Tagged: rainbow

Untangling Things

r-avatarSon of Science Novel has been quite a challenge to outline. We know what events kick the plot into motion, and we know how things come to rest at the end. It’s that pesky middle part that’s been giving us trouble. It’s kind of like this:

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For us, plotting a novel is a lot like combing out long, tangled hair. There are many strands, and it takes patience to get them all in order. If we do our work properly, in the end everything will be silky smooth and free of snarls. It helps if you have a technique.

Our technique is the Plot Rainbow, which we’ve talked about before. Working to untangle Son of Science Novel, we’ve been approaching the story from multiple angles, running through it from various characters’ points of view. We make a little bit of progress with each pass, detailing more plot beats and gaining a deeper understanding of our characters and their motivations.

We know that Hortense will arrive at the cat food factory in time to save Godrick from being thrown into the giant pressure cooker so that the two of them can fall, improbably, in love. The trick is making her trip to the industrial zone feel internally motivated. The reader cannot wonder why such a prim, perhaps even prissy woman would darken the door of such a smelly establishment. Her arrival must feel inevitable based on what we already know about her.

Working backwards is often a good way to solve these problems. If you know that, for your plot to work, Hortense MUST visit the cat food factory, and the only reason you can come up with for her to do that is that she just inherited it, then you know that earlier in the story you need to make significant mention of her terminally ill eccentric aunt. (The one with 38 cats.)

Bringing together Hortense and Godrick does involve more than just keeping him from getting cooked. Their romance, however unlikely it seemed at first, must arise from within each of them and feel — after the fact — as natural and inevitable as the cat hair on all their clothes. This is where we really rely on our partnership, by role-playing the coquettish heiress and the plucky workplace safety inspector. The characters’ lives intertwine, braiding together into a unified story.

Having a process, and tools like the plot rainbow, makes it easier to work out the snags. Working through it with a partner also helps, allowing you to hand the comb to someone else who might have a better angle on the trouble spot.

Tools of the Trade

r-avatarAs we get deeper into the plotting of Son of Science Novel, we’ve been experimenting with some new (to us) software: Aeon Timeline. It’s a very flexible tool for, well, making timelines.

Last week we talked about how we think we have all our new characters’ backstory figured out. In order to test ourselves and make sure there were no holes, inconsistencies, or open questions, we laid out the backstory in our favorite Rainbow formation. Each character gets a column in their own color, and each row represents a story point. It took two work sessions in the auxiliary writing cave to get the whole thing in shape, and to answer the questions we uncovered along the way. And to drink the mulled wine and the raspberry lambic.

When we were happy with the Backstory Rainbow, Jen set about entering all of the data into Aeon Timeline. The result is easy to browse, and doesn’t require immense amounts of floorspace.

Our writing software of choice is Scrivener, which Aeon is supposed to sync with. We say “supposed to” because we haven’t tried it yet. It will be interesting to see just what the two programs do when they talk to each other, and testing it now at the beginning of a project makes a lot more sense than pulling the trigger on a work in progress.

What writing tools do you prefer? Tell us in the comments.

Taste the Rainbow

r-avatarAnd as the seasons change, so to does the focus of our work sessions. The majority of our sub-zero, knee-deep-snow-filled winter was spent in the auxiliary writing cave (aka the family room). Along with delicious hot beverages, a wood fire, and cuddling on the sofa, we indulged in copious brainstorming sessions. We filled an entire steno pad with notes before we were done. We used our brand new Apple TV to view some interesting research materials (and binge on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt). We talked and talked and talked. And talked.

After all of that, we were finally ready to lay the whole plot out in a colorful grid formation that we call the Plot Rainbow. We’ve talked about the Rainbow before, but here’s a brief refresher: Each major character is assigned a colored column in the grid. We proceed chronologically through the plot, filling in what we know of each characters’ actions on coordinating note paper. Each beat gets its own row.

Here’s what our first pass with Son of Music Novel looked like:Rainbow1

(Please excuse the dog hair. Lady Marzipan is an olympic-calibre shedder.)

This plot has a large number of beats, which made the Rainbow particularly long. We laid it out in the hallway so we would have enough room. That probably looks like a lot of story beats, but we can assure you that they don’t all warrant scenes. Often one scene per row will cover the participation of all the characters. Other times, we make a card to note what a character is doing off-page. It helps us keep track of where everyone is and what they’re up to, even if it doesn’t merit inclusion in the final story.

RotatedRainbowWe spent an evening carefully combing through that first Rainbow, making notes about points that were still vague, or questions that were still unanswered. Then we retired to the auxiliary writing cave and filled in all of the missing information.

When it was time to lay out the rainbow again, we abandoned the hallway. Lady Marzipan is far, far too helpful, what with all the sniffing and tail wagging and walking all over everything, and it was much easier to just shut her out of the room. Conveniently, the auxiliary writing cave is just barely wide enough to contain the entirety of the New and Improved Rainbow. We added columns for a couple of secondary characters (bright pink and yellow there at the right of the pic). We added a few rows where we clarified some of the action. Throughout we edited cards and sometimes even replaced them with updated information. A few holes were filled in.

The New and Improved Rainbow gives a much clearer picture of the story we will write. It even held up to scrutiny when we gave it a thorough going-over.

When we stack it all up, it strains the capacity of the largest binder clip we currently have in the house.Stack

When Jen typed it all up into a semi-coherent prose outline/synopsis it ran 8 pages. Single spaced.

Next week we’ll talk about turning that pile of colorful paper and 8-page document into an actual outline.

 

Retro-Rainbow Rocketeers

r-avatarWe’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.

We <3 Outlines!

Kent made an interesting observation the other day. He speculated that when authors say they don’t like the outlining process, what they’re really saying is that they don’t like to be reminded of how much work is ahead of them. Novel writing is a lot of work, there’s no getting around it. But to us it makes all the sense in the world to start with a thorough outline. It may seem like an extra step, but it will save you a ton of time in the long run.

As we mentioned last time, we created a multicolored visual representation of our new plot and spent a few hours studying it. Then we went back to brainstorming and long conversations, and we discovered a new wrinkle for one of our characters, a wrinkle that we wanted to incorporate from the very beginning of the story. If we had simply plunged in and written the first draft, when we discovered that this guy needed a little something extra we would have needed to go back and rewrite all of his scenes. Since we’re taking the time to outline, all we had to do was replace a few of our dark green paper squares, and shuffle a few of the others around. Other characters got notes added to their squares where they intersected with Dark Green, et voila! — heartache, recriminations, and carpal tunnel syndrome averted. Go team!

Alas, the ending is still proving elusive. We have something sketched in that feels right, most of the time. Other times it feels too simple. This has led to an entire week of throwing possible endings back and forth at each other. Most are utter crap, but the ones that pass the first nose-wrinkle test get a full discussion. This entails referring to the plot rainbow so often that we’ve just left it out on the floor all week. We’ll need to pick it up before the Pulitzer Committee comes over for tea.