The Secret of Using the Snowflake Method for Scenes or Short Stories

Do you know the Snowflake Method? It is a method, taught by author Randy Ingermanson, to help you go from a vague novel idea to a workable outline in ten steps. In "Writing Fiction for Dummies" he goes to great lengths to show how to use it to create a novel.

But what if you can't write or plan at great lengths? What if you only are ready to write short fiction right now? Or what if you just can't plan out a whole novel before you start, but your novel comes to you in scenes and short sections, so that you write it as if it were a series of short stories? It may be that you are in the middle ground between being an outliner and a seat-of-the-pants writer, and need to plan things, but only on a scene-by-scene, section-by-section basis.

Never fear, the Snowflake Method can be used in scenes and short stories, too. You just adapt it a little. I've been using the Snowflake Method for the opening scene in what I'm working on now. Because I have Asperger Syndrome, I'm not really good at planning out a whole novel in advance. So I'm writing scene by scene--- and planning this scene in advance.

The full Snowflake Method is meant to cover a full novel. For shorter work, you don't have to do all ten steps. The initial steps may be all you need to write your scene or story.  Here are some hints:

Step One: Storyline
A storyline for just one scene is a lot smaller in scope than one for a full novel.  Here is my scene storyline for the scene I am working on: A cat-girl is stuck in a drab grocery store job until she fights with a werewolf and meets a student mage. If I were to write a storyline for the whole novel/novella instead of just this scene, it would be different. But as yet I haven't fleshed out a lot of the rest of the story. But I do know enough about what will happen in the scene to write this.

Step Two: Three-Act Structure
Your scene is not going to have 'three acts'. It's just a scene! But you can probably divide it into three sections--- beginning, middle and end. In the Snowflake Method, this is supposed to come to about 5 sentences. Mine tend to run over, and I have in the past used what was intended as my Three-Act Structure to be my Short Synopsis (Step Four). But for a mere scene, you may not get as far as doing a Step Four. The Three-Act will be enough.

My Three-Act from today introduces the setting--- a small rural grocery story--- two major characters--- the cat-girl and the student mage--- and minor characters--- the couple that owns the grocery story, and a mother werewolf and her children. There is action--- a minor supernatural creature is banished. And the scene concludes as the cat-girl, who has shape-shifted into her cat form, tries to flee an irate werewolf and is caught by the student mage. (The next scene will show the result of this chance meeting.)

Step Three: Character Definitions
Here is where you write out some brief info on the characters--- name, ambition, scene goal, conflict, epiphany--- and write a one-sentence and one-paragraph summary of the story/scene from the point of view of the character. For scene/short story snowflaking, this gives you more than you need to know about most of the characters. I wrote this out in full for my two major characters, who are not only the focus of this scene, but are the major characters in the rest of the story. The more minor characters, I am going to do far more abbreviated versions of the character definition work.

For a lot of writers, these three steps may be plenty to write the scene or short story. For others, you may go on to do the other steps, particularly if it is a longer short story, or if you lack confidence when you sit down to write out a scene.

Question: Have you ever tried the Snowflake method to write a scene or a short story? Does it sound like something that might work for you?

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The Worst Advice Lawrence Block Ever Gave Me

Lawrence Block, he's a friend of mine. Well, in a totally fictional and fangirl way, he's a friend of mine. I've read his Tanner and Burglar books for years. And Lawrence gives me great writing advice, too, ever since that day many years ago when I first bought a copy of LB's book Writing the Novel:
from Plot to Print.

But in that book Lawrence gave me a major bum steer that I am only now getting over. You see, in that book he recommends strongly that the novice writer NOT bother with writing short stories. The market for short stories, he declares, is too small and too low-paying now for that to be very practical. He recommended that the new writer start out by writing a novel.

Is that the way Lawrence Block learned to write? No, he admits. He wrote short stories for years before he felt ready to tackle the novel.

Many other writers of Lawrence Block's generation learned the same way. At the time, there were a great many short story magazines, called 'pulps', in a wide variety of genres--- sci-fi, mystery, westerns, romance, adventure--- and they were available on every news stand. (Yes, there used to be these things called 'news stands' that sold newspapers and magazines. A newspaper was kind of like the evening news broadcast, only written down and printed on paper.)

At the time LB wrote the book, there were only a tiny handful of short story magazines left and they paid the same as they did a couple of decades back, even though the dollar had declined greatly over that time.

I will agree with LB that at that time there was no real financial incentive for the novice writer to write short stories. But the thing is, the reason most writers started with short stories wasn't a money thing. They did it for the same reason most of us learned to walk before we learned to drive a car or fly an airplane.

A novel is a complicated thing, and you can spend months on it before you discover you are driving it into a dead end. While a short story can be simple enough that you can hold the whole thing in your mind.

A shorter work is just more possible for the novice writer to do, and to do well. Short stories, being short, are also easier to revise and improve.

Lawrence Block said that you can write a novel in the same time it would take to write twenty short stories, and that the odds are better for selling that novel than for selling the twenty short stories.

But what if your writing, at first, is not good enough to sell at all? You will end up with seven utterly hopeless short stories, seven that are a bit better, and then you will have a few with potential. While if you had started with a novel right off the bat, you will have an utterly hopeless novel.

The changing world of publishing has made short stories more worth doing. No, there has been no revival of the pulps as a paying market for short fiction. But now, self-publishing is easier, cheaper and more respected. There is also the internet. There are e-zines to submit to, and web sites where would-be authors can post their stories, and the possibility of publishing your short story, in installments, on your blog. You can also turn a short story into an e-book and sell it or give it away.

All of these things can build you up as a writer. You will learn your craft, and you will get feedback. A tiny amount of that feedback will be things that are actually useful to you.

I have decided, for myself, that what I need to be doing now is to work on short fiction. Perhaps because of my Asperger Syndrome, which has some symptoms similar to ADHD, the complexities of a full novel are beyond me right now. But if I can get the short story right--- well, story stories have been known to become novels, as in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, or Hugh Howey's Wool. This just might lead to something.