Dreams & Dragons

So, it’s been a while, and I’ve got little to show for it.  Allow me to post what I have, then I’ll explain what happened.

Crynn saves Becca’s son, Erik, from a Crawler attack.  
Becca is almost caught with Cara in her home when Crynn shows up to tell her about Erik.  
Cara, ejected from the house ahead of schedule, wanders the town trying to avoid people while waiting for her rendezvous time, when a rival pirate gang attacks.
Crynn goes out to help fight off the pirates, and catches sight of Cara during the fight, but is unable to find her afterwards.
Becca uses one of her new inventions to destroy one of the pirate ships.
Cara escapes to her own ship, and begins planning retribution against the rival gang.
Crynn and Becca are debriefed about the attacks, and Crynn is assigned to hunt down the pirates.
Becca returns home and discovers that one of her inventions was stolen during the raid.
Cara has to deal with new crew members, as well as her second in command, who wants more technology before making any moves.
Crynn confronts Becca about information and inconsistencies that came to light during their debriefing that leads him to suspect she knows about Cara.
Becca tries to join Crynn in his search for Cara and the pirate attackers, and has to deal with her son.
Cara attacks the rival pirates, and is betrayed and captured.

So, this is the step wherein you’re supposed to expand each sentence of your plot paragraph into full paragraphs themselves.  That didn’t work out too well.  I spent two weeks trying to figure out how to do that.  I went back and forth in my mind, trying to work it out, and ended up incredibly frustrated.

The purpose of the Snowflake Method is to help you keep moving forward on your novel, and I hit a roadblock that prevented any forward movement at all.  Not good.

So, I took a step back and decided to approach this from a different angle.  I’ve got three main characters, and I’m taking a bit of advice from Michael A. Stackpole.  He recommends switching the POV character every chapter, rotating between your main characters, with the occasional NPC character as necessary.  (Yes, I’m mixing gaming vocabulary with my writing vocabulary.)

I don’t know if I’m going to want to stick to that kind of model for the long haul, but it’s certainly a good way to get started, I think.  However, I believe that model is also what was causing the roadblock.  I couldn’t wrap my mind around trying to make five intelligible paragraphs out of three converging story lines that will be constantly switched between.

When I took a step back, though, I saw another way around the problem.  The idea is to expand the story from a sentence to a paragraph to a page to a novel, right?  Well, I can fill that page by doing single sentence summaries of each chapter I intend, just as I can with multiple paragraphs about the plot.

So, that’s what we have here.  Each sentence is an intended chapter of the story.  Later, I can expand each sentence into a paragraph and each paragraph into a page and so on.  It’s not the most readable of documents, I’ll admit that.  But then, I figured out early on that posting this process online is going to be the equivalent of filming sausage being made.  I imagine it’s only going to get uglier from this point forward.

One other thing you’ll likely notice; the list’s not complete.  There’s a reason for this, but it’s going to be a bit of an involved explanation, and I need sleep.