Reflection verses Takeaway

Reflection is sharing my experiences, emotionally. Takeaway is giving you the opportunity to apply my shared feelings to your situation, happy or sad. That’s what I learned this past week and I am happy to share this technique with you, so you too can write with a powerful impact on your readers.  

Discovering and then following certain writers and editors on social media, who spark my potential for growth as a creative writer is of importance to me. Recently, Brooke Warner, Editor with She Writes Press, posted a video on You Tube about “Takeaway” when writing.   

To explain, my writing is inspired by memoir; thus my pages, whether it be my big project or another, are filled with experiences that have inevitably shaped who I am today. By sharing these experiences, I hope my readers find my story interesting, uplifting, and a means for their own self-exploration. However, I now understand, that to accomplish such a goal, I need to get out of the “me, me, me” syndrome and into the all-inclusive “We” and “You,” rather than (solely) “I”. 

Photo by Karina Carvalho

Here are a few examples, to compare reflection to take-away.

Instead of the reflection, “The bird I saw in the tree was bright yellow”, change it to a takeaway: “Picture a bright yellow sun against a dark blue sky and you can see what I saw when the yellow bird looked at me from green leaves in the tree.”

Instead of “I feel sad when someone cries”, (a reflection) change it to “We want to hug the person who is crying because it reminds us we are compassionate to others in their difficulties, as a mother is sympathetic to her little boy’s bruised knee.”

Instead of “When I lost my job, I couldn’t pay my bills,” change it to “If you’ve ever lost a job, you know how scary it is to keep control of your finances; it is like (and then explain it in detail).”

Instead of “I won the raffle when I bought more tickets than anyone else”, change it to “You just might win a raffle, if you buy lots of tickets because that’s what happened to me.”

Those are but a few examples to write what is called a “Takeaway”; the oomph that a reader gets from our writing. When writing with a takeaway, consider:

• ·      How can I describe an emotion so my reader feels the same as I do?

• ·      Is there any scientific fact needed to convince my reader?

• ·      If I could make my reader understand something, what would it be?

• ·      And in essence, what message do I want my reader left with?

The seventeen minutes in Brooke’s video caused me to revisit my current big project. This week, my goal is to completely revamp the prologue to my manuscript in progress. For more on this topic, see Takeaway: The Heart of Memoir, with Brooke Warner.  And let me know what you think, in the comment section below, if you’d like.  

-Elle-