What a scriptwriter asks before writing your talk

The first meeting with a talk scriptwriter looks little like a work meeting. There may be coffee, silence and a question you had never asked yourself. At some point you catch yourself telling a story you had not told in years, and you realize it has a place on stage. This conversation is the foundation for everything that comes after, and knowing what will be asked helps you arrive with an open mind and a wide-awake memory.

What a talk scriptwriter wants to know about your life

The first questions deal with your journey. A useful inspiration for this moment comes from psychology. Dan McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern University, created a life story interview that asks the person to think of their life as a book, divided into chapters, and to tell key scenes: the high point, the low point, the turning point, the earliest memory, the defining scenes of each phase, the greatest challenge, the people who influenced the path and the central theme of their life.

When listening for a script, similar questions come up naturally. Who was with you on the day of the turning point? What did you feel that night? What did someone say that you never forgot? What object from that time is still kept in your house? The answers bring the scenes, the characters and the details that will bring the talk to life.

This guidance applies to listening for a script. Your story has details that only you lived, and the job of the person asking is to let those details emerge, patiently, without fitting what you tell into an already familiar mold.

Questions about the audience and about who is hiring

After your life, the questions change direction and turn to those who will listen to you. Who is the talk for? Is it an internal company event, a sales convention, an industry conference, a graduation? Who is hiring, and what does that person expect the audience to feel as they leave? How old is the audience, what moment are they living through, what have they already heard from other speakers?

These answers change the talk. Freeman's 2026 trends report, cited by PCMA's Convene magazine, indicates that 59% of event attendees prefer industry experts as keynote speakers, compared with 6% who prefer celebrities. The article does not report the sample or methodology. Even so, the figure matters to anyone whose life story is tied to a professional field: audiences value people who know the industry from the inside.

The scriptwriter also asks where you have spoken before and what material exists. Leading Authorities, a speakers bureau in Washington, in a 2026 piece on how to choose cybersecurity speakers, recommends that organizers ask for a recent video from a comparable event before booking. In our reading, the logic applies to other topics. Knowing this from the start helps you think of the talk as something that will also be filmed, cut and shown to decision makers.

How much time you have and what the main idea is

Two practical questions come up early. The first is time. TED's guide for TEDx event organizers says speakers need to know how many minutes they have, and that the script needs to fit that time. A fifteen-minute appearance and an hour-long talk call for different choices of stories and pacing.

The second is the idea. The same guide suggests a direct question for reviewing the outline: is there more than one big idea here? If so, which is the best? A life yields many messages, and the talk gains strength when it chooses one and organizes the stories around it.

The story map and the research into your voice

With the answers in hand, we build a story map. Each story gets a role: opening the talk, supporting the main idea, giving the audience a breather, setting up the most emotional moment or being saved for another presentation. It is in this map that the heart of the talk appears.

Listening also includes the way you speak. For the talk opening video we wrote for businesswoman Letícia Rigolim, from Maringá, Léo built a research base with transcripts of her videos and old texts to understand her tone of voice before writing the first-person narration. Whatever could not be found in public sources was marked as unverified. The audience was made up of beauty professionals, and the text was written to speak to them in Letícia's voice.

How to prepare for the conversation with the scriptwriter

You arrive better prepared for listening when you gather some material beforehand. Photos from different phases of your life, videos of past talks, interviews you have given, texts you have written. If you still think your life does not have enough for a talk, the article I don't have a story to tell shows why small stories move people and how they emerge in this conversation.

Here at Mentoniano, listening is the first stage of the talk script, followed by the heart of the story, the path and pacing, and the polishing. We can write the entire talk or organize content you already have. Either way, everything starts with the questions.