On Saturday
night, I finished watching the World Series, then went back to my study to
finish preparing a talk I’m giving for work on Wednesday – at the Association
of Field Service Managers’ annual convention in Reno, to be exact – and didn’t
get to bed until the computer clock, which automatically recalibrated back to
Eastern Standard Time at the appropriate moment, registered 1:30 AM. I have a
private rule not to discuss my day job here, which I won’t other than to note
that its writing aspects are as pleasurable in their own way as much of the
other writing I do, especially when I’m analyzing a conundrum & coming to
new conclusions. Though the process differs.
The way I
prepare a talk like this is to bundle all the various PowerPoint slides I already
have that might pertain to my topic into a single file. Since I gave
presentations that might be seen as direct ancestors of this one, I already had
a pretty good idea of where I wanted to go with it, the general order &
direction. Still, I began with over 200 slides touching both directly on the
topic & drilling down on many different specifics. Most of these I wrote
myself, but I draw on the work of my colleagues – as they do on mine – a fair
amount as well.
One of the
most useful aspects of PowerPoint as a writing tool – I’m not thinking of it as
an alternative to flash or any of the other high-end vizpo technologies, but
rather simply as the generic default program of the corporate presentation – is
that its “slide deck” quality leads one almost inevitably to shuffling the
cards. I do this a lot, rewriting some slides to fit a new context, when it
suddenly seems clear that an aspect I’d previously thought of as a secondary
feature now emerges as the primary point I’m trying to make. I go through this
process of shuffle, rewrite, discard over & over
until, when I shut down last night, I had 55 slides. I want somewhere between
40 & 45 for what I’m doing on Wednesday, so today will be a process of
fine-tuning.
That said, I’m going to give the blog a rest for a couple of days.
I’ll be back when I return from “The Biggest Little City in
