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

Putting All the Parts Together

At the start of this chapter, we talked about plot structure. On the basic three-act structure, we showed the red line of increasing tension to the climax. As you shape your visual story, ask yourself, “How can I build tension by making things harder for my hero?” Look for ways to bring out the key challenges and activities you identified when you looked at the “How” and “What If” to drive the story deeper into situations where commitment to act is required. To keep the attention of your audience, the story needs to build towards more and more conflict, effort, or struggle.

Unless you are a master storyteller, the use of flashbacks and a mixed up timeline will break the sequence of events and fail to raise the tension. When your audience has to guess why something has happened (or has not happened), even for just a moment, they will start to disengage. Confidence that the outcome of your visual story is believable is increased with a strong sequence of cause and effect in the story.

Repetition is the enemy of escalating tension. In Chapter 6 we talked about the use of complication and resolution to set the start and end for the activities you identified as you developed each of the “Hows” for the story. If the resolution for each complication always involves the hero personally taking charge and working late to solve the problem, then you are repeating ...