Created by Randy Ingermanson - "the Snowflake Guy"
America's Mad Professor of Fiction Writing

Where Do Ideas Come From?

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I’ve been thinking lately about where ideas come from. They often seem to blip into your head out of nowhere. And that feels very random. Do you just have to trust to luck for your creativity?

I’m pretty sure the answer is no. Creativity is not about luck. There seem to be three common elements for a creative leap to happen. And you have control over all of them. 

Just Showing Up

A long time ago, somebody told me that “90% of life is just showing up.” 

That doesn’t mean just showing up and doing nothing. It means showing up on a regular schedule and putting in the effort. 

For a novelist, it means writing every day, whether you feel like it or not. Most professional writers have a quota. It might be a time quota or it might be a word-count quota. But they put their butt in the chair every day and write. 

Creativity is about solving problems in new and original ways. You can’t be creative if you don’t know what the problem is. And you learn the problem intimately when you show up every day and do battle with it. Even if you don’t solve it instantly, you learn what the problem actually is.

Filling the Well

Creativity often happens after you’ve spent a lot of time reading other people’s work. If you’re a scientist, that means reading the papers other scientists have written. If you’re a novelist, it means reading other people’s novels. 

Novelists often call this “filling the well.” You’re seeing how other people have solved the same problems you’re tackling. 

Some writers worry that they’ll wreck their creativity by reading other writers’ work. They’re afraid that somehow, this will lead them into Cliche City. Or worse, into plagiarism. 

That won’t happen. Reading other people’s work will teach you what the cliches are. If you read all the cliches enough times, you’ll hate them too much to ever write them. 

As for plagiarism, you can avoid that easily by not using other writers’ words. Use your own words, and string them together into your own sentences and paragraphs. 

It’s fine to get ideas from other writers. In fact, most ideas are variations on other ideas. 

My rule of thumb is that 1 + 1 = 3.  

What that means is that I often take ideas from a couple of sources and then add something new to the mix that’s my own. And the whole is more than the sum of the sources. 

As your creativity develops, you’ll sometimes find that 1 + 1 = 7. 

Down Time

Most of my really creative ideas come at 3 AM. Or in the shower. Or while I’m driving. Or talking to a friend. Or out on a walk. Or or or. 

The creative spark almost always comes when you’re not trying to force it out at your desk. 

So you need down time, when you’re not working. When your brilliant subconscious can pop that clever new idea into your brain. And it will feel like it came out of the blue. 

You Made It Happen

But it’s not really out of the blue. You did what you needed to make it happen: 

  • You spent hours at your desk trying to tackle the problem and failing and trying again and failing.  
  • You spent more hours reading what other people have done. 
  • You gave your conscious mind some down time, so your subconscious mind could solve the problem.

And that’s where ideas some from. Do your part, and the ideas will come. 

Expect them when you least expect them. 

Creating a Minimum Viable Product

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Most writers are perfectionists, and that’s good. It means we like to produce excellent quality writing. 

Most writers are perfectionists, and that’s bad. It means we’re never done. 

The art of being a writer is to balance that good perfectionism against the bad perfectionism. 

There’s a way to do that. It’s a method that has become wildly popular in the world of entrepreneurs. 

The idea is to rapidly create something called a “Minimum Viable Product” and release it to the world. 

But you don’t stop there. Once you’ve released it, you continue to improve it. Forever. 

Let’s elaborate on all that.

What’s a Minimum Viable Product?

A Minimum Viable Product is three things:

A Minimum Viable Product is a product. It’s something useful to the world. Twitter is a product. An author website is a product. A blog post is a product. 

A Minimum Viable Product is viable. It actually works. It’s not something half-baked that you just throw out there. It does one thing and it does it pretty well. Twitter lets people communicate in little snippets to a list of followers. An author website tells the world about an author and their books. A blog post puts out one idea. 

A Minimum Viable Product is minimal. It doesn’t try to be all that it could possibly be. It’s the smallest possible version that can be released. When Twitter was first released, it didn’t have all possible features. Not yet. That came later. When you create an author website, it doesn’t have to be packed with 500 pages of content. Not yet. That might come later. When you write a blog post, it’s not a whole book. It’s one post, 500 to 1000 words. More words will come later. 

To summarize, a Minimum Viable Product is a useful product that actually works pretty well, but it’s not as perfect or complete as it will be someday.

Why Release a Minimum Viable Product?

The reason you release a Minimum Viable Product and not a maximal perfect product is because the fastest way to achieve a maximal perfect product is to release new versions of a product rapidly. 

You should of course make your Minimum Viable Product reasonably good (you want it to be viable), but you don’t have to make it as big as you can (you want it to be minimal), and you can’t possibly make it perfect on the first try.

And why release it rapidly? Because then you can start testing it. Does anyone actually want it? What do people like about it? What do people dislike? What could you do better in the next release? What’s missing that you should add next? 

When you release a Minimum Viable Product rapidly, you now have incentive to improve it, because now you’re hearing from actual users. And they may well have ideas for making it better that you never thought of. 

What Does a Minimum Viable Product Have to Do With Novelists?

Everything. 

Novelists create many different kinds of things that could be released rapidly as a Minimum Viable Product. Here are a few examples:

  • A scene to show to your critique group 
  • A synopsis to take to a writing conference
  • A proposal to show to agents and editors
  • A first draft to show to your critique buddy
  • A second draft to show to your editor
  • A final draft to hand off to your proofreader
  • An author website
  • An author newsletter
  • A landing page for an email signup form
  • A marketing plan
  • An advertising campaign

Nobody will ever get any of these perfect on the first try. You should absolutely do your best to make it as good as you can. But you should also recognize that small is beautiful and fast is better than perfect. 

Create a Minimum Viable Product—one that works but is small. Get it out to the appropriate audience. Ask for feedback. Don’t feel hurt to learn it’s not exactly right yet. Try again and make it better next time. When you hear that it’s good, add more to it. Write another scene. Or another synopsis. Or another proposal. Or another draft. Add pages to your website. Send out your newsletter regularly. Build out your marketing plan to be more advanced. Create more ads. 

Build. Release. Get feedback. Improve. And then do it all over again. 

It may occur to you that each step in my popular Snowflake Method is a Minimum Viable Product for the next step. And you’re absolutely right, although I didn’t realize that when I created the Snowflake Method.

An Example Video Course I Loved Watching

If you’d like to see a Minimum Viable Product created in real-time, let me refer you to a short video course. It’ll show you how to create a Minimum Viable Product that most authors will need at some point in their life—a landing page to gather signups for an email newsletter. 

I thought I understood Minimum Viable Products before I watched this video. And I did, mostly. But watching the video reinforced the ideas in my brain, and it helped me see how the idea of a Minimum Viable Product applies to practically everything I do as a writer. 

The video is part of a whole set of video courses called “Thrive University.”  

As you might guess, the people at Thrive University don’t create free courses out of the goodness of their hearts. They sell an amazingly powerful set of marketing tools, which they call “Thrive Suite.” I recently bought Thrive Suite for myself and I’m incredibly excited to finally have all the tools I’ve been wanting for the last 20 years for building my website into a dynamite marketing machine. 

After I bought the tools, I decided to become an affiliate. In simple terms, that means that if I refer someone who buys Thrive Suite, I get an affiliate commission.

I’ve been using Thrive Suite for several weeks now, and I love, love, love it. But Thrive Suite is a story for another day.

For the moment, I recommend that you just watch this short video course on building a landing page as a Minimum Viable Product. The course is absolutely free, and I expect it’ll revolutionize your thinking. 

See if you agree. Click here to go to the “RAPID Landing Page Building” course on Thrive University.  (affiliate link)

And have fun!

 

What If Your Novel is Losing Steam?

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So you’re planning your first novel, and suddenly it seems like you’ve chewed all the sugar out of the gum. You felt so excited about this novel, but after taking several shots at the opening scenes, the whole thing seems to have run out of steam. What do you do?

Bailee posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I think I have a story that I want to write. This would be my first time writing a book, and I’m at a pretty big loss for words. I find myself wrestling with multiple opening chapters and losing steam when trying to plan it out. It’s unbelievably frustrating to me. Would you say its best to dive right into a novel or should I have a solid outline before beginning?

Randy sez: There are a couple of possible reasons that I can think of for why your novel is losing steam, Bailee. I can’t tell which is the reason, so I’ll cover them both and hope that one of them rings a bell for you.

You might be losing steam because:

  • You’ve gotten stuck on rewriting the first few scenes over and over again. 
  • You’ve tried to plan out your whole novel, when your brain isn’t wired that way.

Let’s look at those two possibilities in more depth.

Revision Hell

Writer sometimes talk about “revision hell”—a bad place where you can get stuck forever.

Note that there is also a “revision heaven” where you put the pot on simmer for a good long time and keep doing revisions over and over while the story turns into soup. I’ve done that for a project that needed it, and I didn’t mind it a bit, because I thought it made the story better.

You can tell whether you’re in revision heaven or revision hell by asking whether the story is getting better. (And also, whether you’re enjoying it.)

Bailee, it’s possible you’re in revision hell. New writers often get caught in revision hell by writing a few scenes, then getting them critiqued, then rewriting the scenes, then getting them critiqued again, and doing that over and over forever. 

That way lies eternal torment. That road guarantees to make your novel lose steam.

If you’re in revision hell, then here’s how to escape. Write your scenes and take them in for critique, but then leave the scenes alone while you write the next scenes in your novel, applying what you just learned from the critique to the new scenes. Promise yourself not to revise any scenes until you finish the first draft of the novel.

When you do this, you make forward progress in your story, and you become a better writer, both at the same time. And your novel doesn’t lose steam.

Planning for Pantsers

Some writers just naturally write by the seat of their pants, without any kind of outline or character preparation. We call these writers “seat-of-the-pants” writers (SOTPs for short), or sometimes just “pantsers.” Their brains are wired to write without planning. Many, many great novelists write this way. If that’s the way your brain is wired, then write that way.

Other writers just naturally need to plan out the story before they write it. Knowing where they’re going gives them the feeling of security they need in order to write the next scene, and the next, and the next. Many, many great novelists write this way. If that’s the way your brain is wired, then write that way. My wildly popular Snowflake Method is one variation on this theme, but there are others.

But what happens if a pantser tries to plan their novel?

Bad things happen. I’ve seen it numerous times. 

The pantser will quickly get bored trying to plan their novel. They feel like the story isn’t fun anymore. And they’re right. Planning isn’t fun for pantsers. Planning is loads of fun for planners. 

Bailee, it’s possible you’re a pantser trying to be a planner. That will take the steam out of your novel every time.

If that’s the case, then the solution is simple. Stop planning and just type the novel. 

Here’s one indicator that can help you decide if you’re a planner or a pantser. Imagine that some authority figure tells you: “Throw away all your plans and just type the novel.” 

How do you feel when you hear those words?

  • If that feels liberating to you, then you’re probably a pantser.
  • If that feels terrifying to you, then you’re probably a planner.

Other Possible Causes

There are probably other possible reasons why Bailee might be losing steam. I can’t think of any right now, but I’m sure my Loyal Blog Readers can. If you’ve got some ideas on what’s causing Bailee’s problem, leave a comment here. 

Writing fiction should be fun. If it’s not fun, then something’s wrong. 

Got a Question for My Blog?

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

NaNoWriMo is Coming Soon!

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NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) begins November 1. Are you excited? Are you ready? 

Amanda posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I’ve decided to do NaNoWriMo next month! Any advice?

Randy sez: First, let’s make sure everyone’s on the same page. 

What’s NaNoWriMo?

NaNoWriMo is an annual event in which tens of thousands of writers try to write a novel in a month. It costs nothing to enter, and the main value is that by the end of the month, you should have at least 50,000 words written on your novel. That’s hard, but doable, and it’s worth doing. So it makes a great goal.

You can learn all about NaNoWriMo on the official NaNoWriMo website.  

Now to Amanda’s question—what advice can I offer to writers planning to enter? I’ve never entered NaNoWriMo myself, but I think it’s a great idea, and a number of my author friends enter it every year because it’s a great motivator to get some words written.

So here are my thoughts on NaNoWriMo:

  • Know why you’re entering. What do you hope to get out of this exercise? 
  • Work out your schedule now.
  • If you’re a planner, then plan your story in advance. 
  • Know what you’ll do after NaNoWriMo is over.

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

What Will You Get Out of NaNoWriMo?

One of my guiding principles in life is this: “Never do anything without a reason.”

What’s your reason for wanting to enter NaNoWriMo? I can think of a number of good reasons a writer might enter. Here are a few of many possible answers:

  • “I think it’ll be fun.”
  • “It’s a challenge. I want to see if I can write a novel.”
  • “I’ve been meaning to write a novel for a long time and I need some accountability. This will motivate me to keep putting words on the page.”
  • “I was about to write a novel anyway, and entering NaNoWriMo will keep me disciplined through the holidays.”
  • “All of the above.”

So what’s your reason? Write it down on a piece of paper and tape it to your monitor or the wall or wherever you’ll see it every day. It’ll help you keep on track after the glow of the first few days wears off. Try to come up with a good strong reason why you’re entering. The stronger the reason, the more likely you are to succeed. 

Planning Your Schedule

If the goal is to write 50,000 words in 30 days, then you need to average 1667 words per day. 

If you know you can write 1000 words per hour, then that works out to an hour and forty minutes every day for 30 days.

So the first step is to schedule that time. It’s not going to schedule itself. Look at your calendar and figure out when you’re going to put in the time. 

You might decide to take weekends off. If you do that, there are only 22 weekdays in the month, which means you’ll need to average 2272 words per day, so you’ll need a bit more time each day. 

You might also decide to take off Thanksgiving and the day after. That leaves 20 working days, which bumps up your required daily word count to 2500 words.

My guess is that there’ll be 2 days in the month where something utterly unexpected will come up and cut into your schedule. So if you want to be safe, you might want to plan for only 18 working days, which means you now need 2778 words per day.

Don’t be daunted by these numbers. Those are doable word counts. But it’s going to take some serious commitment to write them. You’ll need to be tough. You’ll need to stay on course. 

You can do it, but you need to really want to do it.

I’ve written 90,000 words in a month, once. It wasn’t easy. It was brutal, in fact. I worked every single day of the month. But it was fun and I wrote some good words.

You can do this. 

Optional: Planning Your Story

Some writers like to plan their stories in advance. Maybe they’re outliners, like the late great Robert Ludlum. Maybe they’re Snowflakers. Maybe they use the Story Equation. Maybe they use some other system. 

If that’s the way your brain is wired, then October is a fine month to plan out your story, so you’ll be ready to roar on November 1, when NaNoWriMo officially opens.

And if your brain isn’t wired for planning, that’s okay too. If you’re a seat-of-the-pants writer, you can spend your remaining time before NaNoWriMo clearing your plate of things that might distract you.

After NaNoWriMo, Then What?

I think it’s important to know what you plan to do after NaNoWriMo is over. On December 1, you can expect to have 50,000 words written. Maybe more. That may be all or most of a novel. 

Then what are you going to do with it? Put it on a shelf? I hope not! I hope you’ll try to get it published. I hope you’ll actually get it published. 

You don’t have to know exactly how you’ll get your novel published now. That can wait until you have something to be published. 

But it won’t hurt now to be thinking past NaNoWriMo. Because writing a novel is a real achievement, something to be proud of. And writing a novel that people read and enjoy and talk about is an even bigger achievement.

As you probably know, there are two main ways that authors use these days to get published. 

  • Sell the rights to your novel to a publishing company. (This is called “traditional publishing” and it’s been used for well over a hundred years by authors.)
  • Act as your own publisher and put your book up for sale independently on Amazon, Apple Books, Kobo, B&N, and any other online retailers. (This is called “self-publishing” or “indie-authoring” and it’s exploded in popularity in the last decade.)

Either of these approaches will work. They each have pluses and minuses. You get to decide which approach is best for you. My view is that it’s wonderful to have more than one option. If you subscribe to my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, you’ve seen my 5-day series of email on how to get published, which now covers both options in more detail. 

Got a Question for My Blog?

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

Changing Your Novel’s Genre

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Can You Change a Novel’s Genre After Writing It?

Is it possible to change the genre of a novel you’ve already written? If so, how would you go about it? 

Ann posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Dear Randy,

Re: shifting genre of story from romance to crime – advice needed please!

Your Snowflake Method helped me to plan and write my first book(working title:”A Darker Burgundy”) and I submitted the early chapters for a First Novel competition in a UK women’s magazine and it was listed as a runner-up. The story is a romance where love turns to hate in Nazi-Occupied France. I have edited and re-drafted the work many times and I’m now thinking of switching genre from romance to crime, hoping this way to lend the story more pace and momentum in the hope that this may make it more appealing to readers/agents.

Please can you kindly advise me how to go about this daunting task?

Many thanks

Randy sez: this sounds tricky, at least on the surface. A romance novel is written for one target audience. A suspense novel (I think that’s what you’re really asking about, although I can’t be sure) is written for an entirely different target audience. 

A Tale of Two Genres

Let’s talk about these two genres first.

In a romance, the protagonist is the relationship between the two main characters. This relationship is in great danger of being killed. Usually, the reason the relationship might die is that one or both of the characters might pull out of it. Typically every scene (or almost every scene) includes one or both of the main characters. The story usually ends with the relationship blooming into a lifelong commitment.

In a suspense novel, you typically have one character as the protagonist. That character wants to do something or prevent something that would put some person or some group of people at high risk (possibly a nation or even the entire world). A suspense novel can have a large cast of characters and a large stage and you aren’t required to show the protagonist in every scene. 

So the problem here is that there’s not a lot of overlap between these two kinds of stories. It’s possible that you’d need to rewrite the entire story to make it conform to the suspense pattern.

But there is some overlap. The romantic suspense subgenre works as both a romance novel and a suspense novel. As in any romance novel, the protagonist is the relationship between the two main characters. And as in any romance novel, the relationship is in danger of being killed. But the reason the relationship is in danger of being killed is because one or both of the two main characters are in danger of being killed. That’s what makes it also a suspense novel.

So How To Make the Transition?

How would you transition your story to a new genre?

The first thing to do is to decide exactly what genre you want to write. Nobody can tell you what genre to write. You get to decide. What do you want the book to be? Romance? Suspense? Romantic suspense? Something else? Pick one. Amazon has hundreds of subcategories. Browse around until you find exactly the one that you can envision for your book.

The second thing to do is to make sure you know the “rules of the genre.” There aren’t any written rules, of course. You learn the rules by reading current books in your genre and learning what’s done and what’s not done. The rules will tell you what kind of story structure you can have and what the tone of each scene should be. And lots of other things.

If you’re very lucky, the manuscript you’ve reworked many times will be pretty close in structure to the new genre you’ve chosen. In that case, just tweak what you’ve got to fit the genre.

If you’re not lucky, you’re going to have to make structural changes to your novel to fit the “rules” of your new genre. Since you’re a Snowflaker, you can just make a copy of your existing Snowflake document and tweak that document. Then use that new Snowflake document to guide you in adding, deleting, and moving scenes around in your manuscript.

Finally, you will probably also have to adjust the tone of your writing. (Or maybe not. It sounds like you’ve already got a suspense-like tone, which is the reason it’s not having success as a romance. So if you’re lucky, the current tone of your novel is already appropriate for your category.) But the point here is that you should work on the tone of each scene after you’ve already fixed the structure of the novel. It would make no sense to change the tone of scenes before fixing the structure, because you’d be reworking scenes that you might eventually end up deleting.

Ouch, That’s a Lot of Work

Of course, this might end up being a lot of work. That’s not fun, but it’s your reality. If you’re stuck in a swamp, the only way out is to press ahead and get out. So grit your teeth and do it. 

And the lesson to take away from this for your next book is to define the category of your novel very early in the process of Snowflaking it. That’s a lesson that will pay big dividends for the rest of your writing life.

Got a Question for My Blog?

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

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