Talks Are Stories

You’ve done the work, the research, the idea, the audience, and you’ve been accepted. Now it’s time to write the talk. So how do you do that?

One useful way of looking at it is that a talk is a story. This talk is effectively a story about talks; you’re going to tell stories to other people about your topic. A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and a narrative flow that carries people along a path.

I don’t mean take it too literally. I once saw someone start almost with a “once upon a time,” with a whole Hansel-and-Gretel thing going on, and it didn’t quite work, like any analogy you can push it too far. But as a way of thinking about talks, it’s genuinely useful. You want to take people from a starting point, through the story, to an ending point.

That’s just one way of framing and structuring your talk, and it’s the frame the rest of this section builds on.