How to Write a Novel Quickly and Effectively. “The Snowflake Method”
How to Write a Novel?
Do you want to write a novel but can’t get it together? It happens quite often. Writing books is easy; writing good books is hard. If it weren’t, we’d all be writing bestsellers.
There are thousands of ways to write a novel. Which one is the best? The one that works for you. In this article, I want to share the method that works for me.
Good fiction is not something that happens by accident — it is the result of a carefully planned action, the design of the novel. You can do the design work both before and after writing the book. I’ve tried both and, in the end, I’ve found that before is both faster and better.
How do you design a work of fiction? In my day job, I work on the architecture of complex software projects. And I write books the same way I write software — using the snowflake method. What is that? Before we go any further, take a look at this picture. The snowflake pattern is one of the most important mathematical objects, which has been studied by many scientists.
Here we see a step-by-step strategy for creating a snowflake. At first it doesn’t look much like itself, but gradually everything falls into place.
You can write novels on the same principles — start small, and then build on more and more details until you have a full story. Part of design work in literature is creativity, and part of it is managing your creativity: turning disparate material into a well-structured novel. And that’s what I want to teach you.
Most writers spend a lot of time thinking about a novel. You probably do some research. You figure out how the story will unfold. You brainstorm. You listen to the voices of different characters. This is the most important part of writing a book, what I call “dropping information.” I assume you know how to do this: you have an idea for a book in your head, and you’re ready to sit down and write.
But before you do that, you need to do some organizing. You need to get all your ideas down on paper in a form you can use later. Why? Because our memories are unreliable, and because your story (and any other story at this stage) has a lot of holes that need to be filled in before you can start writing. You need to create an outline for your novel, but in a way that doesn’t discourage you from writing. Here’s a step-by-step process for how I create my book design documents, which I hope will help you.
Step One
Take an hour and write a one-sentence synopsis of your novel. Something like this: “An evil physicist travels back in time to kill the apostle Paul” (the synopsis for my first novel, Sin). This is your novel in full view, like the big triangle in the snowflake diagram. When you pitch your book to publishers, your synopsis sentence should appear at the very beginning of your novel. It’s also called the hook, and it’s what sells your novel to publishers, distributors, stores, and readers. So make it sound as good as possible.
Here are some tips on how to do it:
- The shorter the better. The synopsis should be under 15 words.
- No names! Better to say Disabled Acrobat than Jane Doe.
- Tie the overall concept of the novel to the characters. Who has suffered the most in the course of the story? Now, what reward do they want?
- Read the synopses of books on the New York Times bestseller list to see how it's done. Being able to describe a book in one sentence is an art, and it's worth mastering.
Step Two
Spend another hour and expand the sentence into a paragraph describing the novel's setup, conflict, and resolution. This will create something similar to Step Two in the Snowflake Pattern. Personally, I like stories written using the three-conflict-plus-ending pattern. Each conflict takes up a quarter of the book, and the ending takes up another quarter. You can use this paragraph in your pitch, too. Ideally, it should be five sentences long. One sentence for the setup, one for each conflict, and one for the ending.
Step Three
All of the above will give you the general outline of the story. Now you need to write something similar for each character. Characters are the most important part of any novel, so the time you invest in creating them will pay off tenfold when you start working on the book. Spend an hour on each main character and write a short, one-page essay: - The character's name.
- A sentence that describes his or her life story.
- The hero’s motivation (what does he want to achieve, ideally?)
- The hero’s goal (what exactly does he want to achieve?)
- The conflict (what prevents him from achieving his goal?)
- The epiphany (what does he learn, how does he change as a result of the events that happened?)
- The paragraph that describes the events in which the hero takes part.
Important note: you may need to go back and rewrite the annotations after this. This is a good sign – your heroes are teaching you something useful for your story. At every stage of writing a novel, you can go back and rework what you did earlier. This is a very useful thing: it’s better to correct all the flaws now than when you’ve already written a 400-page manuscript.
Step Four
At this stage, you should have a complete picture of your novel in your head – and this will only take you a day or two. Now it’s time to outline the story. Spend a few hours and turn each sentence of the annotation into an independent paragraph. All but the last one should end in conflict (the last one should end with the ending of the story). This will give you a synopsis of the novel, which you can also use to submit to a publisher.
Step Five
Spend a day or two writing a one-page description of each main character. Spend half a page on each secondary character. These character synopses should tell your story from each character's point of view. Go back and make any necessary edits as needed. This is the part I enjoy the most, and I later incorporate the character synopses into the main synopsis. Editors love this, as they always like fiction that is based on human characters.
Step Six
Now you have a coherent story and several short stories based on it, one for each character. Spend a week expanding the one-page synopsis to a four-page one. Essentially, you want to stretch each paragraph from Step Four to a full page. As you go along, you will discover the internal logic of the work and make strategic decisions: in which direction the plot will develop.
Step Seven
Turn the description of the characters into a detailed story about each of them, indicating all the essential details: date of birth, appearance, life story, motivation, goals, etc. And most importantly, how will the hero transform by the end of the novel? As a result, your characters will turn into real people and will sometimes make their own claims to the development of the plot.
Step Eight
Before you start working on your manuscript, there are a couple of things you can do to help you along the way. First, take your four-page synopsis and make a list of all the scenes you need to write. Excel is the easiest way to do this. For some reason, many writers don’t want to mess with unfamiliar programs. Figure it out. You’ve already mastered how to type in Word. Excel is even easier. You need to create a list of scenes, and Excel is designed to make lists. If you don’t have enough knowledge, buy a book and learn. It will take less than a day - it’s worth it.
Each scene should take up one line in the table. In the first column, list the characters from whose point of view the story is told, or through whose eyes you see what is happening in the novel. In another, wider column, write down what happens in this scene. If you want, you can use the third column to indicate how many pages you want the scene to span, and the fourth column to indicate the chapter numbers. An Excel spreadsheet is the perfect tool for this, as you can see the entire story and easily move scenes around.
I usually end up with about 100-odd lines, and it takes me about a week to write them.
Step Nine
Step nine is optional. Go back to Word and break down each scene in the spreadsheet into several paragraphs. Sketch out some dialogue and sketch out the problems you're solving. If the scene doesn't have a problem, you'll need to create one or cut the entire scene out. I usually ended up with one or two pages per chapter, and I started each chapter on a new page. I'd then print it out and put it in a binder so I could swap chapters around or completely rewrite them without confusing the others. This process usually took me a week. The end result would be a 50-page document, which I would then revise with red pen as I wrote the draft. I would jot down any ideas that came to me in the morning in the margins of this document. This is, by the way, a relatively painless way to write the extended synopsis that all writers hate so much.
Step Ten
At this point, sit down and start typing out your draft. You will be surprised at how fast you write. I have seen authors triple the speed at which they wrote their novels this way, and at the same time their drafts looked like they had already been edited. I have heard writers complain time and again about the difficulty of writing the first draft. Without exception, they sit and think: I don’t know what to write next! Life is too short to write like this! There is no reason to spend 500 hours on a first draft if you can do it in 150.
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