It's taken me a while but I finally just passed the 10,000 word mark on the book I'm presently writing (lets call it project DARKSKY). It will end up being the first book that I've ever written and I'm excited to pass this initial landmark. Previous to this I've mostly written short stories and such but nothing as big as what I'm currently planning. When it's all said and done I'm expecting this to be just over 80k words, a little short maybe but I'll be stoked when I finally get there.
On just about everything up to this point I've been what some would call a seat of the pants writer, going in with an idea of what I want to make but largely flying blind and seeing where the story takes me. I recently finished a 20k word novella this way and found that I got stuck at many points, not really sure where I was going to go next. I wanted it to be different this time. Easier. So I decided to go with the snowflake method.
Overall I'm pretty happy with where it went. If you've never read through the snowflake method it's worth a read. Before I even sat down and wrote the first word of the story I had developed summaries of the story of various lengths (from one sentence to one page), character bios, location bios, and an entire outline of the story. I feel like I really have a plan in place and it should help drive me towards finishing without ever getting stuck.
Now I'm just crunching my way through the outline, writing each item piece by piece, racing towards the finish line. Have any of you out there ever written with the snowflake model? If so what were your experiences with it?
