The Topic is Significant
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.
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I could definitely relate to this as well. I’ll come up with a topic, digest it, think about it for days and then end up hating it and throwing it away. I think that about 80% of every project I do is brainstorming and only 20% is doing the project. It makes sense because once you have an idea it’s usually not that difficult to follow through with it. The difficult part is coming up with something worth your time, which ironically takes up most of your time. This especially applied to my Audio-essay proposal which was the result of many hours of not being able to come up with anything.
I find that the inverse of this statement is true for me. I can think of project ideas and frameworks for those ideas almost instantaneously. In fact, I came up with my audio essay project by the end of the class in which the project was first introduced. The development and creative work behind the project takes much longer to come up with because while I have a rough idea of what I want to do for said project, I want to fine tune the ideas so that they are as clear, concise, and developed as they can possibly be.
I used that quote too, and it is good and worth pointing out. It makes sense to spend a lot of time thinking about the topic, and while some people can think of topics they like and settle on them immediately, I can’t. I think too much about the starting topic or idea because it is important and everything will base off it. I would be afraid of starting over if the main idea or topic was not good enough. When a person is engaged with their topic, the development will come naturally and it shouldn’t take as long.