Planting Questions.
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.
3 responses so far
I really liked this point as well. I think it’s important to leave some mystery behind your story because it not only draws but also keeps the listener’s attention. If the listener already knew what was going to happen, it would make no sense for him to continue listening. It’s also really amazing how something as simple as a chain of events could be so thought provoking. Ira Glass makes it look easy but it’s definitely not easy to accomplish.
His idea of an anecdote goes hand in hand with this point. An anecdote is a linear sequence of events that builds up upon another in order to reach a final outcome through suspense or another means. This is just like leading the listener on a path to asking questions at every twist and turn of the story and thus causing the listener to create his / her own sequence of events based on what has been narrated so far. It increases the prestige and mystique of a story if it can lead a listener to ponder such deep thoughts about cause and effect in a story.
I definitely agree with you that this is a very interesting take on story telling. I feel that as writers we do the same thing but not always consciously. My English teacher last year advised us not to give everything away in our writing. That is, we should keep our readers on the edge of their seats. We, as writers, must plant clues in our essays, novels, etc., to keep the reader interested. Why would the reader want to keep reading if he’s being told everything? A rather extreme version of this can be found in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. That man plants the smallest clues and if the reader isn’t careful, he will miss the clues and literally have no idea what is going on. Again, he is an extreme example of this approach but I think that as long as we use this advice subtly in our writing and audio recordings, our readers will stay interested.