Snowflake Software Review
12 Snowflake Computing reviews. A free inside look at company reviews and salaries posted anonymously by employees.
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I've used both. They can't be compared, IMO, because they do such different things. But I'll try to explain why I think that. Scrivener is an open-ended toolbox for organizing writing projects and producing a good first draft of just about anything-novel, short story, poem, screenplay, essay, you name it. I find it a good tool for 2nd drafts, too, but that's not relevant to your question. Mostly people use it for creating drafts, though with its increasing support for ebooks, that picture is changing.
Snowflake (the program) is a narrowly focussed implementation of a novel planning process (the Snowflake method, which is explained in detail on the snowflake website: ). It consists of a series of forms that you fill in. The end result is a novel 'treatment' down to the scene level, consisting of character summaries, plot element summaries, and scene summaries. And that's it. It doesn't provide a means for you to proceed to creating the first draft; it's strictly a planning tool. I have used the Snowflake output as input to a Scrivener project, and I've written snowflake-method driven treatments using other pieces of software, including both StoryBox and Writemonkey. As an implementation of the method, the Snowflake program doesn't really add much.
The UI in particular is something out of the 90s-functional but ugly. The Snowflake method can easily be implemented in Scrivener by creating a document template that has all the Snowflake method work products in the Research section. You can create story outlines using the Outliner, complete with summaries in the Synopsis section of each document (i.e., on the note-card). Hope this helps.
As a reward for completing National Novel Writing Month 2014 successfully, I purchased one of the many novel-writing and fiction-writing software packages that had been on my radar. Ingermanson Communications' Snowflake Pro is one of those.
Snowflake Software Inc
If you're thinking about purchasing it, too, it is my hope that this post will help you make the call one way or the other. Randy Ingermanson is the creator of the 'Snowflake Method' for writing a novel. We talked about that the other day. In a nutshell, you start by defining your novel in a single sentence. Then you expand that to a paragraph, and finally to a page.
From there, you flesh out your characters and begin brainstorming the scenes you'll need to tell your story. At that point, you should be ready to write. Snowflake Pro guides you through Ingermanson's method from start to finish. It doesn't force a particular structure or story design on you, but tries to help you flesh out the story using whatever structure works for that story. You won't write your novel in Snowflake Pro. It's not a word processor.
Ingermanson describes it as a 'design tool' which is an apt description. It helps you design the story, but the structure and writing are all up to you. Getting the Software You can. List price for the software is $100, but if you have purchased the Randy Ingermanson's Writing Fiction for Dummies book from Amazon or another retailer, you can get 50% off (making the software $50). Compared to some of the other writing tools on the Internet, that's cheaper than some and more expensive than others. Once you purchase the software, you'll download it from the author's web site.
Versions are available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. This post will focus on the Windows version, which is what I use. You'll install the software on your computer, launch it, and start using it. Now that you have a basic idea of your story, it's time to create the characters you'll need to properly tell the story.
For each character, you want to identify their ambition, story goal, conflict, epiphany, sentence summary, and paragraph summary. The ambition is their overall life goal, like 'to make the world a better place'. The story goal is the thing the character is trying to accomplish in the novel. The conflict is the reason the character can't immediately have the story goal they want. The epiphany is what the character will learn, or how they will change, in the story.
The Sentence Summary is a one-sentence summary of the character's story line, from their point of view. Paragraph Summary is an expanded version of that character's Sentence Summary. If you're thinking about buying Snowflake Pro, you're probably asking yourself if it's worth the $50-100 Ingermanson is charging for it.
You're wondering if it will help make your stories better. The answer to all those questions is a definite. If you wanted to take the Snowflake Method for a test drive, you might do a web search for Snowflake documents. You'll likely find a number of spreadsheets and word processing document files that ask all the same questions that Snowflake Pro does. Those tools won't include Ingermanson's audio discussions, lecture notes, etc.
They probably won't come with support. And you might have to adjust them to work with your word processor or screen size.
But they won't cost you $50. If you try those and like them, you might want to get Snowflake Pro to have the advantage of a tool supported by the creator of the method. If you try some of those freebies and don't see the value in them, or you read Ingermanson's book and decide it's rubbish, save your money.
As for me, I'm giving it a shot. I've written six novels now, but I've never brainstormed one from a single-sentence description up to a full synopsis. It seems like a complementary approach to things that have worked for me in the past.
I find that if I try to do a 'seat of the pants' write that I go wildly off topic, forget critical events that I wanted to have happen in the story, etc. Perhaps brainstorming with this top-down approach will deliver better results. I haven't had the software long, so time will tell how much I use it, how often, etc.
Right now, it's one of the tools in my writing toolbox. Others include Dramatica Pro 4.0, StoryCraft, Scrivener, Power Structure, and Mariner Contour. There are probably some others in there, too. We'll discuss them eventually. I will say that Snowflake Pro seems to be reliable software that does what it claims to do.
I've not had it crash on me or lose anything I've written. I can't say the same for some other tools I've used over the years.