for the challenge: As she gets ready to move, she wonders if she should take them all; the fake furry creatures that shared her youth. Mickey and Minnie, Snoopy, lions and Easter rabbits. She loves animals but has only recently had her own pet, and every time she had a pang for her childhood cat, she added to her plush menagerie, and now it’s quite a zoo. There is a story attached to each one: holidays, zoo visits, the friends that gave them to her. But it seems kind of like tearing some hearthrob’s photo out of a magazine and planting big lusty kisses on it, at her age, to carry that stuff around again. Maybe she should pass them on and let some other girl make her own story.

If I'm right in thinking I'm writing a 500-page book, I've finally reached the halfway mark.

t exhausted but happy writer flops down and peers off into the distance to see if the end is really in sight

Somebody pointed me to this interesting method/exercise.

The Snowflake Method

I may give it a try. Anybody else heard of this or used it?

Oh, yeah, Joe. A bunch of writers I know up here have been using -- I think we had someone do a workshop on using it at one of our RWA meetings.

I haven't tried it myself, although I have tried something sort of like it once.

I haven't tried it myself, although I have tried something sort of like it once.

How did whatever you tried work out for you?

It was a really interesting jumping off point. The method is sort of ... mathematical, which sounds weird (especially for me, god knows), but it's a way to quickly jumpstart a plot.

What you do is decide "I want to write a 400-page book." (You could also use word count. I like page counts better.) Obviously, you need to know your basic characters and their basic conflict, or whatever the seed for the plot is first.

Then you decide roughly how many chapters you want, how many scenes per chapter, etc. To make it easy, let's say 20 chapters, 20 pages each, four scenes per chapter.

You take an index cad for each scene, and then decide how many POVs you'll use. Two? Three? How many scenes from each POV? You split up your index cards into piles for each, and then just start brainstorming scene ideas. Example: Jane's POV, Jane meets John at the laundromat, and is impressed by his well-behaved penguin.

You don't have to do it chronologically. You can write a card from Petunia the Penguin's POV, even if you don't know where it will fit into the plot later. When you're done, you spread out all of the cards, and work them into a story, or some sort of logical progression.

This is, like, a massive oversimplification, but it really is kind of that easy. When I did it, I had to plot a book quickly, no fucking around, and while half of what I had on the notecards didn't make it into the book, I had the overall structure. I had given myself a big pictures, and I was able to see where I needed to turn left, or describe an event from someone else's POV.

Did that help, Joe? I can try and explain it better, if you want.

No, I got it. I did something similar plotting a movie with a comedy group I worked with in L.A.

I just don't have a corkboard.

I'ma try this Snowflake thing and see if that helps.

I didn't use a corkboard. I used, um, the floor.

Oh.

Well, between the Punk and the World's Stupidest Dog, I don't think the floor would work so well for me.

"Where's Chapter Twelve? Why is Chapter Twelve covered in brown marker and dog drool? What was it doing in the DVD player?

I NEED MY OWN OFFICE!"