Reading and Writing in a Digital Age

My Project

http://soundcloud.com/joseph-maugeri/audio-draft-project2

Well hopefully the project uploaded. It took me about 25 minutes just to figure out how to save it correctly.

The point of this audio project is different than the one that I proposed in class. I interviewed people with my original question, but it did not work out at all until I asked my Mom. Even though she didn’t entirely answer the question as intended, I tried to make it work. The project turned more into a “Story Pitched by our Parents.” It portrays why people remember certain things. It can be because the certain memory sparks an emotion, whether it is a good or a bad emotion is dependent on the specific memory. But, memories are powerful and can be forgotten about until a certain trigger is induced. Then, once the memory is retrieved, some of the same emotions are felt again. I found that very interesting. Also, I hope the story from my mom gives people a few laughs. I hope you all get it, it took me a second to understand when I first heard it. It’ll probably be pretty awkward if I have to explain…

I focused on the idea that one must ‘kill a bad project.’ Even though I did end up asking the same question to my mother, the project went in a totally different direction than expected. (Part 1) Another piece of advice was to ‘talk like yourself.’ (Part 4) It was hard to talk like myself when there is a microphone in your face, but I tried. It helped that I did not entirely follow my script, I used it more as a reference for talking points rather than a script. It helped the fluidity of my speech, but of course it can be improved. It was hard to get the sentences to flow when I was speaking though, I probably recorded the same thing about 15 times and just picked the best one. Plus, I don’t have the best radio voice but I did my best.

Another thing is, I am not an expert with GarageBand. I figured out the gist of it, but my skills can use improvement. Getting the music to be the correct volume and some fading issues arose, but I smoothed it out the best I could. The biggest problem was recording the many people that I interviewed, just to delete it all. It was frustrating that no one gave a decent answer, guess that’s the price you pay for doing a ‘Fifty People One Question.’

I know I’ll be doing a lot of editing, but hopefully the content is decent. Maybe I can re-record some of the parts again, or learn to edit it better. We’ll see.

I’m going to post a link to soundcloud because my project wound up exceeding the limit for upload size! :O

Here’s my draft!

Editing this had to have been one of the most exhausting, tedious things I’ve ever done. Getting the audio cues to come in at the time that I wanted them too was just about impossible. Also, it sounded so much better when I was editing it in GarageBand than when I uploaded it to Soundcloud. Hopefully I can improve the audio quality for the final piece. I also want to improve the transitions between the different audio clips, and also improve the transitions in volume, so it sounds less choppy.

As I mentioned in class, the point of my piece is to evoke a sort of nostalgia, or a longing in my audience. I want to take them back to their special place as I describe mine. The biggest choice I made to evoke this kind of feeling is the song choice. “Home” sets an incredible mood for a story like this. I also tried to pick the stories and aspects of Frost Valley that set it apart and made it so unusual. By picking more unique characteristics regarding the camp to idealize it, I hope I was able to make it more appealing to the casual listener. I want them to believe that I am genuine in my emotional investment in Frost Valley, so they will think of a place they’re emotionally invested in.

The first piece of advice I took from Ira Glass was in Part 3, in the very beginning. He says that at the beginning, you probably have good taste, but the work you’re making isn’t living up to that taste. He also said that a lot of people quit at this juncture. I find this advice extremely important because I’ma complete beginner in this, we’re all complete beginners. In my mind, I have a grand scheme of exactly how everything is going to play out and how people are going to love it. But in reality, I know that things are probably not going to turn out exactly the way I want them too. It’s important to realize that the beginning comes with a lot of struggles and bumps in the road, where you know you can do better, but you don’t know exactly how you can make yourself do better. This advice was something I followed throughout my piece, particularly in the opening of my piece, in the volume adjustments of the song, and the closing. I spent hours working on these parts, totally unsure of their quality. As Ira says, I know it can be better, and it frustrated me. But I also know this is just a draft, so I’ll be patient with it and accept that it isn’t ideal yet. The OTHER piece of Glas advice I followed was in Part 4, in which he urged us to “talk like ourselves.” I tried to let my natural emotion emerge in my piece. I talked about other people, and I talked about the place, and I drew on my memories and my feelings to let my passion emerge in my voice. At times, I chuckled, or I laughed. I also found myself talking more quietly and comfortingly at the end for some reason. I didn’t try to talk like a tour guide or like a young camper. I just let my emotions come out in my voice.

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.

“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings,” was the advice Stephen King gave in his novel On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. In his talk about what makes for an effective story on the radio, Ira Glass gives a very smilar piece of advice. He says, “Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.” What he means to say,  is that it’s hard to just get rid of something you spent so much time working on. But the truth of the matter is, most of the time you’re not going to succeed–you aren’t always likely to end up the the story you imagined. Instead of holding onto it and trying to salvage something good from the mess, it’s better to kill it and move on. And “enjoy the killing,” says Ira, because something better will grow out of it.

I think this is a great piece of advice because it’s something I struggle with often in my writing. When you create something, you put your time, your effort, your thoughts into it. It’s like putting a piece of yourself out there. Killing it sometimes makes it seem like all your hard work went to waste, when in fact, it just helps you move on to something better. I think the same concept can definitely be applied to the Audio Essay. Even though I thought I had it all thought out, I realized that there are actually a lot of challenges that I may come across with the topic I chose and I may just have to kill parts of my proposal off in order to create a better product.

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.

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.

The handout, “what makes a story interesting,” which I compiled from your blog posts responding to “Stories Pitched by our Parents,” is posted on the blog Handouts page. We went over this handout in class on Monday, Oct 1, but some of you were absent to observe a religious holiday. You might want to check out this handout to see what the class consensus was on the elements for crafting interesting and entertaining stories. And everyone: please keep these elements in mind as you work. How can you compose audio-essays that appeal to, entertain, and/or intrigue your listeners? You won’t appeal to all the listeners/readers all the time, of course. But still…  How can you compose work that balances your personal interests and keeps your audience in mind at the same time?

Sometimes the most difficult thing about a project like this is coming up with a good idea. After approximately 2 hours of reading Google search results for thought provoking questions , I decided to ask for help. My parents suggested I talk about immigration, dogs, or read an essay I had already written. I didn’t really feel any of those topics. Then I thought, who better to call than my best friend? He spent an hour on the phone with me trying to help me come up with a great topic. “You’re over-thinking this. Anything you choose will be great if you do it right. You were on the speech team anyways right?” I just wasn’t convinced. I really can’t see myself talking for 4 minutes on the radio, although I could easily go on for more than 10 in real life. Exhausted, I mockingly suggested, “I should just make my project about me asking people what I should do for this project.”

“That would be awesome,” he said. He suggested that the deeper meaning could be the fact that humans rely on one another for ideas. We need help from others to form a basic starting point for our own thoughts and ideas, the same way we rely on Google or Bing to form the factual basis of our research (he’s an Engineer, what can i say?) And that’s how my Audio-Essay proposal came to be. A few Tylenols later, I’m sitting here sharing it with you.

I can’t say that I have this assignment planned out to the last detail or that it won’t be completely different by the time I submit it, but here’s my idea. I’ll give a brief explanation of the situation, as I did here, in the beginning of the essay and introduce the question. Then I plan to interview many people, mainly looking for short answers but periodically focusing on some interesting ones that the audience would like to see developed (hopefully such ideas will, in fact, come along so that I don’t raise my hopes for nothing). Each segment will be under 5 seconds long, aside from the ones that will be developed, which will be approximately 20-30 seconds long. As was suggested in the assignment, this essay could be part of, or the beginning of a potentially longer Audio-Essay which goes on to actually explore the topics suggested (which I probably won’t do). I’ll be broadcasting from many locations, but primarily from Baruch and my home. As for recording equipment, I will be using my handy dandy smartphone and Macbook. My questions are: Do you have any suggestions for improving my essay? How can I make it more interesting/appealing to the audience? Do you think it has the potential to be funny or serious? Also, from a technical standpoint, what is the best technology to use for the technologically challenged?

I love Alissa’s mom’s story. Her grandmother was laying on her deathbed, old and decrepid. She calls her daughter close, to whisper some words in her ear, maybe for the last time. And what does she say? “Im bored.”

This is a great story. When i heard it, i started laughing. I can totally imagine my grandmother saying that when she’s sitting around, but thank God she’s still halthy.

I think what makes a great story is a flash of irony at the end. Here, I was expecting her to whisper a final goodbye to her daughter, a final farewell. But what she actually said couldn’t be more youthful! I can see a little kid saying that to her mom, but certainly not a dying old mother to her daughter.

It also teaches an important lesson- old people are way older on the outside than they are on the inside most of the time. And important lessons are also part of what makes a story great.