Reading and Writing in a Digital Age

I thought Ira Glass’ advice was really helpful and awesome. I particularly liked what he said about the “importance of abandoning crap.” I think we all consciously know that failure is an important step in creating something great, but it’s lost in practice. I often underestimate just how many awful things I have to write in order to finally come up with something close to decent. He made me feel better about how many times I come up with useless and slightly embarrassing material. It’s all part of the process.

The mention of luck really stuck out to me. It’s not that you randomly get lucky and everything is great; it’s that you’ve done so much work that something great is bound to happen. When an idea isn’t working out, it’s sometimes too easy to abandon it. And then feel like a complete failure. Cry a little. When you pick one good idea out of a thousand mediocre ones, though, you know it’s going to be different. You’ve done all the groundwork and eliminated the lame ones, and now you finally have something to work with.

He also mentioned that coming up with interesting ideas is more than half the battle. This just really resonated with me because I have put off almost all of my projects because I needed more time to get that one perfect idea. I’ve definitely spent more time searching for an idea than it took to actually carry it out, but I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if I hadn’t given myself time to do that. Glass’ advice really helped ground me and make me feel a little bit less crazy. Creative work definitely has its obstacles.

Something that we all struggle with is knowing what ideas need to be killed. As Ira Glass said, we need to learn that abandoning crap is not a bad thing.

I have done a lot of creative work, and so definitely relate to this. I can’t count the number of paintings, scene blockings, poems, stories, video storyboards, and songs I have been working on for hours or days, only to realize: “This is shit.” It’s a terrible feeling. However, from the despair of a dead end often comes the potential for another project. Often, my new projects are narratives about failures! It’s amazing how many negative experiences can be turned positive: it would be impossible to number the songs about heartbreak, giving up, death, and other losses.

I thought Ira Glass’s speech was very monotonous, and he spoke very fast. I thought it was kind of ironic that he was delivering these videos, which are specifically about broadcasting. When someone is speaking, his or her tone sets the stage for the rest of the video, and I didn’t think he set himself up very well to gain credibility for these videos. I think he did bring up some good points though. He says that it is important to raise a question – this is something that we see very often in rhetoric – people create a question, a “hook,” to draw in the reader and entice him to find out what the point of that is. He also talks about bringing in anecdotes, another thing which I really like and I personally enjoy reading. He is also very realistic – he says that when creating a project, much of the time is spent just looking and perusing stories. It is important to note that hard work is, well, hard. You can’t just find some stories quickly and then use them. This is something that Chaya and I did while working on our project – we looked through many letters, and in the end we only decided to use a few of them. Similarly, when journalists and newscasters are working on stories, they end up using only a fraction of their well-resarched work. This is the reality of this kind of work. Overall, the points he brought up were very interesting and I hope to incorporate them into my video, into my speaking, and my writing. I think that he had many good points, but because his voice was so monotonous and just seemed to drone on, people could get lost in his tone and not actually process everything he is saying. This is actually something I am going to speak about in my video – how the material presented is influenced by the speaker’s tone. I hope my video will be a bit more dynamic than his though.

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.

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.

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.