A Ghostly Rainbow

It’s hard to refine and improve on something without a sense of its shape. So, to help us visualize our stories we lay them out on multicolored paper squares. It’s become an important part of our process, and some of them have been 15 or 20 feet long.

Fittingly, the first take on a rainbow for the Ghost Story is as pale as bleached bones. And — so far — it fits on the dining room table. Rather than festive notepaper squares, this one uses index cards (which make Kent uneasy, but in this case that just helps set the mood).

The main reason Jen set it up was so we could look at the timeline. It’s a multigenerational epic with a sizable cast (which seems to grow every time we take the dogs for a walk) so there’s a lot to keep track of, and doing it all in our heads was becoming a challenge. We had to make sure that when we put all the events in order, they actually were, you know, in order. Also, we needed a gut-check on how old everybody was when it was time for them to do Significant Things.

So, yeah, technically this wasn’t a rainbow. We didn’t refract the plot threads into different colors and line them up in parallel with each other. It isn’t time for that just yet. But when it is, we’ll give it as much space as it needs so we can bring our ghost tale to life.