Short and long Version

Introduction

Once your story line document is ready, you should have something like an excel with the following sheets:
- Themes & skills
- Chronological stories
- Strengths & weaknesses
- Goals & purpose

We will now try to focus on the "chronological stories" sheet and shape a whole lot of details into engaging stories. The "chronological stories" sheet should contain something like a table with the following columns:
- Time frame
- Story title
- Theme of story
- Nature of story
- Context
- All details

The above idea of an excel and this table is just illustrative of the state of preparedness you should be in. But following it exactly might also be useful. You should now add and fill out columns for "Long version" and "Short version". In the long version, you aim to take "All details" and trim it down to the details which are relevant, as well as rephrase things, so that you have a 10-20 line story, which actually captures the message you want to send across, in an engaging manner. It is strongly recommended that you use the STAR framework from the "Communication" section in "Foundations" for this.
If you have used the STAR framework to build out the long version, it should be easy enough to then apply the principle of "Summarising", from the "Communication" section to slim this down to a 3 line answer for the "Short version" column. Using the STAR framework, each part of the answer can succinctly be shrunk into a sentence which captures the most important 80% of information.
The reason that this is particularly important to write out is that you don't know how much time you'll have for each answer, or how interested the interviewer will be. You should therefore be able to tell each of your stories both succinctly, and elaborate, if need be. Writing out these versions instead of all of the details also helps you find the best phrasing. This isn't in itself too tough an exercise, but you'll be surprised how often you'll reuse this exact phrasing, once you have found something which captures some of your ideas crisply.