Weird thought - a rainbow of Signposts and Journeys

I was thinking I understood the SIgnposts and Journeys pretty well – to me each Signpost and Journey was a scene or groups of scenes; or even groups of sections of scenes (since a single scene might hit multiple Signposts).

But then a few days ago I read this question (How do Act progressions compare to traditional screeplay rules of thumb) and I realized my understanding was a bit weak.

To fill the gap I tried to think of a visualization, and started imagining the 4 signposts as rectangular vases with pretty rocks in them. The rocks were the scenes or bits of scenes. Like this:

| OS Signpost #1 |  | OS Signpost #2 |  | OS Signpost #3 |  | OS Signpost #4 |
|                |  |   o            |  |                |  |                |
|  o   o    o    |  |      o   o     |  |     o   o      |  |           o    |
|    o    o  o   |  | o         o    |  |   o        o   |  |  o    o        |
------------------  ------------------  ------------------  ------------------

And then to imagine the Journeys I thought, what if each of the vases were a different color, and then if arranged them so they slightly overlapped each other, and looked at them in the right light, the Journeys would be the combination of colors where they overlapped. Sorry I can only ASCII-draw them from the top like that now:

            ====== #4
        ====== #3
    ====== #2
====== #1                 O2
(Signpost vases pictured from above; O1,O2,O3 are 3 observers)

O3         O1

Now you can imagine that depending on the angle you look, you might see both Signpost colors and blended-Journey-colors (O1), or only Signposts (O2), or only Journeys (O3 – though actually O3 might still see a tiny bit of SP#1 and SP#4).

Anyway, I realized that this thought experiment also ended up giving me something close to the rainbow, or visible spectrum of light, if you decide Signpost #1 is Red, Journey #1 is Orange, Signpost #2 is Yellow, etc. The weird thing is this also shows how “the story should end where it began”, or at least shows some relation between ending and beginning:

red (Signpost #1)
 orange (Journey #1: red -> yellow)
yellow (Signpost #2)
 green (Journey #2: yellow -> blue)
blue (Signpost #3)
 indigo (Journey #3: blue -> violet)
violet (Signpost #4)

(Since you can see the influence of red on indigo and violet, which both have a component of red to them … a complete story always ends where it begins, or put another way, ending has a component of beginning and vice versa…)

Well, I don’t know if any of that makes sense or if it’s totally pointless. It probably won’t affect how I plan my scenes much, if at all. But I thought it was worth sharing. Now I need to get back to my real writing stuff!