Words with Friend

It started with a tweet

Which became a discussion

Then became a plan

We would write a book together

As you may know, this year my friend, Ciel, and I decided to attempt to write a novel together. Neither of us have written a novel before. And I haven’t co-written anything before. So we thought we should write some kind of work log in case we forget how we did this thing (or anyone ever asks about it). Here goes…

Very early on in our conversations we decided that I would do what we named a spaghetti draft—essentially the bones of the story—on my own before coming together to Make It Good.

So that’s what I’ve been doing. I would write during the day and at night I’d slide into Ciel’s DMs with that day’s words, she’d say ‘Yes. Good.’ and we’d move on. We tried not to over–discuss this early work: mostly just what we liked (‘Cat’ - Ciel), what worked or didn’t, or which direction we should take (‘More cat’ - Ciel). We talked mostly about big picture. The theme of the book. How the characters of the town would interact with each other. How to write a story where people are mostly nice to each other and how to make that interesting. About which pot plants would fit in a backpack.

We gave ourselves (well, me) six months to complete this early draft. We finished on August 1st with around 31,000 words. Obviously, this is only the first step (and first blog post) of many.

The next step is taking a deserved fortnight break and reading over our (actual physical sliced-tree) copies. Then comes the rubberducking.

(‘This post needs more cat’ - Ciel)

Current Status

Cat: Languid

Writing: Fermenting

Hands: In pocket