Jeremy C Kester

1. Write a word
2. Write the next word
3. Repeat step 2 until complete

If only it was that easy. There’s plot, punctuation, characters, and all sorts of other things that one could find in a book. But when you have a project looming where it seems insurmountable, it does best to remember that it actually is a much simpler task than one would think.

Many times in life, assignments and tasks that one has to accomplish appear often to be too large to complete. There are those of us who stress at these tasks. They seem too big at first sight, and this paralyzes us, or pushes us towards procrastination. As a whole, these tasks may indeed be huge, like a large hive on a tree buzzing angrily.

There are those of us who complicate things more than they need to be. It helps then to break these large, insurmountable tasks down into smaller pieces. Every large assignment, every large task is nothing more than a conglomeration of a series of much smaller tasks. Rather than trying to attack the whole hive, it is best to acknowledge that it is a collection of single bees. And while each bee might be scary in its own right, better to face them one at a time than an entire hive of them.

In writing, each work is a collection of the simplest task of writing a single word. That is done over and over and over again until the whole of them combines to make a story. Finding what the next word to write often is itself a chore as we have to find how it connects to the rest of what is there already, but it is only a single word. It’s the single bee from the hive. And that is far less daunting than the whole of the thing.