Ira Glass: “Don’t wait. Just make the thing.”

Ira Glass, host of the weekly NPR radio show “This American Life”, appeared in conversation recently at SXSW with Los Angeles writer Mark Olsen. Speaking about the phenomenal success of the podcast “Serial”:

…we happen to be holding the winning ticket, and because of podcasting we have all this money, to actually do investigative reporting, and to do things like stage a musical with Lin-Manuel Miranda, to send three reporters for five months into a high school in Chicago that had 29 shootings in a year — like, you can’t send three reporters for five months into anything. We’re a little boutique radio show, and we can do that… I don’t take it for granted. We were broke for so long!

About his involvement with Mike Birbglia’s new film Don’t Think Twice, which he executive-produced:

I was saying this to Mike! Why would you make a movie? It takes a year, it’s such a horrible process. The chances of it being any good, and then anyone seeing it — it’s crazy, it’s so wrongheaded… He wants to make movies! He’s into movies. And I was like, ‘Great, do this by yourself.’ And then he just kept showing me scripts, and I was like, ‘OK, you should change this here…’ He totally played me.

And Glass’ advice to creatives:

The main thing that I would say to somebody who’s looking to do creative work is, just do it now. Don’t wait. It’s so hard to make anything, that it’s just easy to put it off, and be like, when I get the right financing, when I get the right this or that — just start doing it now. Because one of the great things about this moment in our culture, it’s never been easier to make something. The technology’s never been cheaper, and honestly the way to get the thing out to people is get your stuff out on the Internet, and get an audience, and get a small version to get you enough backing to do the big version.

There’s so many fucked-up things in our country and in the world right now, and we live in a very dark climate. But the one place where things are going great is, if you want to do creative work, you can actually make some version and get it to people. And just don’t wait, is what I’m saying. Don’t wait. Just make the thing. Make a version. And then make it better. And then make it better.

Don’t wait. Just make the thing. That’s the Spirit of the Spec. That’s the spirit of Zero Draft Thirty. You can’t sell it if you don’t write or make it.

For the rest of the Flavorwire article, go here.