the snowflake project

The Deep Theme

In my first post, I mentioned that the central theme of this story is going to be focused around PERCEPTION. I want the novel to acknowledge that things are rarely what they seem to be, that the forces driving behavior are often hidden deep below the surface. Many aspects of the protagonist’s journey will involve looking deeper, piercing the veil of perception, as it were.

To that end – some of the major plot points will have to revolve around people thinking one thing, but the reality being something different. Smoke and mirrors. I’ll have to keep this theme in the forefront of my thoughts as I write.

I already have some ideas on how to bring this theme to life through various aspects of the story – I’m looking forward to developing those.

Length

First time novel writers obsess about length. It’s thought of as a major factor in a book’s marketability to a publisher. That may be true, but that truth is a sad fallacy (see, already elements of my deep theme are poking through!). Books that are long cost more to print and distribute – and typically cannot be sold for more than other, shorter books, and therefore have a slimmer profit margin. That’s why you’ll often hear that first time novelists should keep to under 90,000 words. I disagree – for a few reasons.

First off, your story needs the number of words it needs. If it’s a good story, people will buy it, and so will a publisher. That’s the old argument. The new argument has two prongs. The first prong is that more and more people are buying and reading ebooks these days, so printing costs needn’t enter into the equation, or at least, not as strongly. The second prong is that it’s becoming somewhat more acceptable to self-publish – and as that’s my plan with this novel (since I’m writing it in public and offering it for free) I don’t give a fig what any publisher thinks at this point.

But thinking of length raises another issue – that is, how much of the story should I tell? I have something of an arc in mind – should I tell the whole thing in one volume, or should I split it up into a series? Because of the way The Snowflake Method works, that’s a decision I need to make now, before I start Step 1.

In the end, it was thinking about Step 1 that helped me decide to write in volumes. The story I have in mind is too big to be condensed into a 15 word sentence.

The Beginning

The fact that I’m already thinking about how to distill my story for Step 1 makes me think I’m ready to begin. Expect an announcement soon that I’ve officially begun writing a novel using The Snowflake Method – and stay tuned for the result of Step 1, which will appear somewhere in the Story Bible area of the site.

The first step in The Snowflake Method is to write one sentence that communicates the essence of the story, in 15 words or less, if possible. Well I can’t do that until I’ve done a great deal of thinking about what sort of story I want my novel to tell. So before Step 1, comes Step 0.

3 Cornerstones

I know three major things about my novel:

1. It will be a fantasy novel
2. It will be an epic physical and metaphysical journey
3. It will be about looking through what SEEMS to be, and finding what really IS

So from those three points, I can determine my genre, the fact that my novel will be jointly driven by plot and by character development, and I have a central theme. That’s a great start to Step 0, but I need a lot more.

Setting

I started thinking about the fantasy genre in general and how much the fringe of the genre is stretching, and how many different ways you can tell a fantasy story. There’s high fantasy, portal fiction, dark fantasy, steampunk, magical, non-magical, modern fantasy, and so much more! I’ve settled on a slightly non-traditional version of high fantasy for my setting.

I enjoy portal fiction just as much as the next geek, but something about writing portal fiction seems like a bit of a cop-out. It makes finding excuses for exposition way too easy. How am I supposed to explain the strange and wonderful workings of my amazing world to my readers? I know! I’ll make the main character a normal person, just like them, who needs everything explained! It also seems just a little too easy to fall into the trap of making the main character too much like me – after all, he’d be a normal guy from my universe. I like the challenge of writing a story completely contained within a world of my own creation.

I know there will be magic – in fact, I’m fairly certain it will play a very large role in the story – however, magic will be rare. I’ve learned from role-playing games, that deciding something like this up front is vitally important to the integrity of the story being told.

My departures from the typical high fantasy setting will be as follows:

1. A smattering of steampunk
2. A somewhat non-traditional look at the standard fantasy races

Characters

I’ve given some thought to the protagonist – and the fact that his story will be a journey. It’s a bit of a cliché in fantasy fiction, especially high fantasy, to make the protagonist a village boy or a farmer who dreams of world travel and adventure, and then finding some way of actually getting him out doing amazing things. I like stories like this; they work. If the protagonist is already somebody important, most people will have a harder time empathizing with him. However – I don’t want to go the country bumpkin with big dreams route. That’s where I draw the line.

My protagonist will be committed to his life – more likely in a city than in the country. He’ll have a lot of reasons to stay – and he’ll go off into the great unknown against his will. More on him later.

As for the other characters – I haven’t yet given them much thought. I’ll need a companion (or two) for my hero, as well as potentially a love interest. I’ll need someone to act as a sage as well. I’ll need a villain, of course, as well. Are there other big character shoes that need filling? Probably – let me know in the comments.

I think that’s enough to chew on for now. I’ll most likely post a “part 2″ of Step 0 soon with a little more initial planning.