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snowflakes
His primary statement about the process of writing:
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.And when Randy says design, he means design. Have a look at the Snowflake Process and you'll see that he advocates a lot of prep work, such as character sketches. He then proceeds to make lists of scenes and chapters, which are expanded, bit by bit, until there's a whole novel. The tools he uses for this are suited to the nature of the task. For example, by step nine of the process:
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.So Randy's approach is very, very structured, and most important: it works for him. It may work for other people, too. The thing about writing fiction is that there are are no universals. What is magic for one writer may paralyze the next one. I've heard many stories over the years of odd things various writers do; some of my own process is idiosyncratic.My spreadsheets usually wind up being over 100 lines long, one line for each scene. 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.
My first reaction to the Snowflake is that it's way too structured for me personally, but on the other hand, I like structure and so I'm intrigued. I just can't really imagine getting one of the Wilderness books to fit into a spreadsheet, scene by scene (we're talking, what, maybe 500 scenes in a 300,000 word novel). But who knows? At some point in the future it may be exactly the thing I need to get a novel off the ground.
Why every one as they like; as the good woman said when she kissed her cow.--Jonathan Swift
April 17, 2005 09:18 AM
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Comments
Indeed, structured approach, man of science. The shoe would seem to fit.
Glad to have read of The Snowflake Process. Could be useful where projects begin to look like they're in danger of taking on uncontrollable lives of their own.
Posted by: Shane at April 17, 2005 10:49 AM
Wow. I mean, I like structure too and I think its useful for any kind of writing ... but there is structure and there is STRUCTURE. Would all that planning maybe take some of the creativeness out of the process? It sounded a lot like a very structured approach to procrastinating. Guess its not completely for me.
Posted by: Jacqui at April 18, 2005 04:43 AM