Friday, I got the opportunity to teach a 90-min seminar on Story to Iowa’s Inter Varsity team in Cedar Falls, IA. The seminar was entitled, “Finding Story: In speaking, preaching, teaching and fundraising. If your interested you can click here to download my notes in PDF form. I thought I’d write a little about how I plan and write a 90-minute interactive seminar… This may not be that interesting, unless you are a writer/speaker…
Ok, so in this particular case I had less than 24 hours to put together the seminar, as it the invitation was confirmed on Thursday at 2:00pm. Because of the short amount of time to prepare, I knew that Thursday night would be a late one (ended up going to bed at 2:00am). When I finally sat down to tackle the content at 8:30pm, 5 slides were already done, as I had put together a rough outline for Jon Heitbrink at our 2pm meeting earlier that day. I then built out the rest of the outline in Keynote.
I use Keynote to construct my outline, rather than writing it out, for a few reasons:
- Flow – working in Keynote in the beginning phase gives me a clean palate of multi-media – I’m not restricted to just words, as in a text outline,
- I am visual, I love using pictures that correlate with the each particular sections – which gives me and the audience a visual cue as to what I am talking about.
- Keynote allows me to hide slides, so I usually add more content than I am going to use… allowing me flexibility – I can easily make it a 30 talk or a 3-hour class, because Keynote allows me to hide slide or uncover slides in my presentation.
After finishing the outline, it is time to go to Pages and construct my notes for each section (see example). I follow my slides and add text and talking points as needed to my notes. Now, I’m a writer before I am a speaker, so usually my notes have a lot more on them that what I will actually say, and that is why my pre-game run through is so important.
If the schedule of my day allows, I will sit down 1-2 hours before the presentation and go through my notes with a pen… following along with the slides, I underline key phrases and put a box around concepts I want to expound on. I also write myself notes in the margin to remind myself of things I either forgot to put in the notes or things I want to add for clarity sake.
In my opinion the pre-game run through is critical, as it allows my mind to focus on the material – organizing and categorizing all the random thoughts rattling around in my head. Times where I have not done the pre-game, due to procrastination or circumstance, my talks suffer the consequence of scrambled thoughts and A.D.O.S. (Atention Deficit Oh That’s Shiny)…
So, how do you prepare your talks/speeches/preaching/teaching?
