Something that works for me - I avoid distilling. Instead I focus on a killer opening line. It's really hard to take four, or whatever, paragraphs and reduce t

Something that works for me - I avoid distilling. Instead I focus on a killer opening line. It's really hard to take four, or whatever, paragraphs and reduce that to one sentence. It'll feel lossy every step. Instead I focus on the first and most powerful sentence. From there I imagine it opening up a dialog where all the possibilities and nuances can flow. But you'd got to start at that sentence. Now, maybe it'll not be that exactly, but I find that process a lot more fruitful than a distilling one.