1 minute to sum up your current life’s effort. Camera in your face. Lights throwing heat at you. Experts judging every word. Every piece of clothing, too.

20 of those Dem candidates had an opening and a closing statement. Although I didn’t time any of the speeches, the moderators said they had ‘one minute for your opening remarks’. It seemed like they all stuck pretty close to that, didn’t it? Maybe 2.

Still… try to summarize you in that amount of time.

It struck me that, if a person ever asks me ‘what’s your book about?’, I would be totally unprepared to give them a summary that takes 1 minute or less. That’s the classic ‘elevator pitch’ that we are all supposed to prepare. It’s the ‘executive summary’. It’s the ‘thumbnail’. Every writer’s book says this on or near page 1. It’s not like I don’t know what to do, so why haven’t I done it?

I have no excuse for not preparing a 1 minute campaign speech for each of my novels, other than it’s a daunting thing. That’s one of the things I’m going to work on. Because, again someday, I’ll have a story written that I have pushed past the 60-70% completion point – the point where it’s hard to finish stitching together the rough main ideas – and want to actually take the plunge and send it to some experts to see if they want to publish it.

And I’ll make sure that I smile at the end of the speech.