Randy is known around the world as the Snowflake Guy for his Snowflake method of designing a novel. Now hes created software to make the Snowflake method. Snowflake Pro Software Free' title='Snowflake Pro Software Free' />Subscribe to Print Get our Best Deal Get a print subscription to Readers Digest and instantly enjoy free digital access on any device. How To Write A Novel Using The Snowflake Method. Writing a novel is easy. Writing a good novel is hard. Thats just life. If it were easy, wed 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, Id like to share with you what works for me. Ive 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 thats fine by me. Look it over, decide what might work for you, and ignore the rest If it makes you puke, I wont be insulted. Different writers are different. If my methods get you rolling, Ill be happy. Ill 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. Good fiction doesnt just happen, it is designed. You can do the design work before or after you write your novel. Ive 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 its important to find a guiding principle early on. This article will give you a powerful metaphor to guide your design. 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, whats the snowflake metaphorBefore you go further, take a look at this cool web site. At the top of the page, youll see a cute pattern known as a snowflake fractal. Dont tell anyone, but this is an important mathematical object thats been widely studied. For our purposes, its just a cool sketch of a snowflake. If you scroll down that same web page a little, youll see a box with a large triangle in it and arrows underneath. If you press the right arrow button repeatedly, youll see the steps used to create the snowflake. It doesnt look much like a snowflake at first, but after a few steps, it starts looking more and more like one, until its done. I claim that thats 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 cant 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. Thats what Id like to teach you here. If youre 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 storys going to work. Hl7 Messaging Second Edition Pdf. You brainstorm. You start hearing the voices of different characters. You think about what the books about the Deep Theme. This is an essential part of every book which I call composting. Its an informal process and every writer does it differently. Im 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 youre 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 your novel. You need a design document. And you need to produce it using a process that doesnt 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. Its 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 1. 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 dont know if this is the ideal structure, its 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 protagonists 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. Transporter - S01e01 on this page. Dont 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 characters name. A one sentence summary of the characters storyline. The characters motivation what does heshe want abstractlyThe characters goal what does heshe want concretelyThe characters conflict what prevents himher from reaching this goalThe characters epiphany what will heshe learn, how will heshe change A one paragraph summary of the characters storyline. An important point You may find that you need to go back and revise your one sentence summary andor your one paragraph summary. Go ahead This is goodit means your characters are teaching you things about your story. Its always okay at any stage of the design process to go back and revise earlier stages. In fact, its not just okayits inevitable.