1 post tagged “snowflake method”

2 month, 4 days and counting....

That's how long there is until NaNoWriMo. Possibly a little bit too soon to start planning, you may think, but it's not that long considering I'm also supposed to be making our wedding scrapbook, learning to draw manga, actually getting round to finishing one of the Guildwars games, and picking up a book on biological psychology at some point in prep for my uni course next year. So now seems like the perfect time to start planning.

This year my shamelessly tacky archetypal fantasy adventure is called "Cold Spell", so it's oddly appropriate that I'm trying out the Snowflake Method to plan it. This method is the creation of Randy Ingermanson (aka "The Snowflake Guy"), and the idea is that you start with one sentence and build outwards until you've got a full detailed plan. I don't know how effective it is. That's what we're here to find out!

With this method you should already have mused a bit on your novel idea and have a pretty good idea of the general direction you're going with it. I'm approaching this from a position of having written out a fairly detailed mythology for the world, an idea of the first scene and the climactic scene (and a couple of vague ideas for currently unplaced events in-between), and a paragraph about each of the four main characters (including the villain).

Step 1: summarise the story in a sentence

This has been the hardest bit so far. I've always struggled with this concept. One sentence to express the substance of your whole book. Heck, if I could say it in a sentence I wouldn't need to write a whole book, would I!? My problem with doing this is that I like to have multiple focus characters, so one sentence doesn't quite do it for me, but I had to pick one and dutifully sticking to the recommended 15 word limit I came up with: "A con-artist unwittingly targets a fated amnesiac prince for her latest money making scheme." Nope, that really doesn't capture the essence of my book. It doesn't mention the spirits or monsters or magic or anything, though it is kind of the seed of the idea I started with so perhaps it's an appropriate point to build from. It'll do for now. Not loving step 1 though.

Step 2: summarise the story in a paragraph

This was less painful, though I deviated ever so slightly from the advice. Randy recommends 5 sentences, 3 of which should be a "disaster" or a turning point in the story. I didn't feel very prepared for this step as I couldn't think of 3 disasters, so instead of doing a paragraph I just wrote out "disaster 1, disaster 2, disaster 3" and sat down for a think. Disaster 3 was easy enough, final confrontation, yadda yadda yadda. Disaster 1 became the first confrontation (though I'm not sure it's disastrous enough to qualify), and disaster 2, well, I managed to think of something that actually ties in nicely, so this step has paid off so far. I've got 3 solid events in a defined order, and though some of them may not end up as official 'end of act disasters' we're starting to see a bit of structure here, which is the point of the exercise.

Step 3: character summary sheets

As an RPG groupie I usually have a different idea of character sheets, but this step has been really useful. Definitely the best step for me so far. The idea is to write a sheet for each character with the following info:

Quote

R. Ingermason, 'How to write a novel: the snowflake method'

I'd already started doing something like this when editing to make sure that each individual character has a coherent storyline on their own. As I said, I like to have quite a few focus characters so doing something like this is so valuable. I found it especially useful to do the story outline for my villain. I quickly realised that she was seriously lacking in anything to do but fail to catch one prince for the whole book, so thank goodness I caught that now and was able to devise some more substantial challenges for her. It would have been a nightmare if I noticed after writing the book. He is the hero, but he's not THAT hard to catch! Definitely a worthwhile stage.

Well, that's as far as I've got for now. I've got another 2 characters to do with step 3, then it's on to step 4!