Turning Nuggets into Ingots

I had the thought today, What would I do if I had to give a two-hour speech about writing? My immediate reaction was, No problem. I've certainly written more than enough in my blog to cover that much time. But after that, it occurred to me that no one entry in my blog came even close to that length. They were closer to 10 minutes than 2 hours. They were nuggets.

There's nothing wrong with having nuggets of wisdom or insight or whatever you want to call it. The only problem is that they're small. A handful of nuggets is nice, but a solid ingot is far more impressive. I am so much more used to coming up with nuggets and sharing them, I wondered if I ever could do something larger. The theoretical speech seemed a lot more intimidating.

I kept thinking about this and I had a realization: Every level of writing above a sentence, from paragraphs onward, are simply a matter of grouping. The difference between a ten-minute speech and a two-hour speech is how much information you can cover. With 10 minutes, you can only give the most general information or you can go slightly in depth on a specific subject (e.g. you can talk vaguely about where ideas come from or you can specifically talk about word association as a method of creating ideas). With 2 hours, you could talk about what ideas are, how we treat them, how we make use of them, and cover several methods of coming up with ideas.

Then I thought about this blog again. These posts are rarely self-contained. I often link to previous entries that cover similar ground. One post will naturally lead me to a further post. If I wanted to cover a particular subject, I could find all of the posts I've made relating to that subject, reorganize them, and present them as a full unit.

So, it seems that you can't get an ingot without having a bunch of nuggets. What you need to do is gather all the nuggets of the same element, melt them down, and then carefully shape them into a single, solid unit. If you want to make a 2-hour speech, just deliver twelve 10-minute speeches on the same subject.

An important lesson is also here for writers who are afraid of big projects. A magnum opus starts with a single letter. Write something, no matter how small it is. Then write something else. Keep on doing that. Create as many nuggets as you can. Eventually, you will be able to turn them into the great work that you envision.