outline – Samuel Snoek-Brown

#AmWriting — off the screen, onto the page

Writing is hard work. That probably won’t surprise anyone reading this blog post, but it constantly surprises me. Take my current novel project: I started the first draft of it back in 2013. It was my NaNoWriMo project that year, and while I had a pretty strong idea of what the book would be, IContinue reading “#AmWriting — off the screen, onto the page”

The confidence of knowing your fictional universe

For about a year now, I’ve been struggling to revise a novella of mine. It has an interested publisher, and that publisher sent me some fantastic notes for kinks to work out in the story, but as I began tugging on burls in the knots I’d tangled, I realized how much more story there was to tell. AndContinue reading “The confidence of knowing your fictional universe”

Crayons, conflicts, crises, and catastrophes: how I’m outlining my new novel

When I was in grad school, I once participated in a group presentation on Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. I forget what all the group as a whole wound up saying, but I remember clearly that my first instinct was to focus on that famous first chapter, where the author of the book (Vonnegut himself?) explains why and how he wentContinue reading “Crayons, conflicts, crises, and catastrophes: how I’m outlining my new novel”