Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

Yesterday, I took a shot at critiquing the first half of John’s 2-paragraph submission. As a reminder, here’s what we’re working with:

As she focused on the radio controls, Destiny never saw the two inch galvanized pipe protruding from the bed of the delivery truck that had quickly stopped in front of her. Except for a very loud noise, she had no sense of the pipe penetrating her skull and destroying her brain. Nor did she notice that the golden retriever puppy had broken its neck as it careened into the dash.

Bob Elliot could scarcely believe his eyes as the tiny sports car ran under the back of the flat bed truck without attempting to stop. He had been a medic in Viet Nam and acted instantly to attempt to save the young woman’s life, although he instinctively knew that the petite blonde-haired person would not survive as he began his resuscitative effort. Following the initial impact, the truck had pulled ahead a few feet removing the pipe from Destiny’s head. She had fallen partially out of the car onto the street, so he began CPR right there. AIRWAY, BREATHING, CIRCULATION, AIRWAY BREATHING CIRCULATION, AIRWAY BREATHING CIRCULATION. When the paramedics arrived four minutes later, Destiny had never been without a pulse or oxygen. Bob was relieved when they took the brain dead woman away in the ambulance.

There’s a POV shift between the paragraphs, and that’s always dicey. You want to stay with a character long enough for the reader to begin empathizing with her. And it’s generally difficult to empathize with a dead character. It can be done. Read THE LOVELY BONES by Alice Sebold to see how.

Actually, John left a comment today to say that dear departed Destiny will play a role in the book. That does sound interesting, doesn’t it? So given that, I’d want to see quite a bit more development. John says this is the beginning of the story. I’d suggest showing us a few pages inside Destiny’s head. That, in fact, is just what Alice Sebold did with her character, who didn’t die till the end of chapter 1.

In any event, at some point the POV will switch to Bob. As I said yesterday, the problem is that the second paragraph is narrative summary. There’s a lot of telling. For some low tension scenes, telling can be an acceptable way to move on to the good stuff.

But this is a high tension scene, so it really needs to play out in real time. I don’t know this character well, so I’ll have to wing this. Here is my quick attempt to write this paragraph using MRUs. (For a quick review of MRUs, see my article on Writing the Perfect Scene.)

Bob Elliot braked hard, cursing the idiot truck driver two cars ahead.

The red Camaro just ahead didn’t even slow down.

“Brake!” Bob shouted, fighting the wheel.

The pipe poking out of the rear of the truck ahead shattered the Camaro’s windshield.

Bob fishtailed to a stop and flung himself out of his car. It was like ‘Nam all over again–blood all over the inside of the Camaro, the sound of roaring in his ears. He raced around to the driver’s side.

The young blonde had fallen halfway out onto the pavement. Major brain trauma, no sign of breathing, massive blood loss.

No way she could survive that. No way. And no way he’d give her up without a battle. He stretched her out flat on the ground, checked her airway, pumped twice on her chest, and breathed into her.

He’d done this a hundred times and quickly settled into a numb routine. Airway, breathing, circulation. Airway, breathing, circulation.

It went on and on and on. Finally, the paramedics arrived.

Bob backed away, letting them do their job. He’d done all he could. She’d not gone without pulse or oxygen since the collision.

And he knew in his gut that it was all useless. She’d been dead before he got to her. Damn!

You will note that in some cases, I’ve put the Motivation and Reaction in the same paragraph, when it seemed appropriate. It’s not easy writing fiction in a little blog window, so I’m not sure how I’d write this if it were in Microsoft Word on the big screen. I hope this is an improvement. I’ve tried to show this in real-time, up to the point where the repetition cuts in (CPR is very repetitive). That’s the time to do a little narrative summary, because repetition is boring.

I was reading through the comments from a couple of days ago and found a question from Jerry Brandt:

How do you make any money with the snowflake method?

The question is just a wee bit ambiguous, at least in my mind. It could mean:

1. How does a writer make money writing novels using the Snowflake method?
2. How do I personally make any money as a result of being the “Snowflake Guy”?

I’ll answer question #1 first. I’ve written six novels. I wrote the first one using some organizational methods that weren’t quite the Snowflake, but which were close. That was fun and easy to write. Then I wrote two with a coauthor, John Olson, who is a bit more on the seat-of-the-pants end of the spectrum than I am. We did map out the book plotwise in advance, but not so for the characters. And each book took about 15 drafts.

After that, I devised the Snowflake because I had a tight deadline and needed to get the book done. And that book was a joy to write. Honestly, the Snowflake saved my behind, because my deadline was outrageously tight. Had I written 15 drafts, I’d have been 6 months late. Instead, I turned it in on time. Ditto for the next several books I’ve written. So in that sense, the Snowflake has been absolute gold for me.

Please note: it is not gold for seat-of-the-pantsers! A true SOTP needs to just sit down and write. The Snowflake may be useful afterwards to help analyze the story. I have an SOTP friend who hates the Snowflake. And yet she creates very detailed character charts and character histories, just like I do in my Snowflake documents. What she hates is the preplotting. That’s fine. That’s her style. Everyone needs to write their own way.

Now I can answer question #2. If this is the question Jerry was in fact asking, then it’s presumably a response to my recent Special Report on how to write “Super Performing Articles.” And the question then is how my free Snowflake article could possibly generate a dime for me. Well, it got everyone talking about me, for one thing. In other words, it captured mindshare and fame for me. That in turn generated a lot of requests to speak at conferences. Writing conferences typically don’t pay big bucks, but it’s always better to be paid to go to a conference than to pay to go.

Secondly, the widespread interest in the Snowflake prompted me to develop other teaching materials. Some of those are free, but I have to charge money for products that take dozens or sometimes hundreds of hours to produce. Those products have done well precisely because I’m the Snowflake Guy.

If I was a smart marketer, I’d have planned all that out in advance. But I just lucked into it. Doesn’t matter. My plans for the next few months include writing a few more SuperArticles. Now that I know how, I understand the huge benefits. Some of these SuperArticles will be about writing fiction and some will be about novels that I’m working on now.

Amazing final comment: Last Saturday, May 5, the Snowflake page got 5299 page views. Yes, in one day. That’s a SuperArticle for you!

The critiques have been extremely popular and generated boatloads of comments, so I’m going to continue a bit longer. Today’s submission is by John Emerson, who posted two quite long paragraphs:

As she focused on the radio controls, Destiny never saw the two inch galvanized pipe protruding from the bed of the delivery truck that had quickly stopped in front of her. Except for a very loud noise, she had no sense of the pipe penetrating her skull and destroying her brain. Nor did she notice that the golden retriever puppy had broken its neck as it careened into the dash.

Bob Elliot could scarcely believe his eyes as the tiny sports car ran under the back of the flat bed truck without attempting to stop. He had been a medic in Viet Nam and acted instantly to attempt to save the young woman’s life, although he instinctively knew that the petite blonde-haired person would not survive as he began his resuscitative effort. Following the initial impact, the truck had pulled ahead a few feet removing the pipe from Destiny’s head. She had fallen partially out of the car onto the street, so he began CPR right there. AIRWAY, BREATHING, CIRCULATION, AIRWAY BREATHING CIRCULATION, AIRWAY BREATHING CIRCULATION. When the paramedics arrived four minutes later, Destiny had never been without a pulse or oxygen. Bob was relieved when they took the brain dead woman away in the ambulance.

Randy sez: This is a pretty exciting scene, with plenty of drama and trauma. I see a couple of issues that are keeping it from reaching its potential. First, there are some point-of-view problems. Second, there is some narrative summary (a fancy way of saying “there’s some telling going on here”).

Let’s deal with the point-of-view issues in paragraph 1 today and we’ll come back tomorrow and deal with the narrative summary issues in paragraph 2.

Remember how we keep score in fiction. We are trying to create a powerful emotional experience in the reader. We do that by creating the illusion that the reader IS one of the characters in the scene. The chosen character is called the point-of-view character (POV character for short). (I am giving you a lightning review of a topic I have covered at great length in my Fiction 101 lecture on Character.)

If you want to persuade the reader that she IS the POV character, then you can’t show the reader anything the character can’t see. So any sentence that begins, “Joe Schmoe didn’t see the…” is a sentence that violates POV.

The question then is how to show poor Destiny meeting her surprise demise because of the pipe that she never saw coming.

The answer is that it can’t be done. I’m sorry, but it can’t. And it shouldn’t be. If you want your reader to empathize with Destiny, then by gum, you’d better show us something to empathize about. Destiny doesn’t feel a thing. Therefore, neither does the reader.

We have two choices here. We can show the scene in Destiny’s POV, but make her aware of the pipe coming at her. OR we can scrub paragraph 1 and show the collision and aftermath completely from Bob’s POV, so that he sees the pipe coming at Destiny. I’m not entirely sure which is a better choice here. Let’s try it both ways and then you all can vote and tell me which works better:

Option 1: Destiny’s POV:

Destiny twisted the radio controls. A hiss of static filled the car.

A screech of brakes ahead.

Destiny jerked her head up.

The truck ahead, fully stopped, loomed enormous. A pipe protruding from its back came spearing at her face. In the final instant before it struck the windshield, time froze.

Destiny began a scream.

Darkness.

* * *

Randy sez: OK, I didn’t do a great job here. It’s a little overwritten, but it’s almost midnight and I’m too tired to do it right. This is the kind of scene where you either smash it out in about 30 seconds and it’s perfect, or you take two hours to grind it out, word by word.

I hope you get the idea, here. We need to show this from within Destiny’s head, showing what she sees, feeling what she feels.

Tomorrow, I’ll try Option 2: We’ll look at paragraph 2 and fold in a couple of pieces from paragraph 1, but it’ll all be in Bob’s POV.

Thanks, John, for showing us a tough, tough scene. You could have given me an easy one to work with, but this kind of scene is intrinsically hard to write.

It’s time to critique another short 2-paragraph item. For newcomers to this blog, I’m analyzing short segments from my readers’ works in progress, using the “MRU” technique which I explained in full on my “Writing the Perfect Scene” article.

This one was posted by Beth:

He swung down to the sandy shore to fetch Jill. He stopped a few yards away, observing her at the water’s edge, her shoulders slumped and her head bowed.

He was familiar with grief. It weighed on her slender form, so heavily it took his breath away. Much as he hated intruding, he had no choice. “Ready?”

Randy sez: One thing I see here is that three sentences in a row start with the word “He.” One of my editors caught this once and I wound up having to rewrite a lot of sentences, so I’m sensitive to this kind of thing.

I would break up paragraph 1 into 2 parts, a Reaction and then a Motivation. The second paragraph is fine in principle. What I see is that the first part leans toward “telling” and I would like to sharpen it up just a bit to be more “showing.”

Here are my suggestions. (And bear in mind, these are ONLY suggestions. Every writer would write this segment differently, and who’s to say who’s right?) My goal here is to redo this as closely as possible to Beth’s original words:

Clay swung down to the sandy shore to fetch Jill, but stopped a few yards away.

She stood at the water’s edge, her shoulders slumped and her head bowed. Grief weighed on her slender form.

Clay felt his breath taken away. Much as he hated intruding, he had no choice. “Ready?”

Randy sez: So the structure is now a Reaction, then a Motivation, then another Reaction.

As many of you have noted, putting in paragraph breaks between each Motivation and Reaction leads to short paragraphs. This has the advantage of letting your reader fly down the page. It also tends to add a lot of pages to the book. The examples we’ve seen have not had a lot of interior monologue or complex actions or dialogue. When you add things like those in, the paragraphs will bulk up again.

Just a quick note on housekeeping issues:

1) Some of you have asked why your comments didn’t appear right away but got shelved for moderation. Answer: I have my spam filters turned on quite tight for this blog. Anyone who posts a comment for the first time automatically gets moderated. After that, they can post comments unmoderated. Also, any post that contains a link will automatically be moderated, since all spam contains links. My spam filters have identified 126 comments as spam. Of those, 125 were real spam, some disgustingly filthy. 1 was a legitimate comment, which I allowed to post.

2) Thanks for all your suggestions on forum software! I appreciate your suggestions. I’ve got several candidates and will be narrowing it down as I study them carefully. I want to choose a good solution.

3) Those of you who have blogs, let me know if you’d like to be on my blogroll. If you have no blog but have a web site, I can put you on my Writers list. I’m thinking that I’ll limit most people to be either on my Writers list or on my blogroll, just so neither one gets overfull. So I’ll be trimming the duplicates out shortly. Don’t take offense–I just don’t think duplicates serve any useful purpose. I will allow duplicates for those of you who run editing services, for which I have a separate category.

4) Thanks to the many of you who’ve linked to me on your own blogs. My technorati rating is steadily improving. If you’ve linked to me and I haven’t yet reciprocated, just send me an email. I may simply not have noticed. It’s been busy lately.

I was going to do another critique tonight, but I read through all your comments and maybe I’ll just answer those. For anyone just joining us, we’re discussing my Snowflake method of designing and writing a novel:

Venessa asked:

I understand that characters are the most important part of the story and are essential in moving the plot forward. But I have a problem with this: “It is OK to have the first disaster be caused by external circumstances, but I think that the second and third disasters should be caused by the protagonist’s attempts to “fix things”. Things just get worse and worse.”

Do the second and third disasters HAVE to be caused by the protagonist’s attempts to fix things? Is it okay to have all the disasters external?

Randy sez: Yes, it’s OK. Do whatever the story demands. The rules are just there to guide you–kind of like that pesky Pirate’s Code, which as we found out is actually more of . . . guidelines.

Rob asked:

In one of your newsletters you mentioned something about a Snowflake computer program. Is this still in the works? Any updates on the progress? I think this would be really helpful, so I’m anxious to try it.

Randy sez: That has been shelved for the moment. The programmer who had contacted me about doing it has gotten sidetracked on other things that are making him tons of money. (Jon Leger, the guy who started the $7 Report craze.) So he’s just not able to do it. I could write the program myself, but I’m not great at user-interfaces, so it might not be all that good. And I’ve been really busy lately. I have a friend who might tackle it–he’s a star at writing user-interfaces. On the other hand, there is apparently a program called Avenir that has a Snowflake option built in. I just heard about it today. Here’s a link. The catch is that it’s Mac only. I hope that somehow, someway, we can get a good Snowflake program.

Rachel wrote:

My Snowflake problem is that with one particular novel I’m plotting out, the back-story is taking over my Snowflake.

Step 2 of the Snowflake is: “Ideally, your paragraph will have about five sentences. One sentence to give me the backdrop and story setup. Then one sentence each for your three disasters. Then one more sentence to tell the ending.”

The back-story is that my heroine runs away from her failings by undertaking volunteer work overseas, but her work to help the people there is thwarted by corruption. She traces the source back to her own country, and returns home to expose those responsible. On page 1 as she puts her plan into action she discovers she must work against, and potentially harm, the hero (whom she has failed in the past) if she is to achieve her goal. The three disasters and the HEA come after all this.

However, when I start by describing the back-story as the first sentence in Step 2, it becomes a whole paragraph by Step 4, and makes up a fair proportion of the four page synopsis in Step 6. It is a large part of what the story is about, but it is not what happens on-stage.

I’m wondering if (a) the back-story is not the “backdrop and setup” as I had interpreted it, and (b) if it isn’t, where does the back-story, which is a vital part of this story, get included in the design documents?

Randy sez: No, the backstory IS all that “backdrop and setup”. However, you do NOT want to spend all of Part 1 of your book explaining the backstory. If it’s that interesting, then it might be wise to make this a series and tell the backstory as a novel in its own right. If the backstory isn’t enough for a full novel, then you’re going to have to find a way to tame it.

I typically write the backstory (a lot of it) in my Snowflake in the character sketches and character charts. This is a good place for it. Write all you want! Get it out of your system. Then tell as LITTLE of it as you can get away with when you start writing. If you can’t help yourself and you must put the backstory into the story, then go ahead–type it all out in the first three chapters. But when the novel’s done, throw away the first three chapters because the story begins in Chapter 4.

Backstory is good! (In your preparation work). It deepens your characters. But treat it like your tax returns or your diary–keep it private and only reveal what you have to.

Doraine wrote:

I can’t figure out how you write the disasters, when you’re not really sure where you’re going. I’ve been a Pantser for most of my writing life. However, I’m finding that with the novel, I need a little more structure. I just can’t figure out how to think that far ahead. Any suggestions anyone?

Randy sez: If you’re a pantser, you’re a pantser. Don’t fight that. Write the story first and THEN write the Snowflake as a way of analyzing your first draft. Then use the Snowflake to rewrite it in the second draft.

Darcie wrote:

How do you focus it towards moving the plot forward? I’m @ 27K words and need another 25-20K more. I’m not sure where to take my plot and would like to use the snowflake for the plot advancemen

Randy sez: The Snowflake is an analytic tool, not a creative tool. So don’t use it to create the plot, use it to analyze the plot you’ve already created. I call the early creative part “composting”. If you have a critique group, you might want to consider an all-day session where you all brainstorm each other’s novels. This often unlocks the creativity.

Darcie wrote: Do you have a printer-friendly version of the snowflake steps?

Randy sez: Alas, not for free. There is one as part of the Snowflake Lecture and Goodies Package, for the outrageously cheap price of $10. :):):)

Paul wrote:

Randy! You need a forum for us to hang out on! Posting comments to blogs just ain’t it.

How about it? Open up a forum!

Randy sez: I’m open to that idea, but don’t know where to start. I’m kind of new to blogging–only been doing it a few weeks, and I’m finally getting the hang of it. I use WordPress, which is GREAT. But I have no idea what’s good software to use for running a forum. Any suggestions anyone?

It’s been a busy day today! For starters, the mama goose and papa goose that have been living in our pond for the last few months hatched four eggs today. So we’ve got a bunch of goslings waddling around on the island in the middle of the pond. That’s been fun to watch. I went down this morning and shouted, “Avast, you ducks!” at the geese. Just trying to make them mad. It seemed to work, because they hissed at me pretty fierce.

I was babysitting my system most of the day to take care of any glitches with the rollout of my SuperArticle Special Report. (Thankfully, there were only about three glitches, all easily resolved.) I’ve had a TON of email from you all, many thanking me for either the Snowflake method or my latest Special Report on how to write a SuperArticle.

You’re all welcome! Thanks for the great response.

One email in particular was interesting to me. One of you wrote to say that you enjoy working through the Snowflake process and getting to know your characters, but then by the end of it, you’re bored with the story and the characters and want to move on to something else.

I would call that Snowflake Fatigue. How to deal with it? I would say, just do a shorter Snowflake document. You don’t want to chew all the sugar out of the gum before you even write the first word. The purpose of the Snowflake is to get you ready to write, not to kill the fun.

So just do less before you start the first draft. The Snowflake is not “one size fits all.” Everybody is different. I expect that everyone who uses the Snowflake will tailor it to fit their own unique personality. There aren’t any rules in writing. Just do what works.

Before we get back to some more of the 2-paragraph critiques, I’ll just toss this out: Any more questions/problems on that pesky Snowflake?

The second-smartest thing I did in the last five years was to invent that pesky “Snowflake method” for designing and writing a novel. No doubt about it — the Snowflake has helped me write better and faster, and that’s been worth a lot of money to me.

What’s the SMARTEST thing I did in the last five years? That’s easy. The smartest thing I did was posting the Snowflake method on my web site for free. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was a great move. Here’s why:

In the four years since I posted my Snowflake article, it’s been viewed 317,000 times. That article has made me famous among writers on six continents. It’s helped numerous writers get rolling on their novels. It’s brought me more speaking engagements than I can handle — which has earned me a fair bit of money in speaking fees. It’s made me hundreds of friends. It’s pulled me in to a large writing organization where I now sit on the Advisory Board. It’s paved the way for me to launch a business doing what I LOVE — teaching writing.

All that from one little article of 3000+ words, which I gave away for free.

The Snowflake article is what I call a “SuperArticle” — a high-performing article that has given me a piece of the global mindshare, brought me fame in the writing world as “the Snowflake Guy”, and even earned me some cash.

Honestly, I lucked into all that. I never expected any of that to happen. Never planned it. Things just fell into place and I followed the opportunities.

Looking back over the last four years, I wish I’d written a bunch more SuperArticles. I wish I’d written one or two for every novel I published. I wish I’d known then what I know now.

Looking forward, I’ve decided that I’m going to do that from here on. I’m going to commit to writing several SuperArticles per year and getting them out there — preparing the way for the novels I’m working on now. I’ve analyzed what I did right with the Snowflake SuperArticle and what I could have done better. I’ve put it all into a step-by-step plan for how I’ll write each SuperArticle from now on.

Wanna try your hand at it too? You can. If you’re a writer, you already have all the skills you need to write killer SuperArticles and start grabbing some of that mindshare, fame, and cash that’s out there. You can start building your platform TODAY for the novel you’ll be bringing out 2 years from now.

I’ll even coach you on it. I’ve put the whole method together into a 32-page Special Report, “Super Performing Articles”. It’s not free, but it’s about as close to free as I can make it. For the price of a fast-food lunch, you can get it. For more info, click on this page.

I’ve read through the comments of the last few days and wanted to answer a few questions that popped up. Let me highlight one sure-fire way to know if a paragraph is Motivation or Reaction.

A Motivation is objective and external (to the viewpoint character).

A Reaction is subjective and internal (to the viewpoint character).

Now a Motivation is definitely going to be something the viewpoint character can see or hear or feel or taste or smell, but it’s not necessary to tell the reader that. The reader is smart and knows that if you show us a flash of lightning, the viewpoint character can see it. So it’s never necessary to write, “Chuck saw a lightning bolt hit the ground three feet in front of him.” It’s sufficient to say, “A lightning bolt hit the ground three feet in front of Chuck.”

Now on to the questions that popped up:

Yeggy asked why I took out the time indicators such as “suddenly” and “before” when I critiqued Alie’s piece. The answer is that “suddenly” is generally a useless word which actually slows down the pace because the reader has to go through another 8 letters to get to the action. So it’s almost always better to eliminate it and just get on with the show. Likewise, the word “before” is almost always redundant, since if two things happen in sequence (one before the other), then you should write them in sequence. The reader is smart enough to know that one happens before the other. If you write them out of sequence, you’ll jar the reader, so it only makes sense to put them in order. Words matter! Extraneous words should be ruthlessly eliminated.

Joleena asked if I might have mislabeled which were Reactions and which were Motivations when I critiqued Caprice’s work. The answer is no, I labeled them the way I intended. I understand the confusion here, but my comments about a Motivation being “external and objective” and a Reaction being “internal and subjective” are apropo here.

Caprice asked if it’s plagiarism to just take my rewrite and stick it in her manuscript. The answer is no. Cut and paste all you want. Go ahead and send me a cut of your advance, too! I probably earned two cents there. I’ll take it in unmarked hundred dollar bills.

Finally, several people were interested in knowing who was outside that door in Yeggy’s piece. Me too! Who is that unseen knocker???

I’ll do another critique or two tomorrow.

I’ve been working most of the day on tonight’s issue of my e-zine. Then I went to my critique group. I’ve got time to do a quick critique tonight, especially since it’s an easy one. Mark posted this one which appears to be part of a fantasy:

Once again Alenia sighed. It would be like the lemmings all over again. He realized he should know better. The long-term repercussions of his uncle’s life dramas were of no concern to anyone save himself. Why, the extras could embrace the plot as reality and no one would care. Well, that would be his loadpouch of younglings to carry across the hatchery beach.

Wannel continued. “The plot is most satisfactory. A downtrodden population, persecuted and humiliated. Then a shining light, a redeemer, who will lift them out of their oppression, for a price. With this new generation of emotional manipulation added I would not be surprised to find many accepting Profit Maker as fact rather than fiction.”

Randy sez: As always with fantasies, it’s a little hard to know what’s going on. But we don’t need to understand it in order to analyze the MRU structure. Paragraph 1 is one complete Reaction. The paragraph is mostly interior monologue. Editors will sometimes incorrectly call this “telling” when in reality it’s merely showing the stream of consciousness of the viewpoint character. The one hazard is that if it goes on too long, then it starts to suffer from the same problems as telling–namely that it gets boring. I would judge this paragraph to be about right in length.

Paragraph 2 is a new Motivation. (It’s external to our viewpoint character, so by definition it’s a Motivation.) The dialogue tag is a little awkward: Wannel continued. I think it would read better to say what Wannel is continuing (i.e., he’s continuing speaking.)

The one issue I see in Paragraph 2 is that the dialogue is quite formal and stilted. There are no contractions and a few longish words that are typical of academic people. I’m going to guess that this is just Wannel’s voice, not the author’s voice. (If it were the author’s voice, then Paragraph 1 would also be formal and stilted, but it’s not.)

Bottom line: Other than the dialogue tag, this snippet works pretty well. I would need to see more of the story to find some problems that need correcting.