The snowball effect. The process of something small building upon itself to grow bigger. That’s writing.
Your story started as a simple sentence or paragraph in a blank document one day. And then KA-POW! It’s a 20,000 word monster right now. It should be a 20,000 monster right now. Is it?
Guess what? It doesn’t matter. If the story is only 3,000 words it’s bigger than most high school essays. Do you remember those? They were pretty tough back in the day.
Given that we are nearly two full weeks into our projects, it makes sense we’re really feeling the work. The first few days it was probably easy to get a couple thousand words out. There was no thinking about it. Your fingers did the magic and words appeared on screen. They poured out of you. Now the same amount of time only gives way to a slow drip of words.
That’s the snowball effect. It’s easy to create small snowballs, but now that we’ve got ourselves giant boulder-like snowballs, we have to push even harder to get it to move. The script has been flipped on us, so it’s our job to go upside down alongside it.
We’ve entered the long trek of our projects. Make sure your canteens are full and you’ve packed a lunch. Depending on how you see it, this can be a picnic or it can be a trial.