Step five of the snowflake method is to write a character synopsis for each character in the book. Major characters get one page, minor get half a page. This builds on step three. To get the most out of this part of the snowflake, I suggest writing each one from the character’s point of view, as if they were recapping events. This help builds the character’s voice and tells you really useful things like what minor characters were doing while they were off screen for major chunks of the book. This step right here was probably the most useful step in drafting Aphrodite 3–Untitled, because I had so many characters to keep track of and their different interpretation on events impacted the plot in a big way.

Here’s an example of a character synopsis from a fairly minor character in Aphrodite 3– Untitled. I’m only including the first two paragraphs to avoid spoilers, but this should give you an idea.

Now, this is not my best writing ever, or particularly good. This drafting was purely for my benefit, so it hasn’t been polished or made pretty.

~@~

I have nothing against Persephone as a person, but I don’t trust her as a leader. I advise her, push her, and outright bully her to take a more extreme stance against the demigods, sensing her hesitation to do anything that could endanger Hades or make her responsible for lost lives. I thought she was being weak.

When I meet up with Aphrodite and Medea in the dreamscape, I give Aphrodite advice and am pleased to see how far she’s come, though she still has Persephone up on a pedestal. Even Poseidon seems to worship the very ground Persephone walks on. I also get a feel for Medea and realize she’s a very broken, very unstable young girl. But I think we can help her. Furthermore, I think we should……

The fourth step of the snowflake method is to turn your one paragraph summary into a one page summary and it’s ridiculously easy.

See, if you’re anything like me, you felt like your one paragraph summary didn’t capture enough of the story and you’ve been itching to fix it. Well now’s your chance.

To do this step, take each sentence in your one paragraph summary and expand it into a paragraph.

Here was my one paragraph summary for Persephone:

Persephone thought she was just a typical, modern day teenager until she realized she was being stalked by a season.When Boreas, the god of Winter, attempts to whisk her away to a not so winter wonderland, she’s rescued by Hades and offered refuge in the Underworld.
Unable to physically reach Persephone in the Underworld, Boreas begins going after her through her dreams. When Persephone learns to defend her mind from the deranged ice god, he kidnaps Persephone’s best friend and threatens to kill her unless Persephone agrees to take her place. In a desperate bid to save her friend, Persephone embraces her power as a goddess and succeeds in killing the god of winter, only to learn an even larger danger is lurking closer to home than she had ever imagined.

Now break it down by sentence.

Sentence 1: Persephone thought she was just a typical, modern day teenager until she realized she was being stalked by a season.

Paragraph 1: Persephone thought she was just a typical, modern day teenager until strange things started happening around her. Girls are snarky with jealousy, water turns to ice whenever she’s around, her best friend is acting like she’s hiding something from her, and her car was nearly blown off the road by a freak ice storm in the middle of Atlanta. But it isn’t until a guy tries to drag her out of her mother’s flower shop, screaming that she’s a daughter of Zeus that her mother finally fesses up.

Persephone’s a goddess.

Sentence 2: When Boreas, the god of Winter, attempts to whisk her away to a not so winter wonderland, she’s rescued by Hades and offered refuge in the Underworld.

Paragraph 2: Persephone thinks her mom has lost her mind. She runs away to her friends house only to discover that her best friend is also in on the secret. Before Persephone can process that they might actually be telling the truth, she’s attacked by a season. Boreas, the god of winter, has his eye on Persephone and now he wants to whisk her away to a not so winter wonderland. She’s rescued from the serial rapist by Hades, Lord of the Underworld, and offered refuge in the Underworld until the end of winter. The catch? He has to marry her to take her there.

Sentence 3: Unable to physically reach Persephone in the Underworld, Boreas begins going after her through her dreams.

Paragraph 3: But marriage doesn’t mean much among the gods, and Hades doesn’t seem interested in the profoundly younger goddess. Persephone gets to know the residents of the Underworld and discovers the place isn’t the epicenter of doom and gloom that she’d been imagining. And Hades isn’t so bad himself. She’s just starting to get the hang of the whole Underworld Queen thing when Boreas attacks her in her dreams.

Sentence 4: When Persephone learns to defend her mind from the deranged ice god, he kidnaps Persephone’s best friend and threatens to kill her unless Persephone agrees to take her place.

Paragraph 4: Hades realizes the younger goddess has no clue how to protect herself or use her powers, so he takes it upon himself to teach her. The more she learns, the closer they grow. Meanwhile, Boreas is rapidly running out of winter, so in a last ditch effort to get his hands on Persephone, he kidnaps Persephone’s best friend, threatening to kill her unless Persephone turns herself over to the deranged ice god.

Sentence 5: In a desperate bid to save her friend, Persephone embraces her power as a goddess and succeeds in killing the god of winter, only to learn an even larger danger is lurking closer to home than she had ever imagined.

Paragraph 5: Despite Hades’s protests, Persephone leaves the safety of the Underworld and faces down the god of winter, determined to save her friend and find out why he’s so obsessed with getting his hands on her. She discovers Boreas is working for Zeus, her father. Persephone succeeds in destroying the ice god, but at great cost. Her best friend is killed in the cross fire. Persephone makes a deal with a Reaper to restore her friends soul and inadvertently locks herself into a promise to keep his shady dealings from Hades. Since gods can’t lie, her promise is binding, and it isn’t until after she makes the deal that she discovers the reaper is working for Zeus and the Underworld is in more danger than she ever could have imagined.

Put it all together and that’s a pretty decent one page summary of Persephone. Is it the greatest summary ever written? No.But it’s considerably more comprehensive then what I sent out in my query letters. If Persephone weren’t already out in the world, I’d spend many more hours polishing this summary into a better reflection of the book. (I’m really proud of my book 6 one page summary, but alas, spoilers). But as an example of how a single paragraph might expand into a page, this works.

Even if you don’t use the snowflake method to outline, this has changed the way I look at my one paragraph and one page summaries for query letters. It’s worth it for that alone. And I haven’t even gotten to the good parts yet.

More on Characters next week.

The third step in the snowflake method has to do with characters. The snowflake website says to do this step for each of the main characters, but I do it for all of the named characters in my book who have more than two or three lines of dialogue.

For each character take an hour and write the following:

• The character’s name
• A one-sentence summary of the character’s storyline
• The character’s motivation (what does he/she want abstractly?)
• The character’s goal (what does he/she want concretely?)
• The character’s conflict (what prevents him/her from reaching this goal?)
• The character’s epiphany (what will he/she learn, how will he/she change?
• A one-paragraph summary of the character’s storyline

This step, particularly the one paragraph summary of the character’s storyline is really helpful to me, because I have so many moving pieces that it’s important that I know what each character has been doing in the background during all the events of the story. Even if they don’t appear “on screen,” knowing what they’ve been up to, why they’ve been up to it, and what conflicts they’re facing helps flesh them out.

Here’s what step 3 looks like for me in scrivener.