the snowflake project

I’ve officially moved on to step 7 of TSM – full fledged character charts.

Kos’s chart is finished and live on the site. You can access it through his character page or go directly to it.

The chart I’m using (which I didn’t at all set up as a chart, but rather more like a questionnaire…) is fairly extensive. I stole it from this book, so you are welcome to steal it from me – but buying the book wouldn’t hurt either. I’ve met one of the authors, Tee Morris, and he’s a fantastic guy. You could do a lot worse than supporting him.

I’ve started in on Achi’s chart, and you’ll have that in a few days. Even just the first few items on the chart are very useful – it’s really important to know what your characters look like!

Sorry for the long delay – but the one page summary from Kos’s point of view turned into something more along the lines of three pages, and I’ve been suffering from a particularly nasty cold.

Anyway on Kos’s Character Page, you can find the whole story from his point of view. I’ll be following that shortly with a (hopefully) shorter version from Achi’s perspective.

I’m beginning to see how much material is hidden away in this plot, waiting to be unpacked in prose. It’s exciting!

I’ve completed step 3′s brief character sketch for Kos, my lead protagonist, over on the Characters page in the Story Bible section. Read it here.

As The Snowflake Method predicts, I now have to go back to the paragraph I wrote in step 2 and revise it slightly. That excites me. Not the prospect of having extra work to do, of course, but the fact that this process is really causing something resembling a story to take shape.

In addition – writing Kos’s story down in the form of a paragraph has told me about at least 2 other major characters I need to tackle, and I expect that those characters will project their own influence on the story at large.

Finding out what Kos’s motivation and goals are really helped me focus him as a character, as well as giving me an insight into what is really holding him back. This character sketch was actually fairly easy to write, which in my experience, means I have a good thing going.