I'm reviewing the ideas presented in the Snowflake Method for organizing a novel, by Randy Ingermanson. I thought Ingermanson had a lot of good practical advice in that article. The key things I thought he got right were:
- an iterative process with layers that lets you manage the large and small structure of a novel; iterative meaning you feed back and correct each layer as you develop the next
- he emphasizes that you should use what works from his ideas. He doesn't think he has all the right answers.
Ingermanson's web site is a bit marketingy and salesy and maybe oversells him. I'd never heard of his writing before encountering the Snowflake concept through NaNoWriMo. He calls himself an award-winning writer, but the awards he cites are for Christian writing, which is a niche that doesn't give him any particular juice for me.
Still, I've gotten a lot of use out of these ideas already. But I've been writing short stories, and I've never done all the detail involved witha full Snowflake. Now I'm working on a novel and I plan to go all the way, baby. And all the way, with the Snowflake method, is a long way: you end up with pages and pages of notes.
I generate pages and pages of notes anyway, though. They just aren't usually as organized as the Snowflake method would have them.
Here's the Snowflake in the smallest nutshell I can distill it down to:
Write progressively more detailed descriptions of your story, like this:
- One sentence.
- One paragraph summary.
- Goals and one-paragraph storylines for each major character.
- Expand the one paragraph summary to a page.
- One page per major character.
- Expand the page summary to four pages.
- Detailed character charts per character.
- List of every scene needed to make this plot work.
- Description for every scene, totalling about a page per chapter.
- Start your first draft...but halfway through, update your design docs.
Image made using the Make-a-Flake flash tool. I wanted a snowflake image and it occurred to me that there must be some art tool out there for making snowflake pictures, and it was only a Google away. The zeitgeist is a wonderful thing.
Maybe you could use some of your XML ideas for tagging essential plot scenes, essential character scenes, etc.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I could do that. I'm kinda afraid it would devolve into tagging-instead-of-writing.
ReplyDeleteI periodically revive an idea to do a very simple xml for prose. But you know, you could tag character names, I'd love to demark things like new day starts .... it quickly becomes madness. ;)
My challenge with the Snowflake method is that I've never felt like I could complete all the preliminary outlining and notemaking that comes before the actual writing, because I've never had that complete an idea of a story in my head.
ReplyDeleteThen again, maybe that's a warning sign.
So, I keep raving about this method, but I never go all the way either.
ReplyDelete(Probably totally consistent with my whole life, to be reluctant to go all the way.... :) )
But my excuse before has been that I was working on short stories, which didn't seem to need the whole shebang. I still think it would be a good idea to try to take a short story through iterative phases where you worked your way through more and more detailed outlines until you suddenly had...the story!
When I work on the snowflake, and I've been working on this one for the last 5 days solid, I tend to work on one chunk, then if I get tired of it, move ahead. I haven't done all my character storylines, but I drafted a 1-page summary anyway. And I think that's okay: I'm not sure the current design needs all the same characters from the story design, anyway, and why not explore up and down the chain? I think that, reading a procedure like this, it's hard to get the proper emphasis on the real iterative up-and-down the scale process.