Reading and Writing in a Digital Age

In the first Youtube video, radio broadcaster Ira Glass does away with all of the rules and regulations established in high school that formed a story. It is his opinion that stories should primarily be told in the form of anecdotes in which there is a sequence of events that complement each other with a certain momentum so as to make any story worth telling, no matter how dull the details or events involved. I can very much relate to this and certainly agree with this point. My friends and I define each other by how we relate different events in our lives. Whenever one of us relates events in our every day lives, we can’t help but listen when they are presented in the form of an anecdote. Stories that are thrown in without any warning or buildup produce little to no effect on us because they are such throw away tales. There is a very small window of opportunity to relate to the events being narrated in such a brief and sudden manner. Anecdotes are the foundation of a story – the more it is developed, the more that someone can learn and / or gain something from it. A sequence of events provides infinitely more opportunities to relate or think about the story being told. It provokes much self-reflection and deep thought as one tries to figure out what the story is leading to. One will create a web of many possible outcomes and endings to any such story that has buildup and suspense. True storytelling like this helps to curb the problem of an increasing amount of cyborgs in this society in modern times.

I wasn’t as impacted by Ira Glass’s advice about revision and ruthlessness and enjoying the kill as I was about the one statement he made regarding the emphasis on choosing something worthy of revising and publishing. He spoke for about half a minute on the topic of picking discussion/story topics.

For me, this is true. I build my judgments of a things I hear on the radio heavily on the topic that is being discussed. “Often finding the decent story is more than the amount of time it takes to produce the story…to actually do creative work, you actually have to set aside just as much time for the looking for stories.” That kind of advice is a safe and logical statement to me since I have caught myself spending a lot of time thinking up a story idea and then throwing it out, and repeating that process over and over again, which seemingly was wasting a hefty amount of time. For a well-respected producer like Ira Glass to say that it’s expected to happen, and to also advise that what you do is to continue doing so gave me a sense of comfort. Similar to a written topic, if a thesis is a weak thesis, no matter how much evidence and support you end up having, the essay overall would be bland. The topic of the radio piece needs to be just as important, if not more important, as how the piece gets refined and fluffed up.

The best pieces of advice from Ira Glass were to keep asking and answering questions to make a Clear point.

I’m not a great story teller, and that’s mostly because I often forget to make a point or ramble so much that my point gets lost. So this advice was really relevant to my situation. The part about asking questions and answering them is also really helpful because I feel like he was saying that the questioning was a key to keeping an audience curious and focused on your story. Since I often can’t catch a good flow when I tell stories, I get lost and I confuse people so they never listen long enough for me to get to my point. I feel like I just need to have better organization of my thoughts. If I don’t have clear thoughts I won’t have clear writing which is what I learned from Zinsser in On Writing Well. If I could follow this advice my stories will hopefully be more interesting and cohesive.

After listening to all 4 clips of advice, the one recommendation that stood out was the idea of planting questions throughout your story and then answering them as you go. Of course, Ira Glass doesn’t mean literally asking questions throughout your story, but rather saying things like, “The house was unearthly quiet”, prompting the listener to ask, “Why was the house so quiet?” I had never thought of story telling as leading your reader on a path. I think a truly remarkable story accomplishes this in a very subtle way, with the reader unaware that she is being “led”.

In planting questions, the reader can force his/her listener’s to focus on a particular aspect and control the emotions that he/she wants to invoke in a certain section. I am always afraid as a writer that I won’t be able to control the response or “effect” I have on my reader, and so I believe that this idea of guiding your audience is very interesting. However, I don’t believe it is an easy task. I do not want to give the impression that I’m controlling my reader’s thoughts and emotions. It appears to be a very “fine line” between influencing your audience and controlling them.

One piece of advice I really liked from Ira Glass’ videos were to have a strict schedule to adhere to through interviews and potential stories. When I heard this piece of advice, I was instantly reminded of Zinsser when he recommended writers to make a schedule for their writing and to stick to it, despite how bad their work might seem. Both men emphasize that a great piece of work will reveal itself eventually, you just have to keep working. I found this fascinating that this piece of advice worked for both audio and written work. Great work can only come from repetition and experience and I hope to bring this to my own audio project by interviewing as many people as possible on a regular basis so I can find those stories that really stand out. Hopefully, following Ira Glass’ advice I can find that one story or experience that will make my project memorable.

The piece of advice from Ira Glass that I related to most was his insistance that “often the amount of time finding the decent story is more than the amount of time it takes to produce the story” (Part 2, 0:24 – 0:28). I know that personally, I spent several days mulling over what I could do my audio project on. It’s actually a great way I’ve invented to fall asleep. I start thinking about an idea I really have to come up with and that’s it, I’m out. Really though, no matter how great your editing or your background music is, if the story itself is a total bore than your audience won’t care how much time you’ve put into it. The actual story is the heart of the show and the show can’t exist if the story’s not strong enough to support it. I got scared, though, when Ira Glass said that sometimes he completely scraps an idea after recording it and everything because it doesn’t come out as he pictured. What if my recorded version of my concept is a total snooze? I don’t think I’ll have time to come up with something new, though I’d like to. I think that’s something we all risk in a project like this with such a close due date. We only really get one shot, so while Ira Glass’s advice is true, I’m not sure how applicable it is in this case.

“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings,” was the advice Stephen King gave in his novel On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. In his talk about what makes for an effective story on the radio, Ira Glass gives a very smilar piece of advice. He says, “Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.” What he means to say,  is that it’s hard to just get rid of something you spent so much time working on. But the truth of the matter is, most of the time you’re not going to succeed–you aren’t always likely to end up the the story you imagined. Instead of holding onto it and trying to salvage something good from the mess, it’s better to kill it and move on. And “enjoy the killing,” says Ira, because something better will grow out of it.

I think this is a great piece of advice because it’s something I struggle with often in my writing. When you create something, you put your time, your effort, your thoughts into it. It’s like putting a piece of yourself out there. Killing it sometimes makes it seem like all your hard work went to waste, when in fact, it just helps you move on to something better. I think the same concept can definitely be applied to the Audio Essay. Even though I thought I had it all thought out, I realized that there are actually a lot of challenges that I may come across with the topic I chose and I may just have to kill parts of my proposal off in order to create a better product.

I loved Glass’s advice on the use of anecdote. I’ve always noted it’s importance in writing and reading, however, I never realized how important is it to use story and anecdote in the broadcasting world. I agree with Glass that “writing with a topic sentence and then the facts following it,” is a boring and formulaic way to think and write. I love his idea to spruce up our work by sharing a personal story and not just by throwing in a random childhood story we find nostalgic or compelling, but carefully making sure our anecdote works with what we are trying to portray. Glass stresses the importance of the basic building blocks of our work and how they contribute to sequence. “The power of the anecdote is so great that no matter how boring the material is… it has a momentum.” Anecdote creates a flow the work whether it be broadcasted or written or spoken and if done right can be very successful and effective to the listener/reader.

I feel that the most prominent advice from Ira Glass in this piece is the notion that one must ‘abandon crap.’ He also says that one must enjoy the killing to make something else better live. It sounds interesting but enjoy the kill? Sounds a little dramatic… Doesn’t it? Well   if you think about it, it really isn’t. Ira Glass explains how an idea can seem brilliant during the brainstorming phase, or even be brilliant during a preliminary interview, but the final product may be missing something. Even if the ‘something’ that is missing cannot be explained, the piece should be scrapped. If it isn’t your best, then it is your worst. And your worst simply needs to die… (Also dramatic, but true.)

A question remains though, why did the idea that seemed so good, turn out to be so bad? Well, there are many reasons… For one, not all of us are geniuses, and sometimes our ideas can use some improvement. But other times, the execution is what ruins it. As Mr. Glass expands upon, people aren’t always interesting. So even if a story is interesting in itself, certain people can spoil the idea with their boringness. It is our job, as the producer of the audio project, to make sure the ideas are conceptually great and executed greatly.

This idea relates to me because I was thinking about changing my proposal during class, but then I decided to leave it and see what happened with it. But, now that I think about it, Ira Glass is right. After I finish this blog post, I am going to go back to my proposal and one of two things will happen: I will scrap it, or I will edit it. I am curious to see how my mind destroys in order to create.

So I have this problem where I’m an exceptionally boring person. See, I was going to draw from my own experiences for this audio essay — until I realized that I’m uninteresting and have no stories of my own. As a result, I decided it would be best if I drew from outside sources instead.

The problem with that is that there’s like 8 million people running around this city. They’ve all got perfectly valid thoughts and ideas and memories and stories. They all think they have they have something interesting to say. I don’t mean to undermine the value of their words or anything, it’s just as an editor/author I have to find what works and what doesn’t.

In part two of his storytelling series, Ira Glass talks about the editing process as applied to web radio. Ira says that when you pursue a particular idea, you have to go out and find stories that support this idea in whatever way. But sometimes, these stories suck. Like there’s no getting around it — sometimes, other people tell bad stories. Maybe they don’t have a purpose, or maybe they’re not thinking about their audience…Or maybe it’s a good story, but it doesn’t help add anything to your overall message.

Ira emphasizes the importance of perseverance in such situations. He says it’s important not to settle for mediocrity, because when you do find something good and useable, it makes the entire journey worth it. You have to be critical and you have to be hard on yourself and others.

So with this piece of advice in mind, I’m going to sort through hours-worth of people talking about what it means to be an American. I know it’s going to get repetitive and annoying, but I have to persevere if I want my final product to be worthwhile. There’s no way I can get people to say what I need them to say, but as long as I push I’ll find something good eventually.