Category: Plotting & Outlines

Essential blueprinting for your fiction enterprise.

The Plot Rainbow is Like The London Tube Map

One of the techniques we rely on heavily for our pre-writing process is the rainbow. It gives us a map to follow. Each row uses a color to represent a character, and the columns reflect the passage of time. Because our stories tend to be large and complex, our rainbows can get pretty unwieldy, taking up the entire hallway, and, more recently, forcing us to use both sides of our ginormous whiteboard.

The power of this tool is that it helps us visualize the flow of the story, to spot characters who are underutilized and debug the timing of events. It’s proven itself to be well worth the hassle. But, keep in mind that the rainbow isn’t a calendar. The objective is to focus on the important beats, which means the columns’ durations are all likely to be different. The rainbow distorts time in a manner reminiscent of how the map of the London Underground distorts space.

london tube map
The iconic London Tube Map designed by Harry Beck.

By discarding concern for geographic accuracy, the London Tube Map becomes more meaningful by showing more stations. Riders need to know which stations are on each line, and in what order. That’s enough for them to use the system to get where they’re going. Do the people riding the tube sometimes need more spatially rigorous information about these places? Surely. That’s just not the job of this particular map. Likewise, writers do sometimes need specific dates. Fortunately, we have calendars for that.

That the columns of the rainbow grid aren’t fixed units of time is not a bug. It’s a feature. But like any other part of the process, having an extra pair of eyes will definitely come in handy to make sure everything’s lining up. A writing partner is someone to help you keep all your stations on the proper lines.

Two Sides to Every Story

Book 4 of the Ghost Series keeps expanding. Regular readers of the blog know that there are so many characters we had to modify our plot rainbow to accommodate them all. And since these characters insist on interacting with one another, having so many of them causes an exponential increase in the number of plot events. In practically no time we outgrew the acreage on the front of our new whiteboard. Lucky for us, the back is also magnetic.

Act 3 of the novel now lives on the back of the board, where it has plenty of space to stretch its legs. We thought this was the perfect solution, and it is pretty great. The problem is, no matter which side of the board we’re looking at we want to reference something on the other side. This entails a lot of flipping the board back and forth. And back and forth. And back and forth. Jen keeps joking about buying a second enormous whiteboard, and Kent keeps hoping that she really is joking. “But just imagine,” she says, “how complicated a plot we could devise if we had twice as much space to work!”

A writing partner is someone who will go along with some — but not all — of your mad schemes.

Too Villainous? Is That a Thing?

All the characters in the story have to be true to themselves. Their actions in response to a given situation have to be what they’d actually do, not what’s convenient for the plot. That applies to the bad guys just as much as the heroes. Well, of course it does. Right?

Yes, but. This is one of those rules not to be followed off a cliff.

In our case, the discussion was over a matter of degree: how horribly will he treat this particular person? It wasn’t a matter of would he do the nasty thing, but would he do it more than once.

When you have questions like that, the real questions you should be asking are, what kind of story am I writing, and what can the plot survive.

What kind of story: just how cruel is your villain, and when you do justice to depicting his depraved actions does it skew the tone or the direction of your story in undesireable ways? Showing what he’s capable of is important, but once that’s established it might start to seem gratuitous to let him keep living his best life.

What can the plot survive: there’s a difference between choosing what’s convenient and avoiding what’s lethal. If the heroes are neutralized, or the object of the quest is destroyed, then the story no longer works.

Back to our situation: we’re leaning toward the once being enough. (Our bad guy will still have plenty of chances to be naughty.) We don’t want the victimized character out of play for too long, and we don’t want to make victimization thematic.

So, yes. There is such a thing as too much villainy. Don’t let your villains kill your story.

The One Time When Failure to Plan ≠ Planning to Fail

Waaaay back when we were working on Book 1 of the Ghost Series, we decreed that an event occurred. Which is what this whole plotting and outlining thing is about, so why pat ourselves on the back now, months later? In this particular case (and probably many others, if we’re honest) we decided what was going to happen, when it was going to happen, and who it was going to happen to. We knew the Who, What, When, and even the Why. Notice anything missing? The Where. At the time it didn’t seem important to specify, and if we’d gone ahead and written Book 1 before thoroughly outlining the rest of the series, we would certainly have set the scene someplace. Perhaps even someplace interesting in its own right. What we probably wouldn’t have done was set it where we’ve now decided is the only place that really makes sense. All we have to do is make a note of this in the Book 1 outline and — BLAMMO — Synergy!

Planning the entire series before we start writing has led to several opportunities like this, and we love it. Any chance to make the pieces mesh more intricately results in a richer final product.

At some point we will actually have to start writing the books, but for now we’re a couple of watchmakers fiddling with all the cogs and springs and itty bitty gears. It may sound like a lot of work, but it will save us a ton of time on rewrites later.

A writing partner is someone who makes sure you don’t end up with any loose parts leftover once you’ve constructed your masterpiece.

Outlining: It Gives You Superpowers

The Ghost Series contains many wonders, some of which have made our planning more complicated. One wondrous element in particular is a pain in the butt: some of the characters are precognitive.

Precognition is what many RPG rule systems refer to as an unbalanced power. If mismanaged, it takes all the fun out of the game. You end up with a player who wants to roll dice every time their character takes a step. The same basic problem can arise with fiction. It’s crucial to place heavy constraints on any precogs you let loose in your world, so they can’t just spoil everything. Yet, the ability to see into the future has to be of some value. They have to be right sometimes or else they’re not precogs, they’re just delusional. In fact, allowing them more power brings more potential for excitement and intrigue.

What you want is a way to level the playing field, so you can match wits against precognitive beings and win. If only you, too, could gain the power to foretell the future.

With an outline, you can! (You knew that was coming — hey, are you psychic?)

There are those who complain about writing from an outline precisely for this reason: you already know how the story will go. We see that as a strength. You can focus on telling the story well, because you don’t have to spend energy inventing it as you go. You can do foreshadowing and recurring themes in a very intentional way.

Here in the Writing Cave, there’s another way that we hold our own when our characters are supernaturally gifted. We gang up on them. A writing partner doubles the number of brain cells available when you need to come up with a way to surprise the precogs.

Four Times the Fun

The thing about quadrilogies (or tetralogies if you prefer) is that they’re longer than trilogies. Like, an entire book longer. And in our case, that extra book is shaping up to be the longest of the series. That’s nothing unusual. You’ve probably noticed in other series you read that the books tend to get longer as their roman numeral suffixes get higher. We were expecting Book 4 to be a bit of a beast. Were, in fact, braced and ready to flip our new whiteboard over and continue our plot rainbow on the back. The damn thing could be 16 feet long if it needed to be! We were prepared. Or so we thought.

When you’re writing a ghost story, you can’t count on death to prune your cast the way you can with other genres. Characters have a way of piling up as we discovered when we tried to set up the rainbow for Book 4. We had nearly twice as many characters as places to put them. The snazzy grid on the whiteboard has room for 11 rows. We needed 18. Not all of these people will have Point of View, but we need to keep track of their comings and goings and dastardly deeds.

We tried looking for ways to lump characters together into a shared row, but there weren’t enough we could do that with to solve the problem. We tried arranging them in columns instead, but that gave us too few rows for the plot. We scratched our collective head and joked about buying a second board.

In the end we dusted off our paper cutter and chopped all our beautiful squares in half, allowing two people to share a row while maintaining their individuality. We have embraced the rectangle lifestyle. The main difference is that Jen has to write smaller to fit all the important info in half the space, but she’s up for the challenge. We just hope we have enough magnets. We bought 400 of the little suckers, and for most plots that would be more than sufficient. Depending on how dense this rainbow ends up being, we might need more, which is truly kind of terrifying.

A good writing partner is someone who isn’t afraid of all the neodymium.

All Aboard!

We’re quite fond of our plot rainbow process, as regular readers of this blog will have no doubt noticed. We do tend to go on about it.

Despite its many shining advantages, there is one not-insignificant downside: it takes up a lot of room. A whole lot. And when you have members on your writing team as eager to help as Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord, it can be a problem. Our furry coauthors have learned that we don’t like it when they scamper around on the rainbow, scattering all the colorful squares willy-nilly, and they do a pretty good job of staying off it. But we can tell they resent it. They like to lay down riiiiight beside it and then casually streeeeetch their legs or shift their snouts into the danger zone. Lady Marzipan’s tail presents a whole other set of challenges. Plus, the two of them shed like they’re being paid to do it, and when the rainbow is spread out on the floor we can’t easily sweep or vacuum.

Terrible Beasties

So instead of wallowing in filth with resentful dogs, we took action. We bought a whiteboard. It’s magnetic, double-sided, and on casters. It’s also freakin’ huge. We’re talking 4 x 8 feet (which is a lot more impressive in person than it looked online). We were going to include a picture of it here, but, I mean. It’s a whiteboard. You know what those look like. It will look a little more exciting once we get the grid drawn on it to keep the rainbow neat and organized.

Our Writing Cave redecoration project is coming along nicely. Jen finally found her inspiration. It’s going to be very cool. We’re just waiting for some samples to arrive before we really dive in. The funny thing is that this amazing new whiteboard is not going to be part of that redesign. We do the vast majority of rainbow-related work in the Auxiliary Writing Cave, which is on an entirely different floor of the SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises HQ than the main Writing Cave, and have no interest in carting this beast up and down the stairs. It will live in the Aux Cave, and spend its off-season tucked beside the elliptical machine in the adjoining exercise room. We have other exciting ideas in store for the main Writing Cave. You’ll hear all about them, we’re sure, as we finalize our plans and do the actual work. And that project *will* be photo-worthy. We guarantee!

A writing partner is sometimes someone who will help assemble your new white elephant. Without complaint.

The colors are out of order? You’re out of order!

 

Fjords

One of the neat things about how we use the rainbow is how it encourages us to really examine everybody’s through-line. We just study the whole thing color-by-color and it helps us make sure everyone’s accounted for.

Of course, we focus on the principle players first. That means by the time we delve into the second half of the cast, stuff’s pretty well defined. We don’t want to add padding, or make excuses to mention these characters. But we don’t want to just dismiss their arcs either. It’s tricky to find things that are worthy of inclusion and also won’t require us to revise our major characters’ actions too much.

Once all the big plot landmasses are established, the goal is to fit stuff into the crinkly bits around the edges.

As you’ve surely guessed, we are currently examining the parts of the rainbow concerned with not-so-major characters. One in particular, whose activities are severely constrained. The way he’s limited is interesting in its own right, but there are only so many times a reader wants to be reminded, “Yup, dude’s still stuck.” For various reasons, we knew it’d be a wrong choice to just skip his parts. It was a bit frustrating. But, we did eventually hit on a setup that ticks all the boxes. It dramatizes the central desires of this person, and intersects with the primary characters’ paths in a non-interfering way. Huzzah!

A writing partner is someone who loves doing all the crinkly bits as much as you do (and helps you remember where your towel is).

Threading The Projector

The rainbowing for Ghosts Book 3 is coming along nicely. Hard to know just how close to done with it we really are, but we’re dealing with events near the climax now so it sure feels like we’re almost done. Thing is, there are colors of this rainbow that have so far received scant attention. It’s going to take a few more trips through the whole thing to get it sufficiently pinned down.

This saga has a lot of moving parts. As Jen put it, we need to figure out how to thread the world’s most complicated projector, but then we’ll get a really cool movie.

It’s a lot of work. We like to advocate doing that work up front, but the work’s still there all the same. We’d be lying if we said that a front-loaded process magically eliminates all the chores. What it does is protect us from writing ourselves into a corner. Sad experience is a great teacher: we don’t want to do that again. Being stuck for six months wasn’t fun. All this pre-writing might take just as long, but it is fun! We’re not stuck. We’re just enjoying the freedom to change our minds about who lives and who dies. (It’s a ghost story, so those words start to lose their meanings, but you get the idea.)

A writing partner is someone who’ll help you solve the puzzle of how to make your story the best it can be.

No One Here Gets Out Alive

It might not be as dire as as the title suggests, but very few of our characters float through our novels unscathed. And now that number is even smaller. A nice enough guy who made it through Book 2 experiencing nothing worse than some hinky interpersonal shenanigans has just found himself drafted into service as a major player in Book 3, where his future looks a lot stickier. Right now we don’t know his ultimate fate, but from what we do know, he’s going to be put through the wringer before he reaches it. Good for our story and those reading it, not so good for him.

Sorry dude, but you knew the hazards when you signed up. You say nobody told you? Hey, not our fault you didn’t ask around. Anyone from any of the other series could have put you wise. Well, half of them are untrustworthy. That’s a fair point.

(All this sass from someone who initially showed up in our notes as “boy-toy.” He should appreciate what a promotion this is.)

Sometimes characters will try to just drift off the page and leave their subplots without a payoff. You’ll want some kind of perimeter alarm system: a laser grid maybe, if it’s a sci-fi setting, or just a little string and some empty cans for lower-tech environments. Now, you don’t necessarily have to catch every last one of them. Not on our account, at least. But you do want them nervous. Right now Boy-Toy is giving us epic stink-eye, but who knows? He might end up doing something really heroic!

A writing partner is someone who will patrol the perimeter with you.