Nucleation

If you are a writer, you very likely have a scene or two in your head that your mind tells you is just perfect. Maybe it is heart-wrenching, maybe it is too cool to not have in your action-adventure, spy thriller, or fantasy novel. Maybe it is a plot twist too perfect to leave out and you know every reader will never see it coming, and will be forced to reread your book to go back and see how they didn’t know.

Sometimes authors say entire books come out of one scene for them and the rest of the book leads up to this point or follows from it.

I call these nucleation scenes, and they are a great way to get started in the writing, get unstuck, or even seriously edit a book.

You see water doesn’t freeze all at once. Even below 32°F it can stay liquid if it has nothing to grab onto. Nucleation is the process when the first little ice crystal forms, usually because something gives the water molecules a place to line up or grab hold of, like dust, a scratch on the container, or even a tiny vibration. Once that first crystal appears, the rest of the water rapidly snaps into the same pattern and freezes.

So, nucleation equals the trigger point where freezing starts. Your single scene can be your nucleation point.

Maybe you don’t know how to write a whole story. Maybe you don’t know how to fix that chapter, or rewrite that book. But we don’t need to write linearly. Write your nucleation point. Write that scene that sticks and won’t let you go, then figure out how you get there. Figure out where you go from there. What things must have happened for that to happen? What must come after if this is as momentous as you believe it is? You don’t need to know every answer. That nucleation point might drive one more scene that makes you think, “ABC is inevitable.” Now go write that. And so on and so on.

I find this method particularly useful when I am outlining a book, learning how the whole plot might have happened, or how characters might come to interact or figure out what they want. Give this nucleation a try especially if you are stuck with what happens next. Don’t worry about next, worry about that big scene you always planned to blow your readers’ minds. The rest can fall into place later.

Now go nucleate. (Write.)