Deadly Sin #4 - Bad Planning

One thing is for sure, you can't have a great performance if you have no idea what you're going to do when you hit the stage.  You need some kind of a plan!  This is pretty obvious for musicians and actors, but even a seasoned public speaker with a reputation for "winging it" will have thought through what he's going to cover ahead of time.  The exception that proves the rule here is improvisation, but then the whole point is to make it up as you go along.  So to put it another way, unless you're planning to improvise, you need a plan.

Then the obvious question is, if I need a plan, how do I make a good one?  Let's start by describing some "deadly sinful" planning strategies that you should avoid.

First, you'll want to avoid the deadly sin of copying someone else's great plan verbatim.  It might have come from the original artist's authentic inner self, but when you do it it's just copying, and everyone can tell because you look like a person trying to remember a plan, instead of a person living one.  The result is a hollow performance - the shadow of a great plan.

Another great way to get a hollow plan is to have no story (see Deadly Sin #3).  If you don't know what you're trying to convey, the planning process always tends toward chaos, and you'll wind up assembling a plan from random bits of cool technique.  "Let's put a crescendo here and let's really chew on the word 'love' in bar 63 and let's use a nice smokey tone quality in the bridge."  The whole house of cards collapses the first time someone pipes up and says, "why?"  (I always encourage chorus singers to reject technical directions that seem to come out of nowhere, in the hope that it will encourage directors to let their singers participate in the creative process, rather than asking them to blindly replicate a sequence of artistic devices.)

Yet another sinful way to approach the plan is the make it too rigid.  Every performance is different, and if you can't go with the situation because you're determined to stick with the plan, you are no longer in communion with the audience.  The feedback from the audience might be subtle or it might be like a bonk on the head, but they do hold up their end of the conversation, if you're willing to listen.  A rigid plan also means your focus is to "get it right", which has all kinds of negative consequences.  First, trying to be right takes your attention away from your story, giving you that glazed over, inside-my-own-head look.  Second, if you believe that the pinnacle of performance is to be "right", you're really going to beat yourself up when something doesn't go according to the plan, even though the audience will neither notice nor care.  Don't try to be right - be present instead!

So enough of that, how can you create a great plan?

The first critical element of the great plan is the great story.  If you understand the piece or the scene, it might not give you a plan on a silver platter, but it will let you choose elements of plan based on whether they support the story or not.  So no more arguments about technical details - make sure you all share the story, and then let the story decide.

Once you've got the great story, just like a painter you need a rich palette of techniques to create your masterpiece.  The more choices you have, the more expressive you can make your plan.  If you are new to the art form of your choice, get a good coach!  They will be able to help you to bring your story to life through good planning.

However, I believe there's a lot to be said for the trial-and-error approach.  Get crystal clear on the story, do a rough plan, and then try it!  See what works.  Try it in front of some people and see what works for them.  Not only will you be able to make a better plan incrementally in this way, you may learn something new about your story, as storytellers often do during the telling.