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

Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

Where Is Your Novel Going?

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in Craft

A story is not like real life. Very often, real life feels like it has no direction. Lots of random stuff happens, and we get through it, or we don’t. We may have plans, but they usually don’t work out. Or they do work out, but then we discover we didn’t want what we thought we did. That’s real life.

A story is different. In a story, your lead character has direction. They don’t know it right away, but they soon figure it out. Then the story is about whether they get where they’re trying to go. They run into roadblocks, and at first, they have no idea how to tackle them. But they learn, and pretty soon they have new skills that allow them to get over, under, around, or through the roadblocks. After working the problem for a while, they reach a do-or-die situation where they have to apply all their new skills to get where they wanted to go.  In the end, they either get there, or they fail trying, or they get somewhere else that turns out to be where they really wanted to go but didn’t realize it. 

Four Act Structure

All of the above has a name: the famous “Four-Act Structure.” It also has another name: the equally famous “Three-Act Structure.” These are secretly the same thing, but they have two names because writers are not great at math. In the Three-Act Structure, the middle Act is nothing more nor less than the middle two Acts in the Four-Act Structure. So they’re the same.  

Here are the four components of the Four-Act Structure:

  1. The lead character figures out where they want to go in the story. At the very end of Act 1, the lead character commits to getting there, whatever the cost. 
  2. The lead character hits roadblocks and fails repeatedly to get past them using the wrong methods. At the very end of Act 2, the lead character realizes that they’ve been doing it wrong up till now, and sees there’s a better way, and commits to doing it right from now on. 
  3. The lead character hits more roadblocks and now begins to have some success getting past them. The lead character realizes that none of these roadblocks are the root problem to be solved. At the very end of Act 3, the lead character commits to attacking the root problem. 
  4. The lead character attacks the root problem using their newly acquired skills and either succeeds or fails. If they succeed, it’s because they deserved it. If they fail, it’s because they deserved it. They may fail at their original goal, but succeed at some other, better goal. If this happens, it’s because the lead character deserved it. 

But That’s Not How Real Life Works!

No, real life doesn’t work out that way, most of the time. Your reader doesn’t want your story to be “just like real life.”

Your reader wants your story to be “the way real life would be if there was justice in the universe.” That’s why your story should always end with the lead character getting what they deserve. That’s justice, whether your lead character succeeds or fails. 

Stories are about our longing for justice in an apparently unjust universe. Let’s be clear that we have no idea if the universe is actually just or not. It doesn’t look just. Sometimes bad things happen to good people, and sometimes good things happen to bad people. But nobody wants that, except bad people. Decent people wish the universe were just, and they desperately hope it will turn out to be just in the end. 

And that’s why your reader wants to see your story end with justice for your lead character. Nothing can erase the desire for justice from your reader. You can break a lot of rules in your fiction writing, but here is one I strongly urge you to never break: 

Always give your lead character what they deserve in the end. 

Where Do Ideas Come From?

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in Production

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. 

Writing the Perfect Synopsis for Beginners

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in Proposals

If you’re trying to sell your novel to a traditional publisher, you must learn to write a synopsis. It’s almost impossible to sell a novel without writing a proposal, and a key element of your proposal is a synopsis of the plot. 

If you think you can avoid this by hiring an agent to sell your novel, that’s not going to work. It’s very difficult to get an agent without showing them a proposal, which must contain a synopsis. And once you’ve got an agent working for you, they’ll insist you write a proposal for every novel you write, before they submit it to a publisher. An agent will critique your proposal, but they won’t write it. That’s your job. 

So how do you write a synopsis, if you’re an unpublished novelist?

First, the bad news. If you’ve never published a novel, then you need to have a full, polished manuscript of your novel, ready to submit to an agent or editor. It’s almost impossible to get the attention of an agent or an editor without one. 

That sounds horribly unfair, but it’s understandable. Agents and editors have all seen hundreds of dreamy-eyed writers who can write three killer scenes but lack the discipline to finish a novel. So agents and editor will insist a beginner must have a full manuscript in hand. 

Now, the good news. If you’ve got a complete manuscript, it should take you no more than 4 hours to drill out a perfectly respectable synopsis of your novel. That’s fast! You could have it done in a day or two. Here’s how…

The Length of Your Synopsis

How long should your synopsis be? It should be whatever length your intended agent or publisher says. If they ask for a 2-page synopsis, they mean 2. Not 1, not 3, and definitely not 55. Synopses are single-spaced, which works out to about 500 words per page. So a 2-page synopsis will be about 1000 words, give or take about 50. 

Agents and editors love writers who follow instructions, because they are inundated with manuscripts and they’re looking for ways to thin the herd. Don’t be thinned.

But now you have a problem. If your novel is 100,000 words and you have to write a synopsis of 1000 words, you have to cut out 99 percent. How do you do that?

The answer is that you don’t cut from 100,000. You start from zero. Here’s how…

Your Scene List

If you’ve got the full manuscript, then you probably also have a list of scenes somewhere. (If you’re a fan of my Snowflake Method, then you wrote your manuscript from a Scene List, and you can just pull that out.) 

If you don’t have a Scene List, it’s easy to make one from your manuscript. Create a spreadsheet in which every row contains a sentence that summarizes one scene. If you’re determined to get this done, you can drill out a Scene List in about two hours. It doesn’t have to be fancy—the Scene List is for your eyes only. Quick and dirty is fine. 

The payoff for having a Scene List is huge, so two hours is a very small price to pay. Please do it. 

When you’ve got your Scene List in hand, note how many scenes it has. This might be as low as 50 or as high as 200. A typical number would be around 80 to 100 scenes. You need to know this number before you move on. 

Your Word and Paragraph Budget 

Now you need to work out your word budget for your synopsis. As an example, if you’ve been asked to create a 2-page, single-spaced synopsis, then that’s about 1000 words (at 500 words per page). If your novel is 100 scenes, you can only afford 10 words per scene, which is not enough. 

Almost always, you can’t summarize every scene in your novel. This is crucial to understand. A synopsis is not a scene-by-scene recounting of your story. It’s less detailed than that.

So what do you do? You’re going to cluster your scenes into Scene Groups—groups of scenes that are related to each other. Your strategy will be to write one paragraph for each Scene Group in the novel. This is gold. This is the most important point in this post. One paragraph per Scene Group. 

Figure that you can write about 10 paragraphs per page, each about 50 words. So if your page limit is 2 pages for the synopsis, you can’t have more than 20 paragraphs total. That’s your paragraph budget.

And since each paragraph summarizes one Scene Group, that’s also your budget for Scene Groups. So you need to know your budget for paragraphs before you move on. 

Creating Your Scene Groups

Once you know how many Scene Groups you can have, you know how many scenes each must have, on average. (If you have 100 scenes and your budget is 20 Scene Groups, then each Scene Group will have an average of 5 scenes.)

Knowing this is power. The power to slice your story to the bone.  

Work through your spreadsheet and mark out your Scene Groups. The easiest way is to select several rows at a time and mark them all with some particular color, so you can see which scenes are in each Scene Group. Once you decide you’re going to do this, you can do it amazingly fast. Give yourself 15 minutes to mark out your Scene Groups.

You must be ruthless here, but it’s not hard when you know your budget with certainty. The math is unforgiving. You know how many Scene Groups you’re allowed to have. Mark them out. 

Writing Your Synopsis

Now write your synopsis. For each Scene Group, summarize it as best you can in about 50 words. Write in third person, present tense. A typical paragraph might look like this: 

Sally discovers her best friend Joe dead in her driveway, and the murder weapon is her own gun. The police arrive and ask Sally to come to the station to help them figure things out. Two hours in, she gets caught in a lie and realizes she needs a lawyer.

That’s one paragraph, summarizing probably 3 to 5 scenes in 50 words. It’s not beautiful, but it skates a straight line through the heart of the story. 

I wrote that paragraph in about 2 minutes, and I don’t even have a story to go with it. I just pulled it out of thin air. If you have your Scene List in front of you with all the Scene Groups marked out, you can write a paragraph for each one in 3 minutes easily. Easily. In one hour, you could have 20 paragraphs written, and that’s a typical synopsis. It’s not fun, so do it fast, like you learned to eat your broccoli when you were a kid. 

But It’s Boring!

Your synopsis is probably boring. There’s no dialogue, no action, no interior monologue, no emotion, no description. It’s all just narrative summary, and you hate it already. You feel certain no agent or editor could possibly enjoy it.

You’re right. No agent or editor ever enjoyed reading a synopsis in the whole history of the human race. Yet they all insist on one. Why? Because they can skim it in one minute and see if you have any understanding at all of the large-scale structure of a story. Any competent agent or editor can do it. Any competent novelist can too. 

So the point of writing a synopsis is to expose the story structure of your novel for the professional eye of an agent or editor. By following the procedure I’ve sketched above, you guarantee that your synopsis exactly matches the structure of your novel. As long as your novel was well-structured to begin with, your synopsis will be too. 

If you’re not sure that your novel is well-structured, then I’ll again point you to my Snowflake Method, which is a 10-step plan of attack for getting the first draft of a perfectly-structured novel down on paper. You don’t have to use the Snowflake Method to write your novel. Some novelists prefer to just write without planning, and that’s fine. But the reason I mention the Snowflake Method is because if you understand how it works, you understand story structure. Even if you use some other method for writing your first draft. 

Good luck, and have fun!

What to Do When You’re Overwhelmed

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in Organizing

Modern life forces you to make impossible choices. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all the stuff that needs doing. When you get overwhelmed, your anxiety level rises, you lose traction, you get even more behind, and you feel more and more overwhelmed.

Writers are very susceptible to getting overwhelmed. Besides everything else that Normal People do, we take on the gargantuan task of writing a novel, getting it published, and then marketing it. This is a lonely, difficult journey of a thousand miles, even for those lucky few who make lots of money at it. For the other 99%, it’s even harder. 

I learned a simple trick years ago for dealing with overwhelm. I call it the “Overwhelm Exercise” and I use it whenever things seem especially bad. (About two or three times a year.)

The Overwhelm Exercise

Do these steps in order: 

  1. Write down every single thing that’s causing you to feel overwhelmed. You can do this on paper or on your computer, whichever is more convenient. Write everything. Keep going until you’ve said it all. You don’t need to put it in any special order. Just spill your guts. Completely. Keep writing until you’ve cleared it all out. All the mess is on the page. It’s still a big mess, but your head is clear. 
  2. Mark ONLY those items you could reasonably get done today. Don’t go overboard. Just find those few things that are small enough for today. You can either color-code them or circle them or mark them with an asterisk. 
  3. Mark ONLY those you could reasonably get done this week, using a different mark. Again, don’t get too ambitious. You’re in a big hole, so set yourself a goal that you can achieve. You can color-code these in a different color, or mark them with a rectangle, or mark them with two asterisks. 
  4. Give yourself permission to deal with everything else later. Next week or next month. But not today and not even this week. Write this down. “I have permission to ONLY do the marked tasks this week.”
  5. Collect all the tasks you marked for today onto a fresh list. It should be small. It should be achievable. Title it, “My Today List.”
  6. Collect all the tasks you marked for this week onto a separate list. This will be a bit bigger. Once again, don’t get too aggressive. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Title this list, “My This-Week List.”
  7. For today, do everything on the Today List. You constructed it to be doable in one day, so do it. When you finish the list, reward yourself with a break. You reached your goal for the day! Enjoy that good feeling. Don’t spoil it by moving the goal posts. You are done until tomorrow. 
  8. Tomorrow, choose out a few tasks from the This Week List and make a new Today List. Again, make sure it’s doable. You’ve been beating yourself up for too long because you’ve got impossible goals. You need a few days of setting possible goals. 
  9. For the rest of the week, continue making doable Today Lists. Don’t crush your spirit by demanding too much of yourself. That way lies dragons. 

Where You’ll Be Next Week

By next week, that original horrible list will have a number of small and mid-size tasks crossed off. It will be much less ferocious-looking. It will still be bad, but it’ll be less bad. If you still feel overwhelmed, repeat the same exercise. But you should be less overwhelmed next week. You’ll be getting some traction. You’ll have some victories under your belt. Maybe small victories, but a win is a win.

Remember that modern life is set up to keep throwing more stuff at you until you break. When you catch your breath a little, think about that some. Can you make some decisions on things you can just say no to? 

Life is the art of saying no to most stuff, so you can say yes to the things that matter most. 

Have a good day.

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