Monday, May 10, 2010

Snowflaking, Step Two.

Okay, so this step was a bit easier, because I was able to wax eloquent - and, as everyone from the NaNoWriMo crowd knows, that's something I've always been able to do!

Step 2) Take another hour and expand that sentence to a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel. ... Ideally, your paragraph will have about five sentences. One sentence to give me the backdrop and story setup. Then one sentence each for your three disasters. Then one more sentence to tell the ending.

Those two sections are from different parts of the actual "Step Two" description, but they're what I was focusing on.

Anyway, here's my own Step Two.

Gary Gray was a fairly normal first-year music major, insofar as 'normal' ever applies to a creative-arts major, with one little quirk - he'd always had a strange 'way' with electronics; anything from an iPod to a streetlight could turn off if he walked by. He'd never really given it much thought until the day a transformer exploded as he walked under it, badly burning him - and seemingly sparking a growth in the extent of this 'power', as well as urging it quickly out of control. It took a drunken man with a gun hijacking his bus to work one day to really show Gary the extent of his powers - if he'd known he could kill a dozen people with a single cry of pain, he would have reined in his powers much sooner. When he starts his unofficial 'training', however, a video winds up on YouTube - and while most of the commenters are awed by the 'amazing CG', the government is quick to realize the new weapon they possess. Given an ultimatum - a choice between killing and dying - Gary decides to make his own third option: remove himself from scrutiny, in any way possible.

Feel free to comment - there are definitely a lot of things I don't like about this, but I've always been awful at summarizing properly. I don't think this sounds like a bad length for 'back-cover copy', as he puts it, though, and it has the right amount of enticing information without giving away the ending too much. I think.

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