Stories that Move Mountains: Storytelling and Visual Design for Persuasive Presentations

Nesting and Embedding (or How to Tell Many Stories at the Same Time)

Sometimes you know that no matter how hard you filter and focus, there is a lot to communicate and a very real danger that your audience's attention will start to drift. This situation often involves a lot of background that needs to be communicated to the audience before they can make sense of the bigger story.

If your content has many individual parts that you need to communicate, you could spend time on each part and then bring it all together at the end. The problem is that each part is a unique story, and every time one of them is brought to a close, the audience will wonder if you're reaching a conclusion. This is no way to build tension. An alternative approach is to have a main story with nested mini-stories so that you can keep bringing the audience back to the main story. You can nest a number of stories inside the main story to provide a sense of continuity and direction to the end of the main story. In some cases, you can also weave a number of stories together to explain different perspectives; then you can bring them together at the end.

You are aiming for the audience to have a sense of completion at the point where you are bringing the story to a climax (and a lack of it until then). When you leave one story to dive into another, you leave a trail with the audience that they know you will come back to. This is a clear indication that there's more to come. Just be sure that, in your planning, each ...