Creative wisdom often advises us to boil down the work to its essence. You must keep the essence – the core theme – in mind when creating. Otherwise, how can you stay on track?
Different people have different techniques for this:
- Steven Pressfield advises us to boil down an enterprise into a single page.
- Austin Kleon chooses a “secret sentence” for each book he writes.
- Francis Ford Coppola choses a single word for each film.
- Quintus Curtius points out how Pliny advised speakers to distill matters to their essentials and hammer the points home over and over again – “focus on the main issue and never leave it”.
- Gary Keller has his concepts of 4-1-1 planning (4 weeks, 1 month, 1 year) and the 1-3-5 planning (one goal, three strategies, five priorities for each strategy) – effectively boiling down your goals into actionable, one-page plans.
What, specifically, you choose to do does not matter much. But you do need to distill down to the essence. Do not stray. Stay to the path.
(This also works as a pre-writing exercise: ask yourself what the core concept is, and make sure it is clear to you.)
References
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Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh\*t by Steven Pressfield
The problem in fiction, from the thrashing writer’s point of view, is almost always, “What is this damn thing about?”
In other words, what’s the theme? What’s the theme of our book, our play, our movie script? What’s the theme of our new restaurant, our start-up, our video game?
When we don’t know the theme, we don’t know the Problem.
When you as a writer carry over and apply this mode of thinking to other fields, say the writing of novels or movies or nonfiction, the first question you ask yourself at the start of any project is, “What’s the concept?”
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Do the Work by Steven Pressfield
Discipline yourself to boil down your story/new business/philanthropic enterprise to a single page.
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See the Throat, and Latch on to It by Quintus Curtius
By this he meant, of course, that the speaker must distill matters down to their essentials, and hammer home these points over and over. Since men’s powers of judgment vary widely, and their estimations are prone to gross distortion resulting from their backgrounds and experiences, the speaker must focus on the main issue and never leave it.
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In One Word by Austin Kleon
At the very end of this video (excerpted here), the director Francis Ford Coppola explains how he chooses a single word for each of films to keep him on track as he makes decision after decision:
Learning from the great Elia Kazan, I always try to have a word that is the core of what the movie is really about.
In one word.
For Godfather, the key word is “succession.” That’s what the movie is about.
Apocalypse Now: “morality.”
The Conversation: “privacy.”
Megalopolis. You know what it is? “Sincerity.” That’s the word I use when I say, “What should I do?”
For each book I write, I choose a secret sentence.