Before we get into it, I’d like to say that the main reason for this blog is not to show off my work (after all, most work I’m hoping I can use to make money sometime down the line), but instead to help inspire people being stuck in the same hole of creative meh-ness I often find myself in. Going over my own creative processes, showing some insight into my routines and attempts at them, might just help someone else to get going themselves.

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Ever heard of the snowflake method?

It’s that thing you do to start building your story, the narrative, a character or more, history, whatever. You start with simple bullet points of whatever tickles your fancy. Then you go into each point and add some details. Then you add more details to each detail.

And so on.

And so forth.

Called snowflake for the obvious reason of the structure just spreading out and forming like a snowflake would from such a simple a beginning.

Maybe I got that wrong. I read about that in a self-help how-to-be-a-writer books. And that’s how I remember it working. Not like there’s one true way of how to build a story.

Usually, I am what they call a pantser. A type of writer that just jumps in and starts writing. However, as I’ve been whining about for a while now, I don’t really have much of a jumping-off point. So, maybe I need to be a bit more focused.

Last year I started NaNo by using a short I posted here, called The Drop. I wanted that piece of fiction to be my first chapter. Then, I sort of outlined the rest of Part 1 (which was Act 1 of the narrative), which I then wrote on day 1 of NaNo (just over 10,000 words). Which proofs that preparation really does work.

Holy shit!

Which is why I’m going down that road, again.Read More »