At the weekend, I went to see Speed Racer. Now, it’s about as fun and as serious as a Ben and Jerry’s Strawberry Cheesecake milkshake, but I learned a lot.
I’m a big believer in feeding your pattern-maker (the adaptive unconscious – the part of the mind that looks for the patterns in the data, made famous by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink). The bigger database that this part of the mind has, the better instincts (sorry, Malcolm) you have in a situation. So by pointing your attention towards the things you want more of, you can then produce those results more easily.
In terms of communication skills, this requires you to have what I call a meta-awareness, a dual awareness of both the content of what you’re experiencing and its structure.
Having this meta-awareness means you can then have a better instinct about how to tell your stories.
This is part of the reason for the presentation analysis posts on this blog (Joshua Klein’s Wisdom of Crows being the first one). My aim is for you presenters to gain the tools to be able to feed your pattern-maker with how someone does great presentations (see my article ‘How to Radically Improve your Presentation Skills Without Saying a Word’ for more details).
This meta-awareness can be applied in any context you’re interested in. I’m coming up to publish my second book, so I spent an illuminating 30 minutes with Natasha Golding the other day in Borders, going through the business section, the self-help section, the fiction section, and looking at which books caught our eye, which we picked up, which we put back. We learned a lot about titles, cover design, author photos (an author photo that doesn’t match the book can make me put it back on the shelf), text size, first line…
It’s about developing a fascination with what works, how you’re being affected unconsciously, and asking yourself how you can wake up and be conscious of those effects.
Storytelling is vital to good writing (fiction and non-fiction) as well as in presentations. Keeping an awareness of how the story is structured can be very instructive.
Now I know that some of you like to keep the magic of movies. I get that. In fact, if a movie is really magical, I just drop all the way in.
However, most movies aren’t pure gold. This way you can enjoy an okay movie, and improve your communication skills at the same time.
And personally, I find that the magic is even greater when I see the craftsmanship of the product. In short, I’m one of the nerds who enjoyed Peter Jackson’s ‘making of’ documentaries for Lord of the RIngs almost as much as the movies themselves.
You can use movies like Speed Racer, which was hardly complex, as a learning device to track how a story is set up, what draws you in, how you get to know the characters, what makes you sit up, what makes you wary, what makes you sigh.
It can be particularly interesting to notice when your sense of story is satisfied, and when it is obstructed. Notice the disappointment and frustration of a mangled ending, or the satisfaction of all the loose ends being tied together.
If you really want to get into this, THE most accessible book on movie story structure is ‘Save the Cat’ by Blake Snyder which gives you everything you need to know about why really good popular movies are so satisfying.
It’s also amazing to map how very different movies are actually the same movie when you move above the content and look at the sequence of scenes.
Quick starts for next time you’re at the movies:
First 60 seconds – What’s this movie like? What’s the tone/genre/setting? How was that done?
First 10 minutes – Who’s been introduced? What are they like? Who is this movie about? What’s the main plotline of the movie? How was that set up?
Last 5 minutes – How are the loose ends being tied up (feel your craving for that)? How does the end scene mirror the first scene? What has changed for the main character? How is this being signalled?
Notice particularly this last one. When you’re telling a story from your life, make it clear how you changed from the start to the end. That is classic storytelling straight from Aristotle’s Poetics.
There aren’t that many problems with presentation structure that this choice doesn’t answer. Done well, people won’t notice that this is the process you’re using. You’ll just come across as clear and relevant.
