Adapted from How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method by Randy Ingermanson
Take an hour and write a one-sentence summary of your novel. The sentence will serve you forever as a ten-second selling tool. This is the big picture view of your story.
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 they want to win.
Take another hour and expand that sentence to a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel. 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.
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 do they want abstractly?)
The character’s goal (what do they want concretely?)
The character’s conflict (what prevents them from reaching this goal?)
The character’s epiphany (what will they learn, how will they 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. 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. 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.
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 hours in a rambling first draft. So 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.
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.
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.
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 appear.
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 saving time downstream.
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.
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.
As you develop the story, you can make new versions of your 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.
Switch back to your document 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 (ymmv on this last bit, not everyone wants constant conflict in their story).
At this point, just sit down and start pounding out the real first draft of the novel. This is supposed to be the fun part, because there are many small-scale logic problems to work out here. 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.
About midway through a first draft, you might take a breather and fix all the broken parts of your design documents. Yes, the design documents are not perfect. That’s okay. They're not carved in stone, but are a living set of documents that grow 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.