[hotdogscout]

As others said, that video bored me and so did the blog post.

The hero's journey is not good Framework for a technical talk.

Be interesting, create a hook, what do you find interesting? What style draws you in? Emulate that, then branch off.

Conversation is a lot more complex and depends on reaction, audience, expertize. Every verbal interaction is a lot like writing.

If you're gonna read a book about it it should be How to Make Friends and and Influence People.

Corny title but a timeless working strategy for communication.

On Writing by Stephen King is fine too but tldr; be honest.

[bawolff]

It depends on what you are talking about, but i actually think the hero's journey is actually a good framework for many (not all) technical talks. [I agree the blog post did a poor job selling it]

A lot of technical talks are essentially a story on how you (or your team/company/whatever) solved some problem. Essentially you are the hero, and you are regailing everyone with the tale of how you solved some technical problem. That naturally forms a sort of narrative story, that isn't that different from fictional stories where the hero's peaceful life is interupted by some call to action, go through some hardships, and eventually slay the dragon.

[hotdogscout]

For one the hero's journey includes resenting the call to action.

That makes the hero relatable but is not a strategy you can always easily include in a corporate technical talk.

"Just buy more of last year's product and let me enjoy my vacation, but no, you needed more features!"

If you're horrible at communicating it'll help as it forces you to simplify yourself as a character of simple motivations but it's not a recipe for success or attention or quality content, especially when you kill most of what people found interesting about the Iliad/Odyssey as theatre plays: Violence, Sex, Death, Love, Hate.

Death/Rebirth moment would best be embodied as a massive failure and some positions don't allow that kind of honesty or framing without risking your job, although it would indeed be more interesting.

The hero's journey is a bread and butter narrative from stage plays from 8th century BC. I'm of the belief that the structure is useless and what engages us are the emotions at display.

Even act structures are just an excuse so actors can change clothes during the play - there's no divine insight about writing there.

[bawolff]

> For one the hero's journey includes resenting the call to action.

Which is super common in tech talks.

Tech talks often have the form: there is some legacy solution we tried really hard to make work, but eventually we realized that despite all the hacks to make it work for us, it simply wasn't viable so we did something else.

[skydhash]

You’re right. But people fails often to define the characters, build the scene, and structure the plot. I’ve been reading some of the books from “Write Great Fiction” series [0] and you can apply the advices to nonfiction too.

[0]: https://www.writersdigest.com/wd-books/wgf-plot-structure