Snowflake Method

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”

 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 6,000,000 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.