Eating the Elephant
By: Kathi Macias
http://kathimacias.netfirms.com/

Have you ever made the mistake of asking an eight-year-old what a movie was about? I have—and the results were brutal. Nearly an hour later, as he finally wrapped up his nonstop, blow-by-blow report with “And that’s what it was about,” my eyes were glazed over and I was bordering on comatose. All I could think of was, I just asked what time it was; I didn’t want to know how to make the clock! Honestly, a simple “It was a story about a dog named Snickers” would have sufficed.

Eight-year-olds, however, have not yet learned to focus. Their attention span is still somewhat akin to that of a housefly, so I knew it was pointless to try to explain to him that I simply wanted a one-line synopsis of the movie. Better to cut my losses and make a run for it before he started telling me about the sequel.
But are adults that much different? To be more specific, are writers that much different? We should be. In fact, we must be if we are to be effective communicators. But are we?

One of the most frequent problems I see in working with writers is a desire to “eat the entire elephant.” I’m sure you’ve heard the saying that the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time, and that’s a great way to approach writing. For instance, if you want to write a story about your family vacation to the Redwoods, you need to stick to what actually happened on that trip. You should, of course, include enough information about your family, the scenery, the weather, and the magnificent trees to bring your story to life, but you don’t have to write an encyclopedia on trees in general. Or, if you are thinking of writing about a particular spiritual experience you once had, you don’t want to attempt to write an apologetic on the entire Bible. In other words, successful writing is about finding and keeping your focus, unlike the eight-year-old with the limited attention span who rambled on and on about the movie because he wasn’t able to formulate and express one clear thought. In essence, he was trying to eat the entire elephant in one big bite. Writers often attempt the same thing, and it simply does not work.

Now because you are reading this newsletter I assume you are a writer. Therefore I will also assume that you have at least one great idea burning in your chest at this very moment, crying to get out and make its way into a book or a magazine. If I were to ask you, as I wanted to ask that eight-year-old, for a one-line synopsis of your masterpiece, would you be able to give it to me? If not, then I have to ask you another question: Do you really know what your idea is about?

Think about it for a moment. If you can’t summarize your would-be manuscript (or, worse yet, one you’ve already written) in one line, that tells me you aren’t really clear on the theme or purpose of the piece. How then can you expect your readers to figure it out? After all, our readers are the key to the success of anything we write. My journalism professor at USC once told me, “Our job as writers is not so much to express ourselves as it is to effectively communicate an idea to our readers.” If someone reads one of my books and comes away scratching his head and mumbling, “I wonder what that was all about,” he’s certainly not going to read my next book or recommend my work to anyone else. And that, in the extremely competitive publishing world, can be fatal to any writing career.

It’s not that we don’t want to make our readers think. All writers have some sort of underlying message that we want readers to chew on for a while, even long after they’ve finished reading our work. But we also want them to be clear on what that message is. The only way to assure that happening is first to be sure that we ourselves are clear on what we are trying to say.

Every well constructed object, whether a twenty-five-story building or a brief magazine article, must begin with a firm foundation. If we lay that foundation in the very beginning and then effectively and systematically build on it, we will eventually come full circle, ending up right back where we started, standing upon the firm foundation that supports the entire manuscript and leaving our readers with a clear and satisfying takeaway thought.

And so I challenge you: Can you capture the heart of that masterpiece that is burning inside of you and write it down in one brief, succinct statement or synopsis, understanding that this statement is the “takeaway” you want to impart to your readers? In other words, when your readers finish reading your piece, will they have been able to find the meaning of your manuscript within the one-line synopsis that was the starting place for your writing?
I realize this may seem a bit tedious and elementary, but as a thirty-year veteran of the publishing world, I find that I still benefit greatly from coming up with this statement before beginning a piece. It keeps me focused as I write, and it cuts down on the amount of rewriting I have to do after finishing my first draft. (In fact, my agent won’t even look at one of my proposals unless I place my one-sentence synopsis in big bold letters at the very top of the proposal.)

Besides, unlike the eight-year-old who tried to eat the entire elephant in one sitting, I’ve learned that one of the many benefits of limiting myself to one bite of pachyderm at a time is that I then have all those other bites to use as future foundations of countless other articles or books. Learning to find and maintain our focus in writing is a win-win situation, not only for those of us who devote our lives to the proper use and arranging of words, but also for those who choose to read them.

*Adapted from THE TRAIN-OF-THOUGHT WRITING METHOD: Practical, User-Friendly Help for Beginning Writers by Kathi Macias (AuthorHouse, 2005).