How to Write a Novel: The Snowflake Method

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
hundreds of 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 . . . 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. 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.
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 are ready to write a proposal
and sell this novel. Do so.
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 wake 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 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 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 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.
(I'll note that many seat-of-the-pants writers shriek at the thought of
doing a Snowflake document. That's fine. Different people are
different. I suspect you know already whether the Snowflake is
something that's going to work for you or not. Even if it does work for
you, I'd encourage you to improvise on it. May a thousand different
Snowflake methods bloom!) There is not just one solution to the
problem of how to write a novel, there are many. Use the one that
works for you.
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
design documents were. And you'll be thrilled at how deep your story
has become.
That's All! That's the Snowflake Method. It works for me and for
many of my writer friends who have tried it. I've lost track of how
many people around the world who have emailed me to say that the
Snowflake helped them get their novel on track. So it works for a lot
of people. I hope it works for you.

Ways To Use The Snowflake

Are you struggling right now with a horrible first draft of your novel
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?
Are you a seat-of-the-pants writer who finally finished your novel,
but now you're staring at an enormous pile of manuscript that
desperately needs rewriting? Take heart! Your novel's done, isn't it?
You've done something many writers only dream about. Now imagine
a big-shot editor bumps into you in the elevator and asks what your
novel's about. In fifteen words or less, what would you say? Take your
time! This is a thought game. What would you say? If you can come
up with an answer in the next hour . . . you've just completed Step 1
of the Snowflake! Do you think some of the other steps might help
you put some order into that manuscript? Give it a shot. What have
you got to lose?
Have you just got a nightmarishly long letter from your editor
detailing all the things that are wrong with your novel? Are you
wondering how you can possibly make all the changes before your
impossible deadline? It's never too late to do the Snowflake. How
about if you take a week and drill through all the steps right now? It'll
clarify things wonderfully, and then you'll have a plan for executing all
those revisions. I bet you'll get it done in record time. And I bet the
book will come out better than you imagined.
If the Snowflake Method works for you, I'd like to hear from you.
You can reach me through the contact page on my web-site.
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.
Best regards,

Randy Ingermanson, Ph.D.