… expand that sentence [from step one] to a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel. … Ideally, your paragraph will have about five sentences. One sentence to give me the backdrop and story setup. Then one sentence each for your three disasters. Then one more sentence to tell the ending.

And so, I try it.

Orphan Samuel and his tiger cub campanion, Ty, travel across the United States, entering sanctioned animal fights to earn funds. Their interactions with combat rival Kyle put the two against an underground organization known as the Solitary Rare. Their involvement with the Solitary Rare deepens when the two are offered sponsorship of a new product stolen from the organization. When the power the Solitary Rare seeks from Kyle is unleashed on Samuel, all his friendships are strained. As he recovers, a benefactor offers him a trip to Africa, but at a great cost unknown to Samuel. Once in Africa, Samuel and Ty go in search of what they’ve been hoping to find.

Is it bad that I’m rather unsatisfied with these, but cannot do any better? I’m trying to cut out everything not relevant to the main plot, but then the main plot just feels so bare to make it so consise.

Maybe I shouldn’t have used character names yet?

Take an hour and write a one-sentence summary of your novel. … The sentence will serve you forever as a ten-second selling tool. This is the big picture …

[This sentence is] the hook that will sell your book … to readers. So make the best one you can!

Recommendations are to keep it within 15 words, and to not include character names. It should involve the character with the most to lose and what he wants to win. So, what have I come up with?

An orphan and his cat cross the country in search of their missing parents.

Over an hour, and many variations went into that. And I’m very much not satisfied with it. Considering everything Samuel and his cat, Ty, go through, it’s hard to fit it into 15 words or less. To be honest, I don’t even know what to do with his parents. Originally he was going to find them, but that leaves the question of why they’ve been gone for this long. I have a few ways to answer that question, but nothing satisfactory for me. They need to be “lost” in Africa for ten years here…

Ingermanson writes,

Tie together the big picture and the personal picture. Which character has the most to lose in this story? Now tell me what he or she wants to win.

Samuel is the main character, so the line has to be about him, but does he have the most to lose? He’s already “lost” his parents. He’s trying to find them, or at least to find out what happened to them.

There’s also Kyle. The “bad guys” are after Kyle for a rare stone he has, something that belonged to his grandmother. Samuel simply gets caught up in it.

Midway in the story, the stone is destroyed, and Vicky enters. She needs funding so her grandfather’s research can be finalized, but the “bad guys” are after that research. This research is something major, and something her grandfather wanted to be completed. Samuel gets caught in this, as well.

By the final stage of the story, the “bad guys” have Ty, Samuel’s tigon cub, as a target. Samuel and Ty have been together for a decade (with a reason for Ty to still be a cub; it’s the dragon blood). Ty was the last gift to Samuel from Samuel’s parents from the time when they vanished. Ty is practically Samuel’s only true friend. But Samuel doesn’t risk losing him until near the end of the story.

I just don’t know how I can improve that sentence, but I don’t care for it.

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”.