Skilled storytellers like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos follow a structure to keep their audiences engaged.
All great stories have a structure. Skilled storytellers like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos follow the structure to keep their audiences engaged.
On Wednesday, Bezos joined other tech CEOs (Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg) at a congressional hearing to answer very tough questions challenging their business practices.
Bezos opened his remarks with a personal story that one Twitter commentator labeled “sticky.” What, exactly, made it sticky—or memorable? Structure and scenes.
At its most basic level, an origin story can be divided into a three-act structure. It’s the formula nearly all successful Hollywood movies follow:
Act 1. Setup
Act 2. Rising Action
Act 3. Resolution
Within the acts, vivid scenes and plot points keep the action moving. Here’s how Bezos followed the structure and used details to paint vivid scenes that are hard to forget.
In this act, characters are introduced, scenes are established, and an ‘inciting incident’ propels the hero into the second act. Bezos opened his first act with an immediate introduction of two principle characters: Jackie and Miguel.
“My mom, Jackie, had me when she was a 17-year-old high school student in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Being pregnant in high school was not popular in Albuquerque in 1964.”
Bezos explained how his mom was allowed to stay in school but not allowed to walk across the stage to receive her diploma. He said his mom took night classes to keep up with her education, and adding just enough detail to leave the listener with a vivid picture of the scene.
“She would show up with two duffel bags—one full of textbooks, and one packed with diapers, bottles, and anything that would keep me interested and quiet for a few minutes.
