Writing FAST - Jeff Bollow 2012

Structure and chunking
Attach your lightning rod
Focus

Chunking is the art of breaking down your idea into chunks.

Technically, you were “chunking” even back when you were stretching your idea across the grid, and deciding how many pages to devote to each major section.

But when you think of Chunking, I want you to focus on the content of your writing.

Specifically, ask yourself how each section will break down, and lay each chunk over its part of the grid.

Let me continue the example using this book.

We know I’ve got eighteen ten-page chapters for Writing FAST. That’s the general plan. And chunking is the process of breaking it into chunks. Of deciding exactly what each of those chapters will be.

So I started with the four main sections — Focus, Apply, Strengthen, Tweak. I labeled each Chapter with a simple title. Something to tell me what’s gonna go there. For the Focus section, it’s “Capture Your Idea,” “Make Your Idea Specific,” and “Turn Your Idea into a Plan”. (The “lightning rod” analogy came later, out of the book’s subtitle, so I put this chapter’s original title as the Focus section subtitle.)

Then I broke each chapter into chunks. For this chapter, it was “The Lightning Rod,” “Create a Power Grid,” “Broad strokes to Micro strokes,” etc.

By doing this for the whole book, I made the writing process ten times easier. By giving each chunk one page, I immediately knew what would go on every page of my book. Not the details, yet, but the overview. The Plan.

How long does this take? It varies.

I’m not gonna lie to you, either. A longer, more complex project (like a thousand-page novel), might take several days or weeks. You could even take months if you wanted to. It depends on you, your style, your temperament.

But the more clearly you nail this step, the faster the rest of your writing will become. That thousand-page novel could take three years the old way. By chunking it properly, you could have your Plan in a few days or a couple weeks, and then blast through it in a few short months.

That’s the power of the FAST System.