Greetings and salutations, readers. Graham here.

I see Clevenger wants to play dirty and turn this into dueling authors. Fine, bring it on! I will out-humble him like he can’t imagine. Clevenger wants you to believe I had this grand scheme to turn him into a writer. Seriously, if I was all that smart, I would have conned him into writing the whole thing. After he outlined all of it, of course! And then the pen name would have been Graham von Graham. Mwahahahaha!!!

So as Flynn said, “Let’s set the way-back machine”, in this case to 1995-ish (1). I and my best (only) friend at the time decided to start playing Warhammer Fantasy Battles. Oh, I was prepared. I’ve been playing fantasy tabletop roleplaying for a couple of years now, and all that time, I had been collecting and painting miniatures for characters. I was now amazingly prepared, well ahead of my friend, since I already had miniatures I could use in my army. Excellent, I’m the best!

But then I start cataloging what I have, pulling out the books, and seeing where they can substitute in. I quickly find that maybe three of my miniatures are of any use at all and two of them will still look kind of out of place. Then just being curious, my friend pulls out a Hero Quest board game. Without even trying, he fills out about a quarter of his army using miniatures from the game, and they all look eerily similar to the official miniatures. Who knew that his board game was made by this same company, in conjunction with Milton Bradley? Suddenly I didn’t feel so cocky. None of my miniatures translated to this new game, and so meant nothing.

Why would I bring this up? Because that is exactly what happened on this novel with Clevenger. We both had this idea that I was the experienced writer, so I would take the lead. The problem was, I had written a few short stories and some aborted attempts at copying someone else’s work. I really didn’t know how to successfully write a novel. None of my skills carried over. And on top of that, Clevenger actually had the organization skills needed to plot and outline what we needed so that we could even start writing. Once again, what I brought to the table fell apart into wishful thinking, and the friend I was working with accidentally brought so much more to the project.

I bring this up because it directly relates to our discussion on scenes. As Clevenger has stated, I started out as the writing half of the partnership. There was no organization by scenes. There was a collection of bullet points and a ton of world building, which even there I can’t take credit for (2). So I had some bullet points and some images in my head. Where to start? At the beginning, of course. Over the course of a few months, I tried three different ways to begin. A flashback, a break-in, a chase scene immediately after a failed break-in. Then I edited the three together and tied them into one continuous scene. Then I decided that since the characters somehow failed the first job, they were given a second break-in to make up for it. We still had no outline. I wrote the second job, an amazingly long 1500 words in only a few days. Man, I’m good. No idea where it will go in the book, but surely it will, right (3)?

Finally, Clevenger and I sat down and started doing some proper outlining. We worked around his notes for Symon, some vague details I had for Jesse and Thorn, and the two scenes I had written. Finally I had a bit of direction. Everything I was writing felt juvenile to me, but we start grabbing some scenes, writing them out, and actually learning how to write. Don’t let Clevenger fool you, we both learned side by side. If I did anything, it was to resurface my old attitudes as an English nerd and a grammar-(word redacted), pointing out minor things like how past and present tense worked, first person vs third person, how to put dots over “i”s, etc (4).

But I was learning nuance, flavor, and atmosphere. I was able to go from writing, “Jesse knocked on the door, opened it, and walked through” to actually describing why he was at that house, why the door was an issue, and how he looked around once inside. Of course, I also learned how to describe the flowers out in front of the house, the color of the door, whether Jesse’s shirt was tucked in before he entered, things like that. I kid, but some of my scenes became a little bloated. You have probably noticed that my blogs are all about 50% longer than Clevenger’s. I can have a tendency to be verbose, overly descriptive, flowery with my language, go off on tangents, and even write a bit more into a section than is necessary. I’m kidding. Sort of. Maybe. I hope.

Aaaaaanyway, one thing that Clevenger said is true. There is nothing more satisfying than us being on one of our weekly Discord calls and I say something, only to hear Clevenger say, “Ooh! Wait, there’s something there! Uh huh, uh huh, gimme just a sec.” Pause. “Got it! What if…” I live to put those brain worms in his head, and watch his imagination move in the most wondrous directions. But I think that is enough for now.

Don’t forget to love one another,

Graham

(1) You either get this reference or you don’t. I am not going to explain anything about Tron, the character of Kevin Flynn, the scene where he explains how his video game designs were stolen while they are in the loft above the arcade he owns. Nope, I am not going to explain that reference at all.

(2) Just watch. Clevenger is going to to claim I need all the credit for the world building, but the second he does, I already have the perfect argument to shut him down and dump all the credit right back on him!

(3) It’s in the rough draft of the book, alright. But boy, is it rough. It reads like someone who hasn’t written since high school wrote it. Now that that atrocious opening chapter has been rewritten in our edit, it is the chapter that needs a rewrite the most, being our second oldest scene.

(4) I’m kidding of course. I also had to teach him how to cross “t”s.