When something’s too big and scary to accomplish, break it down, they say. Make it smaller and smaller until you’ve got small, achievable chunks of work.
But there’s an art to breaking things down into manageable chunks. And I don’t mean saying things like, “I’m going to write a novel, so I need to do a chapter a week for 52 weeks then I’ll be done.” Or, if I’m making a graphic novel, simply saying, “i’ll just do a panel-a-day” won’t make it any easier. What makes it easier? Finishing ‘something’.
How to finish
As artists, we all have goals. One day, I want to write a novel. But writing a novel is going to take a *very* long time. I don’t even know what it takes to write a novel. I can get a sense of what it’s like from testimony – other authors who have accomplished the task and share their words of wisdom about how to do it. We’ve all heard it before, “Write everyday”, “Write whenever you feel like”, “Write for you” or “Write for your audience”. For every piece of sage advice, there’s another sage who went about it the opposite way. All that really tells me is that there are different paths for different people. So what sort of person am I?
What’s your skateboard?
In agile software development, we have the concept of building a skateboard, first. It’s a helpful analogy that is intended to describe the simplest way to achieve your goal. For example, if your goal is to get from A to B, you could build a car. But that’s expensive, and it may take a long time. A skateboard is cheaper and lighter and it will get you from A to B, but maybe not in the comfort or glory that you imagined.
Writing a novel is a bit like building a car. It can take professional novelist 3+ years to write a novel. If I’m a novice, it’s going to take me a lot longer than that. And even then, when I get to the end, I won’t know if it’ll be any good for anyone else to read!
But writing a novel is, in fact, simply telling a story. A novel has a beginning, middle, and end. It has characters, plot, sub-plots. It has a ‘writer-style’, personality, brand. It helps the author explore deep questions about themselves. All of those things that make up a novel can be found in a short story, or even micro-fiction. Perhaps, the skateboard version of a novel is a short story. It’s less time-consuming, less expensive, and when you’re done, you can get feedback more quickly on whether your beginning, middle, and end is present; if your characters are well developed alongside your plot. You can begin to understand your writing style. Sure, it’s not a Ferrari, but it’ll get you from A to B so you can learn from it and then build your bicycle.
The same thing goes for picture books. They take A LOT of work to illustrate. Freya Blackwood says it takes her about 6 months to do one book. And that’s when the words are provided! What’s the picture book illustrator’s skateboard? Well a picture-book illustrator is a visual storyteller. They take a set of words (normally about 300-500), and they tell a story within and alongside them. All of that can be achieved in a single image and a few words. In fact, this is exactly what Scholastic saw when they offered me a contract. I accidentally showed them I could ride a skateboard so they threw me in a car and said, “That’s OK, you know how to get from A to B, just do it for 32 pages now”.
Not writing a novel, just getting from A to B
Agile software development has taught me the art of breaking things down. To have a look at what’s going on at a functional level and create new and interesting ways to achieve the same goal for cheaper and faster. It just so happens that it works the same way for any giant goal we set ourselves. Once we remove the ego involved in wanting to tell our friends, ‘we wrote a novel’, the path toward that final goal isn’t as difficult or as epic as it seems.