(Note: This article was originally published to JamieMcSloy.co.uk on March 6th, 2020. I’m going through an old backup of the site, which has hundreds of posts that aren’t currently uploaded. As I’m working hard on updating the site – and releasing The Vault, letting these old posts be the daily posts for a while.)
Don’t Look For The Forest When You’re Trying To Cut Trees
Today, it’s Lent. Like I wrote yesterday, it’s forty days (although it’s actually thirty-eight plus six Sundays – which apparently don’t count – and Good Friday/Holy Saturday if you’re in the traditional Christian festival.)
I’m not part of the Christian Traditional festival, but I always find these things handy. Plus, my Birthday falls on Good Friday this year, and so the 40 day challenge works out quite well from a personal point.
Why does this matter to you?
Well, I’m doing an ambitious project for these forty days, and that’ll likely shape what happens on the blog-things for the next month and a half.
But that’s for the end of the project, I suppose.
Naturally, there’s quite an amount of writing in this challenge. And I was a bit stuck.
Make Your Commitment To Starting As Small As Possible
Let’s say you’re writing a novel. A novel might be 50,000 words. It’s likely going to be closer to 90,000.
That figure, folks, puts most people off ever writing the first word.
Today, I found myself worrying about the mountain to climb ahead of me.
Here’s what I did, using the novel as an analogy.
Every Novel Needs A Prologue
Let’s say you don’t want to start at the beginning, but you have some scene in your mind that’s where the action occurs.
This is Harry Potter going to Hogwarts as opposed to that bit at the beginning where he’s delivered to the muggle aunt and uncle’s house.
Or it’s Luke Skywalker fighting Darth Vader as opposed to fixing C3PO.
You get the picture; you don’t have to start at the beginning.
Instead, start where you know you can start easily.
A novel might be 90,000 words.
An opening chapter might be 1,500 words.
But let’s not just start there.
Every Prologue Needs An Opening Scene
Let’s say you’ve started in the middle and you’re describing a fight scene, a love scene, or some other scene which is going to grab your readers’ interests in the Amazon Look Inside section.
Of your 1,500 words, you’re probably going to have a scene or two.
All you have to concern yourself with to start is that inciting incident:
Action – Character – Setting.
And that’ll vary heavily depending on what you’re doing; novel, script, (or any other project that extends outside our metaphor.)
Essentially, you’re taking the beginning of the middle of the project and you’re breaking that down into a set of elements which might take you five minutes to complete.
So of your fifteen hundred word opening chapter, you’re concentrating on maybe three hundred words.
Anyone can write three hundred words. It’s at most about ten to fifteen sentences. This article is already nearly five hundred words at this point, and it’s literally taken me four minutes to write so far. It’s about forty-five lines, and I haven’t had to think about it.
You might have a goal to write ten novels in ten weeks. It’s insurmountable until you realise that one chapter will take you an hour and that after an eight hour work day, you might be 1/3 of the way through your first novel.
By breaking these things in your mind, you lose sight of the forest and can easily start hacking away at the trees.
Make It Easier On Yourself
The crazy thing about this approach – the kick-starter, “Get the first bit of the first bit down” method, is that it doesn’t even have to be good.
It’s a metaphorical firestarter. As long as the fire starts and you get into the body of your work, you can go back and change that first part at any time.
Write the couple of hundreds of words. Make those first notes. Do the first pushup.
Take the first slice, and before you know it, you’ll be ripping chunks out of your project.