Brick by Brick
Breaking Challenges Down to Size
Okay let me start again.
The neat thing about writing is that whatever I wrote before—you don’t get to see it, because I deleted it. I could be starting for the fiftieth time, and you’d never know. The beauty is that I can try as many times as I need to get it right and to the end user it looks like I got it right the first time. Being a writer is like being Taylor Swift rehearsing six months for the Eras Tour so the fans never see a mistake. You are Taylor Swift in this simile. You heard it here first.
What I mean is. I started writing today with caps lock on, which is like barging into a room bellowing at top volume, so I erased that and started again at a more moderate tone. I didn’t mean to yell at you, everyone. I’m so sorry.
Anyway today’s Shelf Life is about that ADHD-life coping mechanism that is breaking tasks down to their more manageable components to tackle them. Like if you handed me a Lego Death Star in 4,000-plus pieces, I would look at that and say no and I would hand it back. But if you handed me just the pieces of the little, like, floor-sweeping droid and asked me to put that together, I probably could put that droid together. It only has a few pieces. After that maybe I could try putting together just a floor or something. Before you know it, I could probably build the whole Death Star. That’s what brick by brick means. It is 100 percent a Lego reference. Trust me on this.
If you showed me a cow and asked me to eat it, I would be certain I could not. But, look, there’s 150 or so steaks to the cow and I’ve been on this planet more than 40 years. I’m sure I’ve eaten the equivalent of a whole cow by now.
Anne Lamott paraphrased this best in her 1995 classic titled Bird by Bird, which recounts the story of how her brother tackled an enormous school report on birds after procrastinating on it all summer (relatable). The idea is that if a task is too overwhelming to attempt you can break it down to its component parts, like Lego blocks or the birds of the world, and take each one at a time.
Today is about some strategies for breaking writing tasks down into manageable pieces when looking at the whole task at once makes you want to retire to your bed for six years.
First I’m going to talk about some amazing strategies for making a to-do list. This will be brief. But part of getting on top of any task, for me, is making a list of what I need to do to get on top of the task. This is related to the brick-by-brick theme. If I take a sticky note and I write:
Write novel.
That sticky note is going to give me a panic attack every time I see it. My anxiety medication is not working as well as it used to. Send help. Send elephant-strength tranquilizers.
Instead, I break that task down into its manageable components and write those on the sticky note and that way I can cross things off as I accomplish them. Crossing things off a list is the motivational equivalent of diesel fuel. Once you cross one thing off your to-do list you can start snowballing.
That’s why the first thing on my to-do list is always “make a to-do list.” That way, I can cross something off as soon as I finish making the list and begin the snowball effect immediately. The second to-do list tip is to start writing your to-do list about one-third to halfway down the page instead of at the top. Reserve the top third of the to-do list for low-hanging-fruit items you can accomplish quickly. You don’t have to do the items on your to-do list in order, but I find that if I start reading the list at the top and the first three things on the list are the hardest, lengthiest things, that makes me want to retire to my bed and forget the whole thing. Conversely, if I start reading my to-do list at the top and immediately see things crossed off and things that are easy (relative to the items below them, anyway), I’m more likely to feel motivated to work on them.
My grandmother used to tell me there was no point cheating at solitaire because you only cheat yourself. Listen: Who among us has never cheated at solitaire? Let them cast the first stone.
Writing a novel is an enormous undertaking and it’s something nobody can do for you but you. You have to come up 60,000 words or more and they all have to be coherent and in the same language and everything, unless you’re James Joyce. You have to create believable people out of whole cloth. It is a very normal phenomenon to get ten or twenty pages in and then realize you ran out of story to tell, or motivation to tell it, one or the other.
But there are ways to break it down to reasonable-size pieces.
Consider this: While a short story and a novel are completely different things, and while a novel is not simply a very long short story (or vice versa), it is possible to write a short story first and then develop a novel around that short story. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card was developed around a short story. So was The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood. If a novel is too much to get your mind around all at once, think of the scene in your story that is most vivid in your mind and write that up as a short story of no more than 7,500 words.
This isn’t an arbitrary word limit—many mags won’t consider short stories longer than 7,500 as you’re getting into novelette territory at that point. I suggest a limit of 7,500 words because—
If you don’t end up writing the novel (or even if you do), you have a short story to shop around.
Oh, and, if you do complete a short story of 5,000, 6,000, or 7,000 words, you’ve written 10 percent of a novel-length work.
Writing a short story is not necessarily easier than writing a novel (I say this having written both), but it is faster. If you think a novel is too much to bite off all at once, write a short story. When you’re done, maybe you’ve got 10 percent of your novel down on paper. Ten percent of a novel is huge.
Another related exercise that does not involve writing up part of your novel as a short story is to take your main character and tell an event from their life prior to the events of your novel as a short story of its own. Think about it: Maybe JRR Tolkien found The Lord of the Rings trilogy too overwhelming to dive straight into so he wrote The Hobbit first instead. That could be you. Just kidding, you don’t want to be Tolkien. He’s dead.
The logical way to break any book down is into parts (if there are parts) and then chapters. Fiction can further be broken down into scenes. A scene is generally considered the smallest or most-granular unit of storytelling. A scene is the smallest unit with a beginning, middle, and end. The scene begins with a status quo; actions happen; the scene ends with a changed status quo. That’s a scene.
Gentlethems, start your to-do list: Take a piece of paper—or a blank document on your screen if you like typing—and jot down a list of scenes you already know your novel is going to have. You don’t have to know what every scene is going to be, but if you want to write a novel you probably have some scenes already simmering in your mind. Make a list of what those are—remember, start in the middle of the page. Write the first scene that comes to mind in the middle of the page.
Sandy and Joan arguing in the library over who misplaced a book.
Okay cool, that’s a scene. I didn’t write the whole scene on my to-do list, I just captured enough to know what scene I’m talking about. Now write down the next one you can think of. In terms of difficulty to write—that is, how well developed it is in your mind, or how many characters are involved, or whatever—quickly judge whether it’s going to be harder to write than the first on you wrote down, or easier. Easier scenes above. Harder scenes below. Is there a scene you already started writing but didn’t finish? Put that one right on top. It’s your low-hanging fruit.
Continue listing scenes on the to-do list as long as your brain is readily supplying them, but don’t feel like you have to get the entire story down in scenes or that you have to write down every scene you’ve thought of. Use the microwave popcorn method. Once the scenes stop coming fast and furious and you have to think more than thirty seconds to come up with another one, your list is good.
When you begin writing, you will begin thinking of more scenes that you need or want to write. Add them to the list. The to-do list is not set in stone. The to-do list is a living document.
A scene is totally manageable. A scene can be just a few hundred words—not even short story length. Remember, you don’t get to claim victory only after you have completed the full manuscript. You can celebrate each unit of completion.
You can also try breaking your story into chunks of pages, words, or even time. For instance, a milestone might be:
Writing one page.
Writing 500 words.
Writing steadily for one hour.
These don’t work as well for me as taking on one scene at a time because the measurements above don’t feel like a task to me. Whereas a scene tells a little story in itself, a page might not get to the end of what it started. Or 500 words could be a scene and a half. I’ve found I don’t feel a sense of “concrete thing accomplished” when I measure out my progress in words or pages—perhaps that is why NaNoWriMo is so unsatisfying to me.
Similarly, with other types of tasks, I find breaking them down into smaller tasks works better for me than committing to work on “the project” for, say, two hours each day till they’re done.
If you’ve tried the same trick—“If I just write XXX words YYY times, I’ll have a whole novel!”—without success, then try breaking whatever you’re doing down into its components until you can look at them and feel absolutely no desire to retire to your bed. Now you’re ready to begin.
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