Answer your questions, and GET TO YOUR POINT!
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.
3 responses so far
I have a rambling problem too! It’s definitely important that there’s a point to what you’re doing. Like, you can’t ask people to listen to you for six minutes and then not have a clear point.
I tend to write myself into a point in my writing, so this is something I often have a challenge with. I wrote my first essay’s revision and had to cut out a paragraph and a half off the beginning; I highlighted and deleted my first 20-30 minutes of writing. And it was necessary: I was making my point in such a roundabout way with so much background that I pushed my essay over the page limit!
I definitely get what you’re saying. When I’m telling a story, I usually don’t have an actual point. It’s one thing to tell a series of anecdotes, but stringing them together to make a point is the real challenge.