Good Stuff

Sorry! I said I'd post about my awesome RWA meeting yesterday, but then I had no time. I actually spent the day shopping with a friend, and then I picked up the boys and stayed busy till bedtime. And then today, I had the best of intentions, but I was called to substitute at Mother's Day Out. A little bit tougher than I remember from last year. This was only the second day of school for the little two-year-olds, and there was a lot of crying. I also had a Kindergarten Cop moment when one little girl told me during lunch that babies come out of women's vaginas. Good to know.

So anyway...on to the Saturday presentation. Basically it was a combination of two really interesting ideas. One was the Snowflake Method by Randy Ingermanson, which is basically a way of building up your story from the bottom up. Start with a single, descriptive, carefully honed sentence that describes your WIP or the book you're wanting to write. This is your high concept to be used as a teaser for editors and agents, in promotional materials and on your website, for marketing and publicity, etc. When you're happy with your sentence, you move on to a paragraph describing your book. Then to paragraphs describing your characters. Then take each sentence of your summary paragraph and expand it into a paragraph and when you're through you'll have a one page outline of your book. You get the idea... I think I'll try this (or at least part of it) before I attempt Fast Draft on my next book.

The other part of the presentation was on screenwriter Michael Hague's Six Stage Plot Structure, which breaks a book down into three acts, with six stages, and five turning points evenly distributed throughout the story (a big boost for a sagging middle). There's also a rule of thumb, percentage-wise, on how far along in the story these things should happen. I'm comparing it to my current WIP and finding it a very useful way of looking at things.

So that's it, in a nutshell. Just tools for getting started and refining what you already have.