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.