Inspiration brought to you by the TM Planning Department

I’ve always wanted to be a writer.   I thought it’d be the best job in the world.  To get paid to share your crazy thoughts with random people who you’d never ever ever have the chance to have a conversation with.

But when I really thought about it, who on this floating rock would want to read my bullshit dribble?   I mean, would I want to read a book by some chick with a name with far too many vowels?  Maybe if it was about some secret magic diet where I could live on chips and queso and lose 20 pounds…or if it taught me how to grow a money tree.  Other than that, probably not.

I was in a bookstore this weekend, and I picked up a copy of one of my favorite book: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.   Judge if you want, but that book is amazing.

And just like every time I pick up that book, I thought “Damn, what a great opening line.”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

It’s a perfectly sarcastic and witty statement about the relationship of women and men in the 1810’s.  That one sentence says so much about Jane Austen’s  (and Elizabeth Bennet’s) relationship with marriage, and the dependant status of the fairer sex.

So, of course, I started thinking about the other great opening lines.  From “Call me Ishmael.” and “Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.” to the far less reverent “This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.” and “The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail.”

But what does this mean for us as planners?

Why can’t we treat our briefs like short stories?  Just like a first sentence of book, we can make every word count.

Succinct, concise, but choked full of literary goodness.

Just like all of these first sentences.