The Elephant and the Snake
When the Only Way Out Is Through
My mom and I saw a magnificent snake and she reminded me of something that I thought would be perfect for Shelf Life. Because pics or it didn’t happen, here’s the snake tax:
This is an eastern rat snake, which is large but harmless (like me) and beneficial to have around (also like me?). We hustled the dogs past her and went on with our walk and when we returned she was nowhere to be seen. Snake friend, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry we disturbed your sun bath.
Once upon a time, I lived in the suburbs of Los Angeles, in a town called Thousand Oaks. While I was living there, among other exciting things that happened, someone’s pet cobra escaped and was on the loose for several days (read a news article on the escaped cobra). Personally, I’ll take the harmless and beneficial rat snake over the escaped albino monocled cobra any day.
Another thing that happened while I was living in Thousand Oaks and working for a publisher there is I learned what has since become my favorite metaphor for getting a something done under challenging constraints—a metaphor I had not heard before and have not heard anywhere else since: Moving the elephant through the snake.
The idea is that when a snake eats something that is very large in proportion to the snake, you can see where the prey is in the snake’s digestive system. As a former snake-keeper myself, I can tell you the rule of thumb for feeding snakes is to feed them prey (live or dead) that not bigger around in circumference than your snake is at its largest part. So if a mouse is about as big around as your snake, that’s about the biggest food you should feed it. In the wild, a snake will do what a snake’s gotta do. They will sometimes prey on something bigger that is strictly advisable for them, if they’re hungry and that’s what’s on hand.
The workplace is like this, too. Employers will give a team more work than they can reasonably do—hopefully from time to time and not consistently, which burns people out—and expect the team to find a way to get that overlarge work through the pipeline using the same amount of resources they have available to accomplish business as usual; meaning, without additional resources to tackle the additional work. This is what my boss in California meant by “moving the elephant through the snake.”
The other metaphor this company used for accomplishing a seemingly impossible task in a short amount of time was to “Taco Bell” something: For instance, if we needed to publish a book in two weeks when our standard turn time was eight months, leadership would ask us to “Taco Bell the book.”
In the LA Riots of 1992, the Taco Bell in Compton was destroyed. Taco Bell (the company) committed to rebuilding that Taco Bell (the restaurant) in just 48 hours to help the good people of Compton get back on their feet because obviously what a community needs in its lowest moments is a Taco Bell. You can read about the Taco Bell incident in this old LA Times article.
Both of these metaphors allude to doing something gargantuan in a limited amount of time, by making a heroic effort to accomplish the task. Both of these metaphors also allude to the phenomenon I cited in my subtitle, which is: Sometimes there’s no way over, under, or around; sometimes they only way out of a task is through it.
There’s yet another metaphor related to the above, which comes from the book of the (almost) same name by Brian Tracy, which is to “eat the frog” (see Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy). The idea with this one is the thing you procrastinate hardest, doing your best to avoid doing, is your frog. Eating a frog is disgusting so naturally you do not want to do that, you want to avoid it and put it off as long as you possibly can, and hopefully do it never. The concept of “eating the frog” is that you figure out what your most procrastinatable task is each day and do that one first, thus eating your frog before you can talk yourself out of doing so and start putting it off.
All these metaphors are gross. Why can’t there be a nice metaphor for this situation I’m describing, one in which you have to get a ton of stuff done, with limited resources, on a tight timeline, even though you would rather be doing something else? Probably because there’s no nice way to do too much work in too little time with not enough resources. Even when you like your work and are very engaged by it, these circumstances are less than ideal.
When might you have to move the elephant through the snake, as a writer? Obviously the big one is banging out your first draft. Do do that you have to move the elephant (the story) from its starting point (your brain) to its ending point (document) and the snake in this metaphor is language, it’s all very intangible and confusing and impossible. Other situations include:
Reviewing proposed edits and revising accordingly;
Managing large batches of agent queries;
Reviewing and annotating proofs;
Signing tens of thousands of tip-ins (only if you’re very fortunate);
And more. Sometimes an impossibly large and maybe also unpleasant task is staring you in the face the only way to get out of doing the task is to do it so it’s done and no longer requires doing. This is the worst of all possible worlds.
With writing (editing, revising, publishing), sometimes you have deadlines and sometimes you don’t. The times when you don’t are usually before you’ve sold your first manuscript. The times when you do have deadlines are all the times after that. Once you have sold a book and signed a contract, you have to deliver that manuscript on deadline, respond to edits and proofs on deadline, and maybe even deliver your next manuscript on a deadline that you agree upon with your editor. There will be elephants, and they will need to be moved through snakes.
And then I think many of us are asked to move elephants through snakes in our working lives; anyone who does work that has an uneven load throughout the work cycle is probably familiar with this concept. Employers want to staff according to the needs during light or moderate work periods, leaving employees feeling overworked and understaffed during periods of heavier workflow—but what can you do? (The employer wants to know.) You can’t just have people sitting around with not enough to do during the lighter times!
There’s a minimum amount of work a person can be doing; that is none, zero. No work getting done. This is the same for everyone. There’s a maximum amount of work a person can be doing—the maximum amount they can humanly do before collapsing from exhaustion. This amount will be different for everyone. Everyone’s capacity for work is different. Then there’s an amount of work a person can do for a sustained period without detriment to that person over time; this is the highest workload a person should reasonably have. This, too, is different for everyone and based on their capacity for work. You can ask a person to do more than that for short bursts, up to their max capacity for work, but they’ll need some recovery time after the fact if you don’t want them to burn out.
So when you are called upon to move the elephant through the snake, whether for writing work or for work-work—which presumes that writing work is not your work work—here are a few ways you can do that while managing overwhelm as much as possible and preventing burnout.
First, understand where all your resources are being deployed and figure out what else can give. For instance: In order to produce a 256-page book, we would normally have one copyeditor take four to six weeks with it; then one compositor would take two or three weeks with it; then one proofreader would take two or three weeks; and so on. To “Taco Bell” that same book, we instead split it into ten 25-page chunks and sent the chunks to ten copyeditors to complete overnight. Likewise, we split the composition, proofing, indexing, and other work among several workers when normally one worker would do the whole thing. Further, all those workers (copyeditor, comp, proofer, production editor) would normally be working on multiple projects at the same time, arranging their workload according to deadline. While “Taco Belling” a book, all other responsibilities were sidelined. All your other projects will sit and wait when this one needs work.
The fallout of this is twofold: First, we’re tying up a lot of workers for one project when we’d normally only allocate a few to a project of this size. Second, other projects incur delays because they sit, untouched, while everyone prioritizes the book that is being “Taco Belled.”
The key to this strategy is you have to be willing to live with the fallout. You can’t turn to these workers when the Taco Bell project is done and then tell them: “Great now get everything back on schedule that we told you to let slide these last two weeks.” That time is gone; it was spent on the Taco Bell project. It can’t be regained now without pushing people past that sustainable work level and burning them out.
The logical parallel for applying the Taco Bell method to your project if you are the sole worker on it is to take resources (time) away from other activities that can sit a while without attention and devote that time to your project. After all, as the author of a manuscript, no one else can jump in and write it for you. You can’t split twenty chapters among twenty writers and get it done in a week. I mean you can, if you’re willing to put out an anthology. Also, coauthoring is a thing. But mostly, you have to write your own manuscript.
There’s only so many resources you can take away from other things, if you’re not a full-time working writer. If writing is part of your outside-of-work activities, then it’s competing with critical and time-consuming necessities and responsibilities like child- or eldercare, cooking, cleaning, socializing, and sleeping (my personal favorite). Most of those can’t be shortchanged, at least not without serious consequences. You might need to borrow time from leisure activities or whatever area of your life can spare it, while reminding yourself about this key factor of the elephant/snake metaphor:
The snake is finite in length. The snake ends. The elephant—or what’s left of it, anyway—comes out the other side of the snake at some point and then that process is over. You don’t push an elephant down an infinitely long snake; this isn’t Jörmungandr the world serpent, this is just a regular snake. It’s like maybe twenty or thirty feet long. That’s still really long for a snake and I would not want to meet a snake that size in my yard, but it’s still a snake with a beginning and an end. Once you move the elephant through, you’re done and you go back to a sustainable level of effort—or, ideally, a lower level of effort for a while to recover.
If only someone had told the snake about eating the frog, maybe it would not have eaten an elephant and we could have avoided this whole thing.
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