Ira Glass on writing

Ira Glass on writing - advice distilled from a four-part video (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4). There are two building blocks to a story

• The anecdote. This is literally a sequence of actions.
• The revelation. The actions should raise questions, at least implicitly, which you reveal the answer to.

You can have a great series of events, but if they don't turn out to mean anything, yor story is uninteresting. Conversely you can have a significant revelation filled with meaning, but if the events themselves are uninteresting, again you've got a weak story.

You have to set aside just as much time looking for stories as you do producing them. In other words, the work of thinking up a good idea to write about is as much work and time as writing it up.

Not enough gets said about the importance of "abandoning crap." Most of your story ideas are going to be crap. That's okay because the only way you can surface great ideas is by going through a lot of crappy ones. The only reason you want to be doing this is to make something memorable and special.

The thing I'd like to say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work went through a phase of years where with their good taste, they could tell what they were doing wasn't as good as they wanted it to be ... it didn't have that special thing they wanted it to have ... Everybody goes through that phase ... and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.

Here is a nice "typographic" version of Ira Glass's talk:

Ira Glass is Host and Executive Producer of http://www.thisamericanlife.org/