Steve Neiderhauser

How to Improve Your Drawing Skills

Companies are seeking people with drawing skills for several reasons.

For one, Design Thinking uses drawing to create early prototypes. Think storyboards or visual diagrams. Graphic facilitation also requires some level of drawing skills.

And years ago, we entered the Age of the Artist so it is now important to artistically treat your work.

Finally, drawing helps you balance the body and the mind.

On Jen Reviews blog, Jen shares a well-written article that gives tips and tricks to improve your drawing skills. She mixes an intoxicating cocktail of brain science, research references, and practical exercises that will improve your drawing.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

Ten Steps to Great Dialogue

In Cut To The Chase, Karl Iglesias describes ten steps for crafting compelling dialogue.

In a moment I'll tell you how business can benefit from these steps... First, here's seven of the steps.

Step 1: Is my dialogue active?
Step 2: Is my dialogue as lean as it can be?
Step 3: Is my dialogue realistic?
Step 4: Is my dialogue individual to each character?
Step 5: Does my dialogue reveal exposition invisibly?
Step 6: Is my dialogue emotionally impactful?
Step 7: Does my dialogue have subtext?

Step 2 is my favorite because it keeps speeches short. Karl writes, "Contrary to popular belief, actors hate long speeches... Good actors want fewer words."

When I took Karl's dialogue class, he challenge me to write speeches that contained no more than twelve words. This is a powerful creative constraint that helped me write better dialogue.

How can business benefit from these steps? Well, have you ever received an email from a coworker who rambled on for two or three pages. Like me, you probably deleted that email.

Learning to write lean memos that captures your coworker's attention sets you apart.

Four Tips to Becoming a Better Writer

JB Glossinger shares four tips for becoming a better writer.

Attitude is key. Shift your mindset from "I hate to write" to "I love to write!" and that alone will do wonders.

The Miracle Question

In business, coaching has become the new super power.

Teams are the currency for getting work done and a coach provides the rocket fuel to shift teams to high performance.

In The Coaches Casebook, authors Geoff Watts and Kim Morgan, introduce us to powerful questions, a coaching foundation tool.

Here's a powerful question named "The Miracle Question."

"Suppose tonight, while you slept, a miracle occurred. When you wake up, what are some of the things you'd notice that would tell you your life had suddenly become better?"

This approach works because the question focuses on what the client wants to achieve.

Here's a list of powerful questions.

Woolly Minded People Do What?

According to David Ogilvy, woolly minded people write wooly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.

I've read some woolly emails in my time. And I must admit, for those emails I've punched the delete button.

To avoid wooly writing, read David's ten hints for better writing.

For clearer emails, go with tip three. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

The Screenplay Treatment

The ability to create a treatment for a story is a valuable skill. It allows you to build a prototype of your story and diagnose problems early in the writing process.

In the book Writing Treatments that Sell, Kenneth Atchity and Chi-Li Wong show us how to create a treatment.

They describe a treatment as -

A relatively brief, loosely narrative written pitch of a story intended for production as a film for theatrical exhibition or television broadcast. Written in user-friendly, dramatic, but straightforward and highly visual prose, in the present tense, the treatment highlights in broad stokes your story's hook, primary characters, acts and action line, setting, point of view, and most dramatic scenes and turning points.

The authors go on to enlighten us about the 16 qualities included in their definition.

Let's consider present tense. The present tense places the audience immediately in the action. Consider this sentence:

"The black limousine hurtles around the corner and slams to a stop at the front steps of the courthouse."

It's in the present tense and it's dramatic. Dramatic qualities include focus, intensity, dialogue, concrete characterization, and, most of all, action.

18 Creative Techniques

Huffington Post -- 18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently

Constraints Inspire Creativity

Constraints help artists be more creative. In fact, some designers give themselves constraints to bring out their best.

The Brilliance of Blake Snyder

Like the rays of the sun, the more condensed the words, the more powerful they are.

Blake Snyder shines in Chapter 3 of his book Save the Cat Strikes Back like a super nova. In this one chapter he lays out the three acts, describing them as Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis, in a clear, concise, and clever way that could spring only from Blake's genius.

The rivers of Blake's understanding flow together in this chapter, gifting you with the wisdom of story structure. 

Go ahead! Read the chapter, watch the movies, write your story.

Emphatic Word Order

Roy Peter Clark Clark provides eight strategies that can strengthen your writing. One tool is emphatic word order. Placing a word at the end of a sentence will emphasis the word more than hiding the word in the middle of a winding sentence.

Here's an eloquent description of the tool.

“There is sometimes an extraordinary force in some particular word, which, if it be placed in no very conspicuous position in the middle part of a sentence, is likely to escape the attention of the hearer and to be obscured by the words surrounding it; but if it be put at the end of the sentence is urged upon the reader’s sense and imprinted on his mind.”