Frankly, there are a thousand different people out there who can tell
you how to write a novel. There are a thousand different methods. The
best one for you is the one that works for you.
For a number of years, I was a software architect designing large
software projects. I write novels the same way I write software, using
the “snowflake metaphor”. OK, what’s the snowflake metaphor? Before you
go further, take a look at this cool web site.
On
the side of the page, you’ll see an animation of a pattern known as a
snowflake fractal. Don’t tell anyone, but this is an important
mathematical object that’s been widely studied. For our purposes, it’s
just a cool sketch of a snowflake. If you scroll down that same web page
a little, you’ll see a box with a large triangle in it and arrows
underneath. If you press the right-arrow button repeatedly, you’ll see
the steps used to create the snowflake. It doesn’t look much like a
snowflake at first, but after a few steps, it starts looking more and
more like one, until it’s done.
Step 1) Take an hour and write a one-sentence
summary of your novel. Something like this: “A rogue physicist travels
back in time to kill the apostle Paul.” (This is the summary for my
first novel, Transgression.) The sentence will serve you forever as a
ten-second selling tool. This is the big picture, the analog of that big
starting triangle in the snowflake picture.
When you later write your book proposal, this sentence should appear
very early in the proposal. It’s the hook that will sell your book to
your editor, to your committee, to the sales force, to bookstore owners,
and ultimately to readers. So make the best one you can!
Some hints on what makes a good sentence:
- Shorter is better. Try for fewer than 15 words.
- No character names, please! Better to say “a handicapped trapeze artist” than “Jane Doe”.
- Tie together the big picture and the personal picture. Which
character has the most to lose in this story? Now tell me what he or she
wants to win.
- Read the one-line blurbs on the New York Times Bestseller list to
learn how to do this. Writing a one-sentence description is an art form.
Step 2) Take another hour and expand that sentence
to a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and
ending of the novel. This is the analog of the second stage of the
snowflake. I like to structure a story as “three disasters plus an
ending”. Each of the disasters takes a quarter of the book to develop
and the ending takes the final quarter. I don’t know if this is the
ideal structure, it’s just my personal taste.
If you believe in the Three-Act structure, then the first disaster
corresponds to the end of Act 1. The second disaster is the mid-point of
Act 2. The third disaster is the end of Act 2, and forces Act 3 which
wraps things up. It is OK to have the first disaster be caused by
external circumstances, but I think that the second and third disasters
should be caused by the protagonist’s attempts to “fix things”. Things
just get worse and worse.
You can also use this paragraph in your proposal. Ideally, your
paragraph will have about five sentences. One sentence to give me the
backdrop and story setup. Then one sentence each for your three
disasters. Then one more sentence to tell the ending. Don’t confuse this
paragraph with the back-cover copy for your book. This paragraph
summarizes the whole story. Your back-cover copy should summarize only
about the first quarter of the story.
Step 3) The above gives you a high-level view of
your novel. Now you need something similar for the storylines of each of
your characters. Characters are the most important part of any novel,
and the time you invest in designing them up front will pay off ten-fold
when you start writing. For each of your major characters, take an hour
and write a one-page summary sheet that tells:
- The character’s name
- A one-sentence summary of the character’s storyline
- The character’s motivation (what does he/she want abstractly?)
- The character’s goal (what does he/she want concretely?)
- The character’s conflict (what prevents him/her from reaching this goal?)
- The character’s epiphany (what will he/she learn, how will he/she change?
- A one-paragraph summary of the character’s storyline
An important point: You may find that you need to go
back and revise your one-sentence summary and/or your one-paragraph
summary. Go ahead! This is good–it means your characters are teaching
you things about your story. It’s always okay at any stage of the design
process to go back and revise earlier stages. In fact, it’s not just
okay–it’s inevitable. And it’s good. Any revisions you make now are
revisions you won’t need to make later on to a clunky 400 page
manuscript.
Another important point: It doesn’t have to be
perfect. The purpose of each step in the design process is to advance
you to the next step. Keep your forward momentum! You can always come
back later and fix it when you understand the story better. You will do
this too, unless you’re a lot smarter than I am.
Step 4) By this stage, you should have a good idea
of the large-scale structure of your novel, and you have only spent a
day or two. Well, truthfully, you may have spent as much as a week, but
it doesn’t matter. If the story is broken, you know it now, rather than
after investing 500 hours in a rambling first draft. So now just keep
growing the story. Take several hours and expand each sentence of your
summary paragraph into a full paragraph. All but the last paragraph
should end in a disaster. The final paragraph should tell how the book
ends.
This is a lot of fun, and at the end of the exercise, you have a
pretty decent one-page skeleton of your novel. It’s okay if you can’t
get it all onto one single-spaced page. What matters is that you are
growing the ideas that will go into your story. You are expanding the
conflict. You should now have a synopsis suitable for a proposal,
although there is a better alternative for proposals . . .
Step 5) Take a day or two and write up a one-page
description of each major character and a half-page description of the
other important characters. These “character synopses” should tell the
story from the point of view of each character. As always, feel free to
cycle back to the earlier steps and make revisions as you learn cool
stuff about your characters. I usually enjoy this step the most and
lately, I have been putting the resulting “character synopses” into my
proposals instead of a plot-based synopsis. Editors love character
synopses, because editors love character-based fiction.
Step 6) By now, you have a solid story and several
story-threads, one for each character. Now take a week and expand the
one-page plot synopsis of the novel to a four-page synopsis. Basically,
you will again be expanding each paragraph from step (4) into a full
page. This is a lot of fun, because you are figuring out the high-level
logic of the story and making strategic decisions. Here, you will
definitely want to cycle back and fix things in the earlier steps as you
gain insight into the story and new ideas whack you in the face.
Step 7) Take another week and expand your character
descriptions into full-fledged character charts detailing everything
there is to know about each character. The standard stuff such as
birthdate, description, history, motivation, goal, etc. Most
importantly, how will this character change by the end of the novel?
This is an expansion of your work in step (3), and it will teach you a
lot about your characters. You will probably go back and revise steps
(1-6) as your characters become “real” to you and begin making petulant
demands on the story. This is good — great fiction is character-driven.
Take as much time as you need to do this, because you’re just saving
time downstream. When you have finished this process, (and it may take a
full month of solid effort to get here), you have most of what you need
to write a proposal. If you are a published novelist, then you can
write a proposal now and sell your novel before you write it. If you’re
not yet published, then you’ll need to write your entire novel first
before you can sell it. No, that’s not fair, but life isn’t fair and the
world of fiction writing is especially unfair.
Step 8) You may or may not take a hiatus here,
waiting for the book to sell. At some point, you’ve got to actually
write the novel. Before you do that, there are a couple of things you
can do to make that traumatic first draft easier. The first thing to do
is to take that four-page synopsis and make a list of all the scenes
that you’ll need to turn the story into a novel. And the easiest way to
make that list is . . . with a spreadsheet.
For some reason, this is scary to a lot of writers. Oh the horror.
Deal with it. You learned to use a word-processor. Spreadsheets are
easier. You need to make a list of scenes, and spreadsheets were
invented for making lists. If you need some tutoring, buy a book. There
are a thousand out there, and one of them will work for you. It should
take you less than a day to learn the itty bit you need. It’ll be the
most valuable day you ever spent. Do it.
Make a spreadsheet detailing the scenes that emerge from your
four-page plot outline. Make just one line for each scene. In one
column, list the POV character. In another (wide) column, tell what
happens. If you want to get fancy, add more columns that tell you how
many pages you expect to write for the scene. A spreadsheet is ideal,
because you can see the whole storyline at a glance, and it’s easy to
move scenes around to reorder things.
My spreadsheets usually wind up being over 100 lines long, one line
for each scene of the novel. As I develop the story, I make new versions
of my story spreadsheet. This is incredibly valuable for analyzing a
story. It can take a week to make a good spreadsheet. When you are done,
you can add a new column for chapter numbers and assign a chapter to
each scene.
Step 9) (Optional. I don’t do this step anymore.)
Switch back to your word processor and begin writing a narrative
description of the story. Take each line of the spreadsheet and expand
it to a multi-paragraph description of the scene. Put in any cool lines
of dialogue you think of, and sketch out the essential conflict of that
scene. If there’s no conflict, you’ll know it here and you should either
add conflict or scrub the scene.
I used to write either one or two pages per chapter, and I started
each chapter on a new page. Then I just printed it all out and put it in
a loose-leaf notebook, so I could easily swap chapters around later or
revise chapters without messing up the others. This process usually took
me a week and the end result was a massive 50-page printed document
that I would revise in red ink as I wrote the first draft. All my good
ideas when I woke up in the morning got hand-written in the margins of
this document. This, by the way, is a rather painless way of writing
that dreaded detailed synopsis that all writers seem to hate. But it’s
actually fun to develop, if you have done steps (1) through (8) first.
When I did this step, I never showed this synopsis to anyone, least of
all to an editor — it was for me alone. I liked to think of it as the
prototype first draft. Imagine writing a first draft in a week! Yes, you
can do it and it’s well worth the time. But I’ll be honest, I don’t
feel like I need this step anymore, so I don’t do it now.
Step 10) At this point, just sit down and start
pounding out the real first draft of the novel. You will be astounded at
how fast the story flies out of your fingers at this stage. I have seen
writers triple their fiction writing speed overnight, while producing
better quality first drafts than they usually produce on a third draft.
You might think that all the creativity is chewed out of the story by
this time. Well, no, not unless you overdid your analysis when you
wrote your Snowflake. This is supposed to be the fun part, because there
are many small-scale logic problems to work out here. How does Hero get
out of that tree surrounded by alligators and rescue Heroine who’s in
the burning rowboat? This is the time to figure it out! But it’s fun
because you already know that the large-scale structure of the novel
works. So you only have to solve a limited set of problems, and so you
can write relatively fast.
This stage is incredibly fun and exciting. I have heard many fiction
writers complain about how hard the first draft is. Invariably, that’s
because they have no clue what’s coming next. Good grief! Life is too
short to write like that! There is no reason to spend 500 hours writing a
wandering first draft of your novel when you can write a solid one in
150. Counting the 100 hours it takes to do the design documents, you
come out way ahead in time.
About midway through a first draft, I usually take a breather and fix
all the broken parts of my design documents. Yes, the design documents
are not perfect. That’s okay. The design documents are not fixed in
concrete, they are a living set of documents that grows as you develop
your novel. If you are doing your job right, at the end of the first
draft you will laugh at what an amateurish piece of junk your original
design documents were. And you’ll be thrilled at how deep your story has
become.
Ways To Use The Snowflake
Are you struggling right now with a horrible first
draft of your novel that just seems hopeless? Take an hour and summarize
your story in one sentence. Does that clarify things? You’ve just
completed step (1) of the Snowflake, and it only took an hour. Why not
try the next few steps of the Snowflake and see if your story doesn’t
suddenly start coming to life? What have you got to lose, except a
horrible first draft that you already hate?
Are you a seat-of-the-pants writer who finally
finished your novel, but now you’re staring at an enormous pile of
manuscript that desperately needs rewriting? Take heart! Your novel’s
done, isn’t it? You’ve done something many writers only dream about. Now
imagine a big-shot editor bumps into you in the elevator and asks what
your novel’s about. In fifteen words or less, what would you say? Take
your time! This is a thought game. What would you say? If you can come
up with an answer in the next hour . . . you’ve just completed Step 1 of
the Snowflake! Do you think some of the other steps might help you put
some order into that manuscript? Give it a shot. What have you got to
lose?
Have you just got a nightmarishly long letter from
your editor detailing all the things that are wrong with your novel? Are
you wondering how you can possibly make all the changes before your
impossible deadline? It’s never too late to do the Snowflake. How about
if you take a week and drill through all the steps right now? It’ll
clarify things wonderfully, and then you’ll have a plan for executing
all those revisions. I bet you’ll get it done in record time. And I bet
the book will come out better than you imagined.
If the Snowflake Method works for you, I’d like to hear from you. You can reach me through the contact page on my web-site.
Acknowledgments: I thank my many friends on the Chi
Libris list and especially Janelle Schneider for a large number of
discussions on the Snowflake and much else.
.jpg "John Truby")
.jpg "The Snowflake Method For Designing A Novel by Randy Ingermanson")
