Every good project deserves another, especially in the ever evolving race to obtain and maintain relevance in your field. But let’s say you’ve just finished a project, or you’re easing yourself back in after taking a break, and aren’t ready for some giant undertaking. Let’s figure out how to start small, but in a way that will still help you achieve meaningful results.
For the purposes of this article, I’m going to establish two different reasons why creating small might be a good idea for your next project: Creating small for the sake of creating small, and creating small as a part of something big.
Creating Small for the Sake of Small
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
This six word story by Ernest Hemingway is perhaps the most well known example of flash fiction, a tiny creative work that has since become a form that many have emulated. In fact, several different categories of flash fiction have come to exist - the six word story, ”twitterature” (280 characters), the “dribble” (50 words), drabble (100 words), and the titular flash fiction - 1,000 words.
While these forms are traditionally geared towards writing forms, you can still adapt the flash fiction ideology to different mediums. Consider, for example, a painting using only two colors, on an unusually small canvas. Another idea could be a song with a uniform melody throughout, or peom that involve a lot of repetition, increasing the meaning behind the line you’ve selected as it echoes through the verse. Instead of writing an entire sketch, write one joke, and don’t worry yourself with any more context than is absolutely necessary.
Creating small can feel close to another tactic I’ve written about, Creating Through Constricting, but at the same time, creating small should be focused towards small tasks with small goals, rather than forcing yourself to adhere to a set of guidelines. Sometimes we as creators, just need a win, so if you sit down to create and something is different when you stand back up, you can call that a win for creating small!
Creating Small as a Part of Big
Though the idea of starting a big showy project can be very tempting, it can also be incredibly daunting and leave you without a good idea of where to start. If you can, breaking your project down into bite sized chunks helps establish clear goals and progress markers along the way.
It’s also entirely possible to reverse engineer some small projects into a big project with some curation! The writing process of renowned humorist and author David Sedaris begins with keeping a diary and writing every day. Over time this expanded to him constantly carrying around a notebook and writing things as they occurred to him. Only when a significant number of these musings and writings have been collected are they then curated into the books of essays that he is so well known for.
So too can you collect your work over time and then curate it into a final product, and it still works beyond the formats of essays and novels. If writing a song sounds too hard, start with a theme, and then write one couplet about that theme per day (also check out the Writing Your First Song article for help!). Eventually you’ll have more couplets than you need, and can pick the best ones for your song.
Don’t forget than any small project can still make a big impact. If you like, share your small projects in the comments below!