If you are overwhelmed with something you are writing, start small.
Try not to be defeated by attempting a 40,000-page novel before you even begin.
Make your chapters smaller is my advice.
You can write 1,000 words, right?
Writing forty (1,000 word) essays seems much more manageable.
If you are still disheveled about it, why not 80 chapters?
Do it one paragraph at a time and persist.
Just be patient, and keep going!
John Steinbeck agrees on this point.
Take it Bird By Bird, as Anne Lamott says.
This is also how to blog: One post at a time.
Start small. If you try to think about all of it at once—the world you hope to capture on the page, everything you know, every idea you’ve ever had, each person you’ve met, and the panoply of feelings coursing through you like a river—you’ll be overcome with paralysis. Who wouldn’t be? Just the way we put one foot in front of the other as we get out of bed, the way we brush our teeth, splash water on our faces, feed our animals if we have animals, and our children if we have them, measure the coffee, put on the kettle, we need to approach our writing one step at a time. It’s impossible to evoke an entire world at the start. But it is possible to describe a crack in the sidewalk, the scuffed heel of a shoe. And that sidewalk crack or scuffed heel can be the point of entry, like a pinhole of light, to a story, a character, a universe.
-Dani Shapiro, Still Writing