Snowflaking my own story. - Writers Forum

suzakugaiden · 09-06-2005, 05:46 PM

I figured I'd give this a shot.

BTW, Ilya, since I know you're going to look here: I don't recally seeing "i" in cyrillic when I was taking a brief glance at russian, but I've seen it in a lot of Ukranian names. Is that a regional thing or is my memory fuzzy?

That aside.

I slammed this method, I guess. It still doesn't seem great to me, but it IS useful for generating blurbs and summaries.

Also, hopefully it can be an example of what snowflake looks like in practice.

Okay. Here we go.

Conifer: The Legend of Appalachia and New Mecca

Explanation on the Name: Conifer refers to both the high presence of coniferous plants in the story’s many lush forests and also to the general undying nature of the character’s souls/essences. Appalachia refers to a mountain chain and coastal plain in my story, which is not called Appalachia but is similar to real-world Appalachia. New Mecca is, I’ve realized in the past week, New Orleans, and is a city in the west in my story, were the characters all end up.

Step 1:

A group of high school students abandon their homes and join with a priest-like figure who makes great promises, but abandons the teens when they need him the most.

Step 2 (Actually, this is probably 5. I'll sort it out eventual):

When the city-state of Ekkad fell to the armies of a genocidal demagogue, the 11-year old Elaeus and Dias were forced to flee as refugees. Now sixteen, Elaeus, Dias, and their new friends must return to the rebuilt city to attend their second year of highschool. Being teenagers, they get caught up in the normal sort of teenaged melodrama and issues. Elaeus, Dias, and Zane help sort out a love triangle between Darian, Cicera, and Guis, three natives. Ciel later falls for Darian, and in the process begins to doubt her sense of self. Zane meets a guy called Julian and they form a band, and both tend to clash with their teachers, especially over history. Dias is faced with paranoia and anxiety over the town’s bloody history, at the same time meeting another student named Bran and developing an odd relationship with him. Gwen tries to find ways of being cheekily subversive and incongruously cute. Elaeus, of course, tries his best to remain objective and friendly to everyone, even though he’s growing impatient with every flaw in society.

However, tragedy, as it always does, strikes. When Zane and Julian are bumming are the town of Vykksalus during holiday, they split up. Julian has the misfortune of wandering into a monorail station, which blows up for various reasons. Zane wanders the city for the next two days, and then learns that he’s to attend school in the Chardsi, where he has some living relatives that gain custody of him somehow. End part one.

Zane comes to the Chardsi, hellbent on either saving the world or exploding in the process. He interferes with several of his new peers, introduces bizarre philosophies, and continues to piss off the history teachers. All is going moderately well. However, one day, a group of students begins to protest a foreign war that the nation is involved in. Soldiers come in to control the picketers, but it turns deadly when shots get fired. The town erupts into chaos immediately and secedes. This precludes a bit of a civil war. After accidentally getting mixed up in a bit of conspiracy, Zane wisely gathers his friends and leaves the town.

Things aren’t much better back in Ekkad. Tensions over the Chardsi incident have left people nervous, and the Vykksalus tragedy isn’t helping either, and some people are calling for war, blaming it on the neighboring country of Mingo. Even the students in Ekkad are feeling it. Guis is falling into a crazed religious fervor and growing violent, for instance, and ultimately ends up shooting up a few people in his dorm. Class goes on despite the shootings, and the eventual lengthy blackouts that seem to be occurring. Eventually, a strange priest named Cotton Todd (Cotton as in the plant, Todd as in male fox.) arrives, with Zane and a few others, one of which is a boy who looks exactly like Julian and doesn’t have a name, in tow. The mains join up with him and he leads them off, because Cotton proclaims to be entirely invincible.

He notes that society seems to be collapsing, and that he might have a method of saving/redeeming/showing them a way, and he explains that he plans to do it in the Guinan capital of Bouarc. There are three important stops on the way.

First, the Ualframzijr Pension House. He knows the people there, and they might actually be his parents. They spend the night there. However, Elaeus gets into something hallucinatory while there – not sure WHAT, not sure how – and people with guns surround the building, although the latter is impossible to prove. Zane and Gwen become very close during this.

Second, the town of Vargosta, which was emptied out by a power plant disaster some time earlier. Since then it’s grown relatively less radioactive and safe to live in (species in world has a higher tolerance for radiation [alternatively, use an exploding but non-radioactive power]). Since then, it’s become a home for madmen, highwaymen, painters, and barstool philosophers. I’m still undecided what happens here, other than Zane delivering a dissertation on what the Tragedy of Vargosta was, and why it’s probably responsible for everything that happens. Relate to essentialism somehow.

It ends in Hantresanc. They arrive on their own, and Cotton never shows up. They ultimately make their final revelations about their own place in the world, and decide where they should go from there.

(Considering also a coda involving Julian in the afterlife).

Step three: coming later

Stewart · 09-06-2005, 05:50 PM

The Russian equivalent of our 'i' sound comes with the following character: Ы

Verago · 09-06-2005, 06:49 PM

Hey, I remember Cotton Todd from one of your posts on immortality...he's the "Cotton Todd Cotton Todd Cotton Todd..." dude, right?

Sweetness.

suzakugaiden · 09-06-2005, 07:36 PM

Possibly, although I'm never really sure how sarcastic I'm being or not. Not even sarcastic. Just making stuff up. I mean, I was passionately debating something about politics today, and it's not even something I believe in OR know about, and I didn't realize this for awhile :(

That and the whole summary for this sounds really retarded because it's difficult to describe the sort of bizarre meta-action and whatnot present :/

BTW, http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/4747/alphabet.html <- Ukranian DOES have the i. I guess it replaces that wacky b-stick monster.

journyman161 · 09-06-2005, 11:41 PM

Yeah I agree you've probably skipped a few steps in the process. I used snowflake on the dregs of a scifi novel I'd been (attempting) writing for 30 years & it gave me some new insights, & a few days later, I had an idea pop up which solved my antagonist problem. Not sure it was related, but just who the antagonist could be had me stymied for years, so once I cleared up the plotlines with snowflake, the antagonist was almost an automatic choice.
(for those interested, it's Snowflake Process

suzakugaiden · 09-07-2005, 08:15 PM

Problem with the characters bits. I'm not really sure what the concrete goals and motives should be doing. The cast is largely teenaged, and their goals are either really short-term or really obtuse. Any ideas?

journyman161 · 09-07-2005, 08:21 PM

If they're just reacting to things the way teens usually do, then maybe think about what is your goals for them. What are they learning that will be needed further on.
Does John have to start standing up for himself so he can face the trolls later on?
Does Cecelia need to realise she's following her hated mum's choices for her path so she can discard the notion that the hero isn't a suitable marriage prospect... etc.
I realise I'm presuming here that the teens are resolving something & so need extra skills/abilities/realisations etc.

In mine I wound up with two layers of goals, some for the main character (what did he think he was doing & was going on) & some for the plot (what was really happening & providing the basis for what is to come for the reader)

Hope this helps a bit.

blademasterzzz · 09-07-2005, 09:55 PM

Uh, actually Connor, Ы is not i, it is a different letter that is unpronouncable in english. The russian equivalent of i is "и".

blademasterzzz · 09-07-2005, 09:59 PM

...дa. yes.

Stewart · 09-08-2005, 03:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by blademasterzzz

Uh, actually Connor, Ы is not i, it is a different letter that is unpronouncable in english. The russian equivalent of i is "и".

Not quite, while the European interpretation of 'i' sounds like 'ee' (и) in language such as Spanish, German, Polish, French, and Italian, the English is different in that 'I' sounds like 'eye' and its lowercase 'i' sounds as if spoken in words like 'hill', 'pit', and 'slip'.

So, at least to my Scottish pronunciation, the Russian equivalent of 'i' is 'Ы' although, if transliterating something like Владивосток then, of course, I will use 'i' also. It's just the differences, I believe, in English's phonetics of the Latin alphabet against the rest of Europe with the 'i' and the 'y'.