One Writer's Story of the Takeaway

by Marcia Moston @MarciaMoston

Several years ago my memoir manuscript, Call of a Coward, won the nonfiction award at a writers conference. The following week, puffed with pride, I shared the first few pages at our critique-group meeting. To be sure, even if I didn’t mention my recent honors, I was certain everyone would be impressed with my excerpt.

Some were. One wasn’t. She happened to be one of the leaders—a woman far wiser in the ways of writing than I. She is also a gracious southern woman who doesn’t remember being so blunt, but this is what I heard and remembered, “I wouldn’t read this. What’s the takeaway?” 

Takeaway? I’d never heard of such a thing. I was a new writer who apparently had some talent and a personal story to tell, so why did I need a takeaway? And what was that anyway? I pouted all the way home. When I got there, I threw my manuscript on the kitchen island and declared I was finished. So what if I’d won an award, no one would publish a story that didn’t even have a takeaway. 

For the next two weeks, I circled that manuscript on the island as though it were tainted with plutonium. I notified the Lord I couldn’t and wouldn’t write anymore. To make matters worse, even though I salivate over long sentences, I write short books. What words could I possibly add to this this labor of love (torture) so that it would have takeaway? I wasn’t writing a magazine article on the four ways to bless the driver who pulls out in front of you, doesn’t use turn signals, drives five miles under the 30 mph limit, and waits a full sixty seconds after the light turns green before inching forward. No! I was writing a memoir for crying out loud.

One morning as I sat and stared at the computer, I got it—although I was writing a personal story, it wasn’t really about me. My story was simply the illustration of something bigger, something with universal appeal that would touch on emotions and ideas other people either experienced or desired to know about. Something they could take away for themselves.

So what did I want my reader to take away? As I re-examined each chapter with the reader in mind, my thinking went something like this:

• What is the primary message of my overall story?
• How do my experiences reflect that message?
• What insights did I learn from the particular experiences I wrote about?
• Do those experiences illustrate some human truths that would encourage someone else or help them make sense of their own world? 

By shifting my perspective, I was able to look at the incidents and vignettes for what they were—vehicles to carry a bigger idea, one that would resonate with the heart of my reader. 

And this is what happened:

A year or so later, after my book was published, I received a Google alert about it. I followed the link to a woman’s blog. She wrote about how heavy her heart had been as she reflected on moving with her husband and children to a foreign mission field—the cost of leaving family and friends and all things familiar. As she was wrapping up her home, someone gave her my book, which was about moving to the mission field, in fact, to the very same ministry she was headed! In her time of weariness, Kris, my new blogger friend, was able to take courage as she traveled familiar dusty paths with me. Through my story she faced our shared fears and received refreshment from the anecdotes of grace. Two ordinary women, half a country apart, sharing a similar journey, linked by a story.

Now, years later, she and her husband are running the ministry Costa Rica, and I am reading hernewsletters. We have come full circle. I had heeded the admonition to consider my reader’s takeaway and was rewarded with the privilege of falling into her story.

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Marcia Moston—author of the award-winning Call of a Coward-The God of Moses and the Middle-class Housewife—has written columns and features for several magazines and newspapers. She has served on the faculty of the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference and currently teaches her true love—memoir and creative nonfiction—at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute on the Furman campus in South Carolina.