Chicken Noodle Soup & Snowflakes

Homemade chicken soup.

With big noodles and lots of white meat, green beans, carrots and potatoes.

The kind of soup that makes a meal.

Mm-mmm, very good.

Neal put on his chef’s hat tonight and made a big pot of home made chicken soup as described above. We had a bowl of it, then he canned four quarts of it for later in the winter. What’s left will keep us going for most of the rest of the week. I just love those big batches of food!

It was well worth his effort, let me tell you!

While he was doing that, I was doing snowflakes. Not the kind that fall out of the sky, but the kind that result in a (hopefully!) well designed story. At least that’s what Randy Ingermanson says on his AdvancedFictionWriting.com web site.

The “Mad Professor of Fiction Writing” (the guy has a Ph.D in Physics, for goodness sake!) espouses the Snowflake Method of story design (you can read all about that here) for writing. He says it works best right at the beginning of the process, but can also be used to shorten rewriting time and reduce the number of rewrites necessary to get a polished manuscript.

I’ve been looking for ways to amuse myself until NaNoWriMo kicks in, so when a fellow author recommended this web site, I took a look. I subsequently printed the article, then spent most of the rest of the day developing my own snowflake design.

Rather than work with a brand new story, though, I picked up Parting Gifts, which I’m rewriting, and began working through the ten-step Snowflake Method.

Two things caught my attention right away.

The first was that I’ve been doing some of these things on my own for several years. Character development has always been a particularly favorite thing to do, so I spend a lot of time on that as a matter of course. When I read somewhere quite a long time ago to have my characters tell me about themselves, I started doing first person character biographies. Guess what. That process makes up two of the ten steps in the Snowflake Method.

Cool!

The second thing I found was that just working my way through about half of the steps today has revealed some problem areas and some potential problem areas with Parting Gifts. Things that would probably have been found and fixed with enough revisions, but that are now visible in the first draft.

I’m going to work through more of the process tomorrow, then maybe try it on something new. Something potentially NaNoWriMo. If that time schedule works out, I’ll have three days to do that, then it’s off to November and National Novel Writing Month.

If it doesn’t work, that’s okay, too. Trying new things is good.

Almost as good as home made chicken noodle soup!