Keep it Short

It was back to the elevator speech. Or a response to a polite inquiry into the content of my emerging book. Short. Simple. Just a taste.

For a woman who loves to dive deeply into gargantuan topics, the thought of short or simple used to send me into a panic. I couldn’t even imagine how to boil my words down to a description that felt true and made any sense.

With a lot of hand holding and expertise from Jen Violi, my writing coach, creative dula and content editor, I found my way to the following short book description:

Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself defies easy categorization. It’s memoir and history and a celebration of the power of faith, myth and magic. It’s personal, and it calls for social change. Through the lenses of race, class, gender and spirituality, Nancy Thurston excavates history—personal, familial, global—for the sake of cross-generational healing and transformation.

Then last week I had 3-4 minute interview on Portland’s KATU AM Northwest show. No succinct description written out and read. But the instructions were the same. Short. Simple. Just a taste.

Slowly I am learning the art of brevity. Stretching out the boundaries of my preferences, I am experimenting with the power of holding both the full, deep-sea dive and the teaspoon taste.