Kind of Blue

The best-selling jazz album of all time, Miles Davis’s, “Kind of Blue” is billed as an improvisation. I think most people take that to mean that the musicians came into the studio and just started playing. While it’s true they had no written music to follow, that doesn’t mean they didn’t have a plan.

Before the session started, Davis had sketched out some basic structures and scales that he wanted them to work with. Having the backbone of the piece in place then freed them to play within that structure.

Impromptu speaking is a lot like that. While there are times when I’m forced to just make it up as I go along, that’s not usually the case. Usually, even in an unplanned speaking opportunity, I’ll have a few minutes, or at least a few seconds, to slap together a quick structure in my mind.

What I’m looking for is some kind of arc.

A story arc, in the case of a novel or movie, is how a character or situation changes during the course of the drama. In a speech, it can be that, or an arc from one idea to another, a progression of ideas that lead to a conclusion or any kind of change. The key is that we end up somewhere different from where we started.

Once we’ve identified where we want to start and where we want to go, the change we want to traverse, then it’s usually fairly simple to speak extemporaneously, without sounding like an idiot..………..  Usually.