The Essences of Radio Stories
To me, Ira Glass’s most compelling advice is on Part One, basically the entire five minutes of it starting around 0:35.
Glass mentions that there are two essences of successful radio stories: anecdotes and the reason for telling the anecdotes. I think there is incredible merit in the use of anecdotes, the way it presents a story and how an idea can be express through its usage. The efficacy becomes explicit when he gave the narration of a person doing his morning routine. Even though the content is superbly boring, the way it is narrated, the way it follows a logical sequence of events creates suspense and leads the listener on to want to discover to more. Glass calls this, in my paraphrase, presenting questions in narrative form and answering them continuously.
I often find myself writing ponderously on perhaps interesting things, but I tend not to be able to present it with life. It always comes out dry because mostly I just state the facts. There is substance, but I couldn’t achieve an elegant flow. And anecdotes can fix that. I realized even I listened to Ira Glass’s radio show that I like stories just as much he do. I don’t want to listen to a fact report. The more significant point though is that the story should always have a purpose. I believe this can be achieve by clearly stating it towards the end or implied by a sudden twist in plot.
Hopefully I can apply this advice to my audio-essay, linking different voices together with a logical, and almost anecdotic sequence.
One response so far
I find it really interesting how Glass basically says that it’s not so much the content of the story, but rather how it’s reported. Especially when he later says that the hardest part is coming up with a good idea for a story. So which one is it? Is it the content or the way it’s presented?