In my teens, my friends and I used to play Dungeons & Dragons. We were bad at it, but we enjoyed ourselves, and plenty of snacks were consumed. Among the [mountain of rules]1, one that consistently frustrated us was the way that sorcerers had to prepare to cast a spell.
To cast a spell, the character must first have the spell memorized. If it is not memorized, the spell cannot be cast. The caster must be able to speak (not under the effects of a silence spell or gagged) and have both arms free. […] If the spell is targeted on a person, place, or thing, the caster must be able to see the target. It is not enough to cast a fireball 150 feet ahead into the darkness; the caster must be able to see the point of explosion and the intervening distance.1
They had to find a quiet place, out of the way of a melee, where they could open a spell book and commit the whole spell to memory. Once memorised, they could perform it, invoking whatever magical effect they could muster. The strenuous process of enacting the spell would wipe their minds of it. To cast the spell again, they’d have to repeat the whole process. Worse, spells could have verbal, somatic, and material components, meaning that a sorcerer could be prevented from casting a spell if they couldn’t make the necessary movements, or had forgotten their lucky pheonix feather.
At the time, I thought all this was ridiculous. Why couldn’t they just read it from the book? Why couldn’t they remember it from one casting to the next? Decades later, I’ve come to realise that this far-fetched workflow is more-or-less my process for preparing a talk. I can’t just read it aloud; I have to hide in a darkened room, pacing up and down, talking to myself, trying to internalise the narrative, the highlights, the pivots. I need to have the verbal, somatic, and material all sorted out: where I’ll be standing, which direction I’ll be pointing in, when I’ll cross the stage. Unless I perform every step of this ludicrous ritual, the magic won’t happen.
The challenge of delivering a talk lies in balancing two competing aims: To deliver the material with confidence, I want to be fully in control. Knowing that every word, pixel, and movement has been chosen with intent lets me stay in the moment and avoid the risky territory of improvisation. On the other hand, a live performance of any kind should make an audience memeber feel that something is happening, here and now. Someone reading from a script is merely reporting something that happened in another place and time. Even without the piece of paper, it can feel as though a speaker is reading their script off the back of their eyelids.
The workflow I’ve ended up with is a bit long-winded, but works for me. It starts by standing up. I talk my way through some rough slides, improvising the wording with no-one around. I pace around, wave my hands about, address an imaginary audience, and see what comes out. I write the best of this down, repeat, and refine until I have a complete script. Crucially, this script has not started its life at the keyboard. Working like this ensures that I’m only writing things that I would say. Once in text form, I will edit and revise, but every change is validated by saying it [out loud]2.
In the run-up to showtime, I’ll read through the script and start committing it to memory. Certain passages will be anchored to key slides. It’s here that I’ll start deciding on the somatic components, i.e. when and why to move. It might be easier to point at a diagram from one side or the other, or maybe I want to really emphasise a point downstage centre. Depending on the content, some slides and sections might yet be reordered. Once the sequence is taking shape, I’ll nail down transitions between sections.
The more I memorise, the more I’ll strip away from the script until it’s totally skeletal. By the time I’m on stage, my notes will just a list of one-word prompts to jog my memory if I lose my way. The only parts that will remain verbatim are key linking sentences, the wording of which are crucial to flow.
The purpose of words is to convey ideas.When the ideas are grasped the words are forgotten.Where is a man who has forgotten words?He is the one I would like to talk to.
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