Retro-Rainbow Rocketeers

We’re tackling the revisions on our music novel, which we completed last year. Coming back to it has been a bit eye-opening, leading us to wonder aloud how we got ourselves into certain messes.

Our process evolves with each book we work on, and at the time of this first draft we hadn’t yet implemented our rainbow plot diagramming technique. The read-through showed us that we have some significant structural concerns, and the plot’s complexity was making it hard to verbally analyze all the possible changes. So, we decided to do the rainbow trick after-the-fact.

It’s been eye-opening as well, helping us get all right-brainstormy about our plot structure. In the course of an hour or so the other evening, we re-envisioned the whole book as a set of parallel threads, seeing ways to sync up the revelations of backstory info to help inform the main story thread. The current draft is exposition-heavy, and a lot of that is in flashbacks (messes and wonderment, as previously mentioned), but we never felt that there was actually too much background info. The story world is complex, as are the characters, and we want to portray it all with richness and texture.

The upshot is, by writing the characters’ arcs on color-coded notepaper and spreading the whole thing out on the floor, we were able to see the “jobs” that the backstory exposition is supposed to do, and figure out a way to reposition the pieces so they can get their jobs done. If it sounds like we’re just rationalizing not cutting out the flashbacks, well, we hope that’s not true. Having a picture in our heads of how it’s supposed to interlock should give us the clarity to know which pieces are in fact pulling their weight.