There is no substitute for knowing the subject matter for a talk. The positive impact of personal sovereignty is minimized if the ultimate source of your discomfort as a novelist is that you simply do not know the subject material.
One common reason for inadequate groundwork for a lecture is that the novelist does not set aside enough time for this preparation process. It is important not to underestimate the amount of time this process will consume. The rule of thumb that I use is to first quickly estimate how long it will take me to prepare for the talk, and then simply double that estimate.
Re-familiarize yourself with the content of your work. It may have been months or years since you wrote the book and last reread it. And if you have written subsequent books, then you have developed new plot lines and new characters which can confuse your memory about old plot lines and characters that you haven’t used for years that appear in the book about which you’re going to talk. This can be invaluable, and not just for your own re-education. At the time of your talk someone who has recently read your book may be in the audience. Preparation puts you in the best position to answer what may be sharp and appropriate reactions to your book. Adequate preparation is its own reward. It bears much greater fruit than just the mere product of rote practice. Preparing for a talk is the opportunity for you to surround yourself again in your own work. Immerse yourself in your characters. Know your scenes as if for the first time to your own good satisfaction.
Also understand and acknowledge the role of others in your writing.
The Layman’s Rule
The audience of your talk is hoping and expecting to be educated and illuminated by you. Therefore, although you may have a good deal of information to share with them, you must focus on conveying that information effectively. Make your presentation lucid and digestible. You can learn a great deal from the audience’s response to the presentation that you make.
Their critical appraisal of your work can sharpen your own writing focus. In fact, you may get a new writing idea based on a discerning comment by a member in the audience. However, for these criticisms and comments to be helpful, your audience must first understand your presentation.
In my personal ranking of criticisms that my presentations receive, I do not mind hearing “I know what you’re saying, and I think that you’re wrong.” This is a comment that leads to debate, the outcome of which is good for me and other members of the audience. The worst criticism that I can receive is “Lem, I have no idea what you just spoke about!” This indicates that I have wasted the time of my audience as they try to understand an incomprehensible presentation of mine. It is this criticism that I work hardest to avoid.
With this foremost in my mind during my preparation, I try to keep the points of my presentation as clear and as elementary as possible. I call this the “layman” rule”. My goal is to make a presentation clear enough that a literate layman can understand it.
This rule’s purpose is not to insult the audience; its execution does not imply that the audience is unintelligent. Patronizing the audience is an important mistake to be avoided. The layman rule is instead, based on the fact that the audience does not know my work as well as I do. Some components of my discussion will be new and unfamiliar to them. Sometimes, the concepts on which the talk focuses are ideas with which the audience is familiar; but they are just not used to having them expressed in the way that I have chosen. It takes the audience time to understand my perspective on the question at hand. As the novelist, it my job to keep the audience together and “with me”, rather than to “lose them”. By presenting the material with the same clarity that I would for a layman i.e., a literate non-specialist, I hope to make the talk transparent to everyone.
If you accept the concept that the novelist should make her presentation as clear and as lucid as possible, it then makes sense to apply the following guidelines. Begin your talk by telling your audience what to expect from you. End with a clean, crisp summary. Emphasize the important points, and de-emphasize the unimportant ones. It you’re discussing characters, then, explain each one. If you portray a graph, explicitly take a moment to describe the definitions of each of the axes. Avoid complicated tables and multicolored graphs unless you have a great deal of time to dwell on them and explain them. If you’re saying something new that the audience has not heard before, then give them the opportunity to digest what you have explained before moving on.
If you’re using slides, design them as simply as possible. Many times I have been in the audience of a talk only to be frustrated by the presenter who announces “I know that you can’t see all of the details on this next slide, but…” Why has the presenter inflicted this slide on his audience, if he knows the audience can’t see and understand it? Is this talk for the audience or not? Your goal is to keep your talk as simple as possible so that the ideas that you articulate are clearly communicated with minimal distraction. Respect your audience [[i]].
Another advantage of the “layman rule” is that its invocation challenges my understanding of the material. After all, if I can’t explain the concepts presented in my talk at an elementary level so that an attentive layman understands them, then perhaps I don’t understand the material as completely as I should. In that case, I have more work to do.
Walking the Plank
Rehearsing your talk is time consuming, but of great value. A practice session forces you to concentrate on the small but necessary details of the talk. This micro-focus on the minute issues of your presentation is necessary to ensure the accuracy of the factual content of the lecture. However, the entire talk has to fit together as a complete mosaic. A practice session helps you to integrate your talk and see how well its component pieces fit together. The sections of the presentation must support each other. Its flow must be both logical and natural so that the audience is not confused or distracted. These features are nonscientific but aid and support the comprehension of the audience. Finally, the talk must be a certain length. It is hard to have a precise estimate of the duration of your talk without actually giving it.
The second reason for rehearsals is that they give you the opportunity to practice controlling your own nervous energies. Planning the presentation is one thing. Actually talking through it is quite another. Consider the following analogy.
Imagine a wooden plank, ten feet long and one foot wide. It is lying flat on the ground. When asked, almost everyone can walk that plank without falling off to one side or the other.
Now, take that same plank and raise it until it is one foot off the ground. At this height, fewer people can walk it without falling. If you raise the plank until it is ten feet above the ground, you’ll find that most individuals are not even willing to try to walk it. Only the rare individual can walk the plank elevated one hundred feet.[1]
The proportion of people who can walk the plank shrinks rapidly as the altitude of the plank increases. Yet, the required skill to walk a plank ten feet long and one foot wide remains the same. What has changed is the required confidence in your capability to carry out what remains an easy task. Learning to trust in your own abilities, regardless of the external consequences, takes time and patience. This is what is gained in rehearsal. The more important the presentation (i.e., the higher the plank will be set in the end), the more important the need for rehearsal.
The ease of recording your performance on video can amplify the ability of rehearsals to improve your confidence. First, the use of video adds to the realism of your practice presentation. Secondly, watching the video gives you the opportunity to be in the audience of your own practice presentation. If you can’t video, use a mirror. This perspective will permit you to make some countenance observations. Do you speak too fast? Do you speak in a monotone? Do you look down too much, paying no attention to your audience? Do you move your arms too much, distracting the audience? Do you stand like a statue? These mannerisms are clearly revealed in a videotape of your practice presentation.
Continuing with this issue, you can use the video-rehearsal to aid in changing any of your bad habits that appear during a presentation. For example, I found that, when left to my own natural tendencies, I speak too fast. While I wanted to correct this, moving to the other extreme would be intolerable. I needed a way to calibrate my speaking speed. By using audio to record then watch, record then watch a short reading session of mine, I was able to find the best speaking speed, and practice it until it became effortless.
Practice counts.
[1] Taken from comments by Gen. George Thomas, 1863.
[i]. Feibelman PJ. (1993). A Ph.D. Is Not Enough: A Guide to Survival in Science. Cambridge MA. Perseus Books.