This is the sentence that will hook not only your readers but even the sales force, your editor or the bookshop’s owners. This one sentence has a lot of pressure on it, so try to really make it pop.
Lastly, you should be able to hit your primary targets of the book. Its story, character, and settings, so that as you progress you should be able to add layers of details that are yet to be written.
Being realistic, it is safe to say that writing an entire novel is difficult, but composing a single sentence isn’t quite so scary. Going by this, where you start writing a book with just a sentence, this beginning phase is all about a one-sentence summary of the story.
Take an hour or less and summarize your story in a sentence, this will help you clear your head and you have just completed the first step of the snowflake tactic. Keep moving through the steps and watch as your novel transforms into the story you always wanted it to be.
Step #1: A One-Sentence Summary of Your Book
If you’re not sure how to write a book or if you’re struggling to write your first book, the snowflake approach is for you.
This might seem like a lot of work but it is worth the time spent. This phase is like spending the time to sharpen your knife before barking a tree
If you do not understand exactly what you are writing about anymore, you need a good plan for proper revision. Try going at it with the snowflake method.
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.
In this article, I’d like to share with you what works for me. I’ve published six novels and won about a dozen awards for my writing. I teach the craft of writing fiction at writing conferences all the time. One of my most popular lectures is this one: How to write a novel using what I call the “Snowflake Method.”
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.
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?
Want to Learn More About the Snowflake Method?
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.
But before you start writing, you need to get organized. You need to put all those wonderful ideas down on paper in a form you can use. Why? Because your memory is fallible, and your creativity has probably left a lot of holes in your story — holes you need to fill in before you start writing your novel. You need a design document. And you need to produce it using a process that doesn’t kill your desire to actually write the story. Here is my ten-step process for writing a design document. I use this process for writing my novels, and I hope it will help you.
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.
Randy Ingermanson is a theoretical physicist and the award-winning author of six novels. He has taught at numerous writing conferences over the years and publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.
I liked it so much, I gave Cameron some free labor to make Plottr work way better with the Snowflake Method.
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.
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.
Then I created a Snowflake Method Plot Template for managing the timelines in Plottr, and Cameron put that in Plottr also. (Timelines let you visualize your scene lists from the Snowflake Method.)
About The Author
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.
But before you start writing, you need to get organized. You need to put all those wonderful ideas down on paper in a form you can use. Why? Because your memory is fallible, and your creativity has probably left a lot of holes in your story — holes you need to fill in before you start writing your novel. You need a design document. And you need to produce it using a process that doesn’t kill your desire to actually write the story. Here is my ten-step process for writing a design document. I use this process for writing my novels, and I hope it will help you.
As I said, I use Plottr myself now for my novel design work, and I recommend it to all Snowflakers. Plottr runs on both Macs and Windows, and it has a 30-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee. And it’s priced extremely reasonably.
Plottr is a program that helps you design your novel using several different methods, including the Snowflake Method.
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