The
“Snowflake” Process for Designing Novels
by Randy Ingermanson
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.
How
do you design a novel? In my day job,
I’m a software architect designing large software projects. I write fiction 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:
Here's 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. Now scroll
down the web page a little and 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:
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 before you ever start writing
thinking about your novel. 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.
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. 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 books, and I hope it will help you.
1)
Take an hour and write a one-sentence summary of your
story. 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:
a)
Shorter is better. Try for fewer than 15 words.
b)
No character names, please! Better to say “a
handicapped trapeze artist” than “Jane Doe”.
c)
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.
d)
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.
2)
Take another hour and expand that sentence to a full
paragraph describing the story setup,
major disasters, and ending of the book. 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
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. If this
sounds suspiciously like back-cover copy, it’s because . . . that’s what it is
and that’s where it’s going to appear someday.
3)
The above gives you a high-level view of the story. 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:
a.
The character’s name
b.
A one-sentence summary of the character’s storyline
c.
The character’s motivation (what does he/she want
abstractly?)
d.
The character’s goal (what does he/she want concretely?)
e.
The character’s conflict (what prevents him/her from
reaching this goal?)
f.
The character’s epiphany (what will he/she learn, how will
he/she change?)
g.
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.
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 the story. 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 . . .
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.
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 story 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.
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 story? 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
are ready to write a proposal and sell this novel. Do so.
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 manuscript. 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. 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.
9)
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 usually write either one or two pages per chapter,
and I start each chapter on a new page.
Then I just print it all out and put it in a loose-leaf notebook, so I
can easily swap chapters around later or revise chapters without messing up the
others. This process usually takes me a
week and the end result is a massive 50-page printed document that I will
revise in red ink as I write the first draft.
All my good ideas when I wake up in the morning get 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. I never show
this synopsis to anyone, least of all to an editor—it’s for me alone. I like 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.
10)
At this point, just sit down and start pounding out the real
first draft of the story. You will be
astounded at how fast the story flies out of your fingers at this stage. I have seen writers triple their 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. This is 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 story works.
So you only have to solve a limited set of problems, and you can write
relatively fast.
This stage is incredibly fun and exciting. I have heard many writers complain about how
hard the first draft is. Invariably,
they are seat-of-the-pants writers who 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
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 the
story. 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 design documents were. And
you’ll be thrilled at how deep your story has become.
Are
you struggling right now with a horrible first draft 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?
If
the snowflake process works for you, I’d like to hear from you. You can reach me through the feedback page on
my web-site.
Legal
Shtuff: This document is copyright
Randall Ingermanson, 2003. I give it
away for free, and therefore I don’t allow anyone else to sell it either. However, you can give it away to whomever you want.
Please do. If you really feel that
you must pay me something for this information, then go ahead and buy one of my
books and see what the snowflake has done for me. You can find a complete list of my books on
my web site. Have fun!
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.
Copyright
2003 Randy Ingermanson