As I have mentioned on Twitter, my wife and I are writing a series of books together. Although I have written books before, this is the first foray into serious fiction for me, and as such it has been a serious learning experience.

Having to weave a cohesive story together, full of characters that are believable, even when you throw in the fantasy bits is an incredibly difficult challenge.

Humble Beginnings

I am horrible at organizing my thoughts when it comes to writing. My best posts on this site where stream of consciousness, so of course that is how I tried outlining.

I mean, it works for Stephen King.

I quickly found that my normal approach wasn't going to work in this setting. As it turns out, I am no Stephen King. Funny that. There was just too much to keep in my head at one time.

After some searching around for outlining techniques, I came across "The Snowflake Method". It is a less than ideal name for an incredibly helpful process.

The light at the end of the tunnel

The basics of this method are quite easy. The author of the above link based the technique on a programming pattern, since he spent many years as a developer.

Although I understand his reasoning, I don't think it is the most accessible way to explain the over-arching principle of the thing. The way I understand it, you are moving from the most general, abstract place you can start, to the most specific place you can end.

An Illustration

So let's begin with a word:

Potato

That is a good start, but not very interesting. Lets be a bit more specific:

A small potato.

Now that we have a sense of the size of the potato, what else can we expand upon?

A small brown potato.

You can see where I am getting. We move from the most general concept of the potato, until we have a specific understanding of the essence of the potato:

The potato was small, covered in eyes that we in various states of decay. Forgotten in the bowels of the refrigerator, the foul root mass waited, biding its time and planned. Soon a reconing would come. Then that damnable carrot would know who controlled the fate of the people of the icebox. Soon.

Meanwhile, back at the novel

Back to writing a novel, you do this with each of your characters. Starting with a one sentence summation of the character, expanding to a more specific paragraph that encapsulates the story of your character, finally ending with a multi-paragraph outline of the path your character will be following during the book.

I think the most helpful piece of this for me has been forcing myself to be concise and specific about the journey a given character takes throughout the story. My main characters trip through the pages is about 10 paragraphs. It summizes, neatly, what will unfold for the reader over around 450 pages.

Once I have all the character journeys written out, the novel has basically written itself. You can easily see where character paths align, run afoul of each other, and need to be adjusted.

Anywhoo, I thought I would share some of my insights/trouble/joys while in the process. Hopefully it will help someone.