What is it about?

There's a reason I went through my GCSE's proclaiming to be smart on paper but dopey in real life. I lacked the skill to speak as if I knew what I was actually talking about. It didn't help that I said stupid things like this:

"Do watermelons grow on trees?"

"I thought we had three kidneys..."

"Uhm... I don't know." (In answer to the question "what's your name?")

And the worst part is, that last one was only a few months ago.

Yes, I have daft moments. We probably all do. But this post isn't about that. It's about my inability to explain things clearly unless I've written it down. For example, I could not tell you what the last film I watched was about in person. I'd stutter and be all "there was this guy who wanted to kill the main character because he had the thing that would save their species but it would kill everyone else and they kept fighting about it oh and the bad guy killed his dad like thirty years ago and he gave him a scar but that's not really important. And the girl tries to find out who the main character is because he saved her life after she followed him into the ice tunnel and..." You get the idea. It's not coherent, it's not interesting, and it sounds like it's not enjoyable.

Which is a shame, because I really didn't give Man of Steel the hype it deserved.

Imagine me talking like that about my WIP. My older brother's friend came over a couple of weeks ago and asked what I was writing about. He is honestly a lovely guy and I genuinely did want to tell him what it was about.

What ensued was five minutes of silence. Followed by a list of genre categories it falls into. Then more silence.

My mum insisted that I was doing it on purpose because apparently, I never tell anyone what I'm writing about. That's true and partly not true. Nobody really asks, and because they don't ask I'm not well-rehearsed with my answer so what they get is five minutes of silence and a vague smattering of key words. Yeah.

So I've decided to figure out what exactly my story is about, WRITE IT DOWN, then tell people using proper, understandable words what I'm writing about. The final product should be a variation of this:

It's about a space crew who fly halfway around the planet to save a local hero from being executed, only to be given an even bigger task to carry out that could save their world.

I totally nailed it, right? Right. Now to replicate that orally...