Write like a project manager

While exploring writer’s block I’ve focused on motivation. How do my desires and thoughts lead to the creation of self-imposed limits that keep me distracted and mired in fruitless pursuits? But there’s another aspect to writing that can lead to a blockage. Writing fiction is hard.

My current thoughts on writing can be summarized as project management for writers.

How can a fiction writer estimate and adjust the scope of their projects in order to balance the required cognitive load with their current capacity?

Writers don’t get tutorial levels. They seek advice from the pros. But those pros are operating on hard mode with permadeath and they’re ranking. Pro advice focuses on what experts think about when writing–the high-order goals. Those other writers, the noobs seeking advice, are still learning how to fill a single empty page. They’re working on low-order goals.

PRO: And that’s what you do when you get the Hammer of Thundar +11 to Strength!

NOOB: Got it. So… which button lets me talk to villagers?

Overloading the writer’s system leads to discomfort, anxiety, and avoidance. A game developer understands this and they balance their game’s difficulty to match (and develop) the player’s skill. Most writers, unfortunately, need to learn through grit and intuition. Even when their process works and they finish a story they might start their next project and their process falls off a cliff. They didn’t really know what conditions led to success. They didn’t know how to balance the difficulty to match their skill.

So essentially, if the blank page feels overwhelming it might be because I’m overloading my system with too much scope. I can adjust my scope down while offloading some work to development and revision stages. The outline and the shitty first draft are both forms of offloading work.

The scope of a writing project takes some work to estimate. Writing is opaque and many writers treat their work like it’s a soft magic system and wizardry. You just need a wand and some basic Latin. They don’t study how content, structure, style, and even their process affect the scope of a project. A book that focuses on a couple falling in love over a week-long vacation in Aruba has less complexity than a book in an epic fantasy series with multiple main characters and viewpoints. Obvious, right? But how do you estimate the scope of each book before you start writing?

That’s where my exploration and experiments are heading.