Ira Glass on Storytelling #2Show Video Details ↓ [silence]Ira Glass: One of the things that I think is really hard that nobody ever tells you if you want to do creative work is how hard it is to actually find a decent story. I think that we all think, well, the real work of it is that I'm going to go out and I'm going to shoot the thing and I'm going to sit and edit it and I'm going to write it and I'm going to put music under it, whatever, and that's going to be where the time is. But often, and people don't really tell you this, often the amount of time finding the decent story is more than the amount of time it takes to produce the story and that if somebody wants you to do creative work you actually have to set aside just as much time for the looking for stories. I mean I work on a national radio show and we don't follow news or anything... All we do is look for interesting stories and there's 7 of us or 8 of us now and I will say, like, more than half of our week is simply engaged in the looking for stories and then trying stuff out. And like we're really good at our jobs right? We're as good as anybody who does this kind of thing. And I'll say we kick around a lot of stories and between a half and a third of everything that we try, we'll go out and we'll get the tape and then we kill it. And you should think of it the same way. You know? You thought it was going to be good, you went out, you did the interview, the person wasn't such a great talker, they weren't so funny, they weren't so emotional, somehow when they told it to you in person with the camera it wasn't the way they told you when you talked to them on the phone beforehand, they just got a little intimidated by the camera, just something about the chemistry was wrong, you can't even name what it is and why even bother to try? But then when you look at the footage you know there's a feeling that you had about it which isn't in the footage, right? And then it's time, at that point, to be the ambitious, super-achieving person who you're going to be, and kill it. It's time to kill and it's time to enjoy the killing because by killing you will make something else even better live and I think that not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap. One thing that you should know is that all video production is trying to be crap. Like, in fact our radio production is trying to be crap. Basically it's like the laws of entropy. You know that thing where like the universe is... All the energy in the universe is dissipating and all the atoms are getting lower and lower in energy? Well basically anything that you put on tape, from the moment that you put it on tape, basically it's trying to be really bad. It's trying to be unstructured, it's trying to be pointless, it's trying to be boring, it's trying to be digressive, much like these sentences that I'm saying right here. And pretty much you have to prop it up aggressively at every stage of the way if it's going to be any good. You have to be really a killer about getting rid of the boring parts and going right to the parts that get into your heart. You just have to be ruthless if anything is going to be good. Things that are really good are good because people are being really, really tough. And you're going to be really tough in doing it and you're going to know also that failure is a big part of success. Sometimes I sound like some Michael Jordan ad, but you know what I mean? You're going to run a lot of stuff and it's going to go nowhere and you should be happy about that. If you're doing that, you're doing it right. If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get super lucky. And basically a lot of video and radio production, a lot of broadcasting, is just in the purest way about luck. Like really you just want to be in the situation where you're doing enough material, where you're doing enough interviews every week where you have put yourself on a schedule so that you know every week you're going to interview somebody about something. And through that, once a month, maybe once every 6 weeks, you're going to stumble on somebody who is so compelling, and a story that's so great that it makes those other 5 weeks worth it. And, I don't know, people don't talk about this stuff much but you have to kind of go into it knowing that you've got to record and get rid of a lot of crap before you're going to get to anything that's special. And you don't want to be making mediocre stuff, you know what I mean? That's not why anybody gets into this. The only reason why you want to do this is because you want to make something that's so memorable it's special. And that's what you want to do. One other thing that... |