Reading and Writing in a Digital Age

So I have this problem where I’m an exceptionally boring person. See, I was going to draw from my own experiences for this audio essay — until I realized that I’m uninteresting and have no stories of my own. As a result, I decided it would be best if I drew from outside sources instead.

The problem with that is that there’s like 8 million people running around this city. They’ve all got perfectly valid thoughts and ideas and memories and stories. They all think they have they have something interesting to say. I don’t mean to undermine the value of their words or anything, it’s just as an editor/author I have to find what works and what doesn’t.

In part two of his storytelling series, Ira Glass talks about the editing process as applied to web radio. Ira says that when you pursue a particular idea, you have to go out and find stories that support this idea in whatever way. But sometimes, these stories suck. Like there’s no getting around it — sometimes, other people tell bad stories. Maybe they don’t have a purpose, or maybe they’re not thinking about their audience…Or maybe it’s a good story, but it doesn’t help add anything to your overall message.

Ira emphasizes the importance of perseverance in such situations. He says it’s important not to settle for mediocrity, because when you do find something good and useable, it makes the entire journey worth it. You have to be critical and you have to be hard on yourself and others.

So with this piece of advice in mind, I’m going to sort through hours-worth of people talking about what it means to be an American. I know it’s going to get repetitive and annoying, but I have to persevere if I want my final product to be worthwhile. There’s no way I can get people to say what I need them to say, but as long as I push I’ll find something good eventually.

BE YOURSELF. Always. When you’re writing, creating an audio essay, meeting someone new. Zinsser suggests it, Glass suggests it, your guidance counselor suggests it. There’s no better way to go about things in life. This advice applies to those of us making recordings that only involve our voice and those of us interviewing a number of people. Of course, it’s a lot easier when we’re interviewing others because, well, what do they care what they sound like? In most cases they will be their genuine selves and that genuineness will help to make a great audio essay (hopefully). Sometimes when I’m interviewing friends they fall into the, “Oh God, this is so stressful. SO MUCH PRESSURE JACKY. OMG ARE YOU RECORDING?! *insert nervous giggle* STOP STOP I WASN’T READY LET ME PRACTICE!!!” So I have to go on to tell them to relax, it will be fine, no one will care if your voice is obnoxious, just tell me what you’re thinking. They proceed to tell me what it is they’d like to achieve if failing wasn’t an option and it goes great. That sense of unexpectedness both in the nature of the question and unrehearsed manner in which they deliver their response, is what Ira suggests, makes an interesting radio segment. I don’t think we can go wrong with this piece of advice and although it applies more to the people narrating their own story, it also helps when we bump into the occasional nervous friend. Kudos to you Ira Glass.

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.

For as long as I’ve studied drama, I’ve always taken the approach that you build your story around your characters, and that – like Ibsen – you don’t write a word until every character is fleshed out to the last detail. (There’s always that chance that you’ll uncover some new facet of a character as you write – which is a wonderful experience, and should usually be taken into account if the thought is organic – but I digress.) You’re going to have characters no matter what story you try to tell, and they’re instrumental to providing a plot that’s both thought-out and progresses naturally. When Ira Glass brought up the word “drama,” it cemented my notion that character is one of the larger parts in storytelling as well. He says: “It’s a drama. It’s like people interacting, conflicting, getting along, liking each other, and hating each other, and they’re like, laughing, you know, just like, you want all the things that happen between people…” (Part 4, 2:22-2:30). Character’s pretty important.

If two characters get into a fight, leaving one dead and the other trying to cover up the deed, having a witness character there provides ample drama. Look on TV, there’s endless love triangles to fuel the season’s plot forward. The best part about it is that you don’t even need something huge like a murder, or an affair, to spark a story. It can be something as small as a man wearing a green hat. Why does he wear that hat? Why that hat specifically? Does he only wear it on Tuesdays? Who gave him the hat? Endless stories. Endless drama.

“It’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually gonna catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making is going to be as good as your ambitions.” (1:57 – 2:05) part 3

This is probably my least favorite, yet most necessary advice I faced in Ira Glass’s interview.

Ira Glass talks about how poor the product maybe you should continue and ensures that everyone goes through that stage and you having a taste for it is good enough for you to become good at it only if you constantly do huge volume of works to close the gap between your ideals and reality.

Yes, we all know that “failure is the mother of success” and that “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” but does it have to follow a “Schedule?”

When you think of creative work, you mostly think of waiting for a great idea to suddenly pop up while living your daily life. You normally don’t think of actually having to go through series of drudgery work following a schedule to do anything with “creativity.”

I’m more of a wait-for-the-perfect-idea-then-devote-all-of-your-hours-into-the-project kind of person. Working in a timed setting, I am scared to start anything unless it seems the most appropriate. It always feels like you just don’t have enough time to make mistakes. But then going through the possible ideas or searching for inspiration takes too much time and the result is never good, as you wanted it to be.

It was quite a shocker to hear that the only way to overcome it is doing the exact thing you want to avoid the most. It always felt like working on a timed bases never allows you to really devote yourself into it, forcing you to move on after time ends. But then I guess nothing would be really accomplished if it weren’t timed. And sometimes you need to push yourself to doing stuff unless you’ll only think of it not actually putting your fingers on to it.

The most profound piece of advice that I heard from Ira Glass’s interview came in Part One. Here, he says that it is extremely important to keep the audience engaged by asking questions. I took it to mean that it is important to have an interactive broadcast. Maybe you don’t have to ask direct questions, but subtly make the audience wonder why something happened, or make them predict what might happen next. It’s certainly something that I did not consider when I started drafting my story. I was stuck thinking about how interesting my story was to me, not about what others would think of it. However, I believe that I can incorporate Ira’s advice on question asking into certain segments of my story, and help keep my listeners involved and interested in my story. It’s interesting, really, thinking about how to engage an audience with a piece. Certainly, with radio, the methods are different. In a visual medium, whether that be television, print, or some other option, simple aesthetic choices, like font style, font size, and inclusion of pictures for books and color, visual changes, etc. for TV can do the trick. SInce radio is not a visual method of information communication, we have to actively select ways to engage our listeners. Ira clearly believes that question-asking is one of the most essential and useful ways of involving one’s audience. We can also use musical/audio changes to engage the audience, but it’s important to remember the audience wants to think, and audio can’t really make them think as much as question-asking can. I wasn’t planning on inclusing questions as a part of my piece, but after hearing what Ira had to say, I think I’ll try adding some hypothetical quesitons as well as some answerable ones as I progress through my story.

Ira Glass claimed that the amount of time finding a decent story is usually just as much or more than the time producing the story. I was interested and I believed it instantly. I agree and it’s one of the issues some of us have to face. Sometimes taking the first step can be the hardest, and when it comes to stories, finding a good story may be hard. There could be something better, or there are too many options to pick from. The story idea has to be good and strong so that it can be built on and still be well. When developing a story, there is already an idea to work off of, but finding the story is different issue. If there’s no assignment or restriction, finding stories is just as hard, because where is one supposed to start? People do try various ideas and the first idea may not work, so it takes time. I always thought too long before deciding on an idea to work on, so I feel like I can relate to Ira Glass’ statement.

“Things that are really good are good because people are being really really tough, and you’re going to be really tough.” (2:42) Part 2

I think that this is great advice not just for radio broadcast and story telling, but for life in general. In broadcasting, it makes sense that you have to know when to kill a story. You may like it a lot because it may have some meaning to you, but if it isn’t good, it takes a certain attitude to step up and kill it. This gives way to the opportunity to make a better story which means that after time, you will have a great story because you killed all the bad ones to get there. By being tough on yourself, you make your story better, adding more details, always looking for a better interview, whatever it is. Just like in essay writing how you want to be a harsh critic on yourself to improve your work, the same goes for speaking. Settling for just an average or good story won’t keep you on the air because you will lose people’s interest.

But connecting this to a bigger picture, being tough on yourself for anything makes you a better person. Anyone can get by doing average work and passing. An average person doesn’t wow anyone just as an average story doesn’t keep people entertained. Being really tough on yourself always makes you want more than you have and motivates you to strive for the best. By doing this, you become really good at whatever you try, whether it be essay writing and radio broadcast, to sports and talents. You need to be tough on yourself or you just settle for average. I really like this piece of advice from Ira Glass because it connects to something bigger than the intended message.

One piece of advice from Ira Glass is that the two basic building blocks of storytelling are an anecdote and a moment of reflection. He mentions this at the beginning of part 1. The anecdote is a sequence of actions laid out at the beginning of the conversation in order to engage the listener.  Glass explains how the anecdote is like the “bait” that lures the reader into the story and that even the most boring anecdote can be captivating because it is a series of actions that the listener wants to follow. In Glass’ terms the anecdote makes you feel like “you’re on a train that has a destination.” And who wants to be on a train that goes nowhere?

The second building block- the moment of reflection-is the point of the story in general. The moment of reflection shows the reader why he’s listening to this story and what it means in a broader sense.  An anecdote that doesn’t tell you something new is of little value to the listener. Your job as a storyteller is not only to entertain the listener with a story or an idea, but also to make sure the listener realizes why the story or idea is important. Think about it. Every time you tell a story, there is a reason why you chose to tell it at a certain time to a certain person. Maybe you wanted to make them laugh, think, cry, sympathize, do something, stop doing something, etc. There is always something motivating us to speak up. When you’re speaking to a friend or a family member you may not have to have an actual “moment of reflection” because people close to you usually understand you well enough to know your intentions. However, when you’re relaying an idea to a broader audience who don’t know you well, you have to at least subtly hint to your point so that they understand why they are listening and why they should care.

I want to try to follow this advice as I work on my Audio Essay. I think it would work well to start with an anecdote of some sort and to end off with a subtle moment of relection.

At around 50 seconds in to part 3 of Ira Glass on Storytelling, he talks about something really interesting. In the beginning, most of an artist’s work is not so good. They have good enough taste to know that their work is not as good as i can be though, and they may get discouraged. Ira Glass advises us to not give up and get past that point.

I know, when i listen to the comings of my radio show, that if i heard it on the radio i would probably turn the dial. And im trying to mae it better, but a sheer lack of experience is really whats hindering my project. I have to take this advice to heart and keep trying, even after this assignment is over, and that is the only way my future work willbe any better.

Thank you, Mr. Glass, for those kind words.