When it comes to content, thinking in terms of building up from multiple small things.
Tweets/Toots/SMS -> Blog Post -> "Essay" - "Book"
Vines/Shorts/TikToks/Reels -> YouTube -> Video Essay -> "Documentary Film"
Riff -> Chorus -> Song -> Album
And how the skills developed in building the small things can accumulate into something much bigger, over time, or lead to building something more as well.
This can work in other realms too:
Take a step, jog around the block, run a mile, run a marathon, hike up a mountain.
Build a box, build a chair, build a garage, build a house.
Sometimes you’ll aim for the big thing at the outset. Often this can be due to need: I need a house, f’rex, preferably sooner rather than later, but more likely you’ll be making smaller steps along the way. Not everyone writes a full-length novel or films a feature length documentary on their first time out.*
There’s usually some baby steps involved.
There is a danger though, in following the reductive path.
Because at the end of the day, 1000 tweets*** is not the same as a novel, nor is 1000 15-second Tiktoks a feature film. The aggregate is not the same as the monolith, even though they are the same in “weight”. Sandstone is not granite, at the end of the day. And yet…
…and yet, the aggregate can be something more, something unique, something different. Witness the stitched fan film recreations of Raiders of the Lost Ark (Strompolos, 1989[2015]), The Princess Bride (Reitman, 2020), or the various Star Wars fan films. Each of these recreations brings something new to the material, an energy, an earnestness, an authenticity.
And, regardless of the outcome, it is in the making, the building – piece by piece – of the work, layer by layer through Additive Manufacturing, that the skills develop, and the project takes shape.
This “manufacturing” then, is really “content creation” writ large. The ‘E’ in the EFP. Short for Extruded (Mass Content) Production**. The material that drives the platforms that are Architects of our Attention. The production has been outsourced, or offloaded at least, to the millions of us engaged in making it. Each tiny element can be done quickly, or it can take as much time, energy, and resources that one wishes to devote to it.
The trick, I suspect, is knowing when each of those pieces are done. For now, this one will do…
Footnotes & References
*: and those that do often have some significant help, assistance, or a leg up. Don’t let that stop you from being amazing though.
**: EFP, Extruded Fantasy Product. A catch-all for those Fantasy series that seem to proliferate across bookshelves where the authors magically produce another doorstop on a regular, perhaps annual, basis. (see also: Creativity, and Sanderson, Brandon.
***: or Toots, or Xs, or whatever the microblog equivalent is at the time you read this. July 2023 is/was weird.