Playing around with the snowflake method of writing

I wrote in the previous post about how I'm moving up from freewriting into planned writing, themed writing etcetera where every post will generally have a purpose behind it [Unless I'm feeling crappy in which case more freewriting!]. And freewriting's not going away I'm just adapting the lessons I'll be learning to try to learn more advanced writing techniques. It's all about the technique and write now I've learned to float in the water barely. If the deep end is too scary there's always the float in the shallow end that's my place of comfort that I can come back to.

In any case, there's this technique called The Snowflake Method where you start with a single sentence summary of what you're going to write, and describe every part of it, and you keep on expanding every individual bit of it, and each individual bit further, create characters and characters out of characters etcetera until you have a complex fractal piece of work that began with one seed but now exists in a well-defined universe of its own. It' a pretty top-down approach meaning you first plan everything out and then start writing. Your characters and events can influence the story obviously but that happens after the fact, not as you write. This gives you the safety blanket of knowing where your story is going and what's happening next even if you don't know how you're getting there. You know it's all going to turn out well (for you, not necessarily for your characters hon hon hon). That seems comforting to me at this point anyway when it's unclear if I even have it in me to write an entire novel yet.

So here's the pointers. A checklist of the snowflake method is here. A detailed description of each step and how to execute is here. And here is a good list of writing templates like the snowflake method to get me started writing more easily. This is not going to be easy but it's going to be fun!

As long as I'm here, I should remind you that this is not going to be the only focused writing I'll be doing. Fable-writing (or some form of that) seems to be fun, short-stories would definitely be fun if I could write a proper beginning-middle-end with some substance. And there's so many other potential formats to try at. But no matter what I write or which technique I write, I'll be mindful about what exactly I'm doing and why I'm doing that at any point. That'll inform the direction the piece will take instead of the general rambling and meandering that's currently happening. Ohh dear the beer bees and the honey piece from yesterday I was so desperate. Great at getting something written down on the train when I was feeling tired and dizzy, crap at being about anything actually entertaining or informing.