Sekrit Projekt R&R: Chapter 4

[swan_tower]

It’s interesting to see how different the workload feels when collaborating like this with someone else. I imagine that varies widely depending on how you approach it; Alyc and I are trading off as we go through the scene, usually with one of us writing the viewpoint character and the other handling the NVPs (non-viewpoint characters; it’s our new term), and some amount of swapping about on the narration. The result is that momentum carries me surprisingly far: not only are we producing more each week than I generally aim for in a week of working solo — which makes sense when you figure that each of us is writing roughly half of it — but we’re doing it in about three days instead of seven, and it doesn’t even feel that hard. The only reason we’re not going even faster is that we need to stop and work out details of worldbuilding and plot structure before we charge ahead. It is possible that our pace will become terrifying when we have more of that in place. 😛

(Or we’ll just find more things to worldbuild. Let’s not kid ourselves: it’s me and Alyc. That’s how we roll.)

Word count: ~33000
Authorial sadism: . . . would you believe, I’m not sure there is any? Some awkward moments, but we fed hot chocolate to our protagonist and gave a beloved family heirloom back to another character. We were nice this week.
LBR quotient: Lots of rhetoric, as we start getting into the politics of the city. But also love, since this chapter was all about the characters working on setting up various alliances. Mind you, those alliances are half-built on lies and the warmest they get right now is enlightened self-interest — but you take what you can get.

Mirrored from Swan Tower.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

oooo

[sovay]

The result is that momentum carries me surprisingly far: not only are we producing more each week than I generally aim for in a week of working solo — which makes sense when you figure that each of us is writing roughly half of it — but we’re doing it in about three days instead of seven, and it doesn’t even feel that hard.

I'm really glad it's working that way. The divison of viewpoint/non-viewpoint characters is an interesting way to do it.

[swan_tower]

Mind you, it isn't quite as tidy as I make it sound. But this comes from Alyc and I writing scenes together for the game she's running; those have almost always been from the viewpoint of my PC (because as a player, I shouldn't necessarily know what the NPCs are thinking, but it's helpful to the GM to know what my PC is thinking). So for those, Alyc writes the dialogue and actions of all the other characters, I write the dialogue, actions, and interiority of my character, and then we sort of divvy up the general narration as we go, sometimes skipping over bits with [reaction] when we know it's likely to be just a line or two in the midst of a larger block, each of us polishing what the other has written to make it line up better with what we have in mind, and occasionally -- more often, as we go along and get used to the characters -- making forays into crossing that fuzzy line, so that Alyc writes bits for my PC and I write bits for the NPCs, but mostly sticking to our own halves.

For the novel it's similar, except that there are a few characters who "belong" to Alyc and one (the protagonist) who "belongs" to me, and the rest get tossed back and forth depending on where the weight of the scene is landing, so that the work involved gets divvied up semi-evenly. (So, for example, when the protagonist R interacted with D, Alyc wrote D; when G, one of Alyc's primary characters, interacted with D, I took over writing her.) Sometimes that swings one way or another, of course, depending on what's happening in the scene; we've done bits where for a long-ish stretch my part is just supplying a couple of lines in between large block from Alyc, and we've done bits where the reverse is true. But in the long run it balances out.