Taking Nigella Lawson to bed – learning story telling from how-to writers

via Kaptain Kobold

Despite being 99.95% against scripted presentations (and I’m lying about the .05% to seem fair-minded) I do think we can learn a lot from writers and the practice of writing.

I love how-to books, always have. But bare instruction holds no interest for me. I want to hear the voice of the person talking, and their stories.

I took Nigella Lawson to bed the other night – her cookery books are made to be pored over, not just cooked from. My copy of Domestic Goddess is covered in post-its and scone dough.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s writing about knitting is so good I don’t want to waste it.

Then there’s Randy Halberstadt on jazz piano.

Marilyn Paul on becoming organised.

Brad Warner on hardcore punk zen.

These are just some that are by my bed right now.

All of them write like they’re in conversation. With me.

All of them tell stories.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s friend knitted the largest jumper on earth, ignoring how big it was becoming to just keep going.

Brad Warner’s disappointment with his dream job working on Ultraman movies in Japan lead him back to Zen.

Marilyn Paul set about clearing her desk, only to have it pile up again and again, more like Sisyphus than Tenzing.

Pianist Randy Halberstadt spent 6 months practicing 150 riffs in 12 keys from Nicolas Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, thinking they would just appear magically out of his fingers on the keyboard at the right time. In retrospect he would have practiced only 25, but in the meantime learned that no key can defeat him.

So, reading, I learn to knit to gauge, not be fooled by perfect work-life dreams, not to be scared of my messy desk, not to try too many riffs at once.

At a higher level, I learn to admit things are off-track early, to expect the mind to produce dissatisfaction, to take tiny bites off a project, and… to take tiny bites off a project.

Story is what allows these people to teach.

What how-to books do you love, and what stories do you remember from them?

Tell me in a comment below (or if you get this article by email, click the link at the top of the page to arrive at the post on the website, and scroll down to the bottom where it says ‘Leave a Reply’.)

Worth thinking about next time you are about to launch into technical explanations thinking people only want the facts…