The Snowflake Method of Novel Design, with Randy Ingermanson

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. Episode 10. Today we're talking about the snowflake method of novel design with writer, writing teacher, and theoretical physicist Randy Ingermanson.

All right. Welcome back again to the show. I'm excited to bring you another great interview today.

But before we get into that, just a quick reminder that you can find the show notes for this episode at the show's website. Now, in addition to a recap of what we talk about today, you're also going to find links to the resources that that are mentioned on the interview today, as well as a comment section there, so you can talk about today's show, ask questions of other listeners, and share your thoughts about today's topic. We've got some interesting discussion going on over there, too.

So I hope you'll be a part of that on on the website as well. And I want to invite you to stay tuned after the interview for an announcement about something new I want to try on the show, something that you can be, we'll say, intimately involved with, if you're brave, that is. As as usual, you'll also find our weekly wise words segment and weekly challenge after the interview.

So I hope you'll stick around for that. Without further ado, let's get into today's interview. My guest today is a theoretical physicist turned writer and writing teacher. He's the author of the bestselling book in the fiction writing reference category on Amazon. It's also the highest rated book in that category. It's called Fiction Writing for Dummies.

You might know him as the Snowflake Guy from his very popular method for designing a novel. Welcome to the show, Randy Ingermanson. Hi, Brad. Thanks for having me on. Oh, it's my pleasure.

So yet another theoretical physicist turned fiction writer, huh? There's just an awful lot of us. It's a crowded category. Yeah, right. That old story.

So tell us, Randy, a little bit about how that came about. Well, you know, my first year in grad school at UC Berkeley, I was studying for the prelim exams, and I just got so burned out studying that I started reading fiction as an escape. And at a certain point, you know, a few years down the line, I realized, or I just came to this delusion that, hey, I could do that, too. You know, I could write as well as these guys.

And so somewhere in there, I actually started writing. I think it was when I was a postdoc. I started writing my first novel and I discovered a horrible truth. I couldn't write as well as those guys. It's not as easy as it looks. And the part of the art of fiction is making it look easy, making it look as if anybody could do this.

But it's not easy. And so I'm a good learner. When I set my mind to learn something, I can go out and figure out how it works.

So I bought some books, started studying, and learned how fiction works and, you know, got the skills I needed to actually get published. And I like fiction writing. It's great. I like physics, too. It's great, too. They exercise, you know, pretty much the same parts of the brain, both the left brain and the right brain.

But they are very different things. So, you know, at a certain point, started getting published. People started asking me to teach and I discovered that I had some sort of a skill that I had never imagined, which is that I'm able to analyze things, make them simple for people, and explain it in a way that most people can get.

And so, you know, the height of my career is writing a dummies book. Which, you know, I never had actually read a dummies book, because I always thought the brand itself was kind of insulting. I don't like to insinuate that people are stupid.

But, you know, what I did find is that many of the dummies books like to do exactly the kind of thing that I like to do, which is break it down to the nuts and bolts, show how it works, explain where it's simple, and then of course, you know, once you've got all the simple things in place, putting it all together can be complicated. But, you know, so I'm very happy to have written a book in the dummies line. In closing the circle, I heard from a creative writing teacher at UC Berkeley a while back saying, hey, I'm using your book in my courses here. Oh, wow.

So, you know, it, you know, what goes around comes around somehow or other. That's right. Yeah.

Introduction to the Snowflake Method

So I want to get right into your Snowflake method this morning. I discovered it when I was working on my third novel, and it really helped me understand why my first two were complete crap, really. You know, I too had read countless books on writing, and a lot of them talked really in detail about some of the techniques in your approach, yet they never really sank in until I used your Snowflake approach.

So tell us a little bit about the Snowflake method and why you think it is so effective. The basic idea of the Snowflake method is very simple. It's divide and conquer.

So you have this large task that you have to achieve, right? Your task is to create the first draft of your novel. Okay, that's a major milestone in writing a novel and getting it published is just to get the first draft down on paper because once it's on paper, you can edit it.

Okay, but how do you get it on paper? Okay, there are different kinds of people in the world. Some people like to work top down, so from the top of a problem and then work down steadily to finer and finer detail. Those are the kinds of people who love the snowflake.

Now, there are other kinds of people who like to start from the bottom up and start with the details, work up and synthesize as they go till finally at the end, they understand it all. Those are the kind of people who hate the snowflake. Okay, and neither one is right or wrong. It's just they're right or wrong for me.

Steps of the Snowflake Method

Okay, or for you. If the snowflake works for you, breaking things down into smaller and smaller pieces, then it works for you and you pretty much know that immediately and if it's not going to work for you, you pretty much hate it immediately. Okay, so I'm not going to be dogmatic at all, but the basic idea of the snowflake is first figure out in one sentence what your story is about and then break it down from there. Keep expanding that out.

So the first step of the snowflake is to come up with one sentence that summarizes your story. And it doesn't have to have very much in it. So here's an example of a one-sentence summary. An 11-year-old wizard tries to stop an evil sorcerer from returning to life. I think maybe I know that book. Yeah.

Okay, that's Harry Potter book one. Now, I don't know if J. K. Rowling actually had that in mind when she started the book, but I kind of think she did. She kind of seems like a top-down type of person. It'd be fun to ask her.

But from that now, you've got the kernel of a story. This is the driving idea for the story. And so this is what I would call maybe the 50,000-foot view of the story.

But then you want to kind of zoom in a little bit and expand that out to a paragraph. And that would be the second step of the snowflake is to kind of work out, well, what are the stages in this wizard first discovering that he is a wizard and discovering that there's an evil sorcerer and then realizing that he is the one person who can stop this sorcerer from returning to life? And so the stages of that actually turn out to be something which most writers know about called the three-act structure. And you can summarize that in a paragraph. And then, you know, some people believe that the snowflake is all about plot.

Now, that's really not true. The snowflake is about growing your story. I would say growing your story organically from a seed into a tree. And a story really has two extremely important parts. It has the plot and it has the characters.

So step three of the snowflake immediately, you know, moves you into defining who your characters are. And then there's several steps in the story development of the snowflake method, but they kind of alternate plot, character, plot, character. And you're always just expanding, expanding, expanding.

Okay, interesting. I do want to mention for the listeners that the article really outlining the snowflake approach is available for free on your website. It's advancedfictionwriting. com. Is that right? Correct.

Importance of a One-Sentence Summary

Okay, yeah. So I really encourage them to go over there and check that out. I want to focus a little bit on just that first step that you talked about, that coming up with a one-sentence summary of your story. And, you know, I think as authors, we sometimes don't want to admit that our stories can be summed up in so short a way. And it's almost like an admission that we haven't written something important or nuanced or complex. Right.

You know, it occurs to me that as people are talking about our book, you know, the kind of that word-of-mouth advertising, that our readers are going to be talking about it in that one-sentence structure, really. I mean, that's how we discuss books with each other. So I just think that's really important. Yeah. Well, there's a guy I admire, Al Einstein, and he used to say, you know, you should make something as simple as Okay, that sounds kind of intimidating, but it's what I call the selling chain.

The first person you have to sell the idea to is the acquisitions editor at a publishing house. Okay, and if they don't like it, it's dead, right? At least it's dead at their house.

But if they do like it, the book isn't automatically a bestseller. They still have to now go to their publishing committee and sell the idea to the publishing committee. And a lot of stories get shot down right there.

But suppose the publishing committee says, yes, we're going to publish it. They make you an offer. Now the story has to be sold to the sales team, and the sales team are the people who will be then selling your story to the buyers at the national chains and stuff.

So there's another couple of steps in the selling chain that you have to make the sale to. And then ultimately, somebody in employees in the store, if your book is going to be a success in stores, it's probably because there are people who work in those stores who are hand-selling your books. So those people need to be sold that this is a great book. Because think about it, bookstores get in tons of books every week. Which ones are they going to have time to read? They're going to read the ones that are interesting to them, and if they like the story, then they're going to sell it to customers who walk in.

So that's called hand-selling. And then finally, this is the most important link in the chain, your early readers are going to sell the idea of your story to their friends. We call that word of mouth, and that's extremely important. If that doesn't happen, you have a book that sells its initial print run and then it dies. If it does happen, you have a breakout bestseller. And that's what you want.

The Selling Chain of Your Story

Now, remember, this is a chain with seven steps in it. It's kind of like the old gossip game. If you give somebody a long, complicated explanation, it's going to get kind of ground down and worn down and possibly changed along that transmission line.

But if you give somebody a very simple concept and say, this is what my story is about, my story is about a physicist who goes back in time to kill the apostle Paul. Okay, that's very simple. It's so simple, it's probably not going to be changed very much as it's transmitted from one person to the next to the next to the next to the next. The simpler you can make it, the better. The more intriguing you can make it, the better. Yeah, that's fascinating.

You also talk a little bit about how we can use that same concept as we're writing our book to kind of go back and check that we're still grounded in that original story. Right, right. And two things can happen. You may discover midway through your story that your story is kind of veering off.

And so you may say, oh, doggone it, I need to get back on track. I'm losing focus. So that's one path that the snowflake can do for you.

But the other one is you may discover, you know what? My story is kind of veering off, but it's getting better. Yeah, exactly. I'm actually improving it by veering, and therefore what I'm going to do is go back and change my concept sentence. I'm going to change my one-sentence summary to be better. And no editor on the planet ever got mad at a writer for turning in a story that was better than the one they pitched to us.

Exactly, yeah. That's not a loss. Exactly, yeah.

But it's just a good idea. And what I do when I'm writing a first draft is somewhere around 25% of the way into the book, I kind of look back at my snowflake document and ask myself, am I on track? Am I keeping to the story or am I not? And typically I'm not. Well, that's fine. I just produce a second edition of the snowflake document and kind of tweak things a little bit as the story has evolved.

And then at the 50% mark, I do that again. And at the 75% mark, I do it again. And by the end of the story, you know, sometimes it really is quite a different story than it was at the beginning, but that's okay. It's improved. For me, all along the way, I just need to know where I'm going. I need kind of a roadmap that tells me more or less how I'm going to get to the ending.

Sure. And yeah, there's going to be detours. Yeah, I may actually change the final destination.

But just knowing that I have a roadmap gives me the confidence to be able to actually type the words. Absolutely, yeah. And there are people who just like to drive and they don't care about the end destination.

And so those people are analogous to seat-of-the-pants writers. And that's completely okay for them, but it just wouldn't work for me. Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of writers really push back against anything that feels like a formula for writing fiction. For those listeners who might be out in that crowd today and listening, what would you tell them? Well, tell me whether this is or is not a limerick.

There once was a writer named Ran whose poetry never would scan. He said, I try hard, but I guess I'm no bard because I always have to cram as many words into the last line as I possibly can. It was so close to a limerick, yes. Yeah, question for you is, was that a limerick? Almost, yeah.

Okay, we know what a limerick is. It's five lines. The first two lines have to rhyme.

The second two lines also rhyme. Sorry, the third and fourth lines also rhyme. And the fifth line rhymes with lines one and two. And there's a particular meter to it. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. That's the rules of the limerick.

It's very tightly constrained, but it works. And what's the goal of the limerick? This is the important thing. This is the most important thing you can understand. What is the goal of the limerick? It's to be funny.

Now, did we meet the goal of the limerick? I think you did, yeah. Yeah, yeah, we did. That's a classical limerick. I stole it and adapted it.

Okay. I got it from a joke book years ago. Yeah, it's funny. Why is it funny? Because it slightly violates the rules of limerickness.

Okay, sure. Limerickicity. Okay, but it achieves the one thing it had to do, which was to be funny and to be mostly a limerick.

So I would classify that as a limerick, even though it doesn't quite follow the rules. See, it's okay to color outside the lines as long as you know where the lines are. Sure, okay. If there were no lines, if a limerick could be 17 lines and didn't have to rhyme and didn't have to have scanning, that wouldn't work at all. That limerick would no longer be a limerick, even though it would not be funny.

Okay. Now, what is our goal as novelists? It's very simple. It's to create in our reader a powerful emotional experience. If you do only that and nothing else, you're good.

Okay. If you have a great voice and a great theme and all that, but you don't give your reader a powerful emotional experience, there's something missing. It may be a good book, but it's not the best novel that it could be.

Balancing Structure and Creativity

Okay. So, you know, when I talk about structure and, you know, various ideas for creating fiction, it's very easy for people to get the idea that, oh, there's all these rules and I'm not allowed to color outside the lines, and it's just, you're putting me in a box. Okay, not exactly. All those, you know, quote, rules, unquote, are there for one purpose. They're to sort of guide you in your quest to give your reader a powerful emotional experience. If you're writing a romance, you want your reader to fall in love with the hero or the heroine, as the case may be.

Sure. If you're writing a thriller, you want your reader sitting on the edge of the seat pulling the trigger. Okay. Sure. You want your reader right there.

And so everything that I teach in fiction writing is targeted towards helping you figure out how to make that happen. And typically, the way it works is, you know, I encourage people, just write. Do not ever think about the rules, okay, when you're writing, when you're first drafting, you know, you put on your creative hat and the rules are totally out the window, just write. When it's time to edit, okay, which is not the same day that you're creating, okay, you put on your editor's hat.

Now it's time to analyze and you ask yourself one question, does it work? Does this scene that I just wrote give my reader a powerful emotional experience? In fact, does it give, you know, the best possible powerful emotional experience? If it does, then forget the rules, you know. You don't need to worry about the rules.

But if it doesn't, then you start asking yourself, why? What could I have done better? And that's when you pull out these, you know, these rules about structure and about form and that sort of thing. And you say, if I had tried this instead, would it give my reader a more powerful emotional experience? If so, well then I'll apply that rule. I'll use that structure.

Sure. If it doesn't, toss it out and go on to the next one and keep working, keep working until you have maximized for yourself that powerful emotional experience. And if you again when you need help.

Additional Resources and Tools

Okay, I love that, yeah. So Randy, tell us a little bit about some of the other resources that you've got available, especially on your website. I know you've got some other articles there and even some software to guide us in using the snowflake method. Right. Well, I would say that the main resource on my site is my monthly e-zine, so it's free. I send it out every month on the first Tuesday of the month.

And it's a long thing. It usually has three articles. One article is going to be on craft, so the craft of fiction writing. One article is going to be on marketing, so how do you market your work effectively? And then the third article is going to be on just keeping your life organized enough so you can write. And I would say that's the big thing on my website.

Like I said, that's free. I call it the Advanced Fiction Writing e-zine. I have like 32,000 people who read that.

Okay, I also have a blog, which I try to blog about once a week. And you know, my philosophy on blogging is fewer, but as good as I can possibly do them. So I don't try to blog every day. I just want to have articles of lasting significance, things that will be useful to people five years from now.

Okay, so of course, those are the free resources, and I've got several other articles, you know, the famous article on the snowflake method, which gets somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 page views every day. Wow, that's great. If you just Google snowflake method, you'll find it. I have an article called Writing the Perfect Scene, which explains how to write a perfect scene every time. You never have to guess. You can always write a scene that's perfect for your purpose.

And then I have some teaching products. I try not to have too many things that people have to pay for, but I have a complete series of lectures, six and a half hours of lectures, audio lectures, which I call Fiction 101. And then there's a follow-up, Fiction 201. And then for people who like the snowflake method, I have software that I wrote because, hey, I'm a physicist. That's right. You know, I've worked for years and years as a software developer.

So I realized at a certain point, I love doing the snowflake. It works great for me. It makes writing my novels easier, but just keeping track of all the characters, you know, it's a hassle trying to do it in Microsoft Word.

So I just wrote software that makes it easier for me to work through the steps of the snowflake. I call that Snowflake Pro, and that's on my site. And, you know, I have a few other things, but my goal has always been to provide lots of stuff for free. Yeah, I think you've succeeded at that. I really do hope that my listeners will go check that out. Again, that's advancedfictionwriting.

com. It'll be time well spent there. I can assure them of that.

So Randy, I've got one more question here for you today. Sure. I call it the time travel question.

Now, you also write fiction. You've described yourself as a geek suspense novelist. Is that right? Right, right, right. I'm a geek, yeah, and I love suspense.

Okay, so if you could go back in this time machine that I'm giving you this morning and visit the pre-published Randy Ingermanson, what advice would you have to give that Randy Ingermanson? Oh, mercy. I've never been asked that question. Let me think here. I would say, you know what? Have faith in yourself.

You know, if you have this vision for the kind of book you want to write, and if you tell that vision to people, you know, 99 out of 100 people are going to say, ah, that's not for me. But there's one person out of 100 who's going to say, wow, that sounds really interesting. I'd like to read that book.

So, you know, as you go through life, you know, most of the people are going to be in that 99 group, okay? And it can be very discouraging. You need to have faith in yourself. You need to, you know, have something in your gut that says, I'm going to stay on this path no matter what. I am writing for that one person in 100. And remember, there's 7 billion people on the planet.

1% of 7 billion people is 70 million readers. Yeah, you're doing okay at that point. J. K. Rowling had maybe, I don't know, 100 million, 200 million people who were actual readers of her books, you know, just based on her actual sales, okay?

So that's, you know, 1. 5% maybe of the population of the earth. Keep it okay.

So believe in your vision for what you want your fiction to be and pursue, pursue, pursue. Don't let anyone tell you, you know, that's not going to be interesting. If it's interesting to 10,000 people, you know, that's a success. Yeah. Boy, excellent advice. I appreciate that.

Randy, thank you so much for your time this morning. It's just been a real pleasure. Well, thanks for having me on, Brad. I really enjoyed it.

All right. And I learned something. You did. Yes. What should I tell my, you know, if I could time travel back, what should I tell myself? There you go.

Because that is something, you know, honestly, it's easy to lose sight of the vision. It's easy to get discouraged. Writing is a, you know, it's a marathon. It's not a sprint. Yeah, absolutely. You've got to keep the goal in mind.

Boy, isn't that the truth? All right. Well, Randy, thank you again.

All right. Thanks. So I hope you'll take some time this week to head on over to advancedfictionwriting. com. Sign up for Randy's e-zine. Check out some of the free articles there, especially the snowflake method article.

And whether you're a method writer, you know, kind of a formula writer or not, I think you're going to find some real value in looking at writing and novel design through the eyes of a theoretical physicist. So I hope you'll check that out. I'm considering doing something new with the show. Certainly not every week, but every once in a while. What I'd like to try is doing some on-air workshopping of some of your writing. I think it's going to be a great way to talk about some of the topics we've covered on the show and do some real-world work with how they show up in our writing and how we can maybe rework our writing to better utilize them.

So I hope you'll consider sending in just the first few pages of whatever it is that you're working on right now. What I'm envisioning is that we'll read it on the air. We'll talk about some of what you're doing well as maybe some of the places that could use a little bit of tweaking. And I'd like to maybe even have a conversation with you as the writer as a part of the show. If that's something you'd like to be involved in, I'd invite you to send your submission to feedback at the show's website. You'll also find that link over on the website at the Talk to Us link.

Now, be sure to include some contact info so that I can get in touch with you about maybe being on the show as part of the workshop. And again, certainly this won't be every week. It's not a new direction for the show or anything like that.

Weekly Challenge and Conclusion

But it is something I'd like to try a couple of times just to see how it goes, see if it's of value to you. Our weekly challenge this week, as you might have guessed, the challenge this week is to head on over to advancedfictionwriting. com and check out Randy's snowflake method. Then I'd like you to use step one. It's coming up with a single sentence for your novel or story. And try to do that for whatever it is that you're working on right now.

So we're kind of backwards engineering it a little bit today for our weekly challenge. But I think it's a great way to make sure that your story is focused, that it's compelling, and also kind of a way to hear what your book is going to sound like as your readers begin to spread word of mouth about it. In other words, what is the sentence they're going to use to describe what your book is about? Our wise word this week. We've had a really interesting discussion going on over on the website in the comments section of last week's episode. It's in response to the way that I close the show every week.

If you're familiar with the show, you'll know that I say that the best way to improve our craft is by writing. And I think the conversation kind of came from that, from the way I closed the show. And this is what Adam had to say. He kind of started off the discussion. He said, It's often said that in order to improve, a writer must write every day, or at least consistently. Besides writing, another hobby of mine is playing guitar.

As I learn how to play, I am often reminded by teachers, gurus, etc. that practice doesn't necessarily make perfect. If you are practicing something incorrectly, you will only learn how to do it incorrectly.

So I just want to thank Adam for sharing that on the website, and those of you who have chimed in on that. I love his analogy to playing guitar. As a guitar player myself, I realized that I learned most of what I know about guitar playing by sitting around jamming with other guitarists, you know, watching how they played, just watching what they're doing and learning from that.

So I think the writing and taking apart what they're doing and really setting their own work up against it to see how we can improve it. So, Adam, I appreciate that. Even having said that, I'm going to close the show the way I usually do, because I do believe that writing is key.

So, until next week, remember the best way to improve your craft is by writing and reading. That's what I'm off to go do, and I hope you're off to do the same. Let's get some words on paper this week, and we'll meet up again next week for another episode of the show's website. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing podcast with your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. We'll be back next week, but until then, join the conversation at the show's website.