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!"

I've got brain damage. I couldn't do that either. Unless I want the floor to look like my brain.

I always did it one fell swoop, though, and cleaned it up, rather than leaving it out.

A corkboard (a big one) would definitely be better.

I can't remember why I haven't tried the snowflake thing. I should read the description again.

I could SO not do that method. I'm one of the seat-of-the-pants writers he describes as shrieking at the thought of doing a Snowflake document. I'm not a pure pantser--I do know where this thing is going, just not precisely how I'm going to get there. And that's part of the fun, discovering the path between where I am now and that mountaintop of finished story on the horizon. In particular, I'd hate doing character descriptions and charts. I just can't imagine doing something so mechanical. At the risk of sounding all woo-woo about this, my characters are people. I don't build them, I know them.

Obviously, you do whatever works for you. As Jenny Crusie says, there are many roads to Oz. That one is just the polar opposite of the one I've been paving for myself.

OK, so I just finished the first of Conn Iggulden's GENGHIS series and went and found his website so I could check his backlist and so on.

He's my age! Dammit.

OK, I'm 37, so it's not all that surprising that there are people my age with books on the shelves. But...he has eight books out already, and I have a big fat zero. So I'm all irrationally jealous.