Keeping my Sanity

Snowflake Method

Day two of the Novel.





So yesterday I had a great idea (well I think it is for me).  I spent the day writing random scenes, plot ideas and characters as they came to me and when I looked back at it last night felt a little overwhelmed.  I realised I had far too much going on, there were 3 characters that were fighting to be the protagonist which was confusing me, each potential protagonist had their own overarching story and I had no idea where to start and who to pick.





I was googling 'how to write a scene', thinking that I would just write the scenes I outlined in a random order and see what happened.  Turned out I couldn't get started, it was hard to pick a scene, without knowing who my protagonist was I couldn't write the scene ideas. 





Then I re-discovered the snowflake method.  I had tried this before, always failing at step one.  I think I gave up on outlining because I have never really had a complete creative idea.  So I decided to try.  I knuckled down and started Step 1 this morning.  I thought this is easy, one sentence describing the deep theme of the story.  I can do this.  Err, what's my deep theme?  So I had to think, what was the big thing in my story, the thing that kicks the story off and needs to be resolved.  After a lot of brain storming I realised what it was, once I knew what it was I knew exactly who my MC was.  I started writing.  He tells you take an hour, pfffft, I don't need an hour to write one sentence.  So I started, my first sentence was a paragraph, crap this is harder than I thought.  Then I read keep under 15 words.  WTF, I looked at my 50 words.  Then I spent the next hour narrowing down my word count, this meant narrowing down my deep theme, I realised that I had sub plots in my deep theme, they are great to keep the story going but what is the whole point of the story.





Well, after just over an hour, yep I needed the whole hour, I finally nailed it.  I am as happy as a pig in shit.





Snowflake Method





One Sentence Summary





An outcast witch opens a portal to escape the pending implosion of her world.





I am now on my way to writing a whole paragraph about my story .