Presentation Advice from Novelists II

January 6, 2010 by Jerry

breatheyesmemory

In the previous blog, you read about an article in the Wall Street Journal on the creative processes of novelists that provided two valuable pieces of advice for presenters:

• Begin with your goal or objective in mind
• Write, rewrite and rewrite

That same article provided two more pieces of advice from one of the novelists interviewed, Edwidge Danticat, the author of Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah’s Book Club selection. The first:

Before she begins a novel, Edwidge Danticat creates
a collage on a bulletin board in her office, tacking up
photos she’s taken on trips to her native Haiti and
images she clips from magazines…[she] says she
adapted the technique from story boarding, which
filmmakers use to map out scenes.

Television and film directors use storyboards to plan their end products, whether it is a 60-second commercial or a multi-million-dollar special-effects epic. They map out the camera angles of each scene and then envision how the individual scenes will combine into a whole sequence. The storyboard provides a 35,000 foot view.

The equivalent in presentations is the Microsoft PowerPoint Slide Sorter, a 35,000 foot view of all the slides in the deck. In the Power Presentations programs, we provide our clients with an electronic (and paper) version of the Slide Sorter view called Storyboard. You can download a soft copy of this form from our website. Both of these versions provide a panoramic view of your story.

This view lets you see all the slides in your presentation at a glance, a perspective that minimizes your focus on details and offers a broader outlook of the landscape. It’s an efficient planning tool that helps you check the progression of your story.

You can then validate the progression by speaking your narration aloud with the storyboard in front of you. This practice method, called Verbalization, the subject of a prior blog. For the moment, let’s conclude this post with the words of Ms. Danticat, the writer who treats her manuscripts as storyboards and then Verbalizes:

She makes a tape recording of herself reading the entire novel aloud—a trick she learned from
Walter Mosley—and revises passages that cause her to stumble.

As part of your preparation, display your slides in a panoramic view and narrate your presentation aloud. Revise as you do until you are comfortable with the flow. By the time you stand up in front your actual audience, your presentation will be a clear, crisp, and fluid.

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