Playing in the Snow Flakes

Playing in the Snow Flakes

With the conference now behind me, it was time to make use of what I've learned and get back to the business of writing. The main project, of course, is the novel. I also want to make some time to revise the short story "The Hallway" based on the excellent advice I received from my private read and critique with literary agent Jill Marr. More on that in a future post.

I am now on my third draft of "The Majik of Spark." That means I have two 80k+ word novels and a partial third stuffed into my files as well as probably triple that in notes, background, alternatives, and who knows what else. The linear writing process I use (also known as SOTP, or Seat of the Pants writing) is, for me, good for my creativity, but not very conducive to good organization. I just haven't done a good job of organizing the project. When I started coming across old content that looked suspiciously like something important that should have been in the book, I had to take a step back and reassess the plan/non-plan I was using. Having no plan is, by default, a sort of plan, and there is probably someone somewhere who could say it better than I. Aha! Let's let Winston Churchill give his version: "He who fails to plan is planning to fail." Change "plan/planning" to "prepare/preparing' and you have Ben Franklin's quote, "If you fail to prepare then you are preparing to fail."

What I'm leading up to is that I need to do some desperately needed planning and preparation before I jump back into pounding out chapters. In our last writer's group there were mixed views about how formal or informal this should be. There are specific guidelines (such as the Three Act process) that a great many writers, agents, and publishers insist on seeing when reading manuscripts. Then there were some who felt that guidelines restricted creativity and turned the art of writing into a cookie cutter process.

I can only comment on my own efforts, based on my obviously limited experience in writing a novel. I did not follow or even know about such guidelines when I wrote the first draft. In my opinion, the faults of the first draft included a failure to inject a sense of danger and conflict early enough in the book; ie, it lacked the first disaster called for in the three act process. There were lots of other mistakes, of course, but the lack of a tempo that is comfortable to readers was a major flaw. The second draft, while much better in a lot of ways, did not address that fundamental issue from the first draft.

My intent with the third draft is to pay homage to the Three Act process. Frankly, when I looked at the novel in that way, the three disasters fairly jumped out at me. They were in there even before I knew that was what they were. Two were pretty solid, but I could see that one was weak and would need reinforcement. Is that a cookie cutter approach, or an understanding of what gives a novel the ebb and flow it needs to have? That will be up to readers to decide.

I know that I am good at organizing things, when I decide to do it. I also know that I have trouble realizing when organizing should end and writing chapters should begin again. That will be my challenge going forward. I'm going to use a well known method of organizing called the Snowflake Method. I've spent the week since the conference crafting the first two steps, which I'll explain in a moment. I have made some alterations to the storyline based on input from the conference as well, so I hope the changes won't be too jarring to those who have patiently waded through all of these drafts. The first step is to write a one sentence summary of the whole book. The second step is to expand that to a paragraph that captures the story setup, the major disasters, and the ending. All of the emotion is essentially wrung out of this process in order to get to the basic framework from which all the good stuff can be built upon it.

It was hard not to try to fit in Song, or Conductors, or the Well of the worlds, or explain how magic/majik works in Spark but not in Chord, etc. The first thing this process did for me was help me to separate the book I was writing from the book that I will write down the road (ie, Chord). Too often I've confused those two, and this process cleared it up for me. So, below is the result of those first two steps. I'm interested to see if you can imagine how The Majik of Spark can be built, layer by layer, from this beginning.

Step 1 - Write a one sentence summary of the novel.

"A teenaged girl tormented with horrific visions joins a mysterious expedition to restore a shattered, life-giving well."  - 17 words [goal, 15 words]

Say what? I can imagine that reaction. Let's take it by the numbers. [1] Philly is the girl, of course, and the story now centers on her as the main character. [2] The "why" that brings her into the expedition is now explained - she has horrific visions of the shattered well that drive her. [3] Those visions come from the wizard Reskin, who plays a more vital role than before. [4] The expedition itself now has a more concrete goal. [5] I've reversed the idea of breaking the barrier between the worlds to restoring the shattered connection, a more positive goal.

Step 2 - Write a paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel (roughly five sentences). NOTE: I am only going to include the first two sentences (of seven) since entire plotlines and the ending are spelled out. I'd like to save that for eventual readers to encounter when they read the book. For our writer's group, I'll make more details available so you can see where I am taking this third draft.

Here's the teaser:

"A teenage girl befriends a wizard who, on his deathbed, floods her mind with horrific visions surrounding an immense, shattered well beneath a sky raining blood. Convinced by a wakened goddess that her visions are real, the girl joins a mysterious expedition to find and restore the shattered well and stop the evil forces that covet it's power."