Today I confronted the sheer vastness of the topic I have chosen to write my book about. I indulged my vertigo for about 15 minutes. Then I borrowed a page from some of the people I’m writing about.
A while back, the team at OSAF, in an effort to wrestle the schedule of their project to the ground, temporarily moved their planning process off the wiki and onto a whiteboard. They broke their project down into roughly equal chunks of work and wrote the name of each chunk on a simple yellow sticky note. Instantly, the outlines of a schedule became easier to discern.
Stickies (a k a “Post-It” notes)! I’d seen play- and screen-writing friends do the same for their projects. I’m a devotee of outlining software, and I’m using a venerable outliner to organize my research. But I needed a different approach to get beyond the sense of “Oh crap, how do I find a way out of this swamp and onto that mountain range?” Somehow, laying all the pieces out in an open-ended, non-hierarchical way on a two-dimensional plane just helped: Something about being able to take in all the pieces in a map-like overview rather than peering in through the keyhole of screen real estate.
My stickies are now marshalled out on a 3′ x 4′ foamcore board and looming over my desk. Over the next few months I will add to them, rearrange and reorganize them, then remove them from the board one by one as they pass from concept into actual pieces of writing.
One day the board will be empty. And I’ll be done with a first draft.
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