badcharacterdesign:

i’m currently somewhat working on a webcomic and i thought i’d share what personally i think is the most intuitive guide on how to write a piece of fiction and a lot of you have probably heard before

full article on the snowflake method

STEP 1 ONE SENTENCE SUMMARY

Write a one-sentence summary of your novel. This sentence could become the hook that will sell your book. A good sentence is shorter rather than longer – ideally fewer than 15 words. It should not contain character names. It is better to say “a mercenary time travelling adventurer” than “Septimus Mason”. This sentence should aim to tie together the big picture of the book with the personal picture of the main character.

STEP 2 ONE PARAGRAPH PLOT

You now need to expand that sentence to a full paragraph describing the background, the major disasters, and the ending of the novel.

It is a good idea to think about the a story as “three disasters plus an ending”. Each of the disasters takes a quarter of the book to develop and the ending takes the final quarter. If you are approaching publishers you can also use this paragraph in your proposal. Or alternatively if you self-publish this could easily become the back cover blurb. Ideally, your paragraph will have about five sentences: one sentence to give me the backdrop and story setup, one sentence each for your three disasters, then one more sentence to tell the ending.

STEP 3 DEVELOP CHARACTERS

Plots are all very good but the book is going to need compelling characters. So you need something similar for the storylines of each of your characters. For each of your major characters, we need this information:
-The character’s name
-A one-sentence summary of the character’s storyline
-The character’s goal (what does he/she want?)
-The character’s conflict (what prevents him/her from reaching this goal?)
-The character’s epiphany (what will he/she learn, how will he/she change? -A one-paragraph summary of the character’s storyline

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