49. Define Your Book's "Takeaway" to Decide What Scenes Belong

Defining a Theme or "Takeaway" for your book can help you at any stage of the writing process. In this episode, Suzy dives into how to define your takeaway, why it matters, and how to use it to test each scene. Using the takeaway you can write a book that is laser-focused on your message, and create an experience that readers will love.

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Transcript

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Welcome to Show. Don't Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vidori, where I teach you the tried and true secrets to writing fiction nonfiction that are gonna wow your readers broken down step by step. We're gonna explore writing techniques. I'm gonna show you a glimpse behind the scenes of successful writers' careers that you wouldn't have access to otherwise. And I'm also gonna coach writers live on their pages so that you can learn and transform your own storytelling. Whether you're just starting out, you're drafting your first book, you're editing, or you're currently rewriting that book, or maybe even your 10th book, this show's gonna help you unlock the writing skills that you didn't even know you needed, but you definitely do. I'm so looking forward to helping you get your amazing ideas from your mind onto your pages in an exciting way for both you and your readers, so that you can achieve your wildest writing dreams, and you're gonna also have some fun doing it. Let's dive in. Today we're gonna talk about using your book's takeaway, which I'm gonna explain what that is. It's kind of related to theme, to flag advancer scenes in your book that you should quite frankly cut. Most writers start writing a book because they have a gripping idea, something that's just like blowing up in their minds and they cannot write it, and that's a good thing for me. Those ideas usually come to me at a time when I'm relaxed, when I'm doing something else entirely, and it comes to me like one vivid scene playing over and over 10 in my mind. Maybe you can relate that I just can't shape where the stakes are high and one wrong move would end up with a character falling off a metaphorical cliff. That germ of an idea eventually ends up being my inciting incident, or the rising action, or possibly even the climax of my next book. Maybe the idea that made you wanna write your book that you're working on now, start it with a moment just like that, that something that happened in real life or that triggered something for you, an event or a message that you wanted to share with the world. However it arrived in your brain. It did. It stuck with you long enough and burnt bright enough that you're turning it into a book and you're on this path. But writing an entire book is an immensely complex undertaking it. Even if you've outlined meticulously writers all agree that you need way more ideas than you can possibly imagine when you first start to fill the pages of an entire book. This is a bit daunting. And I find that when I work with writers, if they had known how much work it was gonna be or how much it was really gonna include, I don't know that they would have stepped on the path to writing a book in the first place. And I don't say this to discourage you because they're always glad they did, but it actually takes a lot more work than you think it's gonna take. And so when that's happening in your life, if you're there right now, I want you to hear this because that is normal. I. And sometimes we think, oh my gosh, am I making this way too complicated? Our brains get stuck on this. Like, is there a shortcut? Is there another path there might not be, and that's okay. So just sit with it. Because your book, if you're writing fiction, is going to be somewhere between 50,000 words to a hundred thousand words, possibly beyond, depending on your genre. If you don't know how long your book should be, look it up. Look at similar books in your genre, and don't go too far outside that word count because you'll disappoint readers and it'll be harder for you to find a publisher. It'll be harder for you to find readers. So somewhere between that word count and what you've mapped out in detail, hopefully in an outline, might only fill a portion of this word count. So whether you're writing fiction or pulling from real events for a nonfiction book, so that might be a memoir where you are actually using inspiration from your own life or using real events from your own life, but you still have to decide what goes in the book. So as you write, your brain is gonna make decisions about what to include and what to skip. So what comes easily to you might depend on your mood or might even depend on what you got up to that day. And that's great, but just know that sometimes your brain can put things in that kind of don't belong. I like to use this example because I can't believe how many times it comes up, but when I read about characters that are making spaghetti, while I'm editing draft pages of a writer's fantasy novel or a science fiction where they're literally on a spaceship and all of a sudden they're having spaghetti for dinner because the writer had spaghetti for dinner. Or if a character is cleaning their house in detail in a romance. I know instantly that the writer is bringing snippets of their own lives into the pages, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes these pages and these scenes are brilliant writing, so don't get me wrong, they might be really good. That's not what we're talking about here. The question is, does it actually add or detract from your story? Not the quality of the writing itself. Occasionally, I gotta say that these scenes are on point and they tie into the rest of the book. If the spaghetti, for instance, is there because you know you're gonna mirror a lady in the tramp scene with two characters sharing a plate, or there's a zero gravity thing and the spaceship, and you wanna show that and spaghetti's a great, fun, messy way to do it, great. If it doesn't build something about the world though, you can probably do better and I'm gonna challenge you to do better. Because many times seems like these have nothing to do with your character's journey and they slow the pace of your book to the point that a reader might stop reading. That's right. If a reader finds that you're sort of too far off the beaten path and it has nothing to do with what's happening, their eyes will glaze over and they lose the thread, the thread of what they're trying to track. What we're really talking as a reader is your main character's journey. How are they changing? From the beginning of the story to the end, what are they doing to further their situation? Whether it ends up being good for them or bad for them, that's called agency. If they're taking actions to accomplish something, if they want something, and if they're eating spaghetti and spaghetti doesn't actually build this world for you, what if they were eating hydroponic plants that were grown on some other place in the ship? That would be a great world building detail that you could add. That means that we don't have to visit that space and watch all the hydroponic plants grow. You've shown me that we eat them, and now I know that they're there. So make sure that everything that you're including fits in sometime. Another one that I see all the time when I ask people to expand a scene, or if we have a scene that's really heavy on dialogue that doesn't have a lot of action in it. So a scene where, for instance, your characters are sitting around telling each other something, and I ask the writer, I'm like, Hey, if this were a movie and they were sitting around telling each other something, it'd be pretty boring to watch. So the same thing is true in your books. We want them to be doing something while they're having that conversation. And I would say about 50% of the time. The thing that that writers add all the time is somebody makes tea and then they sip tea while they do this. Right? That is not what I'm talking about. We don't want them sipping tea. If tea has nothing to do with the story, that doesn't add anything, that is just as boring as them sitting around at a table. Just because they're sipping tea doesn't make it interesting. What I'm talking about is adding an activity in that scene that mirrors or contrasts, or that pushes your character in some way. Okay, I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself here, so just bear with me for a moment 'cause I'm gonna show you how to do that as you're coming up with ideas and exploring how they fit into your book. It's easy to lose sight of what you wanted to say to readers in the first place. Kind of get off a track. Instead, while you're scrambling to fill your pages, you're gonna veer off course and you might create a book full of cool things. And I'm not saying they're not cool. I bet they are. But might not be what you meant to write at all, and it's gonna leave your readers confused and your book without a cohesive path for them to follow. I have conversations with Writers Weekly who wanna discuss whether they should add this brand new shiny idea that they just came up with to their book. What they want is a compass, a set of rules that will tell them if the scene that they're adding to their book is improving the book, or taking away from their reader's experience. You as a writer need to choose what you want your readers to take away from your story. So what is a book's takeaway? The takeaway that you decide on for your book is closely related to what some might call your theme or the point of your story, depending on which methodology you're using to write your book. As with everything that I teach you about writing, I like to flip the script and think about your reader at every single term because they're the ones at the end of the day that you hope are gonna find your book and read your book and love your book, and share your book with others, right? That's what's gonna make it successful. That's what's gonna start that conversation with the world, which is probably why you started writing a book in the first place. They're the ones, right? The readers are the ones that you're starting that conversation with. When you publish your book and choosing a quote unquote takeaway can help you decide which scenes belong and which ones you should just kick to the curb. To choose a takeaway for your book, you're gonna have to take a big step back from that book that you're writing and ask yourself a simple question, okay, are you ready for it? Get a pen. I want you to ask yourself, what message do you want readers to take away from your book? Okay. Again, what message do you want readers to take away from your book? Sometimes this is really clear for a writer and we have something that we wanna say about humanity or about the world. We started writing for a huge, huge reason, and it's really clear. Sometimes we say, well, I just wanna entertain. Okay. Even if your goal is to entertain, there are ways that you can think about this. What do you want readers to think when they're done? All of these things, so you don't have to get too fancy with this tool, by the way, nobody's gonna see it. You, your editor, your coach, there's a couple of people who will see it, but it's not something that you're gonna advertise to the world. It's just for you, so it can sound like a bumper sticker. It can be a simple sentence, a cliche, something that's tried and true, or any old mantra will do. Something that you can use as a talisman or a touchstone to keep coming back to you that you can actually use to direct yourself and use to evaluate these great new ideas, these cool new things that you're coming up with. And decide, does spaghetti actually belong in my book or could I do something better? Okay. So as long as it resonates with you and it's what you hope your readers will think about when they're done in the book. Your takeaway isn't gonna be shared with the world. It's just a reference point. So don't sweat. Make it every word in it. Perfect. Okay, so what are some examples of takeaways in books? They're super simple. Maybe blood is thicker than water, right? Meaning that you are gonna be more loyal to your family than you are to people who are not your family. There are a million ways that that's your takeaway. There are a million ways to show that in a book, you could show a case where that's true, a case where that's not true. Mirror contrast, push your characters in some way to make decisions based on that takeaway. Okay? How about you can't accept love until you love yourself? Interesting takeaway, right? There are a number of ways in that book that would be completely different from blood is thicker than water. The decisions, the scenes, what you've highlight in the scenes, the interactions with your characters, even if your plot is exactly the same, the choices, their attitudes, what you choose to zoom in on and expand and really show in your scenes is gonna change. Based on that takeaway, how about you get out of life, what you put into it, you get out of life. What you put into it is gonna show characters who don't put much in and don't get much out, is gonna show characters who put a ton in and get a ton out. There's a lot of different ways that you can mirror and contrast that takeaway. This is not going to feel contrived to your reader. They will not know what you're doing, but it will subconsciously feel super cohesive and really intriguing to them and very satisfying when you make it work. So choosing your takeaway, this can happen when you're planning your book. So if you're just planning your book, perfect, choose it now. It will help you when you outline to make a decision and when you're trying to choose a path. Okay. It can also happen during your revision stage. So if that's where you're at now, it's not too late. Choose a takeaway and then evaluate each of your scenes against it and be ruthless if they don't fit or tweak them if you can see how you can make them fit. So to get started on choosing your takeaway, you can do a quick exercise. You can spend about 20 minutes brainstorming a list of five to seven possible takeaways for the book that you're writing now. And then narrow it down to the one that you're the most excited about. At the end of the day, this is to inspire you. This whole exercise is to inspire you. So here's some tips. As you create your list of five to seven, you only get one takeaway per book. I have writers try to cheat this all the time, say, but I have so many things that I want to say. You know what? If you have a bunch of different takeaways that you're trying to shove into the same book or a bunch of different themes, points, things that you're trying to say, messages that you want your readers to understand, learn, deepen their knowledge of by the time they're done, their book, if you have too many of these things, it's gonna feel all over the map. And guess what? It's not bad. I know you're a very complex person. You have a lot of things to say, but you also get to write as many books as you want in your lifetime. So if something doesn't fit and you have a takeaway that you want it to do, I highly, highly recommend. In fact, if you were working with me, I would insist that you only choose one and make it broad enough that a lot of the things that you wanna say can be fit into it. This might take some work if it doesn't fit that takeaway. If there's a takeaway that doesn't fit in your book, no problem, guess what? You get to write another book. Wait. Use that takeaway for another book. In fact. That is something that we often recommend when you're writing a series or a book too. If you change the takeaway and you tell a new story, or if you're writing a memoir and you tell your story from a different takeaway and you highlight different things in your life that helps you learn a different lesson or helps you see a different path. If each takeaway for each book that you write is different, it makes it possible to write a number of memoirs, even if the events in your life are the same. It sounds simple right now. Here's the fun part. Once you've chosen your takeaway, that is that sentence, that bumper onboard sticker saying that cliche that you're gonna tie everything to in your book. You now have this really cool tool to test every single idea or scene that you wanna include in your book to see if it fits. Just take one quick note here. Choosing a takeaway doesn't mean that everything in your book will feel the same. It's not gonna be redundant, or that every character in your book has to view the world in the same way. They don't. And I often get this pushback from writers who don't wanna be restricted or don't want to limit themselves. But here's what choosing a takeaway actually does. It doesn't restrict you, but it actually opens up multiple directions for your scenes to go. While keeping it cohesive and delivering an experience to your reader, that feels incredibly satisfying. This is my favorite part about most of the techniques that I teach. They're gonna have no idea how you did it. Even very seasoned agents, publishers, they come to me all the time for my clients books and they say, oh my gosh, I don't know what it is about this book. I just love it. It might be this, right?'cause there's a magic and a behind the scenes of writing that pulls it all together. If you can pull this off, your reader is gonna love your book even more, and they may have no idea why. And that's okay. With's your takeaway handy, then you take a look. Maybe it's love conquers. All right? That's the takeaway for every Harry Potter book. Love Conquers All with your takeaway handy. Take a look at each scene that you've written. Each event that you maybe plan to write, right? Each action that your character takes or a character's reaction that you want to include in your book, you can do this again, you can do this at the planning stage. You can do this at the writing stage. You can take a look ruthlessly at the end of the revision stage. It works at all three stages. Okay? Does it compare? Does it contrast? Does it mirror? Does it challenge or does it support your takeaway again? Does it somehow compare one character's behavior to another? Does it somehow contrast? So it's the opposite. Does it mirror? Does it challenge or support your takeaway? If it does one of those things, that scene, that action, that chapter belongs in your book. But if it doesn't, it's probably off topic and it's gonna feel outta place to your reader. Just be ruthless and cut it. Here's another example. If blood is thicker than water, is your takeaway scenes that show that support. This takeaway will obviously show family bonds that are stronger than anything else in a character's life, but don't forget to include ideas and scenes that are going to compare contrast mirror or challenge this takeaway. Such as maybe you've got a subplot and it shows a completely dysfunctional family with no loyalty among them, backstabbing, galore, and the end result, right? That still supports your takeaway because it shows the opposite. Or you could show a character who has no family who's trying to find their place in the world, so they have no family. They're really trying to figure this blood is thicker than water thing out, but they're coming up short. Maybe you've got a storyline where supporting one's blood relatives results in an absolute disaster, so it's the opposite. Or maybe you have a character who feels burdened by their family, even if the relationships benefit them. So you can have so many areas on the spectrum still supporting that same takeaway. It doesn't have to all be the same. You can include any number of ideas that revolve around your takeaway in your book. Weave it throughout. They might be small ideas, they might be big ideas. Remember, if you have a scene that doesn't fit this bill, take it out. Even if you love it in writing, we call this killing your darlings. Something that you absolutely think is brilliant, that you're super proud of, and at some point you're like, whew, this really stands out. It doesn't fit my book. It's distracting. It's whatever. Even if it's brilliant writing. When I make the suggestion, know that I'm not saying that the scene that you wrote isn't good. I'm saying that it won't help your reader enjoy your book more, okay? Take these scenes out, even if you spent tons of time working on them, that's a sunk cost fallacy, right? I've already spent the time. Therefore, it's good I already have the word count, therefore, it belongs. No, these are not good reasons. If you dig in your heels and leave that scene. Your readers are gonna miss out on the incredibly satisfying experience of having everything in your book, pointing in the same direction as your plot unfolds, and leading readers to love and share your book with others. That's what works, okay? So be ruthless, using your takeaway as a guide to what belongs in your book. Your message is going to come through loud and clear. Now, I don't mean that we're gonna hit people over the head with it, and it's gonna feel cheesy, not at all. It's just gonna linger long after they reach the end. And it's a subtle thing. What's your takeaway is woven into every scene, every action, every interaction that you include in your book. You're gonna start to see possibilities and connections that you didn't see before. Writers tell me, oh, I don't have that. And then we start talking about it. I'm like, it's already here. Because our subconscious, if there was a takeaway that you started with, that you knew that you wanted readers to understand better after they're done your book, this happens all the time subconsciously, and so it's already going to be there if you choose the right takeaway, but we wanna drag your readers deep into your story and reinforce, and reinforce and reinforce that idea. Those deleted scenes. So if you're ruthless, if you follow this advice and you take out those beautiful scenes that you wrote that just don't darn fit, you can always release them later as a bonus material for your loyal readers, right? That deleted chapter or something, and I see this all the time, I always like to read these when I'm like, Ooh, a deleted scene, I wanna read that. And it's almost always exactly this, especially when it's an established writer and you see a deleted scene. It's like that trip to Disneyland that really didn't belong in that fantasy world or that just something that really stuck out like a sore thumb. Again, it's not bad writing and it's a great read as an aside or an accompaniment to your book later on. It's not that there's anything wrong with those scenes, but they would really stick out. Or you can include them in a future book that revolves around a different takeaway. So we talked about that too. If you've got more than one thing that you think you'd like to say, consider making that the next book that you write. So those scenes are never really lost. Don't feel sad about it. And even if your word count dips what's left in your book is going to be so much stronger, I promise you it will be worth it. So defining your takeaway and making sure that everything that you've included in your book aligns with that or evokes that takeaway in some way, is that secret sauce that's gonna hold your reader's attention and push their experience over the top with your book. So keep this takeaway near, nearby, maybe put it on a sticky note on your computer, or write it on your notebook next to your keyboard, or write it at the top of your page when you start writing. Keep the takeaway handy. Keep reminding yourself of it until it becomes second nature to be able to evaluate things as you're going along. Keep it top of mind while you plan, while you write, while you revise your book to make it as impactful as it can be. Thanks for tuning in to show. No. Tell Writing With me, Susie Vori, help me continue to bring you the straight goods for that book you're writing or planning to write. Please consider subscribing to this podcast and leaving a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever else you're listening. Also visit susie vidori.com/newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list where you'll stay inspired and be the first to know about upcoming training events and writing courses that happen in my community. If you're feeling brave, check the show notes and send us a page. If you're writing that isn't quite where you want it to be, yet for our show to tell page review. Episodes. Remember that book and your writing is going to open doors that you haven't even thought of yet, and I can't wait to help you make it the absolute best you're feeling called to write that book. Keep going and I'm gonna be right here cheering you on. See you again next week.