Why Even Bother With The Rainbow?

All of the semi-serious content on this entire blog could be boiled down to “we believe in the process.” We pretty much never shut up about it. Of course the process has evolved over time. It’s workflow, not dogma. But in our Friday posts we’ve really hammered the point that we think it’s important, and of all the steps it comprises probably the one we’ve nattered about the most is the rainbow.

Recent experience has further solidified our confidence that the rainbow is effective. Because, you see, we almost decided to skip it this time.

The ghost story is something we’ve been brainstorming about for quite a while, long enough that we really feel we’re getting to know the characters. We have tons of notes, which Jen has somehow collated into a synopsis that doesn’t contradict itself. Reading that made us so excited about the story, it was tempting to jump ahead to outlining, or maybe even start generating prose.

We didn’t always have the rainbow. Way, way back when we began writing novels together, we had nothing like our current process. But we did have some guidelines and rituals. For example, we originally did our first drafts longhand, and the act of typing them up created the second draft. We don’t do longhand drafts anymore. Even though it seemed important at one time, we came to see it as unnecessary.

Maybe the rainbow would fall into that same category. Maybe it was time we outgrew it?

Fortunately, we stuck to the process. Converting the information about our story from one form (synopsis) to a different form (a grid of colorful paper squares arranged on the floor) in this case revealed major gaps in the plotting. But, it didn’t turn into a major problem for the project. All it took was a little unscheduled brainstorming and we got the pieces to fit.

Would it have been a disaster if we’d skipped over the rainbow? Probably not. We probably would have seen the issues when we got to that part in the writing, and we still could have devised a solution. Of course, fixing it would have required rewriting a bunch of scenes, and reluctance to make so many changes might have made us less willing to consider taking the best approach. And, when you’re head-down cranking out prose is not the best time to notice large-scale issues. It’s quite possible that we wouldn’t have caught a problem like this until an entire draft was written. Ouch.

We like having a process that keeps us on track. Another thing we clearly remember about our very earliest collaborative experiences is the months-long droughts we would fall into because we’d written ourselves into a corner. Getting stuck might be a sign that your process is letting you down.