How to Use The Snowflake Method to Write Your Book

March 19, 2020 | 6 min read

There’s a proverb that says “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” In other words, however long and difficult the task, it has to start with one simple action. If sitting down to write 60,000+ words feels like that proverbial journey, then The Snowflake Method of planning your book might be right for you.

The Snowflake Method was invented by Randy Ingermanson, a theoretical physicist who, for reasons not even clear to himself, suddenly developed the burning desire to write a historical suspense novel. His first attempt was (in his own words) “horrible drivel”, but undeterred, he persisted for ten more years, working hard at improving his craft until an agent finally took a chance on him and got his first book into print.

Suddenly – again for reasons he cannot understand – people started asking him to speak at writing conferences, and he discovered a passion for teaching fiction. That’s when he put an article on his website about his method of writing a novel, which he had named “The Snowflake Method.” The rest, as they say, is history. 

So, what is The Snowflake Method? As the name suggests, it’s a way of writing a book that mirrors the way a snowflake forms. First, a droplet of water freezes to a particle of dust, creating an ice crystal. As this crystal moves through the atmosphere, water vapor freezes to the outside of it, growing and building the flake’s unique structure. In this analogy, your story’s premise is the original ice crystal, and you build outwards from there.

Let’s cover each step of The Snowflake Method in detail. If you follow these steps faithfully, you’ll complete the entire process of planning and writing your book.

Step one: Write a one-sentence summary

Recommended time – 1 hour

In one short sentence (try to keep it to 15 words or less), describe the premise of your novel. Don’t worry about character names right now – just concentrate on who they are and what challenges they face. Ingermanson suggests looking through the New York Times’ Best Sellers List to see some great examples. For instance, their summary for American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins is simply, “A bookseller flees Mexico for the United States with her son while pursued by the head of a drug cartel.” 

Step two: Write a one-paragraph setup

Recommended time – 1 hour

Once you’ve distilled your premise into a single sentence, the next step is to expand it into a paragraph of around five sentences. The first sentence should set up your story, and the next three should outline the conflicts/disasters/problems that arise throughout the novel. Finally, the fifth sentence should wrap up everything that happens. 

Step three: Introduce your characters

Recommended time – 1 hour per character

Now that you know the story you’re going to tell, you need to start thinking about your characters. For each one, create a one-page summary that contains:

  • Their name
  • A brief sentence about their storyline
  • Their motivation
  • Their goal
  • Their conflicts or challenges
  • What they learn or how they change throughout the story
  • A more in-depth paragraph about their storyline

These character overviews don’t have to be perfect right off the bat – feel free to revisit and refine them as you work through the process. The more you think about your characters and how they fit within your story (and with each other), the more evident it might become that elements of your original setup to change. Now is the best time to do that, before you invest hours and hours writing the first draft!

Step four: Write a one-page summary

Recommended time – 3-4 hours

Now you’re getting deeper into the business of building up the structure of your novel. Take your one-paragraph setup from step two and turn each sentence into a paragraph. Here, your first paragraph sets the scene, and the next three explore the different challenges and conflicts that your characters experience. The final paragraph explains how everything comes together and how the story ends. When you’re done, you should have approximately one page covering your story from start to finish.

Step five: Create your individual character stories

Recommended time – 1-2 days

Next, you’re going to do the same fleshing-out exercise with each of your characters by writing a one-page synopsis for each major player that tells the story from their perspective. Do the same thing, but shorter, for the minor players in your novel. Don’t forget that you can return to steps one through four at any time during this stage to make changes as you start to learn more about each character. 

Step six: Create your synopsis

Recommended time – 1 week

This step involves taking your one-page summary and each of your character’s story threads and combining them to create a four-page synopsis. Here is where your story really starts to come together, and you can see the way all the elements interact. You’ll probably discover that you want to go back and make some adjustments to the previous steps so that everything fits.

Step seven: Expand your characters

Recommended time – up to a month

It’s time to get to know your characters better and create detailed sheets for each of them. Include every little detail, like how old they are, what they look like, their likes and dislikes, their motivations, dreams, goals and fears. What experiences shaped them? What kind of personality do they have? What are their qualifications? Do they have any odd quirks? This might seem like a time-consuming activity, but it saves you even more time once you finally start writing your first draft, because you’ll have a fantastic handle on everybody, and you’ll have already tweaked your story summary and synopsis to accommodate any revelations that come out of this process.

Step eight: Create a spreadsheet of scenes

Recommended time – up to a week

Before you jump boots and all into your first draft, you may find it helpful to plan out all your scenes in a spreadsheet. Assign one row to each scene, with one column for the POV character and another column to briefly describe what happens in the scene (just a sentence or two). If your descriptions run off the page and you don’t want to be constantly scrolling from left to right, ensure you have “wrap text” enabled. Use your four-page synopsis to help you create this list. While it might seem odd to use a spreadsheet for this task, it helps to keep everything visually neat, and it’s easier to move scenes around as required. You can add extra columns for things like how many pages each scene might fill and what chapter it belongs to.

Step nine: Expand your scenes

Recommended time – 1-2 weeks

You might be ready to start writing now, but if not, this optional step helps you to prepare even further. It involves taking each brief scene description from your spreadsheet and writing several paragraphs describing the scene. Here’s where you can start jotting down snippets of dialogue and confirming the purpose of the scene – what’s the essential conflict? If you can’t find a purpose for the scene, then you will either need to add one or remove the scene from the story. You should start each scene on a separate page or in a separate document. Ingermanson recommends printing them all out and putting them in a loose-leaf binder so that you can jot notes on them and swap scenes around easily.

Step ten: Write your book!

Now you have all the tools to write your story, and this part of the process is going to be much quicker because you already know who is doing what and when. There will still be little details to work out along the way, but you’ve already done the hard work, so any decisions required at this point will be small.

The Snowflake Method isn’t just good for starting from scratch. You can also use it to finish a half-written novel if you’ve lost your way, or to polish a completed novel so that your story is tighter and more cohesive. 

If you’ve had a story floating around in your head but felt overwhelmed by the enormity of writing a book or just didn’t know where to start, The Snowflake Method’s system of breaking it down to its smallest step might be just what you need to finally get writing.

Recommended articles

More recommended articles for you

March 22, 2025 4 min read

I’ve spent years writing while secretly fearing that a single misplaced word would expose me — not just as a bad writer, but as a fraud.

My background is originally in photography, and I see it there, too. A photographer I know recently posted a before-and-after comparison of their editing from 2018 versus now, asking if we also saw changes in our own work over the years.

Naturally, we should. If our work is the same, years apart, have we really grown as artists?

So why is that the growing, the process of it, the daily grind of it, is so painful?

So why is that the growing, the process of it, the daily grind of it, is so painful?

The Haunting

Hitting “publish” on an essay or a blog always stirs up insecurity — the overthinking, the over-editing. The fear that someone will call me out for not being a real writer.

I initially hesitated to make writing part of my freelance work. My background is in photography and design. Writing was something I gravitated toward, but I had no degree to validate it. No official stamp of approval.

Like many writers, I started with zero confidence in my voice — agonizing over edits, drowning in research, second-guessing every word.

I even created a shield for myself: ghostwriting.

I even created a shield for myself: ghostwriting.

If my words weren’t my own, they couldn’t be wrong. Ghostwriting meant safety — no risk, no vulnerability, just words without ownership.

I still remember the feeling of scrolling to the bottom of an article I had written and seeing someone else’s name, their face beside words that had once been mine.

The truth is, I always wanted to write. As a kid, I imagined it. Yet, I found myself handing over my work, letting someone else own it.

I told myself it didn’t matter. It was work. Getting paid to write should be enough.

But here’s the thing: I wasn’t just playing it safe — I was slowly erasing myself. Word by word. Edit by edit. And finally, in the by-line.

I wasn’t just playing it safe — I was slowly erasing myself. Word by word. Edit by edit. And finally, in the by-line.

The Disappearing Act

This was true when I was writing under my own name, too. The more I worried about getting it right, the less I sounded like me.

I worried. I worried about how long an essay was (“people will be bored”), finding endless examples as proof of my research (“no way my own opinion is valid on its own”), the title I gave a piece (“it has to be a hook”), or editing out personal touches (“better to be safe than be seen”).

I built a guardrail around my writing, adjusting, tweaking, over-correcting. Advice meant to help only locked me in. It created a sentence rewritten to sound smarter, an opinion softened to sound safer, a paragraph reshaped to sound acceptable.

I built a guardrail around my writing, adjusting, tweaking, over-correcting.

But playing it safe makes the work dull. Writing loses its edge.

It took deliberate effort to break this habit. I’m not perfect, but here’s what I know after a year of intentionally letting my writing sound like me:

My work is clearer. It moves with my own rhythm. It’s less shaped by external influence, by fear, by the constant need to smooth it into something more polished, more likable.

But playing it safe makes the work dull. Writing loses its edge.

The Resurrection

The drive for acceptance is a slippery slope — one we don’t always realize we’re sliding down. It’s present in the small choices that pull us away from artistic integrity: checking how others did it first, tweaking our work to fit a mold, hesitating before saying what we actually mean.

And let’s be honest — this isn’t just about writing. It bleeds into everything.

It’s there when we stay silent in the face of wrongdoing, when we hold back our true way of being, when we choose work that feels “respectable,” whatever that means. It’s in every “yes” we say when we really want to say “no.”

If your self-expression is rooted in a need for acceptance, are you creating for yourself — or for others? Does your work help you explore your thoughts, your life? Does it add depth, energy, and meaning?

My work is clearer. It moves with my own rhythm. It’s less shaped by external influence, by fear, by the constant need to smooth it into something more polished, more likable.

I get it. We’re social creatures. Isolation isn’t the answer. Ignoring societal norms won’t make us better writers. Often, the most meaningful work is born from responding to or resisting those norms.

But knowing yourself well enough to recognize when acceptance is shaping your work brings clarity.

Am I doing this to be part of a community, to build connections, to learn and grow?

Or am I doing this to meet someone else’s expectations, dulling my voice just to fit in?

The Revival

Here’s what I know as I look back at my writing: I’m grateful for the years spent learning, for the times I sought acceptance with curiosity. But I’m in a different phase now.

I know who I am, and those who connect with my work reflect that back at me — in the messages they send, in the conversations we share.

I know who I am, and those who connect with my work reflect that back at me — in the messages they send, in the conversations we share.

It’s our differences that drive growth. I want to nurture these connections, to be challenged by difference, to keep writing in a way that feels like me. The me who isn’t afraid to show what I think and care about.

So, I ask you, as I ask myself now:

If no one was watching, if no one could judge, what would you write?

If no one was watching, if no one could judge, what would you write?

March 20, 2025 6 min read

A book deal without an agent? An agent offer after a book deal? Learn how Writer Bobby Miller took his publishing journey into his own hands. 

March 19, 2025 1 min read

We've chatted with the creatures of Middle Earth to discover their writing preferences and which Freewrite devices work best for each of them.

Find your Lord of the Rings identity and discover your next Freewrite.