Snowflake Method Five

Today, I'm wrapping up my Snowflake Method series. We've done the first four steps together; I'll leave the other six up to you. The steps get progressively more complex and detailed as you go, and you don't really need to do them all to be ready for November. If you've only done the first four, you'll already be more prepared than most WriMos!

The only thing you really need to worry about, in terms of preparation, is having answers to the really obvious questions. When you are writing, you don't want to stop for anything, so any detail that you can't fill in with no more than a brief pause will either get a [detail goes here] placeholder, or derail you. So try to figure out a few potential trouble spots in advance and write them down.

That (especially) includes the names of things...characters, settings, and other nouns. Have a list of character names for every character, even the minor ones. Know what street your main character lives, in what town, in what state or province, and in what country. If they own a car, know what kind of car and what colour it is. Keep a list of these little facts at hand, and add to it whenever you think of something new or finish a section of writing. There's nothing that will mess you up more than going back and trying to find some little detail you wrote a week ago. That way lies madness and editing.

The other thing that really, really helps is a timeline. It doesn't have to be fancy or detailed or precise; it just needs to give you a big picture view of when things happen. You can do one for your backstory, one for your plotline, or both. And the scale can be entirely relative: six years ago, one month later, etc. You don't need actual dates.