Category Archives: Resources

Randy Ingerman has an excellent tutorial on writing, using a method he calls the “Snowflake method”.

I claim that that’s how you design a novel — you start small, then build stuff up until it looks like a story.  Part of this is creative work, and I can’t teach you how to do that.  Not here, anyway.  But part of the work is just managing your creativity — getting it organized into a well-structured novel.  That’s what I’d like to teach you here.

Step 1) Take an hour and write a one-sentence summary of your story.  Something like this:  “A rogue physicist travels back in time to kill the apostle Paul.”  (This is the summary for my first novel, Transgression.)  The sentence will serve you forever as a ten-second selling tool.  This is the big picture, the analog of that big starting triangle in the snowflake picture.

Step 2) Take another hour and expand that sentence to a full paragraph describing the story setup,  major disasters, and ending of the book.  This is the analog of the second stage of the snowflake.  I like to structure a story as “three disasters plus an ending”.  Each of the disasters takes a quarter of the book to develop and the ending takes the final quarter.  I don’t know if this is the ideal structure, it’s just my personal taste.

As someone who finds it hard to get words out on paper, I’ve personally found this method very helpful in organizing my thoughts.  Give it a try!

Yehuda Berlinger has posted a step-by-step article on improving the creative process – applicable to writers, game designers, inventors or anyone else who spends their time trying to come up with ideas.

2. Prepare your brain so that worth can flourish.

All ideas, thoughts, inspirations, inventions, and so on appear in your brain seemingly at random. The very subject of this article, the very words of this sentence, simply come to me. Why to me, and not to others?

The primary reason why worth comes to some people is that the groundwork is laid. Ideas come as a result of triggers in thought patterns. The more diverse the thought patterns, the more ideas you’ve been exposed to, the more relationship possibilities that can exist and appear.

If you never learn about the sky, the stars, the moon, or anything in outer space, you will never come up with an idea about how things in outer space interact. You may come up with an idea about outer space, but you will be re-treading ground that already exists.

Read it here at his blog (via Lifehacker).