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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34322
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34322
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

One solution is to keep the protagonist from even **knowing** the answer. Make the project a kind of an exploration and discovery so small accomplishments accumulate to larger things, that suddenly coalesce into a finished project.

The other thing to do is keep their thoughts, when working on the project, not on what **it does** but what it **means,** what the results would be. Not **how** to cure cancer, but the idea _This will cure cancer._ Focus on the implications or consequences of the project.

In fact, I would focus on both ends of the spectrum, the extremely fine details of the project, and the extremely large.

A mathematician / statistician like me isn't thinking _"I'm inventing a new distribution that does XYZ for fracture prediction"_, that's the middle ground.

We think _"I'm going to save lives and keep aircraft from falling out of the sky. [consequences,] I just have to find a way to narrow this error range a little more, maybe I can use a conditioning equation... [microscopic details]."_

The trick is, the **consequences** of the project do not really tell the reader what the heck the project is, and the microscopic details worked on each day are "a tree" instead of "the forest", so they don't tell the reader the nature of the big idea either.

But still the reader feels like they are somehow privy to the thoughts of the inventor, it is just the original inspiration for the project occurred before the book began (like many other thoughts the protagonist has had), so the big idea is never discussed.

In fact trying to see the forest from the trees could be played as a kind of mystery, the clues being the "big consequences" and "microscopic details."

Original score: 3