A thousand words. Hard enough, yes? How in the world are you going to get to fifty thousand?
There are a few answers to that question, but first, let’s move away from the numbers and understand the mechanism behind it. Let’s go to the beginning. Let’s go to the root of literature.
You want to create a story – to share something creative within you, in some capacity, and have others absorb it. That is the purpose. And so, when we go from Facebook posts, or Twitter tweets, or short stories, to the leviathan task of writing a full novel, there is an impending crisis: how do I expand how I share these creative moments into something that seems totally out of my scope?
Again, let’s go back to the root: to share something creative within you. If we take this primary directive and apply it to the question, we get a relatively simple answer: share more of yourself!
But how? You have to change your mentality from someone that writes in a way to share only the facts of said creativity, to letting that creativity “flow”, “infect”, and “expand” into whatever ideas, descriptions, and extensions your imagination takes you. If, for example, you want to express how a character feels about a flower, you can say: “She hated the way the flower looked.”
You have to change your mentality from someone that writes in a way to share only the facts of said creativity, to letting that creativity “flow”, “infect”, and “expand”
But if you take the shackles off your imagination, you can peel open the can that describes “hated”. What does it mean to hate, to you? Does it relate to the scene of a moldy apple? Does it bring about thoughts of violence? Is it a passive, restrained hate, that bottles up within? And in what flavor does your character manifest this hate?
Combine this, with the reason behind the hate. Does it remind her of her childhood? Why? Do you want to explain that now, or later? Does it relate to any other aspect of the story? Do you want to allude to it?
As you can see, one simple sentence can be expanded – but not arbitrarily, through force, but through the natural expansion of your base desire to share your creativity. Remove the limits, and let the imagination soar.
