Comments on: Novel Writing Tips

By: webmaster

webmaster — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 01:10:49 +0000

Yeah, that’s what’s made me hesitate on outlining up front. I’m afraid that I’ll lose the creative “spark” by over-analyzing. Unfortunately, I’m sitting on two novels that need so much work, they almost need a complete rewrite. I’m willing to try this to see if I can do better this time around.

By: Randy

Randy — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 21:52:58 +0000

That Snowflake method sounds a lot like some tactics I got in a screenwriting class, which taught us to essentially begin with a one-sentence tagline for our work, and then work through the nuts and bolts of major plot points, to develop an outline before we start. It seemed a little formulaic to me, and a little confining. But it did help get me thinking about overall structure. For NaNo this year, I’m starting to brainstorm and come up with notes, but I think I want to leave a fair amount to feed the muse come crunch time.

Cheers

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Wed, 03 Oct 2007 15:02:32 +0000

[...] Novel Writing Tips [...]

By: webmaster

webmaster — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 01:48:46 +0000

Snowflake does seem very time consuming, and I may shorten it a bit as I work my way through. One thing that will help is that I already have about 60,000 words to work with! I just need to organize my thoughts and work out a few plot kinks. I’m hoping snowflake can help with that.

By: HED854

HED854 — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 15:00:26 +0000

I tried snowflake some months ago and i don’t like it because I feel I put more time snowflaking than writing

The second method seems better.

By: webmaster

webmaster — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:06:25 +0000

I can relate. I have a novel-length manuscript that was written with the seat-of-the-pants method, and it definitely shows. I think trying to rewrite it, and salvage the good parts, is much tougher than the original draft. I’m hoping that doing more prep work up front will help.

One good thing about having this huge, if messy, manuscript. I can write the synopsis; I know what my characters want, etc. For me, I don’t think there’s any getting around doing at least a partial (very) rough draft.

By: Lydia

Lydia — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 21:34:49 +0000

The snowflake method intrigued me too, but ultimately I found that the one-sentence synopsis was the hardest part of writing the entire book. Maybe if it was called something other than synopsis — you know, that word makes it seem so finalized and all-figured-out. If there was a way to combine the coolness of the snowflake method with the sort of scrambled logic of the seat-of-the-pants method…

I guess snowflakes are by definition not scrambled.