The Snowflake Method For Designing A Novel
Writing a novel is easy. Writing a good novel is hard. That’s just life. If it were easy, we’d all be writing best-selling, prize-winning fiction.
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.
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.”
This page is the most popular one on my web site,
and gets over a thousand page views per day, so you can guess that a lot
of people find it useful. But you may not, and that’s fine by me. Look
it over, decide what might work for you, and ignore the rest! If it
makes you puke, I won’t be insulted. Different writers are different. If
my methods get you rolling, I’ll be happy. I’ll make the best case I
can for my way of organizing things, but you are the final judge of what
works best for you. Have fun and . . . write your novel!
The Importance of Design
Good fiction doesn’t just happen, it is designed.
You can do the design work before or after you write your novel. I’ve
done it both ways and I strongly believe that doing it first is quicker
and leads to a better result. Design is hard work, so it’s important to
find a guiding principle early on. This article will give you a powerful
metaphor to guide your design.
Our fundamental question is this: How do you design a novel?
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.
At
the top of the page, you’ll see a cute 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.
The first few steps look like this:
I claim that that’s how you design a novel — you
start small, then build stuff up until it looks like a story. Part of
this is creative work, and I can’t teach you how to do that. Not here,
anyway. But part of the work is just managing your creativity — getting
it organized into a well-structured novel. That’s what I’d like to teach
you here.
If you’re like most people, you spend a long time
thinking about your novel before you ever start writing. You may do some
research. You daydream about how the story’s going to work. You
brainstorm. You start hearing the voices of different characters. You
think about what the book’s about — the Deep Theme. This is an essential
part of every book which I call “composting”. It’s an informal process
and every writer does it differently. I’m going to assume that you know
how to compost your story ideas and that you have already got a novel
well-composted in your mind and that you’re ready to sit down and start
writing that novel.
The Ten Steps of Design
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 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.
Over the years, I’ve taught the Snowflake method to hundreds of
writers at conferences. I’ve also had this article posted here on my web
site for a long time, and the page has now been viewed over 2,400,000
times. I’ve heard from many, many writers. Some people love the
Snowflake; some don’t. My attitude is that if it works for you, then use
it. If only parts of it work for you, then use only those parts.I write
my own novels using the Snowflake method. Make no mistake — it’s a fair
bit of work. For a long time, I did it the hard way, using Microsoft
Word to write the text and Microsoft Excel to manage the list of scenes.
Unfortunately, neither of those tools knows about the structure of
fiction. Finally, I realized that it would be a whole lot easier to work
through the method if the tools were designed specially for fiction.
So one day I decided to create that software. I wanted something that
would automate every step that could be automated. The result was a
commercial software package I call Snowflake Pro. It makes my own Snowflaking incredibly easier, and it’s now doing the same for zillions of other writers.
