Sometimes, the horse just jumps over the fence

And that's it.

Kurt Vonnegut, one of the lions of 20th-century literature, is how I first fell in love with writing. One of my favorite stories about him is his short-lived time at Sports Illustrated, in which he walked off the job in frustration after coming up empty trying to write about a racehorse that nearly ran away:

He often said he had to be a writer because he wasn't good at anything else. He was not good at being an employee. Back in the mid-1950s, he was employed by Sports Illustrated, briefly. He reported to work, was asked to write a short piece on a racehorse that had jumped over a fence and tried to run away. Kurt stared at the blank piece of paper all morning and then typed, "The horse jumped over the f****** fence," and walked out, self-employed again.

As storytellers, we sometimes get so caught up in momentum that we end up majoring in minors.

The greatest and worst thing about writing in the digital age is you’re not barricaded by what’ll fit on paper. So if you think a story is so compelling that it merits thousands of words to unpack it all, then by golly you can give it the Tolstoy treatment you think it deserves.

But in turn, it can also be tough to police yourself. Because that extra detail can be there if you want it to be, even if it doesn’t add anything to the narrative. You can take as many offramps as you want to get to the point, readers’ attention span and patience for the payoff be damned. And the more offramps you take, the more you end up trying to justify your story’s length by bubbling it up to some ridiculous comparison that makes you look foolish.

Trust me. It took me a long time, with plenty of ass-kickings along the way, to understand that economy of words — not a surplus of them — is the real gift in storytelling.

In my heyday as a sportswriter, I could sit down in the TD Garden press room 10 minutes before deadline and crank out a 750-word Bruins story with my eyes closed. Now, I’ll spend hours, days, sometimes weeks trying to come up with the perfect brand statement for a marketing campaign I’m working on. And it might only be four words.

So I tell that Vonnegut story to young writers looking to tell wonderful stories in this business. Even the greatest American wordsmiths fold a hand or two.

Not every action here on Earth is meant to be the mudroom of some grand social commentary about a societal ill. And not every detail elicits a reaction or adds tension to the story you’re trying to tell. Sometimes, the story isn’t what you think it is.

Sometimes, the horse just jumps over the fence.