Effective stories have one dominant message. You may have to write a first draft to discover the message, but there should be a single meaning that has priority over all the other meanings in the story. If you can’t tell the message in a sentence or less after you have written the final draft, you haven’t written the final draft.

— Donald M. Murray, Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000), 125.