If you didn’t like the ore previous method of shifting around notecards then here’s an alternative with 10 steps.
1) write one sentence summarizing the main concept of the story. ONLY ONE! It will serve as a reminder throughout the writing process and concrete the backbone of the story.
2) Develop that sentence into a paragraph including story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel. One good way is to identify the major disasters of the novel and an ending. Using the time between each to develop up to the next disaster while building on the last. Remember that disasters can also be internal.
3) Write a page on each main character including the character’s storyline, motivation, goal, conflict and what they learner or how they grew.
4) Expand each sentence in your paragraph into their own separate paragraphs expanding further on the initial ideas.
5) write half pagers for less important characters. Remember to write them all as being told from the point of view of each character.
6) Break each paragraph into a page.while figuring out the high-level logic of the story and making strategic decisions.
7) This step expands on step three, where you will detail everything there is to know about each character such as their birthday, place of birth, description, history, etc. But the most important aspect is still how they change over the course of the novel.
8) Create a spreadsheet detailing the scenes that emerge from your four-page plot outline in step four, making each line a single scene
9) “Take each line of the spreadsheet and expand it to a multi-paragraph description of the scene. Put in any cool lines of dialogue you think of, and sketch out the essential conflict of that scene. If there’s no conflict, you’ll know it here and you should either add conflict or scrub the scene.”
10)Write the first draft!
http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/
