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Month: April 2024

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Social Media Writing Part 2

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on April 30, 2024

Getting to Social Media Writing Part 2

Let’s look at Social Media Writing Part 2? Er, I mean Social Media and Writing, Part 2.

More about the Chuck Wendig blog post, and my take on it all.

Recap from Social Media Writing Part 1

Let us return to our discussion. In the first part of this post, I talked about the current state of social media, more or less. Numbers are high. The avalanche won’t let up.

Now is the time to talk about you.

Yeah, you.

Your Definition of Success Will Define Your Book-Related Happiness. Choose It Wisely

What am I talking about?

What I mean is, if you go into writing thinking you’re going to become wealthy, stop right there, turn around, and go to actuarial school or something.

Actuarial?

Er, I don’t know. Bear with me, okay?

Just, don’t consider writing as a super-lucrative career. That is rare, which is why most of the people who have become wealthy from writing are household names.*

Furthermore, two of them, JK Rowling and Stephen King, both started in grinding poverty. They both played what I like to call Bill Roulette, where you have five monthly bills but only enough money to pay four. So you mentally spin a big wheel and choose who you’re going to stiff that month.

Although they probably both dreamed of making it big, I imagine their initial goals were things like paying all the bills or getting the transmission fixed on the car.

*Note: there are people who write to market and can do rather well. And you should see how much they spend on ads, promos, covers, etc.! If you get there, great. But do not expect to get there. It is a ton of work. In particular, if you have a day job, it is likely to be out of reach.

Icons

Think you’re going to become iconic, like Harper Lee? You might, yes. It’s not wholly outside the realm of possibility. But don’t go into writing with that as your primary goal. For you will surely be disappointed. Furthermore, before your death, how do you even measure iconic status? If it’s by number of books sold, then you’re back to the fame and fortune dream, supra.

SMART Goal Success FTW

Instead, try defining success in bite-sized terms. And try defining it objectively. Usually that means books sold or reviews obtained.

Goal: sell 50 books. Get 20 reviews. Average 3 1/2 stars or better on the reviews.

There. That’s reasonable, attainable, and measurable. It’s a good old SMART goal. And it’s useful, because at a certain number of ads, Amazon starts serving the link to your book in more places.

You may or may not want to add a time component, but I personally would not. Why not? Because you’ll just make yourself crazy with a self-imposed timeline.

What if, for example, your most devoted and reliable readers end up being middle schoolers? They might not have the time to read for pleasure during the school year. So if you limit your goal to the school year, you could end up feeling like a failure. And then summer would save you. So avoid the heartache and just excise the time element. You’ll be a far happier person.

Nobody Wants to See or Read a Nonstop Advertising Stream

Seriously. Stop doing that. That’s why people are on the Internet in the first place. If they wanted ads, they would be watching network television.

If the only thing you have to talk about is where to buy your book, then I’ve got news for you.

You’re boring.

So please don’t do that.

Instead, divvy up your time. And spend 30% or less of it on self-promotions. For your other time, take 40% for promoting others. And take no more than 30% providing more personal information. Don’t talk about the weather or your lunch, but if you just broke through writer’s block, I bet your audience would love to know that.

Me, I use my personal info percent and a bit of my promoting others percent by writing information/instructional stuff. You know, like this post.

Social Media Writing Part 2 Isn’t Done Yet!

Egad, I had no idea I would write this much! Time for part 3!

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Social Media and Writing

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on April 25, 2024

What is Social Media Writing?

Is there such a thing as social media writing? No, I mean both of them. Not the combo.

Social media and writing go together.

Kind of.

I read Chuck Wendig’s post on the two and I want to comment on it.

Basic Info That Can Help Anyone (Really!)

Let’s start with the basics.

Social media will not save a bad book

Unfortunately, it’s true. We have all seen the Twilight tropes, e. g. “still a better love story than Twilight”. My apologies to Stephenie Meyer, and to the people who enjoy her work. She caught fire because she hit a particular market extremely well. Social media did not fuel her success, at least not in the beginning. Although it probably did later, as people shared their joy on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Rather, her work did well, at least in part, because it hit the teen/tween girl market like a bull’s eye. Ever wonder why Bella Swan is so undeveloped with such a bare bones description? It’s so any young girl can dream of being her. Any girl of any race or height or weight or hobbies.

Her publisher, Hachette Book Group, also marketed the Twilight novels very well. At the time the fourth one came out, I received it (it’s called Breaking Dawn) as a bonus because I was working for Hachette in their IT department.

Some people get Thanksgiving turkeys. Some people get …

Er, sorry, Ms. Meyer. I don’t want to turn this into a bash session.

Rather, the point I am dancing around is: what if Ms. Meyer had blasted everything on Twitter and Facebook? What if she hadn’t had a good marketing department behind her? Then she probably would not have gotten so far.

Social media did not improve her works. It did not worsen them, either. Her success arose, for the most part, outside the realm of social media. And it did not save critics from savaging her work.

Converting from one platform to another is exceptionally difficult

You may be fantastic on LinkedIn but stink on X. You may be killin’ it on Wattpad but limping along on YouTube. Or you may even have tons of Facebook friends but few followers on your Facebook page.

True story. I read a lot (duh!). It’s all sorts of stuff. I read fanfiction, I read original writing, I read free stuff, I read NaNoWriMo novels. And I read the classics.

What often interests me is seeing works which are highly rated on GoodReads with so few sales on Amazon that they don’t get recommendations. But with enough sales, your book gets mentioned in those, “If you like __, you might enjoy ___” kinds of notifications.

I see people who are Wattpad gods and goddesses, cranking out tons of super-appreciated chapters and adored by hundreds of thousands of (presumably) screaming fans. Then they try to monetize their work, and it falls flat. New York Times bestselling authors, for real, only sell a few tens of thousands of works in any given week and they make the cut.

So why don’t these Wattpad writers with phenomenal read counts to an order of magnitude ten higher than that end up on bestseller lists?

Social media is a daily tsunami

Part of the reason? This right here. We are all inundated, every single day. Users upload over twenty-four hours of new YouTube content every second of every day. They have over one billion users. Facebook has over 1.7 billion registered users and over one billion of those people access the site on a daily basis. Therefore, Facebook considers them ‘regular users’.

The average number of Facebook friends currently hovers at around 150 or so. X’s users also number in the hundreds of millions.

Given all of these big numbers, you can’t blame organic reach decline on a platform trying to hide posts so you’ll pay for the privilege of advertising (although that’s part of it). It is also a sheer numbers game.

If you have 150 friends on Facebook and it’s your sole platform, you still can’t keep up with it all. If you go on Facebook for 150 minutes (e. g. two and a half hours), that won’t be one minute per friend, as you will inevitably read a headline, take a survey or quiz, like a comment, post a picture, or watch a video.

Social Media Writing – Takeaways

How does this apply to you, the indie author? Does social media writing matter? Stay tuned; I’ll keep covering it.

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Sharing Less

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on April 23, 2024

Sharing Less

Did you know that sharing less can help you out in dozens of ways? Because there is something to be said for mystery.

For a fan dancer’s artfully concealing fans, if you will. For a dark corner where the camera does not go, and where we do not allow others to see. Perhaps not even our lovers, our mothers, our children and, most assuredly, not our government.

Origins

This post is a riff on Learning Not to Share, an article by Rich Barlow in my alumni magazine, Bostonia.

Wait a second, oops! I just told you where I went to college. Better cover that up, and sweep it out of the way.

Oh no, wait! I just told you it was undergrad. Good thing I didn’t tell you one of my professors studied under Wittgenstein.

D’oh! I probably just gave away that I majored in Philosophy! Wait, I’ll come in again.

We Keep on Sharing

It is like this, over and over and over again online. We share. And we share again. And then we overshare. While the above few tidbits probably don’t tell you too much about me, there is plenty of additional information out there. There are plenty of minefields.

So, I might accidentally drop something whereby someone could steal a password, stalk me, take my identity, burgle my house while I’m away, etc.

Digital Nosiness

Stephen Baker, the author of The Numerati, talks about what essentially amounts to digital nosiness – too much information out there, and we’re all inviting it in.

And we do so in the name of greater security, or peace of mind. We want to make sure our teenagers are driving safely so we agree to put a black box in the car.

And we want to know that our elderly parents are all right (but we are not committed enough to move them home with us, or move to their homes or cities, even briefly), so we install sensors in their beds to make sure they get out of them every day.

So then, as privacy erodes, we accept more and more of these intrusions until they are no longer seen as intrusive. And a privacy (and shame!) tradition that harkens back to biblical times is canned in favor of The Age of TMI.

Stop Volunteering Information

Is it possible to shut the barn door, when the horse has hightailed it for the next county? Sadly, probably not. But this oversharing is nothing new. I well recall, when I was practicing law (uh oh, another identifier!), prepping witnesses for depositions.

E. g. if the opposing counsel asks, “Were you driving?”, the answer is yes, no, or I don’t remember. It is not, yes, and the car is blue. If the lawyer wants to know the color of the car, she’ll ask. Don’t volunteer anything.

Yet, inevitably, people would do just that – they would volunteer all sorts of stuff. The vast majority of it was completely harmless. However, every now and then, it opened up different things, and drew others into question.

Or it got the whole thing onto some wacky tangent and it then became hard to throw a lasso over the proceedings and get them back to the matter at hand.

And a deposition, once, which was going to take maybe 45 minutes took the better part of a week as a witness and opposing counsel kept feeding one another more digressions.

This was even after I repeatedly told the witness to just stick with answering the actual questions and nothing more.

This tactic, by the way, did not, ultimately, harm my client or help the opponent. All it did was make the matter stretch out that much longer. And, I am sure, it nicely increased my opponent’s bill.

I was on salary – a deposition could take three years and I would not make any extra money. Dang, there I go again, oversharing!

Wiping Away Shame

Some sharing, particularly in the face of things that have been taboo for too long, seems to be, to me, to be a very good thing. Take, for example, the physical demands and changes that go along with weight loss.

In the interests of full disclosure, this is a subject rather near and dear to my heart.

So I put it out there – the fact that stretch marks don’t really go away and what post-weight loss plastic surgery is really like and how sometimes, no matter how much you want to convince yourself otherwise, the oatmeal just does not taste one bit like fried chicken.

I think that this kind of oversharing can have a true benefit. Give hope, or at least some amusement and information. And trample away shame until it’s gone.

But there is plenty more out there where that came from, and it is often all too much, and it can be damaging. Give away too much and you are the naked fan dancer, all out of fans.

How to Strike a Balance by Sharing Less

So my suggestion is: tread lightly, and as wisely as you can, and ask yourself: will this information do more harm than good? Will it hurt me or my family?

So, even if the answer to both questions is no, my advice is: consider it and weigh it anyway. And decide, one way or the other.

Do this based upon reasoned understanding and not on expediency, or going along to get along, or trying to be cooler than everyone else in school. Above all, do not sleepwalk and step backward into these kinds of giveaways.

If you are going to toss aside that last fan, at least look your audience in the eye when you do so.

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How Social Media Can Ruin Your Life

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on April 18, 2024

Do You Know How Social Media Can Ruin Your Life?

Woo doggy, social media can really do it to you.

Oh. My. God.

You did WHAT???!?!?!?

Quick, lemme tweet it!

No, I’ll take a picture and upload it to Instagram.

And I can’t forget to blog it!

This kind of gaffe deserves a Facebook post, too!

Really?

So you know what’s it like. You post a selfie taken at the ballgame. Except you told your boss that you were home sick, with the flu. You were supposed to be with your significant other. But, oops, you checked into Foursquare. With your friend. You know, the one with benefits. Or maybe you rant against your kid’s soccer coach on Twitter. And he calls you out on it.

Hence in May of 2014, The Boston Globe presented a half a dozen ways that social media can ruin your life.

And the article presents some boneheaded moves, including a poor choice of a Halloween costume (because evidently the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing are a laugh riot to someone out there), a Candy Crush addiction, and some poorly thought out tweets.

You Did What?

I’m sure that the following will, eventually, be the kinds of behaviors that could be added to a successor article (Note: some of these are real, some are speculative. I won’t name names. So you decide whether any of these have really happened, or are still in the ‘maybe’ column):

  1. How about claiming a permanent injury for your lawsuit and then checking in from a dance contest
  2. What about a court-ordered Gamblers’ Anonymous meeting blown off for a trip to the track – and a selfie with the dogs or horses running their hearts out in the background.
  3. Or dissing your ex, big time, on Facebook or Twitter, and your child growing up to read your sunshiny status updates.
  4. And then maybe a job interview, as you tout your fine record of academic achievement, with old Instagram photos of you showing off your barely passing C-average transcript.
  5. Finally, politicians caught with underage drinking photos, sexting, pictures of their junk, and a panoply of other nuggets of oversharing.

I love social media but man oh man, people! Have a little self-control and some common sense.

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The Cyber Legacy

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on April 16, 2024

The Cyber Legacy

What’s your cyber legacy?

Introductions

So you find a new site. You look around. And you think – this looks like a place I might like. Therefore, you take the plunge and you register.

And it doesn’t really matter if it’s Twitter, or Facebook or Able2know. If it’s big enough, it scrolls and leaps by so fast that you can barely get your arms around it. And in the beginning, that can be incredibly exciting.

However, after a while, it’s a bit too much. So if you want to hang around and have a more meaningful interactive experience than complaining about the weather, you end up finding yourself some sort of an enclave. I’ve covered this before, actually.

Life Online

You find your niche, whatever it is. And you start spending time with people. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, be it playing fantasy sports, or comparing notes as new mothers, or trading rumors about the next season of Doctor Who. What matters is, you’ve found your peeps.

And that’s when it can get kind of complicated.

Transitioning to the In-Person Experience

My husband and I once met a fellow we had know for a few years from online. He was passing through Boston on his way home from Maine. And one thing he mentioned was – my online friends and my offline friends are pretty well-integrated. I like that.

After all, consider some of my closest friends who I didn’t meet online. Most of them either attended school with me at some stage or another, or they worked with me. In some fashion or another, we hit it off. However, the same is true of the cyber world, is it not? You meet someone, and you hit it off with them, and you thereby become friends.

No great mystery there. The only remarkable thing is that the lines are being forever blurred between people we met physically first, and people we physically met later, if at all. And we care less and less about how we met our friends, these days.

Cyber Mourning

With cyber friendships – as with all friendships – there can be loss. And we all know that it is going to happen sooner or later. A voice will be stilled, a timeline no longer updated. We may or may not know the correct or full name. We may never have heard that person so much as speak on a video or on the telephone. Yet we feel a sense of loss just the same.

I have found that, as this has happened on Able2know (and it has happened several times now, a function of both the size of the site and its skew in the direction of more elder demographics), people have wanted to rally around. It is not necessarily a formal obituary type of posting or topic.

Instead, it can be a topic that’s more like a wake in its layout, verbiage and intent. There is no real template for this. You just go with what works. And recognize that there are people who grieve in their own ways. There may even be hostility (“You were never kind to him until it was too late!”) or one-upmanship (“I got to meet her in person!”).

Internet Afterlife and a Cyber Legacy

The If I Die app allows for a final status update once three people (you choose them) confirm to the service that you’ve shuffled the mortal coil off to Buffalo. It almost seems like a video will, where the rich uncle leaves everything to his parakeet and, while the cameras are rolling, also tells the assembled family that they’re all wastrels.

But it’s not just that. It’s also – look at the data that’s out there. What sort of a legacy are we leaving for future generations?

A tour through Facebook reveals an awful lot of appreciation for cute cats who can’t spell, George Takei and political soundbite memes.

And if future generations only look at that (which might happen, as it could very well be the only thing that survives long enough and is complete enough), they might just that cyber legacy and feel we are rather shallow people indeed.

Forums Tell a Different Story

However, if they dig into communities, I think they’ll see a rather different picture. A picture of real caring. Of reasoned and impassioned debate.

Or of rabid fandom. Of people who help each other by answering questions or offering advice on things like repairing a fan belt on a ’68 Buick or ridding a computer of spyware. And of some fall on the floor humor as well.

So, what footprints and fingerprints will you leave behind for your cyber legacy? And what digital fossils will await future archaeologists’ discovery?

What will the people of 3024 think of us? What’s your cyber legacy going to be?

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Why Use a Screen Name?

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on April 11, 2024

Is There Any Good Reason to Use a Screen Name?

So, a screen name – good idea, or no? Particularly in the age of Facebook and the real names requirement.

I was inspired by this post in Angela Connor‘s blog. If you don’t know Angela Connor, I urge you to check her out; her blog is extremely insightful and is still one of my favorites.

Her ideas make a great deal of sense, and I think some of this is why the Blizzard forum experiment in real names for users was such an immediate and egregious flop.

Masks

The ’net, like it or not, is for many people a place of masks. You pretend to be younger and thinner than you are. Or you pretend to be unmarried. You pretend to be a Klingon. Or you’re a teenager and pretend to be an adult. Or you pretend to be another gender or richer or lovelier or more conservative or whatever.

And the masks can be freeing to many. Perhaps they were freeing when the ancient Greeks donned them while performing Oedipus Rex for the first time. I think there is more of a place for them than perhaps we’d all care to admit. Because there seems to be a value to being able to spread war paint (or lamp black) on one’s face, or wear a Halloween costume.

Screen Name Unreality

And this is not the same as our reality. It is related but not identical. Maybe the librarian who goes out for Halloween dressed as a dance hall girl wants to be known as someone who takes risks (and maybe foolish ones, at that). But when the morning after rolls around, she’s back in the library helping others do research.

A Screen Name Allows for (Somewhat) Anonymous Commenting

This kind of anonymous commenting allows for something like this. Because the sympathetic guy who’s really seething inside gets to call people out. He gets to be a bully and be an all-around racist jerk (I have worse names, but don’t wish to besmirch my blog) behind one screen name.

But then he surfs to a different site where he can chat up the ladies with his sensitive New Age guy demeanor, all behind another screen name. And then when the time to log off comes, he goes home and kisses his wife and plays with his children. And this is all one guy.

Facebook and Screen Names

To comment openly through a full, correct name (usually) medium like Facebook would be to cut off the dance hall girl. And it would stifle the racist jerk, the ladies’ man, and any number of other secret selves in favor of a drab and ordinary world. Even on a news site, which is pretty much the definition of drab unless there’s some sort of a hot story, the jerk, the dancer and the Romeo all want to be free.

Still, Facebook has been a runaway success. But some of that is still screen names. A person with Au at the end of their name is identifying to all and sundry that they are on the autism spectrum. I have seen last names like Lionchaser and Orange and Juneberry. The chances are extremely good that none or most of these are real.

But does that actually matter, in the grand scheme of things?

Who’s Real?

But we shouldn’t take their opinions as seriously as the real people. Because, even though those personae live in real people’s skins, it’s the real people who vote, marry, pay taxes, work, make the news and are members of our real society.

The trouble is telling them apart and knowing which one is real.

Can you always tell? I bet you can’t. Not always.

ChatGPT Adds to the Confusion on Screen Names and More

Beyond whether the name is real, are the posts real these days? A friend who runs a writing contest just had to jettison a few entries because they were written by AI.

AI is only going to get better and better—and more unnerving—as time marches on.

We may very well look back on questions about screen names as being a quaint little hiccup. You know, right before the Apocalypse.

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Social Media Balance

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on April 4, 2024

Social Media Balance

Social media balance is sometimes elusive. Yet much like everything else, social media needs to be balanced. Too much, and you’ll alienate your readers. And too little, and they’ll wonder if you’re still alive.

I’ll confine my comments to just blogging, Facebook and Twitter. Of course there are other outlets, but let’s just look at those three.

Too Much

During the 2012 Christmas season here in Boston, the oldies station began broadcasting all-day Christmas music early. How early?

So it was, if I am recalling correctly, before Veterans’ Day. Egad, it was awful. And then of course other radio stations also began their regular broadcast of holiday music. So it was very hard to get away from it all.

Now, lots of these songs are lovely. This is not me slamming religion – don’t misunderstand me. Rather, it was just … c’mon already! Because it was way too much!

It was not festive. Instead, it annoyed people (not just me!). And the same can be said of social media. If you’re a small outlet, a tiny company, a Mom and Pop operation, here’s a little secret. You don’t need to constantly tweet and update Facebook.

Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Overdo It

  • You’ll oversaturate the people you’re trying to endear, and they’ll turn off to your message.
  • And you’ll burn out.
  • Also, you’ll run out of things to say.

Not Enough

It continually amuses me when people say something like, “I have a blog.” And they’ll post their link. However, the last time they updated was 13 months ago, or more, or they’ve never updated. Or it’s a Twitter stream with three tweets, and the account is over a year old. Maybe they have a Facebook page with nearly nothing on it.

Given the number of abandoned accounts, and the number of deceased persons’ accounts on Facebook and the like, followers might be wondering. Have you gone to the great computer room in the sky?

Per my SEO pal Garit Boothe, best practices is to keep everything fresh to the tune of nothing being over 3 months old (so, posts are updated and re-released at later dates).

Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Underdo It

  • Your readers will leave you, big time. They may be loyal but today’s audiences are also pretty fickle. You’re no longer shiny and new. So they leave.
  • Google still indexes abandoned accounts, although the information is out of date. And it can sometimes end up making you look worse than not having a social media presence at all.
  • You show, essentially, that you no longer care about your subject matter. So why should anyone read what you write at all, if even you don’t believe in it?
  • The algorithms will smash your site into smithereens.

While the exact, perfect information on any algorithm is proprietary and kept secret from us hoi polloi, one thing is certain. Newness counts. No posting means you’ve got nothing new going on. And it will push your site down in rankings on Google and YouTube. Facebook also values recency. And as for Twitter? No one will be able to find your stuff.

Seeking Social Media Balance

It’s rather Zen, I suppose, to seek a balance here.

But how do you get it?

The easiest way is to consider the people who you follow where you just love their updates. They don’t seem forced or rushed, and they seem to come in, just at the right time.

Don’t think of really big wigs in social media, like George Takei, Shama Hyder Kabani, Wil Wheaton, Guy Kawasaki, or Ashton Kutcher, etc. Instead, consider your friends, colleagues, and neighbors, even if it’s people who aren’t making (or trying to make) a career out of social media.

Look at their Facebook walls and their Twitter streams and their blogs. What is it about how they handle those outlets that grabs you?

By the way, recognize that a person might be really good at one form of balance, but not at another. That’s not unexpected, as these are all rather different forms of media.

Your friend who crushes it on Twitter might be just plain awful on Facebook.

2 Reasons Why You Should Strike a Social Media Balance

  1. Posting too much at the beginning can lead directly to posting pretty much nothing later on, so spread things out over time, and you can avoid both issues simultaneously.
  2. Giving yourself a degree of posting responsibility can help you take it all more seriously. Of course you can (and probably should) be playful. But even the silliest of accounts have some form of a schedule, particularly if they’ve gotten large. They can’t just “forget” to post.

Schedule Those Suckers

  • If you’re really inspired and have a lot to say, that’s great! But unless it’s time-sensitive, use the scheduling features of programs like HootSuite. Or try Facebook’s own post scheduling feature. WordPress and Blogger both allow you to save drafts and schedule them to publish when you want them to. These functions are your friend.
  • Spreading the wealth over time will assure your readers that you’re not just some flash in the pan. It will also assure them that you’re still among the living.
  • Too many posts means that many of them will get lost in the shuffle. Too few means that they can loom large, and maybe seem more important than you think they should be. Spread the wealth, and you can avoid both problems.

One more thing about social media balance. While Tweeting, Facebooking, etc. should be mindful, it should also be kinda fun. Overdoing it means that you’re probably spending too much time online. While underdoing it probably means that it no longer interests you that much. Or, at least, what you’re posting and sending out to the universe has lost its luster.

Consider what either of those scenarios means to you. Because social media balance matters.

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Snowflake Novel Outlining Method Revisited

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on April 2, 2024

A Look at the Snowflake Novel Outlining Method, Revisited

Snowflake is but one method for outlining a novel. It’s not the only kind, and your methodology is probably best for you. But this is what I do. And it does not truly matter which genre I am writing in!

See, I do a variation on snowflake. Do this on paper. I’ve never been able to do it on a screen and I think paper gives some semi-permanent feelings. But if you can do it on a screen, then have at it. As always, you do you.

The First Snowflake Falls: Getting Started

1) Start with a concept. Let’s say the concept is that the world has run out of pumpkin spice.

2) Name a main-ish character (this can always be changed). So let’s go with a sapient chipmunk.

3) Write the main character’s name in the center of a page and circle it.

4) Write the concept down as well, maybe at the top of the page and circle it.

The Next Snowflake Will Fall: Making Connections

5) Draw 3 lines between them, but fewer if it’s a short story, more if it’s meant to be a series.

6) Along those lines, write possible connections. But don’t worry about them sounding stupid. Your sapient chipmunk might be hoarding it (and thereby is the villain). Another option is they might be searching for it as some sort of chipmunk holy quest. Or they might stumble upon it by accident.

It could be that they might have to pay it as ransom to the mean squirrel which kidnapped their baby chipmunks, whatever.

7) So now you’ve got more characters and more scene concepts.

Look, Another Snowflake: Supporting Characters

8) It’s time to grab a new page of paper. Same name in the center, circled. Now surround it with the names or at least descriptions of the other characters you came up with. In this case, the mean squirrel, whoever sent the chipmunk on the quest, whoever hid the pumpkin spice treasure our heroine stumbles over, the kidnapper, etc.

9) Draw connecting lines to the main character and, as before, write along those lines what the connections are. And do this even if you already have them written elsewhere. Otherwise, you’re going back and forth between pages, which is a pain.

Flurries: Supporting Scenes

10) Third sheet of paper: do the same with the concept and possible scenes. So these are scenes like the dramatic kidnapping, receiving the ransom note, a news story about the spice theft, the stumbling, etc.

More Flurries: Create Order (for the Scenes)

11) Fourth sheet of paper: take your scenes and put them in as coherent an order as you can and number them accordingly. Plus this can be changed. You’re just getting a rough idea here. So #1 kidnapper makes plans. And #2 spice is stolen; #3 meet the chipmunks, etc. Maybe you need to go back earlier to when the kidnapper first thought of the idea of kidnapping – that’s scene #0.

Hence maybe you want the news story between #2 and #3 – then rename it #2a and move on.

Snow Showers: Moving Onto Your Computer

12) Transcribe the scenes into a word processing document. I use Word; some people like Scrivener or Google docs, etc. In addition, continue to reorder the scenes and see where the filler and the exposition go.

13) Transcribe the character types and any names you’ve got. First of all, you’ve got to get across that the chipmunk heroine is sapient. So does she have an amazing backstory? Sketch it out, but do not feel married to it. Because it may or may not end up in the book.

Sometimes a backstory doesn’t need to be explicitly stated, but if you know your chipmunk was an escapee from a science lab, that might inform how you write her.

Just because you researched or thought of something, does not mean it absolutely must end up on the page.

I cannot stress that enough.

The Blizzard: Assign Tasks

14) Time to figure out who does what. Hence maybe the crow delivers the ransom note, or the wolf acts as the squirrel’s henchman and does the actual dirty work of kidnapping.

15) Keep refining and go back to the paper if you need to.

** Note: a lot of people who don’t like outlines feel they have to show every single little thing planned out. But this does not have to be true. Because all you really need is a general idea for a scene, like someone kidnaps the chipmunk babies kidnapped, pumpkin spice shortage reported in the news, etc. Just know what your scenes’ purposes are.

Post-Storm Clean-Up: Do You Really Need That Scene or Character?

A scene should have one of two purposes (it can have both):

1) Develop characters (particularly the main character) or

2) Advance the plot.

So any scenes which do neither should get scuttled or altered.

Lather, rinse, repeat. This is my version of the snowflake method. But it’s not the only way to write a snowflake novel.

And once again, for the cheap seats – you do you. Everyone else is taken.

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