One of the basic rules of Esquire was, if you’re going to write about a bear, bring on the bear!
Byron Dobell, former editor of Esquire
This has to be one of my favorite insights about how to structure a piece of writing, partly because I think bears are the coolest. Bring on the bears!
A twist on the journalist’s maxim don’t bury the lede—in other words, don’t leave out the most newsworthy part of a story from the beginning—bring on the bear expands that idea to any piece of writing.
A common problem when writing a draft of something, whether a project description or a blog post, is that sometimes you don’t know what the bear is. What is the piece actually about?
I counsel colleagues on the importance of rereading and developing second drafts, because you will often find that the bear of your piece is not clear from the start. I often find that my metaphorical bear is hiding elsewhere in my draft, and that I need to reshape the piece so that the bear is clear from the beginning.
In other words, I need to make sure that I’m bringing on the bear!
Taylor Coe 