The Book Bag: Vision by Galen Snowden & Cathy Newcomb ~ Guest Posts

Saturday, January 26, 2013

Vision by Galen Snowden & Cathy Newcomb ~ Guest Posts

Madi sees demons, the very embodiment of the vices that stalk humanity. Gift or curse, it has never done anything good for her—only shown her how ugly the world truly is.

Her visions might have helped the night of Cassi’s accident—maybe she could have seen something, stopped it. But she ran—like always.

Now, with Cassi clinging to life, Madi struggles to keep herself and Vision Records from falling apart. The demons, however, have plans of their own. ~~ synopsis form Goodreads

My thoughts about Vision ~~

I read this book last month and loved it! You can read my thought here. And this wonderful e-book is on sale right now for $.99 on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. You are going to want to go get it!

Today I have both of the authors of this fabulous book here to answer a few questions for me. I posed two questions to these two authors and they each took one and responded. I guess that is how a team works.

As I was reading Vision, and especially after I was done and was thinking about the story, I wondered how it was possible for two writers to write a book like this together. I can't even imagine what goes into writing a book, let alone with some one else, someone who might have different thoughts and ideas about where the story should go. Cathy and Galen did a wonderful job of working together and as I was reading Vision, I didn't feel like I was hearing two voices.

Here is what Cathy had to say about that.

We are often asked how we were able to write a book with two authors. Well, we started with Galen’s idea. We then broke it down into outline of the basic story. Then we went further and outlined each chapter. We divided up the proposed scenes and set to writing. After we had each individually written our assigned scene, we would trade it with the other person for editing. All of our editing was done in Microsoft Word with the track changes option enabled. This allowed us to discuss proposed changes and then act accordingly.

Most often we came to an agreeable compromise when faced with opposing ideas. Only once did an opposition cause us to wonder about actually completing the project. Time, conversations, some prayers and a thorough evaluation of the story and characters brought about a resolution.
Once the scenes were finalized, they were merged with other scenes with appropriate transition sentences to blend them together. This process happened throughout the book. Outline, write, edit, merge, outline, write, edit, merge and so on until the book was finished. Then the most important part of writing a good book took place; we edited some more.

We went back to the first page and read the book out loud line by line. I read a passage and then we discussed what needed to be changed. Since we live a half a continent away from each other, this endeavor was done over the phone and again with track changes. We looked at spelling, content, tone, low and characterization. It was an immense amount of work and it took a long time to get through it. This work was done in the evening after each of us had come home from our regular jobs. However, it was this step that blended all of our scenes into a cohesive novel; one in which you can’t tell which scenes were written by which author. We both had a hand in writing every line in the book. Sometimes even we forget which scenes we originally wrote.

Our advice to new authors? Start writing. Perhaps this is the year you start or finish writing that novel of yours. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Start your journey today.

Cathy Newcomb

The next question I asked was the one I like to ask authors about hearing voices when they write.

I have heard other authors say that they 'hear voices in their head' and that is how they write their books: the characters are telling their stories. Not being a writer myself, that concept has always intrigued me.

When some people hear voices, we get them medical attention, others end up becoming writers. Does this happen to you? How do you come up with your stories?

Here is what Galen had to say.

Even though the book is about hearing voices, I never directly heard any. The novel is partly about my struggles to sort out the warring thoughts in my mind, but we still had to figure out how to write it. I felt like writing it was something God wanted me to do, and we certainly were inspired at times, but writing is still hard work.

As far as the characters go, I never heard them speaking to me—not literally at least. To answer your question, you do have to let characters be true to themselves. Once you have a clear idea of who the characters are, you’ll find they won’t “do” some things you want them to. When you’re plotting a novel, you’re thinking in terms of actions and events, but the characters will have ideas of their own. You have the choice then of making the character do something that doesn’t feel right, or going with what feels right for the character and accepting you’re going to have to change the story to fit that.

We pretty much got the character of Gabe, the fast talking hustler, right in the first draft. He was easy for both Cathy and I to write correct. Madi took some more work to get her voice and character consistent. Eventually, Cathy and I knew much more about the characters than actually went into the book, but we needed that background to write them correctly.