months, if they’re not dependent on each other. (Rough plots are fine, but we adapt a lot so we never end up quite where we thought we would.)
Of course, often times in the midst of all that writing, something will come up. Edits, promotional work, blurbs, cover art forms… Donna is the editing queen. All edits, copy edits and proofs go to her. I am responsible for our website, cover art forms, blurb forms and promotional work.
This is where the partnership is most awesome for us. I can’t edit. I can stare at my name spelled wrong and not notice. I have actually freaked out for upwards of five minutes before because I spelled our domain name wrong and think our website has crashed. God bless Donna, who can spot a typo at fifty yards. And since I have all those PHP ninja skills and a working copy of photoshop, I can keep our website running well enough.
Finally, my most favorite part: world building. We’re spec fic writers. We always have rules and worlds and characters and plotlines and series arcs that stretch out over books and books. (The Southern Arcana series is particularly bad about this. There are tiny incidents that happened in books 1 & 2 that will explode in book #4.) We used to have all of our writing stuff in a private wiki I’d installed on our server. We swore by Liquid Silver Binder for a while, too, but since we don’t use it to write, it was never quite right.
Now I am a Microsoft OneNote convert:
Book outlines, characters, places, organizations, world building, settings, research…it’s all in there. Along with the Master Timeline for Southern Arcana, which currently spans four years. I love this program, and it keeps everything nice and tidy and beautiful. <3
So. That is the ENORMOUS (over 1,000 words!) explanation of How We Write. Of course, it’s very possible I left out something that seems minor to me but is a big huge question mark for someone else, so if you wander across this and want to know the answer, leave a comment!
And now, if you read this far, you deserve… CAKE!
Categories: All Posts, The Writing Life · Tags: My Very Serious Thoughts
That has got to be one of the nerdiest cakes ever made. LOL!
Click on the picture and check out all the other geeky cakes!
Oh for awesome! That Dalek cake, or one a lot like it, was the inspiration for the chocolate Daleks we made for my friends birthday a few years ago. Cookies, kit kats, M&Ms … they were good.
What kind of info would I find in your character profiles is I looked? I’ve seem heaps of character profile sheets but nothing seems to fit the way I like so I have a character notebook (yes, paper & pen) that sits on my desk right in front of my keyboard. The problem is it’s getting too small and I need to revamp the way I work it but nothing I’ve found seems to fit. And as I’m not the geeky nerd that Bree is there’s no way I’m making any sort of program on the computer myself. lol
And you do realize I’m ready to sleep now you’ve explained how you work. Damn I’m tired.
The character profiles vary wildly. Some have reference pictures & vital stats. Some have huge blocks of text about motivation or background. A lot of the ones in the Southern Arcana universe have notes we’ve left as we write, like parents names, important dates, when things happened to them in previous books.
And if you can afford the investment, I’d totally download the 60 day trial of Microsoft OneNote. (And you can buy it at NewEgg for $85 with a free upgrade to 2010 when it comes out.)
The reason I love OneNote is because it’s like a virtual, endless notebook. You can organize each notebook into sections (the bits across the top in my picture) and each section into pages. It is great for organizing notes. I have a notebook for each universe we do, because then I can keep master timelines and stuff.
Thanks Bree. I’ll take a look at this for sure. At the moment the pen & paper option is enough but things are expanding quickly and I need something a little more organized. Have I mentioned lately how much I love your geekiness?
I wondered how that worked. This was a very interesting post! I imagined you locked in a room together with the walls covered in charts of your various “worlds”.
Haha, sometimes we get together, but to be honest? Most of the time when we end up in the same room, we watch The Tudors or Gerard Butler movies. :p We find ourselves most productive when we’re in our separate offices!
Wow- that’s a lot of information and it’s interesting that you work on 3 projects at about the same time so that you have things you can swap back and forth but I really think that the most elemental part is that both you and Donna….just genuinely like each other and that no matter what project you both choose to tackle as long as you do it together…you will do it better and faster.
I think you’re right! We like each other and we like the same sorts of things, but another important detail is that we come at them from different directions. We both love the paranormal and romance, but Donna’s read romance her whole life and I read SF/F & Urban Fantasy. I think that’s probably why we straddle genre lines a little bit.
Loved the insight. Thanks!!
Thanks for the lesson, I enjoy learning how the book I read are built…
It’s always really fascinating hearing about how well you and Donna work together with your books.
Girl, I read it and now I want real cake. However, that has to be one of the best examples of teamwork and friendship I have ever seen. Explains why your books are so awesome.
So, you guys really are my secret fan girl Squeeeeee and favorites.
Now, get back to it, will ya…pay day is tomorrow and I’ll be caught up again. lol
Thanks for sharing that with us! I have been wondering how you guys write together! And I love geeky cakes. My husband’s groom’s cake was the most awesome Optimus Prime cake ever! Now I want cake.
I totally cracked up about the Corn Palace thing. I used to live in South Dakota and I’ve been there…I can just picture Mackenzie working there, too. heh
That cake is full of geeky awesomeness. <3
That cake is the bomb. Oh, and so are you both!!!
To get the yellow block on the top to the right position:
rotate middle down 1/4
rotate bottom to the right 1/4
rotate right side counterclockwise 1/4
rotate center right to the left 1/4
What?
Love your process. You take way more notes than me–but I can really see the value since there’s two of you. And I love the result, so gotta say it works.
Thanks, I have always wanted to know how two people can get together and produce a great result at the end!
This post is full of awesome and I totally tried to zoom in on the One Note image, alas… evil plan foiled again.
Hahaha, I know you and your evil zoom-y ways. I attempted to zoom in on the image before I posted it, just to see if it was giving away anything I didn’t want to…
“There are tiny incidents that happened in books 1 & 2 that will explode in book #4″
That one sentence made me forget everything else I just read. Now I’m stuck in the OMG-what-happens-next stage. And I want cake.
Muahahaha. Yes. Alas, I can’t give you more of a clue yet. I’m gonna keep the heroine of book #4 a secret a liiiiittle bit longer.
and can i just add that when y’all do sit in the same room and write, it can be very cool to sit in that room? you’ll tell donna that you’re sending her an email, and donna will read you a small snippet and you’re all “yeah dude!”
i miss hanging out with you guys!!!