Soft Skills: How to communicate effectively

To be successful, you must communicate your ideas. The heart of communication is a story which must be written. Emma Coats wrote stories for Pixar, and tweeted a series of “story basics”. Most of these are applicable to communicating, and I’m posting them here to remind myself how to communicate better.

What do you want to say?

  • Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
  • Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
  • What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

How you want to say it?

  • You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.
  • Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
  • Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.
  • Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
  •  Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

How do you stay motivated as a writer?

  • Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.
  • Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.
  • When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. The material to get you unstuck often shows up.
  • No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on - it’ll come back around to be useful later.
  • You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, it testing not optimizing.

How to become a better writer:

  • Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize to use it.
  • Take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Finding CLR exceptions without visual studio

(If you want to understand what exception code 0xe0434352 is, read this post ) Often exceptions are thrown and caught and you don't see them. You probably know how to debug this in Visual Studio, so let me show you how to do it in cdb. Sample Code: class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { foreach (var x in Enumerable.Range(0,2000)) { Thread.Sleep(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1)); Console.WriteLine("Hello World"); ThrowAndCatchException(); } } private static void ThrowAndCatchException() { try { throw new NotImplementedException(); } catch(Exception) { } } } Output of the application: Hello World Hello World Hello World Nothing about an exception, but you're sure it's happening behind the covers -- fire up cdb: C:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows (x64)>cdb -pn consoleapplication3.exe <SNIP> ModLoad: 000007fe`f7e90000 000007fe`f7eb4000 C:\Windows\Mi...
Read more

Why do I keep getting exception code e0434352?

If you want to know how to debug CLR exceptions using cdb then read this post . Exception code e0434352 is the exception code used internally by the CLR to represent most exceptions(*). Regardless of if you throw a System.NullReferenceException or a System.ArgumentException in C#, you'll throw a SEH exception e0434352 under the covers. A fun way to validate this theory is to watch what happens to the CLR exceptions settings in cdb. Fire up cdb, and see the state of clr exceptions: 0:000> .shell -ci "sx" findstr clr clr - CLR exception - second-chance break - not handled clrn - CLR notification exception - break - handled .shell: Process exited Now, set the exception handler for exception number e0434352 and recheck the value of the clr exception handler: 0:000> sxe e0434352 0:000> .shell -ci "sx" findstr clr clr - CLR exception - break - not handled clrn - CLR notification exception - break - handled .shell: Process exited Armed with ...
Read more

Powershell script to enable windows to capture localhost traffic in wireshark

If you want to understand why the following scripts work read this post . Otherwise just paste the following into an elevated powershell window: Setup windows networking to allow localhost capturing in wireshark: # Find the network configuration that has the default gateway. $defaultAdapter = Get-WMIObject Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration | ? {$_.DefaultIPGateway} if (@($defaultAdapter).Length -ne 1) {throw "You don't have 1 default gateway, your network configuration is not supported" } # Route local IP address via the default gateway route add $defaultAdapter.IPAddress[0] $defaultAdapter.DefaultIPGateway Write-Host "Start capturing on localhost by connecting to $($defaultAdapter.IPAddress[0])" Return windows networking to normal configuration: # Find the network configuration that has the default gateway. $defaultAdapter = Get-WMIObject Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration | ? {$_.DefaultIPGateway} if (@($defaultAdapter).Length -ne 1) {throw "Y...
Read more