Tonight starts a process that I haven’t done before.  Tonight…I start outlining a novel.  At this point, I’ve got full-length drafts of four novels: Rust, End of the Line, Ragnarok, and Conqueror Worm.  In each case, I walked into the novel having a vague idea of where everything was going, but never really knew how I was going to get there, or even what the end would be in all cases.  Rust is a murder mystery where I only figured out who the murderer was halfway through the first draft.  I can’t say that’s not the way novels are written, because clearly it has worked.  Somehow.  But this new novel is different.  It’s more complex.  It’s the kind of thing where I can’t just dance blithely into a blank page and start writing.

I need to know where I’m going.  I need a map.  So, thus, I need to start by making one.

I’m going to attempt a process called the Snowflake Method, as it feels very organic to the way I approach things, and lets me be as fiddly as detailed as I want to be before I get started.  It’ll be a modified approach, I know, but it’s at least some way to get my brain to start thinking in terms of breaking the story down into workable chunks, and then writing them.

The novel, I’ve mentioned it here, and at CVS (2.0 in the house) is called Capsule.  Step one of the snowflake is a sentence of no more than 15 words meant to provide the highest level most abstract view of the novel.  Think of it as opening Google Earth and seeing the globe just sitting there, waiting to be zoomed in on.  It’s earth, there’s no question, but there is so much more hiding that needs to be explored.

A greusome murder forces a detective to explore the horrific underbelly of a utopic future.

Fifteen words exactly.  Let’s do this thing.