Sarah-Beth Watkins

As a creativity coach, I advise writers to chunk their ideas down.

This is a well tested NLP technique that can help you to make your writing seem more realistic and more doable.

One of my clients recently told me that he had an idea for a book but it would be an in-depth scientific book that would mean a lot of research and he just didn’t know where to start. I asked him to break down his idea into steps so he had a list that read something like – plan chapters, do research, write a proposal, get an expert to write the introduction, find quotes from the professionals, and so on. Then I asked him to take each one of these steps again and break it down. So for planning chapters, he would write chapter titles, work out the number of chapters, decide on the focus of each chapter, etc. I asked him to pick one and commit to it during the following week. He chose writing the chapter titles but this was enough of a smaller task to make him believe he could manage the whole project and within the week, he had actually planned out a chapter list, titles and the focus for each chapter. Sometimes starting a project can be the hardest task of all but by chunking down what seems to be an insurmountable body of work into manageable pieces, it can help you to focus on developing and ultimately completing that project.