Back to Basics: 6 Methods to Right-Size Your Next Writing Project

[Ep 227] Have you ever written a blog post and found it's growing too big and unwieldy? Or you set out to develop a book only to realize you don't have enough material to fill a 45K- or 50K-word manuscript?  If so, you're struggling with Goldilocks Syndrome: your idea is too big or too small for the project’s purpose and the way it’ll be published or shared with the world. You’re trying to cram everything you know about, say, computers into 800 to 1,000 words. You’ve got the makings of a book when you set out to write a blog post. How do you narrow it to a reasonable length? Or you’re trying to stretch the idea of cooking with crackers into a book-length project, but it’s not enough material. How do you broaden the concept to produce a compelling cookbook? What does it take to land on that just right length for your next writing project?  The 6 Right-Sizing Methods Test these six methods for narrowing—or broadening—your next writing idea and you’ll land on the perfect length, approach, and slant to suit this project’s audience, purpose, and medium. In the process, you’ll gain clarity and solidify your ideas.   The six different methods to right-size your projects are: TimeLocationCategoriesAudienceIssueStructure Let me describe each one, starting with time. When does it mean to right-size your project using time? TIME You can use time to focus on decades, a stage of life, or an era. For example, depending on your topic, you might limit your idea to focus only on the 1950s, only early childhood, or only on the Middle Ages.  If you’re writing a memoir, you’ll limit the scope of your book to a specific time in your life in which you experienced struggle and transformation. If you’re writing about plants, you could focus on the planting stage.  If you need to broaden your idea because it’s too narrow, you can simply expand from the 1950s to the first half of the 20th century or from early childhood to Kindergarten through sixth grade. LOCATION Location is another way to land on the right size for your project. You could focus on geography, meaning anything from a continent or country all the way down to a city landmark, neighborhood, or business.  But you could think of location on an object or a space. The gardener may want to write about an area of the garden or the location on a specific plant, such as the roots or petals. If you’re writing about flight, you could focus on small airports in a given state or areas within a specific airport. CATEGORIES We can also use categories to think through an idea we find to be too big and broad or too small and narrow. Find some commonalities and group those things that are similar. If you’re the garden blogger, you could focus on one category—vegetables—instead of flowers, trees, or groundcover. Dial down even more by categorizing nightshades or spring vegetables or weeds. The blogger who writes about planes can narrow to categories such as biplanes, jets, or airliners. By focusing on a small category, you easily narrow your idea. And then you can broaden by including multiple categories. AUDIENCE First-time authors often want to write a book for everyone in the whole world. That’s not realistic. The first step in right-sizing will be to narrow your audience.