Ira Glass

Ira Glass on Storytelling on youtube:

a story in it's purist form is a sequence of actions, this happened, then this happened, then this happened, and that made me think of this, and then this happened.

it has a momentum in and of itself.

the most boring story will even survive just because it feels like it's going somewhere.

when you have one thing leading to the next leading to the next you feel that you're on a train that's leading somewhere.

often you want to start with action, that's one of your building blocks.

bait, you want to constantly be raising questions, it's implied that any questions you raise you are going to answer.

the whole shape of the story is that you are throwing out questions to keep peoples attention and then answering them along the way

another building block is a moment of reflection, what the bigger something is that makes this story worth listening. "what does it all mean"

so you need the story to work, and you need a moment of reflection, and you bounce back and forth between, if it's not working you might be missing one of those two building blocks.

not enough is said about the importance of abandoning crap. Don't be afraid of killing your babies.

Failure is a big part of success. If you're messing up a lot you should be happy because you're doing it right. If you're making a lot of mistakes it means that you are working hard and you're going to be in the right place to catch the gold when you find it.

Every creative person he knows went through a phase (years long) where they knew what good stuff was, and they knew that the stuff they were doing wasn't there. In other words you know what's good, and you aren't making it. A lot of people quit at this point. The way to get through it is to make a lot of work, get in a situation where you half to turn out the work. The only way to close that gap between vision and crap is to do so much work that you pick up the skills to close it. Ira is top of the game, he says it took him longer then anyone he knows to close that gap.

2 errors beginners make, when they start: try and talk like you're on tv or the radio, the opposite is true, the more you talk like yourself ( a real person) the more compelling you are. And being an egotist. It's interesting how people interact, not just people who only think and care about themself. Better at least what you think of other people.