The Ten Steps of Design

But before you start writing, you need to get organized. You need to put all those wonderful ideas
down on paper in a form you can use. Why? Because your memory is fallible, and your creativity
has probably left a lot of holes in your story holes you need to fill in before you start writing
your novel. You need a design document. And you need to produce it using a process that
doesnt !ill your desire to actually write the story. "ere is my ten#step process for writing a design
document. $ use this process for writing my novels, and $ hope it will help you.
Step 1) %a!e an hour and write a one#sentence summary of your novel. &omething li!e this' (A
rogue physicist travels bac! in time to !ill the apostle )aul.* +%his is the summary for my first
novel, %ransgression., %he sentence will serve you forever as a ten#second selling tool. %his is
the big picture, the analog of that big starting triangle in the snowfla!e picture.
When you later write your boo! proposal, this sentence should appear very early in the proposal.
$ts the hoo! that will sell your boo! to your editor, to your committee, to the sales force, to
boo!store owners, and ultimately to readers. &o ma!e the best one you can-
&ome hints on what ma!es a good sentence'
&horter is better. %ry for fewer than ./ words.
0o character names, please- Better to say (a handicapped trapeze artist* than (1ane 2oe*.
%ie together the big picture and the personal picture. Which character has the most to lose
in this story? 0ow tell me what he or she wants to win.
3ead the one#line blurbs on the 0ew Yor! %imes Bestseller list to learn how to do this.
Writing a one#sentence description is an art form.

Step 2) %a!e another hour and e4pand that sentence to a full paragraph describing the story
setup, ma5or disasters, and ending of the novel. %his is the analog of the second stage of the
snowfla!e. $ li!e to structure a story as (three disasters plus an ending*. 6ach of the disasters
ta!es a 7uarter of the boo! to develop and the ending ta!es the final 7uarter. $ dont !now if this
is the ideal structure, its 5ust my personal taste.
$f you believe in the %hree#Act structure, then the first disaster corresponds to the end of Act ..
%he second disaster is the mid#point of Act 8. %he third disaster is the end of Act 8, and forces
Act 9 which wraps things up. $t is :; to have the first disaster be caused by e4ternal
circumstances, but $ thin! that the second and third disasters should be caused by the
protagonists attempts to (fi4 things*. %hings 5ust get worse and worse.
You can also use this paragraph in your proposal. $deally, your paragraph will have about five
sentences. :ne sentence to give me the bac!drop and story setup. %hen one sentence each for
your three disasters. %hen one more sentence to tell the ending. 2ont confuse this paragraph
with the bac!#cover copy for your boo!. %his paragraph summarizes the whole story. Your bac!#
cover copy should summarize only about the first 7uarter of the story.
Step 3) %he above gives you a high#level view of your novel. 0ow you need something similar
for the storylines of each of your characters. <haracters are the most important part of any
novel, and the time you invest in designing them up front will pay off ten#fold when you start
writing. =or each of your ma5or characters, ta!e an hour and write a one#page summary sheet
that tells'
%he characters name
A one#sentence summary of the characters storyline
%he characters motivation +what does he>she want abstractly?,
%he characters goal +what does he>she want concretely?,
%he characters conflict +what prevents him>her from reaching this goal?,
%he characters epiphany +what will he>she learn, how will he>she change?
A one#paragraph summary of the characters storyline
An important point' You may find that you need to go bac! and revise your one#sentence
summary and>or your one#paragraph summary. ?o ahead- %his is good@it means your
characters are teaching you things about your story. $ts always o!ay at any stage of the design
process to go bac! and revise earlier stages. $n fact, its not 5ust o!ay@its inevitable. And its
good. Any revisions you ma!e now are revisions you wont need to ma!e later on to a clun!y ABB
page manuscript.
Another important point' $t doesnt have to be perfect. %he purpose of each step in the design
process is to advance you to the ne4t step. ;eep your forward momentum- You can always
come bac! later and fi4 it when you understand the story better. You will do this too, unless
youre a lot smarter than $ am.
Step 4) By this stage, you should have a good idea of the large#scale structure of your novel,
and you have only spent a day or two. Well, truthfully, you may have spent as much as a wee!,
but it doesnt matter. $f the story is bro!en, you !now it now, rather than after investing /BB hours
in a rambling first draft. &o now 5ust !eep growing the story. %a!e several hours and e4pand each
sentence of your summary paragraph into a full paragraph. All but the last paragraph should end
in a disaster. %he final paragraph should tell how the boo! ends.
%his is a lot of fun, and at the end of the e4ercise, you have a pretty decent one#page s!eleton of
your novel. $ts o!ay if you cant get it all onto one single#spaced page. What matters is that you
are growing the ideas that will go into your story. You are e4panding the conflict. You should now
have a synopsis suitable for a proposal, although there is a better alternative for proposals . . .
Step 5) %a!e a day or two and write up a one#page description of each ma5or character and a
half#page description of the other important characters. %hese (character synopses* should tell
the story from the point of view of each character. As always, feel free to cycle bac! to the earlier
steps and ma!e revisions as you learn cool stuff about your characters. $ usually en5oy this step
the most and lately, $ have been putting the resulting (character synopses* into my proposals
instead of a plot#based synopsis. 6ditors love character synopses, because editors love
character#based fiction.
Step 6) By now, you have a solid story and several story#threads, one for each character. 0ow
ta!e a wee! and e4pand the one#page plot synopsis of the novel to a four#page synopsis.
Basically, you will again be e4panding each paragraph from step +A, into a full page. %his is a lot
of fun, because you are figuring out the high#level logic of the story and ma!ing strategic
decisions. "ere, you will definitely want to cycle bac! and fi4 things in the earlier steps as you
gain insight into the story and new ideas whac! you in the face.
Step 7) %a!e another wee! and e4pand your character descriptions into full#fledged character
charts detailing everything there is to !now about each character. %he standard stuff such as
birthdate, description, history, motivation, goal, etc. Cost importantly, how will this character
change by the end of the novel? %his is an e4pansion of your wor! in step +9,, and it will teach
you a lot about your characters. You will probably go bac! and revise steps +.#D, as your
characters become (real* to you and begin ma!ing petulant demands on the story. %his is good
great fiction is character#driven. %a!e as much time as you need to do this, because youre
5ust saving time downstream. When you have finished this process, +and it may ta!e a full month
of solid effort to get here,, you have most of what you need to write a proposal. $f you are a
published novelist, then you can write a proposal now and sell your novel before you write it. $f
youre not yet published, then youll need to write your entire novel first before you can sell it. 0o,
thats not fair, but life isnt fair and the world of fiction writing is especially unfair.
Step 8) You may or may not ta!e a hiatus here, waiting for the boo! to sell. At some point,
youve got to actually write the novel. Before you do that, there are a couple of things you can do
to ma!e that traumatic first draft easier. %he first thing to do is to ta!e that four#page synopsis
and ma!e a list of all the scenes that youll need to turn the story into a novel. And the easiest
way to ma!e that list is . . . with a spreadsheet.
=or some reason, this is scary to a lot of writers. :h the horror. 2eal with it. You learned to use a
word#processor. &preadsheets are easier. You need to ma!e a list of scenes, and spreadsheets
were invented for ma!ing lists. $f you need some tutoring, buy a boo!. %here are a thousand out
there, and one of them will wor! for you. $t should ta!e you less than a day to learn the itty bit
you need. $tll be the most valuable day you ever spent. 2o it.
Ca!e a spreadsheet detailing the scenes that emerge from your four#page plot outline. Ca!e 5ust
one line for each scene. $n one column, list the ):E character. $n another +wide, column, tell
what happens. $f you want to get fancy, add more columns that tell you how many pages you
e4pect to write for the scene. A spreadsheet is ideal, because you can see the whole storyline at
a glance, and its easy to move scenes around to reorder things.
Cy spreadsheets usually wind up being over .BB lines long, one line for each scene of the novel.
As $ develop the story, $ ma!e new versions of my story spreadsheet. %his is incredibly valuable
for analyzing a story. $t can ta!e a wee! to ma!e a good spreadsheet. When you are done, you
can add a new column for chapter numbers and assign a chapter to each scene.
Step 9) +:ptional. $ dont do this step anymore., &witch bac! to your word processor and begin
writing a narrative description of the story. %a!e each line of the spreadsheet and e4pand it to a
multi#paragraph description of the scene. )ut in any cool lines of dialogue you thin! of, and
s!etch out the essential conflict of that scene. $f theres no conflict, youll !now it here and you
should either add conflict or scrub the scene.
$ used to write either one or two pages per chapter, and $ started each chapter on a new page.
%hen $ 5ust printed it all out and put it in a loose#leaf noteboo!, so $ could easily swap chapters
around later or revise chapters without messing up the others. %his process usually too! me a
wee! and the end result was a massive /B#page printed document that $ would revise in red in!
as $ wrote the first draft. All my good ideas when $ wo!e up in the morning got hand#written in the
margins of this document. %his, by the way, is a rather painless way of writing that dreaded
detailed synopsis that all writers seem to hate. But its actually fun to develop, if you have done
steps +., through +F, first. When $ did this step, $ never showed this synopsis to anyone, least of
all to an editor it was for me alone. $ li!ed to thin! of it as the prototype first draft. $magine
writing a first draft in a wee!- Yes, you can do it and its well worth the time. But $ll be honest, $
dont feel li!e $ need this step anymore, so $ dont do it now.
Step 10) At this point, 5ust sit down and start pounding out the real first draft of the novel. You will
be astounded at how fast the story flies out of your fingers at this stage. $ have seen writers triple
their fiction writing speed overnight, while producing better 7uality first drafts than they usually
produce on a third draft.
You might thin! that all the creativity is chewed out of the story by this time. Well, no, not unless
you overdid your analysis when you wrote your &nowfla!e. %his is supposed to be the fun part,
because there are many small#scale logic problems to wor! out here. "ow does "ero get out of
that tree surrounded by alligators and rescue "eroine whos in the burning rowboat? %his is the
time to figure it out- But its fun because you already !now that the large#scale structure of the
novel wor!s. &o you only have to solve a limited set of problems, and so you can write relatively
fast.
%his stage is incredibly fun and e4citing. $ have heard many fiction writers complain about how
hard the first draft is. $nvariably, thats because they have no clue whats coming ne4t. ?ood
grief- Gife is too short to write li!e that- %here is no reason to spend /BB hours writing a
wandering first draft of your novel when you can write a solid one in ./B. <ounting the .BB hours
it ta!es to do the design documents, you come out way ahead in time.
About midway through a first draft, $ usually ta!e a breather and fi4 all the bro!en parts of my
design documents. Yes, the design documents are not perfect. %hats o!ay. %he design
documents are not fi4ed in concrete, they are a living set of documents that grows as you
develop your novel. $f you are doing your 5ob right, at the end of the first draft you will laugh at
what an amateurish piece of 5un! your original design documents were. And youll be thrilled at
how deep your story has become.
:ver the years, $ve taught the &nowfla!e method to hundreds of writers at conferences. $ve
also had this article posted here on my web site for a long time, and the page has now been
viewed over 8,ABB,BBB times. $ve heard from many, many writers. &ome people love the
&nowfla!eH some dont. Cy attitude is that if it wor!s for you, then use it. $f only parts of it wor!
for you, then use only those parts.$ write my own novels using the &nowfla!e method. Ca!e no
mista!e its a fair bit of wor!. =or a long time, $ did it the hard way, using Cicrosoft Word to
write the te4t and Cicrosoft 64cel to manage the list of scenes. Infortunately, neither of those
tools !nows about the structure of fiction. =inally, $ realized that it would be a whole lot easier to
wor! through the method if the tools were designed specially for fiction.