A Series of Short Assignments

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott shares that she keeps an empty, one-inch picture frame at her desk to remind herself that any writing project is really a series of short assignments. Whether she is working on an essay or a novel, she can can build her story “one small scene, one memory, one exchange” (or one bird) at a time. All she has “to do is to write down as much as [she] can see through a one-inch picture frame.”

This is great advice when the task you’ve set yourself seems too overwhelming to start, but it can also be a tool to enrich your current draft. By focusing on singular pieces of your story—be it a character, event, moment—you can shape your narrative world one image at a time. This is especially helpful if you have the rough structure of your story, but it’s all skeleton and little meat. I find I often urge my editing clients to help me see and know the places or characters in their manuscripts. What did it feel like to enter this room? What did New York look and smell like in 1905? These images within your small picture frames can help us see the people and places that fill your narrative world.

Take the opening section of your current project (because openings are always the hardest). What do you want your reader to know by the end of the section? Your answer can only be one sentence long. Distill this down to 1-3 discrete things (these answers can only be 1-3 words long). Remember that these should be small elements, images only big enough to fill a single, one-inch picture frame (for the literal among us, I’d suggest it’s hard to get more than a paragraph inside of a small picture frame). Is it the house where your subject lives? The road on which the journey begins? The time in which your story begins? Look at your imaginary frame and capture this one thing or, as Lamott urges, “paint a picture of it, in words.”