Good fiction doesn’t just happen, it is designed.
This is how Randy Ingermanson begins his discussion on novel design in his article, How to Write a Novel: The Snowflake Method. I’ve found the snowflake method to be very effective, so I’ve decided to apply it to a story I started years and years and years ago, and every now and then write a little bit more to, or clean up what I have.
The story in question is “Dragon Blood”. It started out as a Pokémon fanfic, set in the United States (and the original working title was literally “Pokémon USA”). When it became a greater story than the world I had it constrained in, I ported it over to “the real world”, but I kept the “battling monsters” twist (replacing monsters with animals).
At one point, I decided I wanted those animals battling to have a higher intelligence than most animals, and I set it out that these animals had been infused with the blood of dragons. However, no one knows about dragons, except for various reports that have been kept “hush hush”.
So, how do we get from no one knowing about dragons to animals infused with dragon’s blood and still have people not know about dragons? The “bad guys” work for a large and powerful organization which has been researching and testing dragon blood, so it would be possible for and “accident” to result in some animals having dragon blood get into their system. But…how does this account for animals all across the country? Or the world?
My leading theory is that this organization is international, and the storage method they used for the dragon blood was pretty much the same in all faciliites. However, unknown to anyone in the organization, the stored dragon blood that sat around the longest was seeping through the containers, and into underground water streams. When drank by animals, they become “infused” with dragon blood. When drank by humans, it’s deadly, but simply filtering the water will remove the dragon blood.
So, maybe I can make that work. But what about the rest of the story? There are still lots of parts that need to be reworked, or (horror of horrors) scrapped completely. It’s only recently that I finally came to a resolution and decided that characters Vicky and Jenna do not have animals of their own to battle with. They were Pokémon trainers in the original concept story, but it doesn’t work out in what the story has become. That’s one of the parts that has been “easy” to deal with, taking maybe only six months of playing with ideas here and there to resolve it.
February of 2009 will be my “Snowflake Dragon Blood Month”.