As of today I have six of the ten stages of the Snowflake for my NaNoWriMo book done. Next up is stage 7 – detailed character charts. This is an expansion on stages 3 (1 paragraph character summary) and 5 (full page paragraph summary, incl POV exercise).
I have three major characters, two important secondary characters, a couple of bit players, and one which can’t make up her mind. She keeps wandering in and out of the main story depending on whose POV I’m thinking about. Hopefully stage 7 will help me clarify her role in things.
Stage 8 – a scene list – I know I want to this do roughly. I’m not sure I’ll take it as far as Randy recommends, and put it in a spread sheet – but maybe. I’m actually looking forward to this stage, getting to have a good look at the bones of the book. I think I’ll do the initial run of this on index cards, so that it will be easy to re-arrange scenes and think about how they should flow.
Stage 9 I won’t be doing – trying to write a scene narrative version of the book before I start writing the book itself just seems….. excessive. I think it’s a valuable technique to have in my tool kit though – it will probably be helpful when I get stuck on scene transitions.
Stage 10. First Draft. This starts November 1st!
Knit-Write 