So, hey, it’s November! You know what that means? Moustaches everywhere, Christmas decorations everywhere, and NaNoWriMo everywhere! Or is that just my life? For those unaware, National Novel Writing Month is an ambitious internet movement aiming to encourage people to write a novel in the month of November. In this post I’ll try to explain the Snowflake Method for plotting out a novel. If you’re more into riding the thrill of the plot instead of planning it out, bear with me, I promise I’ll do some posts about that as well!
Digging through my bookmark archives, here is the original article I read about this method. Before I jump into the details, let me sneak in some science. Have you ever head of fractals? They are a mesmerising mathematical concept… Recursive and infinitely self-similar shape. In other words, no matter how much you zoom in on a fractal shape, it is still the same. If you would like to have a look at various shapes, go ahead, I’ll wait. They’re beautiful and I’m a nerd…
Anyway. Done? Excellent! We can move on to the main point of this post. The Snowflake method, like fractals, is self-similar. The basic premise is you start with one sentence that describes your story. Okay, maybe this isn’t the easiest step to start at, but you should be able to explain your story in 30 seconds or less. It’s the elevator pitch.
Next up is the first expansion. Take your single sentence and make it into a short paragraph. I’ll be looking at various narrative arcs and plot structures over some future blogposts, so I’ll discuss those in more detail there. You can use a sentence to set up the background of the story, one for each act of your plot, and one to tie things up in the end. If you’re like me and are…. Bad at endings, this will help you flesh out the later stages of your plot so you don’t get lost along the way. Remember, keep it about your protagonist and keep it simple. If you can summarise your plot in a short paragraph and still keep it engaging, you’re a long way along!
Okay. Phew. That’s a lot of thinking. When I last did this exercise, I had to take a long time doing these first bits since I only had an initial concept and not much of a plot. Now that we know what the story and your protagonist are doing, let’s see who else is involved. In future I’ll talk about the fine manoeuvring required to balance plot advancement and character development, but at this point it’s good to know who the character is, a one-sentence summary of their story, then a short paragraph. Are you starting to see the self-similarity here? Start with the really high-level abstract ideas and keep going from there. The more you dig, the more details you’ll find, but for now you have the bare bones of your story. And the best part is, if you don’t like some of it, you can cross out your paragraph and write it again! Better a few dozen words to rewrite than 50 pages, isn’t it?
Time to ramp it up a bit! Take your story summary paragraph, split it into sentences… and turn those into paragraphs! Try to keep this around a page. This is your roadmap. It doesn’t contain every nitty-gritty detail, but it gives you the steps and keeps you from writing yourself into a dead end. Things will be starting to get serious at this point and it’s okay to want to take a break. This is the design of your story and you’re not expected to do it in a single day or even single week. After all, your snowflake will grow and multiply until it’s eventually a snowstorm of words!
Following our pattern, we’ve expanded the story paragraph, it’s time to do the same with the character paragraphs. It’s useful to think about this: we are all the main characters in our own story. What I mean is that this story has a main character, a villain, a love interest, a pet, and everything else in between. On the other hand, the villain has their own story and their own opinion about our protagonist. The point of having different characters is that they have their own motivation and needs, and more often than not it’s another character in your story that is stopping those needs from being fulfilled. When you expand the character paragraphs, keep in mind that even though Alice and Bob aren’t protagonists, they should be fully-developed people (or ghosts, or zombies, or centaurs!) in their own right. The reader may not see the entirety of their personality and backstory, but those things show in their actions.
Okay… back to the story! You remember that one page? Time for it to do some work and turn into several pages! Remember when you had less than 15 words to describe your story? Look how far you’ve already come! Building on high-level summaries helps you not lose the plot (see what I did there? I’m hilarious, I know. I’m here all day, every day, folks). But seriously, if you construct every step on the basis of the previous, you know where you’re going, you’re just using more details to get there. Keep in mind all those pesky side characters and their motivations, as they are constant driving forces for minor (and sometimes major!) plot points.
Speaking of characters, you know what I’m about to say. Time to bring out the A2 paper and go wild! I know everyone has their own favourite way of detailing who a character is, so take yours and have some fun! Doesn’t matter if it’s 100 questions that you like to answer for every character or ten pages of backstory, as long as it works. You may ask yourself, why spend so much time on every character? Well, maybe not every, but those who have any role in the advancement of the plot. Think about your favourite long-running book series. You have the protagonist, but they also have a Scooby gang of friends and probably a bunch of foes. Now, do you think you’d like the series as much if any of those side characters were boring or flat? If they didn’t have their own lives, their own stories, that sometimes impacted the main plot? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Besides, isn’t it fun to play god and make people up out of thin air and have them jump through hoops for your own amusement? Or is that just me? Nevermind then…
This is where it gets very serious. You have four or five pages worth of story and that will eventually have to turn into a full book… But how? You should know at this point what I’m about to say. Take your paragraphs and turn them into scenes! If you’ve been using paper so far, it might be a good idea to switch to typing since it’s very likely you’ll be doing a lot of reshuffling and rethinking at this point. Your ‘scenes’ can be as abstract as five-word snippets. Alice goes to the fair. Bumps into Bob there. They decide to go on the Ferris wheel. And so on until you run out of plot.
At this point you’ve done a lot of work! You might want to reward yourself with wine, cake, takeout, or all of the above. Your 15 words have probably turned to 1500 and you should have a fairly good idea of what your story is about. Congratulations! You’ve made an outline! Unfortunately, you’re not even remotely done. This is where the hardest part comes. You have to actually sit down and write the damn thing. I’m sorry to disappoint, but no fairies will come and write it for you. It’s all you.
If you’re participating in NaNoWriMo, I hope I’ve helped even a little. If you’re not, you can apply this method to any story idea during any month of the year! Happy writing!